According to Vicki Hollub, president and CEO with Oxy, the O&G industry "has a big role to play" in the ongoing global energy transition focused on managing emissions.
"There’s nobody that knows better how to develop sequestration wells, or how to manage methane and CO2," Hollub said. "We [in industry] also have the experience and abilities to build large projects and to innovate."
Speaking as a panelist at CERAWeek by S&P Global, Hollub lauded the industry for progress toward carbon capture and net-zero.
"People don’t give our industry credit for the innovation, but we were doing AI before AI became cool. We were doing it with 3D seismics — and then later to actually apply this sub-surface modeling based on the seismic and our well logs. We have put together all sorts of things to actually have a better understanding of what none of us can see," she explained. "And as we move forward in this transition, we’re going to be using more AI. We’re going to need it."
Confident that the industry is rising to this challenge, Hollub noted the industry’s strength and agility in meeting new goals.
Oxy: AI essential to multidimensional energy transition
Vicki Hollub with Oxy. Photo by CERAWeek by S&P Global.
"We can solve the tough problems that we have in our industry," she said. "I don’t think there’s been an issue we’ve faced that we haven’t been able to overcome."
Rather than defining climate transition as an obstacle, Hollub instead sees it as an opportunity.
"We’re going to take all of the skills that we have, apply them to that opportunity and create value for our shareholders by doing so," she said with confidence.
Hollub admitted that her approach to AI has "changed a lot" since its inception.
"When we first started looking at the process of capturing CO2 from industry, we had two billion barrels of oil yet to be developed in our CO2 conventional floods. We just needed more CO2, so we started going to industry," she said.
At that time, back in 2008 and 2009, other industry leaders were less than enthusiastic about putting carbon capture in their plants, "and to take it and use it in an oil reservoir," Hollub said.
Eventually, Oxy engaged Carbon Engineering, "a group of incredibly innovative people who put together a pilot plan in technology which extracts CO2 out of the atmosphere," Hollub said. "That became for us the solution to a value proposition to develop reserves that otherwise wouldn’t be developed for our shareholders."
As Hollub and her Oxy teams learned about CO2 in the atmosphere, they realized they were on to something more than just a way to create value for their shareholders.
"We had the technology that would actually enable us to help the world mitigate global warming, so that became a mission for us," Hollub concluded. "It became a motivation, actually, for our entire company."
Joining Hollub on the panel, Scott Guthrie, executive VP with Microsoft, described his company’s central role in the AI revolution as "fun, busy and exciting."
"Ten years ago we tried to reinvent our company, change our culture and really approach how to put customers at the center and take what we call moving from a ‘know-it-all’ to a ‘learn-it-all’ mindset — really working with customers to understand how we can solve problems," he said.
Guthrie said that goal has been achieved with Microsoft’s integrated cloud platform for cloud solutions, as well as its involvement with AI.
"Obviously, we’ve made progress this past year with some of the transformational AI models. Open AI has opened people’s eyes to the promise of being able to use AI for all new types of problems," he said. "We’re really excited to take that technology and drive it forward on the technical side, but then really work with our customers and our partners to actually apply it to solve real business problems."
