 Good afternoon and welcome to today's energy seminar. Very pleased you could be here to join us. It's my distinct pleasure to introduce our speaker today, Julie Mulcarin Ortiz, the general manager of energy transition strategy and planning. For regulars at the energy seminar, you may remember Julie Mulcarin who spoke with her then boss, John White. Here almost exactly two years ago, pre-COVID times on campus in a video auditorium, while two big changes have occurred since then. One is Julie has now been promoted to John's job, general manager of energy transitions and strategy and planning. She was then I think the internal and external climate coordinator within the energy transitions and strategy and planning group. Two is she's added a new name and she told us in the pre-session, gotten married a year and a half ago, conveniently right before COVID. So she's gonna update us now. A lot of you have seen in the news, a lot of interesting and exciting announcements coming out of our local energy behemoth, Chevron Corporation. Julie is based in the Bay Area. So she's gonna give us an update on all that and more in her talk, Chevron Climate Change Resilience, Advancing a Lower Carbon Future. Julie, take it away. Thank you so much for welcoming me back here today. It's always great to be at a local school and really unfortunate that we can't be together in person, but hopefully, yeah, these media more people are able to attend and we can have a lively discussion just like we would have in the room. So as was mentioned, I'm here to talk about Chevron's Climate Change Strategy and our recently released Climate Change Resilience Report, Advancing a Lower Carbon Future. This is our third task force for a financial related climate disclosure report and the third one that I've worked on. So as you can see here on the front cover, this is a snippet of the 24 that's on our page, which we'll cover in a few moments, but really excited to share some of the updates with you today. I'm gonna go through some of the external environment that we look at and consider at Chevron and then pivot into what Chevron strategy is and how we address the energy transition. And so the first thing that I like to start with and really to set the context is that we believe the future is lower carbon. I look at this map on the right-hand side and our team jokes that we have to update it on almost a weekly basis. The colors and blue signify the countries that ratified the Paris Agreement, which to remind everyone was signed in 2015 and ratified in 2016. And then recently and over the last couple of years, more and more countries have been adding additional pledges to both their NDCs as well as net zero commitments to an earlier timeframe than was originally outlined in the Paris Agreement. So kind of my shorthand in the way I think about it is that the Paris has the commitment to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius or less with an ambition towards 1.5. And the shorthand that we translate that into kind of internally is that two degrees roughly translates into 2070 in the median of the scenarios that are run and a 1.5 is roughly around 2050. And so when we see these countries in green, these are almost all countries that are having commitments towards a 2050 net zero ambition. So looking at this trend and kind of taking this in a macro environment, we track this as well as other policy announcements and technology advancements in this advancing lower carbon future. At Chevron, we believe we're a global leader and we're working towards a global net zero to help the world achieve its goals. The chart shown here on the right hand side shows the progress that we've already made in reduction emissions intensity. As you can see in 2016, our emissions intensity for our upstream was in the high 30s and we're already reducing down into the 20s. We have achieved a number of reductions through both portfolio changes and math which I'll cover in a couple more slides, marginal abatement cost curve projects. And we have more identified for the future and then are continuing to invest in innovation and looking at offsets to help on that transition towards a global net zero. We're in the top 25% of oil and gas producers which I can talk about in the question and answer and I'll talk about in metric section in a moment. We're committed to making our updates to our metrics every five years in alignment with the Paris stock take agreement. And we've tied nearly 10% of all employee variable pay to advancing on our energy transition strategy and our reduction goals. We believe we have a viral role to play. When we start talking about the metrics and the areas that we're looking at, we try and take our competitive advantage and the strengths that we have at Chevron and help advance in the lower carbon future. The chart shown here on the right-hand side is a graphical representation of a number of different scenarios and the ranges of the different energy mixes that they're projecting in the future. As you can see all forms of energy are needed in the future with renewables being the fastest growing category. You can see that really what most people are talking about is the pace of change and the amount of change that will happen. But you can see that oil and gas continue to make up an important part of the energy future which is why we focus a lot of our attention on how we can become a more efficient producer. The different types of activities as I talked about a minute ago on some of the macroeconomic trends and policies like technology influence the pace and scale of this change and the locations in which it happens. Because of this really intense focus on a lower carbon future and the net zero commitments that governments are making, we believe that more efficient production of oil and gas and really all commodities and all products is needed. Oil and gas and before I get into the space I wasn't aware of this is a naturally declining asset which means that to keep producing at the same levels you need to have continued investment. And so you can see from the chart on the right hand side that even under the scenarios under the sustainable development scenarios and other low carbon scenarios you still need to make continued investments into oil and gas production to meet the demand in any one of the scenarios that was kind of highlighted in the range of outlooks that was shown on the previous slide. So with that and to that aim we have launched a marginal abatement cost curve process and which I'll cover in a couple more sides. We've launched a global methane detection campaign looking at identifying future to methane sources to be able to abate them. And we've joined the World Bank's commitment to zero team learning by 2030. Covering and now kind of getting to what the 24 signifies that was on the cover side and is on the cover report. We set market-based approach to metrics starting with 24 kilograms of CO2 equivalent for oil and for gas on individual commodity basis. We have a target for two degrees for methane along with the global methane detection campaign as well as a commitment to zero team clearing by 2030 and three kilograms of CO2 per barrel of overall flaring by 2028. We like to talk about this as a market-based approach. My background is in commodity trading and I like to think if I were in the market how would I determine if the producer that I'm buying for is one of the more efficient producers? So that's why we've set the metrics on individual commodity basis and on an equity basis. So equity means that anything that we have a financial interest and we're reporting our metrics and we hold ourselves accountable for. So that's both things that we operate as well as assets that we don't operate we've invested through joint ventures. We also believe that these metrics along with offsets should be tradable and verifiable. So that if you wanted to take these intensity metrics and be able to verify them or look at them along with your underlying products you would be able to do that as well. And continuing on what Chevron is doing to advance the global energy transition we like to categorize our activities and strategies into three areas. The first is lowering carbon intensity cost efficiently to which we've committed $2 billion from 2021 to 2028 and carbon reduction projects. Our second action area increase renewables and offsets in support of our business has a commitment of $750 million over the same period. And the third invest in low carbon technologies to enable commercial solutions was just announced that we have a $300 million commitment to our second future energy fund. In the next few slides I'll cover what each one of them is focused on. So one of the first things that I'm really proud to talk about that we helped design was our approach to the marginal payment cost curve project. What this has done is identified more than 100 projects of reduction opportunities. And when all of these $2 billion of projects are funded we expect them to produce more than 4 million tons of anticipated reductions. What the marginal payment cost curve project does is it takes a number of opportunities that you can see shown on the right-hand side of the portfolio opportunities pie chart and maps them against one another so that you can compare each one of the opportunities to one another. For those of you not familiar with the marginal payment cost curve the width of each bar represents the volume of abatement or reductions available and the height of each bar represents either the NPV on a per ton basis or sometimes the breakeven carbon cost per ton. What this allows us to do is use standard portfolio theory and efficient investment from tier theory to allow us to select a range of opportunities while maximizing for returns and lower carbon which is the tagline of the company right now. In addition we're advancing as I mentioned before through a global methane detection campaign we're partnered with the environmental partnership to identify best practices on managing methane and we're investing in a number of technologies to reduce methane and detect methane. In addition we're also partnering with flaring reduction partnerships such as the oil and gas climate initiative the global gas flare reduction partnership and recently the World Bank's commitment to zero routine flaring. All of these are examples of partnerships that we believe are necessary to help advance the energy transition and a lower carbon future. On our second action area increased renewables and offsets in support of our business we're focusing on things that can help continue to lower the intensity of our business as well into markets that are policy enabled that are calling for additional fuels such as renewable fuel partnerships and opportunities that we see here in California. For example, a couple of them highlighted here are efforts on renewable natural gas. In addition, we're looking at other sectors such as the marine and aviation sectors and really how we can partner to advance lower carbon fuels and activities in those areas as well as scaling and offsets. Right now offsets or credits from uncovered sectors are an important part of the market but you need standardized contracts, rules, accounting systems making sure that you're not double counting, double claiming you have corresponding adjustments and all these activities kind of the backbone of the activities that go to enable article six in the Paris Agreement. We're partnering with a number of organizations such as the World Bank and IHS market to really bring standardization to these initiatives into these areas. On our third action area invest in low carbon technologies to enable commercial solutions. As I mentioned before, we've committed another $300 million for our future energy fund. This brings our total commitment to more than $500 million to our venture capital funds for future energy solutions. We focus across the value chain of our D&D, our research development and deployment all the way through commercial opportunities. And again, we believe that partnerships here are key. You can see that we have a number of partnerships both in the United States and internationally and we're deploying these technologies in our operations to try and advance commercial scale of opportunities. Our focus areas for our low carbon technologies are carbon caption, utilization and storage, hydrogen and emerging power like novel geothermal. One of the things that I think is especially important to cover when talking about the energy transition and so we're also advocating for just transition. In the back of our climate change resilience report which hopefully some of you have had a chance to look at, we have one page chair out sheets that talk about our different advocacy positions. Chevron supports well-designed climate policy, global engagement, research and innovation to bring down the green premium, performance based that are tied back to things like our metrics and transparency to enable decision making. Just to cover a couple of the items that are on the page things like well-designed climate policy you can see out here even though it's small still a graphical representation of the marginal-abatement cost curve. While we believe that carbon pricing should be the backbone of kind of great climate policy we also believe that support for innovation to help reduce the cost and bring forward some of the opportunities like carbon capture utilization and storage are necessary to help bring them into the suite of opportunities that could be incentivized by carbon pricing. In addition, we recognize that there's some activities that may need directed policy support. For example, a lot of building efficiency codes where you have a market failure or an agency problem where those that have to pay for the reduction or that are investing in the potentially profitable activity or the inactivity that may pay for itself aren't necessarily the ones that receive the benefits of it. So for example, when I mentioned building codes or building standards an owner may invest in the reductions but the renter or the tenant may receive the benefit. So in things where there are mismatches between those types of situations we also believe in targeted policies. As I had shown before as well on transparency we support the well-designed emission reduction metrics to try and incentivize efficient production and transparent reporting across our sector and others to go towards value chain emissions reporting. So I'm kind of highlighting that point and we'll spend a couple of minutes is really to talk about how we aim to lead in transparency. One of the things that we cover on this side is that we're working towards putting our products up to the point of sale. When we think about the activities which we have potential to influence or control we can think about the actions in our value chain that are upstream of us. By having the information available the way that we've set our metrics for example it enables customers along the value chain to make decisions about the goods that they purchase. To help with that we're working with a number of partnerships and external organizations to help set accounting standards, methodologies, protocols and platforms where this can become more scalable. And we're working with our customers to help deliver those solutions. For example, one of the activities that we're working with our organizations is a World Business Council for Sustainable Developments Pathfinder Initiative. We're working with other companies to help standardize carbon footprinting methodology that can then be verified and certified that can then be transferred along customer value chain. We signed and announced our first agreement with Pavilion Energy in Singapore to deliver a long-term contract of LNG that's carbon footprinted. We're working with them now to develop that methodology to make it transparent so that they know the intensity of the cargos that they're buying. We're also working on helping scale offsets as I mentioned before with things like the task force for scaling voluntary carbon markets as well as AIDA on trying our trade organization which is helping advance nature-based solutions and really scaling both the funding and opportunities to help nature deliver solutions to the energy transition future in our lower carbon path. We also support company level transparent reporting in the back of our climate change resilience report. In section five, you can see all of our emission information reported both on a company level by each segment on both an operated and on an equity basis. In addition, we lay out the formulas for assessing our metrics and a number of other footnotes that we think are useful to our stakeholders to understand how we're reporting our emissions, how they can compare them to other companies that may be similar and how they can combine those elements to make the calculations or make the comparisons that are useful to them. As I had started off the presentation by talking about, we also believe in comprehensive reporting, having done now three task force for financial related climate disclosures. So kind of closing out on this side and really what the majority of the presentation is I wanted to leave a lot of time for question and answer. Really all of this comes together to say that we believe in transparency and working with partnerships to help advance the lower carbon future. As I've mentioned on the climate change resilience report, we have about 65 pages in our report, but if that's too much for people, we wanna make it available and consumable in different formats and ways as well. We have an executive summary that's roughly 10 pages as well as a brochure that highlights our role in some of the key facts and information. With that, it looks like we have some questions in the poll, so I'd like to open it up for the discussion period. Thanks very much, Julie. That was a terrific update. So you can see the questions members of the audience, please submit any questions you might have. We have quite a bit of time for questions now through the Q&A portal. I'd like to start with, as you can see, there's a bunch of questions reporting to say that what you have been talking about is inconsistent with the quote, new science of climate change. My understanding of that, if I do understand it, is people who read trust reports, not the actual IPCC reports, believe that we must get to zero net emissions within a very short period of time, perhaps 10 to 20 years or there will be major consequences. I think if you read the report, that's actually not what the reports say. Concomitly, and this is probably something that you're in a good position to talk about, there is a presumption based on reading another workgroup report, namely workgroup three, which I've been more actively involved in, that the cost of getting to zero net emissions within that time period is zero or negative. I don't think that report says that either. So the way I could ask this to you is, what do you say to people that say, you're doing more than you used to, but Chevron, a new person, they should be doing a lot more? Let me just start with that question. I'm sure you've been asked this question before and will be asked again, but I think just to open things up a bit, that would be a good place to start. Yeah, thanks for the question. So as shown on one of the first slides, most major energy forecasts and scenarios show that oil and gas continue to have an important role in the future. And we believe that promoting the most efficient producers is the right thing to do. And we believe that we're amongst the most efficient producers, really transparently reporting on the information so that you can see how companies assess their performance so that you're able to assess it as well. We think it's necessary to be able to advance a lower carbon future. In a number of the scenarios, they talk about the cost and technologies that will be needed. And it's an area that we've seen yet that advances without things like carbon capture utilization and storage. Things that require advanced investment and skills and technologies that we have expertise in and that capitalize on our core strengths. So when we think about all of these, how do we contribute the best? I often tell my team and I think myself, being helping advance a lower carbon future doesn't mean that everybody stops doing what they're doing. But how do we promote the most efficient producers at whatever activity that they're doing? And we believe that we're amongst the best oil and gas producers. And there should be a preference and incentive towards more responsible producers. So one of the things that we look at is that goes straight back into how we set our intensity metrics, how we're reporting transparently and the types of investments that we're making to help scale some of the different technologies that can help reduce carbon. As a follow on, at a more detailed level which you're actually more directly involved in as a company, there is a lot of debate now about the role of big oil in keeping cheap natural gas available. So what does your view, there's three or four parts to this, but what does your view of natural gas as a potential bridge to the future amount an NREL advisory board? And last week, we heard yet again from them that even the National Energy Renewable Lab, which is out there promoting renewable energy and energy efficiency, thanks. Natural gas is a role to play in the short to intermediate term in enabling more renewables to come on to the grid and keeping the grid stable. What is your view on that either as an individual or a corporate? I don't know which one you want to take first. Yeah, so we agree that all forms of energy are needed and that natural gas has an important role to play. You can, obviously we follow the same reports that you're referring to that talk about its need and peaking capacity. We can see what's happened when you don't have enough natural gas available or enough energy available. And overall we're promoting affordable, reliable, ever cleaner energy. And that includes across all forms. So when we set, for example, our intensity targets just linking it back, 24 is amongst the world's lowest gas intensity levels. If you look at the charts from the IEA or others that we've been able to find. And so continuing to promote on not relying that natural gas or that any one form of fuel will always be needed, but how do you continue to innovate and promote lower carbon intensity across your value chain and across your assets as part of our core strategy? So the next one in this track is, what is your view on the outlook for CCUS? And even a specific question on, do you provide or can you help facilitate the provision of offsets in that regard as a company on an industry? Yeah, so as mentioned, CCUS is viewed to be needed in all low carbon scenarios and net zero scenarios. So we believe that we have competitive advantage. We have one of the world's largest carbon capture storage projects in Australia and Gorgon. We also are invested in Quest in Canada and we're working on advancing CCUS more broadly. Of course, as I mentioned in kind of the policy support, we were active in helping pass and extend 45Q credit in the United States because we believe that you can need continued investment to try and bring these technologies forward. Some of the things that are with CCUS is that they're large projects that take a number of years to develop, permit, scale and implement, but we believe those technologies and really the private public partnership that is happening to support it is what's needed in the future and that we look to be a part of as well. You can see a number of places where governments and industry are coming together with industry hubs or clusters to try and bring use cases for CCUS as well together with where the emissions are or the CO2 is available. So you can see some things where like our investment in blue planet that are using the mineralization to try and improve concrete or things like the partnership that we announced for Mendota, California that are looking at bioenergy with CCUS and in Central California. So we believe all of these technologies are necessary. All technologies and trying to scale the different ones are needed, but there is most degree and all of the reports that we're following ask and call for more CCUS in the future. So the next step in this is the role of hydrogen. I know the oil industry is currently I think still the biggest producer of hydrogen today. So what is your corporate view on the future role of hydrogen? And within that, the somewhat heated debate right now about whether or not hydrogen can be gray for a while and then turn green or needs to be green and only renewable based from the get go. This is probably similar to the natural gas story. I would imagine, but you're the expert in this. So we agree that hydrogen is an important part and a potentially very exciting part of the energy future. We tend to not talk about it as much as the colors is really of how do you look at the right opportunities and the right markets and what policies or what opportunities are enabled in those markets to really help improve the intensity and cost of hydrogen production. So as you mentioned, the oil and gas industry has a expertise in producing hydrogen. We use hydrogen now at our refineries, for example. Of course, you can make it from natural gas and other assets and resources that we have, but really you need continued breakthroughs in technology and advancement and as well as looking at the different use cases for hydrogen and really all fuels. So in this report, we have a chart that really shows the trade-offs of some of the different fuels against one another and their use cases. And really what kind of one of the main takeaways for me was is that you still need continued technology advancement in different fuels for different uses. But one of the areas that we are focused on in addition to CCUS is hydrogen. So we're part of the Hydrogen Council in Europe. We're part of the fuel partnership in California and we look for continued opportunities to partner to bring forward hydrogen. On that one, what is your view on the role of hydrogen in the transportation sector? Meaning, I think electricity now seems to have an advantage in many places for light-duty vehicles, but not yet for heavy-duty vehicles, not to mention marine and air applications. Do you have that market segmented in your own mind at this point? We look at a number of different use cases for hydrogen. I mean, I think back to when I joined the company, we were one of the first companies that had a number of hydrogen stations around California. And one of my first projects was actually helping decommission those stations because we were a little bit out too far ahead of where the technology and where the market was. I think there are still a number of opportunities where hydrogen makes sense even in the passenger segment. For example, long-distance commuting or long-distance road travel, it can offer a solution. Of course, we're looking at it as well in heavy-duty and additional sources like marine, which are still, I'd say early stage at this point. But I think that continuing to look at it and seeing that it can have a role in transport is still part of our frame. We had a follow-up question. I'm sorry, I got this out of order, but how big is your U program within your CCUS thing? We've had some interesting entrepreneurial lab talks on kind of advanced uses of carbon to even make more sustainable life cycle fuels and whatnot. Do you have a big interest in that or set of investments in that area? The use side of the CCSU panoply of different technology strategies? Yeah, so the utilization part is really interesting. And I think it's an area that a lot of people are looking, Chevron included, really looking to scale and increase investments in. As I had mentioned, BluePana earlier, we also have one of the most exciting areas is around the use even for conversion of proteins. We have a program company that's part of our catalyst program to help advance that called NOVA nutrients. On the utilization side, currently the largest form of utilization, as many people may know, is enhanced oil recovery. We're looking at really beyond that for a lot of the categories that we consider. And I think that utilization is perfect marrying of where it can have a win-win for both the producers of CO2, as well as the users to help do things like cure concrete more quickly. It's a focus area as well as the OGCI climate investments, which were, we've committed $100 million to the over $1 billion investment funds. So it's an area that, I think there's a lot of enthusiasm and warranted enthusiasm around and look forward to the advancements that are made in the utilization space. Great. Switching to the industrial sector, I know from various studies that if your overall goal is to reduce net GHD or GHD equivalent emissions, some of the harder areas to reduce emissions are in the industrial sector where there are a lot of big materials production industries that are using technologies as old as 100 years old. Do you see technological innovation there or offsets in other sectors taking care of offsetting emissions that are otherwise very difficult? We have certain emissions in the ag sector having to do with livestock and so forth. What is your view on the industrial and agricultural sector emissions? Do you think innovations are required? Are you involved in R&D on those or offsets or other types of substitutions say at the product level? So I mainly focus on global emissions, but really on Chevrons and what Chevron strategy should be. We partner and look at through energy hubs and others the different sectors and how we can partner with them to help reduce overall emissions. I think a lot of people agree that the ag sector looks like it has a lot of potential and that offsetting can be a way to help bring together a cross-sectoral approach to reducing emissions. Some of kind of going back to this concept that I was talking about of hubs, I think it's such an interesting way of looking at where the opportunities may lie and really helping to deparvinize hard to abate sectors. You can look at some activities, for example, the way Singapore is really doing it on Chevron Island where they're trying to bring together a number of different sectors, pilot new technologies, identify the needs, go from all the way from research and development all the way through commercialization, piloting some of the first projects and really creating environment for business as successful ways of doing it. So when we look in through, for example, what we're invested through our technology venture group through the OGCI Climate Investment Fund, again, looking at those hard to abate sectors is also one of the key focus areas there. And I think more technologies are continued to be needed to address some emissions from kind of the wider industrial sector. And I wanna go back to as well as really highlighting and thinking about this concept of a marginal abatement cost curve and where are emissions? Where do they come from and what's the most economic and viable way to reduce emissions in the future? I think that it's important for each sector and each company really to know what their suite of opportunities is. What are areas that need increased investment? What are opportunities that are viable now? What are the barriers that exist to prevent those projects from happening? And how can you collaborate with other interested parties to help advance the suite of opportunities and really find the solutions that work for a multiple group of companies or multiple sectors to help advance? So some of those areas, for example, you mentioned offsets, crediting between sectors is a way that each sector can actually collaborate with others to help advance. And you can see that in situations like under cap and trade scenarios where the credits are fungible between different industries and you're really trying to help incentivize reductions across the entire value chain and across the economy to its most efficient use. So shifting gears a little bit, but not too much. I was impressed and intrigued by your mentioning it many points in your preparatory remarks, increasing transparency. So I guess your argument would be more transparency leads to greater knowledge and understanding and it's really a enabler of taking decisive action in the corporate sector, private sector, NGO sector and whatnot. One thing that's intrigued me the last 10 years which you had mentioned in your abstract is the engagement in the last over that period of the financial community and climate change. So I wonder what your impression of that is in your experience in working on issues brought to you through the task force on climate financial disclosures and the subsequent network for agreeing the financial system and other like initiatives. I think those are pretty major. They also in a way increase transparency not just to the public at large but to yours and all other corporation shareholders. What is your view on that or is it a good thing, bad thing? How are you trying to work with them or are you working mostly with them or against them? How do you look at that whole set of interactions which I think has been a pretty major and hopefully desirable mega trend the last 10 years? Yeah, if I think back to some of that when I started at Chevron a little bit more than 10 years ago and the number of questions that would come from the financial sector or the active investors compared to what it is now it's completely different. And it's a trend that we welcome. As I mentioned, kind of throughout the presentation really partnerships and everyone working together and collaborating to figure out how do we advance the lower carbon future is needed and our stockholders are some of the most important stakeholders. We talk about in our climate change resilience report that we have a dedicated ESG engagement team that is non-stop meeting with our financial sector stakeholders and aims to meet with our top 50 investors each year. I support them in some of the engagements when we wanna talk about energy transition and especially the climate change resilience report. And I think the conversations have really evolved and are quite sophisticated now where companies and investors are wanting to model individual companies and look at their performance which goes back to how we've designed some of our metrics on really making it so that you can tell what our performances and the commodities that we produce and that we believe our core strengths currently and also on how we design the metrics tables at the back of the report. I know I often joke that, you know talking about accounting isn't exactly people's most favorite dinner topic conversation but really the accounting around carbon and disclosures around it. Disclosure tables on each individual sector or the gases or glomerable potentials these are all incredibly important things so that when you're either investing in a company when you personally or through a fund or when you're buying a company's products you're able to assess the performance. There was a really interesting podcast that I listened to you recently and I think, wow, I work in this as my full-time job and it said, what do you think the carbon footprint of your tennis shoes are? And I thought, wow, I don't know the answer to that. I mean, I have a ballpark estimate but really just thinking about how we've evolved as I often use a shorthand reference of it's like we're trying to go on a low calorie diet without knowing how many calories are in any of the foods that we eat. It's really hard to make assessments and so whether I look in my personal life or as at Chevron, really trying to assess well, where did the emissions come from? Where are the abatement opportunities? How much does it cost? Where is my best option either as an individual or to help the company assess where do we put our efforts and investments into to help a lower carbon future? But circling back to really kind of the engagement of the financial sector, I think it's been extremely productive. Who would have believed a number of years ago that ESG funds would be kind of the very dominant or very popular funds that they are now and I think it's an exciting trend. So I think though that kind of advancing on that and going back to the transparency comment, you really need the level of transparency from companies and the financial sector is also working on it for their own sector to assess their portfolios. Is needed to help society overall understand kind of the individual carbon footprints we have and of the activities that we participate in. Great, now on the way to getting a little bit more contemporary political, don't worry, not too pointed at that, right? I was pretty pleased to hear it because I found them amazingly active and impactful these days with the World Bank Group. For a while, I thought they were kind of doing more abstract things, largely stimulated by interactions with academics like me, but now they seem to be much more action-oriented in the space of trying to get all the stakeholders together and we're trying to do a little bit more on this at Stanford as you probably read. So that's one element, but I guess what I wanted to get to because we don't have too much time left is I imagine you and the company at large is in active discussions, both with the Biden administration in DC and given your location in particular with the Newsome administration here in California, which is trying to go much faster on this than the federal government. So what has that set of interactions been like and where do you see problems and opportunities? There was even a perspicacious question by the audience that I think would be an interesting thing. Could you do a carbon capture and sequestration demo or even a commercial project within California in the near future? What is your view on that whole range of issues? Yeah, so we work with governments around the world on trying to help advance some lower carbon future and also the policies that will help support that. We were one of the companies that helped support the extension of the cap and trade in California a number of years ago. One of the first things that I worked on when I came to the company was on the low carbon fuel standard. So I'd say that there are lots of opportunities. Each region and kind of geographical area offers its own suite of opportunities and different solution set. Going back to what I talked about originally on carbon pricing really being the base and really having this transferability between sectors is so important to help find the efficient solutions and collaboration between sectors, which is why we put a number of these policy one-pagers in our report. We look at, you know, CCS in a number of different areas and locations. I think we'd be excited to do pilots and look at different opportunities. As I mentioned before, what we've already announced on looking at the San Joaquin Valley where we have oil production and looking at a pilot. We talk about it as CCS pilot. We've looked at some of the capture technologies in particular, as well as what I talked about earlier on the Mendota project, which is for bioenergy and carbon capture in the Central Valley as well, is something that we would be excited to advance. And then kind of going back to CCS overall because of its importance in both the reductions that it can help the world achieve, as well as our capabilities in it is an area that we are looking at in multiple geographies around the world. So I wanna squeeze in a couple of questions before my finale, which is basically advice to the young people about what kinds of skills will be needed in the future. And the interim questions are regarding kind of here and now rapid action things. And they are, do you work with or are you interacting with people like the plant-based food industry? I know Impossible Foods has now said they would like to make it not, the world not dependent, not dependent taste and policy things aside on animal-based protein by 2035. And on the vehicle side of, back in the oil embargo days, there was this kind of cash for clunkers. Are you engaged with any auto industry groups of any type to try to facilitate what I would call with the questioner called stock turnover rates to get more people buying EVs or hydrogen vehicles to get to a lower level of carbon and therefore greenhouse gas emissions? Yeah, I know I'm chevron in the past when I joined the company was involved in a number of those types of efforts on the vehicle turnover and helping even fund repairs for smog tests if there were repairs identified in those. So I think it's an important area and as the question kind of alluded to or addressed is the stock take turnover is one of the reasons why there are different forecasts on the scale and pace of energy transition. If you look at some of the data right now from COVID for example, during the COVID pandemic, some of the asset life in vehicles in particular is actually lengthening during this period of time as people are more reluctant to invest in some of those technology upgrades or new vehicles. So you asked about the plant-based interest as well. I think that's a really exciting area. My background before the oil and gas sector was in agriculture. So I'm always hopeful that there's going to be kind of a joining of more forces. We have some, the company that I mentioned in the catalyst program. And of course in my own personal life have a refrigerator full of some of those plant-based alternatives. And so I think what that's getting to as well is really looking at what are all of the suite of opportunities and solution sets that we can employ as individuals or as companies. And I know that Chevron is looking and continues to look at partnerships and really working with others is the best way of advancing the low carbon future. So I'm gonna actually read a very timely question from an audience member as a lead-in to your up close and personal with the student following your seminar. And that is, what is your view regarding people and skills to lead this transformation? What is missing today and what will be required within the next three years? I guess both at Chevron and for the world at large since you're right in the middle of this, you're kind of where the rubber meets the road on this. So what kind of people do you wish there were more of? And do you think both in your engagements within and outside the company? Yeah, so I joined Chevron 13 years ago and I've been working on energy transition topics for the entire time I've been at the company from both the trading perspective and with our trading group to our technology ventures group to our long-term strategy group to now where I sit in corporate strategy and sustainability. And I think that if I talk to, I talk to a lot of employees that are new and incoming people that are excited about working in the space both internally and externally. I say that the number one thing probably not dissimilar from what other people say for really anything in life is grit and perseverance and really thinking about how do we, this isn't unfortunately, there's not just like most things an easy solution. We're talking about kind of as had been mentioned before global stock and turnover, lifestyle choices, activities, systems of change. And those systems of change are very, very large. You're trying to change an entire system and it requires kind of waking up every day with a sense of optimism and thinking, how do we change the incentives? How do we align the incentives to the future that we're looking for? And how do you keep going day after day to look for the technologies, innovations, the partnerships, the policies that can really help advance that? So I'd say perseverance, really anything that people are pursuing is one of the things that I hope that people continue to have as we look to advance a lower carbon future. So I'm going to sneak in a sneaky follow on question. I hope you don't mind that that is in your 13 years, my impression is groups like yours at Chevron and those similar groups elsewhere have a lot more influence in the corporate boardroom than when you first joined. Would that be an accurate assessment? And so you'd probably like it to be moving faster but how do you think about the pace of change from the inside looking out? It's an interesting question because when I joined the company and really if you think about the pace that the industry has changed just in the last decade, we went from a situation where we talked about peak oil not from a point of peak demand but really from peak supply. So we've went from limited supply to limited demand or changes in demand. And that change I think has really and really the pace of change, the volatility of prices, the changing environment, of course now with COVID, all of these paces of change seem to be that what they really go to and it goes to the title of our report circling back to it of resilience. There's a company that tests multiple scenarios. I didn't cover kind of the slides in here because most people now don't ask about all the scenario tests that we do and kind of looking at the different outcomes of those. But we often talk about how do we win in the environment? How do we analyze a number of different situations and scenarios? So I'd say that over the course that I've been with Charvan, I've really seen us continue to advance the types of scenarios that we're looking at and really the range and the types of opportunities that people, if we were to go back just a couple of years who would have thought that we would have a, well, I'm sure that there are actually, I've read some books about some of them that were forecasting that we're going to have a pandemic. But really some of these things aren't necessarily of how do you get this one ride or his energy transitions more popular, less popular or how much more is it advancing? But really how are you continuing to test kind of against external views, different scenarios and really trying to inform a company strategy that can go with the test of time? Charvan has been around for 140 years, a little bit, you know, plus or minus and looks to be around for the future. And generally people at Charvan are joining the company because they wanna work on careers that have important contributions to society and that can last an entire career. So I'm one of the anomalies that came in kind of a mid-career transfer over into the company. But I think from the time that I've been there, really that focus on the long-term and how do you ensure your resilience for the long-term is something that I've seen continued from the time that I joined? Yeah, and I'm very glad as a citizen and sometimes researcher that you've done that. With a soft back to our new science people, I think you would agree that there is an issue about timing perhaps, but all the new science does say that the need to act is more urgent than ever. So I'm glad you're on the job looking from the inside out of Chevron. So we thank you for a very enlightening and transparent and inspirational seminar. And we hope you can indeed, as you said at the beginning, come visit it here, hear us on campus soon. You have a short trip to come see us, but I hope you'll be able to be used to in the near future. So thanks once again and now I'll leave you to the follow-up session with the students. Thank you again. Thank you.