 Well thanks Arun, it's great to be here. I have the fortune of getting to travel to a lot of universities and interact with students and faculty and I must say this is by far my favorite place to attend. I said the same thing in MIT, no I'm just kidding. This is, you know, the other thing is you can, that was the nicest way anybody said I was old, kind of back to 87, but what does make you feel old is every time you come to university the students are always 18 to 22 and each year I get one year further away from 18 to 22, so, but I'm looking forward to it. I do look forward to talking about really what Arun said which is there's a lot of talk about energy, there's probably more talk about energy today than it has been in a long time. I'm gonna talk, in this talk I'm gonna talk a little bit about the external environment. This is a technology talk, so I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on policy or the other elements. They're obviously very important but I really wanna talk about the role of technology. From an outside perspective first and then bring it back internally and I'll talk a little bit about the work we're doing within our labs at ExxonMobil and talk about the solutions that we're working on which we think are part of the solution. But when you think about energy it is often taken for granted, when you woke up this morning I don't think any of you wondered if the lights would come on when you hit the switch. None of you were worried about a rolling blackout during a football game last night. At least not during the first half. But you know we live in a world where if you have it you take it for granted and if you don't have it it's magic. There's still about a billion people who don't have access to energy largely in the developing world and quite frankly that's the goal. They want the same quality of life we have and while people always think about cars and airplanes the reality is everything in this room is either a direct derivative energy or one step from energy. So whether it's the clothes we're wearing or the upholstery or the carpeting or the computers everything is tied to energy. So it really is quality life. It's simple things like washing machines. It's simple things like medicine and all those have a huge energy component. So it is everywhere. It underpins everything. You know you hear people say energy is essential to life and I certainly believe that. And now we're faced with the challenge of how to continue to grow energy supplies as seven billion people become nine billion people. And as Arun said the challenge now is how do you do that while mitigating emissions while getting on the two degree pathway. Our thesis is that's largely a technology challenge. That we've got to work on technical solutions and one other concept before we get into this is just remember one of the challenges in energy is scale. Scale is almost impossible to explain. So I can wow you with the units of hundreds of millions of barrels a day and gigatons and gigawatts and no one really knows what it, well Stanford students know what a gigawatt is. People know what a gigawatt is thanks to Back to the Future but very few people actually know what a gigawatt is. And so it's trying to explain the scale and how do we get to those scalable solutions which is really the key. So real simple. This is in essence the challenge. So the chart on the left is the y-axis is the human development index which is essentially the UN has criteria, living standards, education, quality of life basically is on the axis and on the right is the energy use per capita and in a different set of units thousands of BTU per person per day. And you can see in general as you move up from the red dots to the blue dots you consume more energy. And so that's simply put and you can see also throughout this talk you'll see the red dots will be the developing nations and the blue dots will be the developed nations. And you can see the disparity between the developing and the developed and obviously the developing nations want to get into that upper right quadrant where they can have the quality of life that we all enjoy and to do that the access to energy is needed. Now the challenge of course is the good news is we have the energy. So for much of my career we were worried about not having enough energy and now we have a lot of energy but as often once you solve one challenge another challenge arises this is the second challenge and that is how to manage the emissions and you can see this data again OECD versus non OECD and you can see the energy related CO2 emissions and you can see the tip where it went from the OECDs to the non OECDs largely driving this and that is essentially you'll hear this phrase often used dual challenge that is the dual challenge how do you do chart one which is easy because we have lots of energy chart two it's easy to control emissions limit demand but you don't want to do that so how do you do the dual challenge how do you solve the dual challenge which is providing affordable scalable energy to a growing middle class to a growing population while reducing the risks of climate change and reducing emissions that is a simple question it's a very difficult question to answer so let's talk about this so how do you do this now many many many years ago you guys can do the math I was a chemical engineering student and I remember the first thing we learned in chemical engineering was when you get a problem the first thing you do is read the problem the second thing you do is reread the problem the third thing you do is draw a picture of the problem which in my world everything was a box and every triangle was a nice little isosceles triangle and the fourth thing you did was listed your assumptions and your pathways so you were four or five steps into it before you even started trying to solve the problem it's not going to spend a little time talking about well how do you define the problem because you could make it a real simple problem nine billion people two degrees that's the problem but the reality is you have to go one you have to go at least one level further and you have to say well where are the emissions coming from and I'm going to call it three sectors it shows us four but I'm going to put buildings in with electricity generation so it's transportation it's power and it's the industrial sector so we've gone from essentially one problem maybe two if you said it was OECD and not OECD and we've gone from two to six because you have three sectors and each sector is going to have a unique suite of solutions so where in the power sector you're really chasing for an electron in the industrial sector if you're trying to make plastic it's really hard to make plastic out of an electron you need to see H bond to make a polymer and so you've got a balance and you've got to get a field of answers across each one of the sectors and then while you could easily say it's OECD and not OECD it's really country specific and in fact in large countries like the US it's often state specific so you can see how a simple one sentence dual challenge problem can expand into fifty hundred plus questions all which have to be solved more or less simultaneously to get to the nine billion people in two degrees so that's the science problem and again it's really instructive to think about this across the sectors and you'll hear you know depending on what you read and what you follow emphasis on one verse they obviously interrelate so if you electrify the the cars that will put uh... more pressure on the power grid and so there is an inner interconnectivity as well not that the problem isn't hard enough you now have codependent dependent variables as well so that's a way to think about this challenge and that's that's certainly the way we think about it we want to come up with robust solutions uh... across the sectors and then ultimately we will talk about carbon capture and things like that because those cut across all sectors if you can just somehow pull the CO2 out that obviously is a changing approach as well I said I was going to spend most of my time on technology this is I think there's only one or two charts here that have anything to do with either policy or some sort of a uh... a model a modeling basis and of course who else better to use than stanford here so this work was done at stanford a few years ago and again this is a very simple chart the y-axis is basically energy efficiency getting more efficient using less higher miles per gallon cars lighter weight plastics etc the x-axis is literally decarbonization pulling CO2 out each dot is five years so the dots begin in nineteen eighty uh... through two thousand fifteen and what you see is you see the uh... the emissions from nineteen eighty two thousand fifteen and then extrapolated out to twenty forty based on public information and he sees things like that and then on the purple blue line there obviously to get to two degrees it's going to be a combination of decarbonization efficiency uh... and so that's a hypothetical two degree line and what you'll see in this shouldn't surprise anyone in this room is over the last twenty five thirty plus years we've really been going down the efficiency axis and we all live it our cars are more efficient the plastics are lighter uh... everything around us has gotten more efficient and so you can see the vertical change now to get to that to the get to the line we want to get to though we have to continue to do everything we can to be more efficient so that continues to be important but ultimately you will have to look for ways to decarbonize to actually pull CO2 out and we'll talk about the technology set there but again this is another way to frame the question in terms of what are we trying to do and what type of urgency, what type of speed do we need to move it at that's not a dramatic pause, I'm just not moving forward, okay so just to put it in perspective if you take that line and say okay just give me some rough estimates for what we have to do so efficiency has to continue to get better so we have to continue 50% more efficient than we are today low greenhouse gas electricity so this includes solar, wind nuclear as well as uh... power with carbon capture so it's all of those there and we have to get uh... you know we have to grow significantly there, we have to get up to 80% and biofuels which today make up about one percent we're gonna have to get to 15% so the amount and by the way that still doesn't quite get you where you want to get so the the challenge is pretty severe it's going to require uh... technologies is going to require the combination of technology policy and infrastructure you can almost think of those in equilibrium that once one is set the other two uh... somewhat become constrained and you know our view is you want to you want to try to let technology you want you want the policies you want things that are as technology agnostic as possible so that the scientists and the technology guys can come up with scalable and affordable solutions so with that I'm now going to switch over to okay so with that is the problem let's start talking about solutions because we spend a lot of time talking about the problem but the real key is how do we solve this and how do we do this I want to talk a little bit about how ExxonMobil approaches this Arun talked about some of the history uh... that Exxon has had in energy but I'm going to talk a little bit more about it and then I'll pivot away pivot into what are we actually doing today in our labs uh... that some of you may have read about uh... but I want to talk about that as well so let's talk about how do we think about this problem and this if you boil this down this is fairly logical okay it's a four pronged approach to progressing solutions the first thing is take care of your own business so mitigate emissions in your own operations so that could be the the goals we've set on reducing methane flaring as we as we continue to explore for oil and gas all the way how do we get more efficient and how we refine to make the fuels that we all use today and make the plastics that we use today so first step mitigate your own second step take care of your customers provide solutions for those in adjacent businesses so that could be the polymers we're making that go into the automotives that make the cars lighter that could be the motor oils mobile one uh... which i'm sure you all use mobile one uh... again makes fuel fuel uh... increases fuel efficiency so it's providing energy options for customers natural gas making that more available as a as a alternative to coal for instance huge emissions reduction if you do that switching step three you got to talk about it you have to engage in the policy you have to engage in places like stanford that has that rare combination of unbelievable science capabilities and unbelievable policy uh... generation and so these these centers here become great places to talk about uh... climate change policy as well as uh... with the various governments that's a that's not my group my group does the research but we have a separate group that really focuses on that and then finally and this is what we're going to pivot to in a minute is with all that said we have a technology gap we have to come up with new affordable and scalable solutions and we have to progress those to where we can get those in the field so they can help us get on the pathway we need to get so that's it it's it's as simple as four steps it's somewhat logical as always it's always the details and how do you execute uh... this plan but that's our approach that's what we've been doing for years and we expect uh... to continue to do that now you need to have a little bit of background to say well what we're doing is what we've been doing so this is a very simple chart that goes back to nineteen forty i could have actually gone back further but as the years get longer powerpoint fonts begin to become the limiting factor here okay so uh... but if i was to show you nineteen nineteen nineteen is when we uh... was the first process to make isopropyl alcohol rubbing alcohol and it was the first petrochemical made and it was made from propylene in a refinery and again propylene plus water with an acid catalyst will give you isopropyl alcohol back in nineteen nineteen you use sulfuric dilute sulfuric acid with propylene to make isopropyl alcohol now the world had rubbing alcohol before then but this was the first time that we made it as a petrochemical and it changed the scalability of isopropyl alcohol so if you move forward and i would just highlight a couple of these so if i'm gonna highlight the first two which uh... technologies that rolled out in the late thirties early forties but actually the research actually began in the academic world twenty years earlier uh... the first one high octane gasoline is actually an offshoot of the fluid catalytic cracker and the concept of fluidization actually goes back to the nineteen tens nineteen twenties uh... in academia and the bottom of course uh... it was all natural rubber back then it was it was rubber plants out of which you you got rubber in our company was the first to develop the process to make synthetic rubber butyl rubber which is still the rubber that's used today predominantly still the same process used predominantly uh... for tires today synthetic the first synthetic catalyst course that was a game changer because that allows you to run reactions at different rates under different conditions to increase yield get more efficient plastic polyethylene polypropylene synthetic lubricants uh... everyone mentioned the lithium-ion battery just to show you that that was nineteen seventy the Nobel Prize was last year just to talk about the time scale uh... for energy and then if you kind of look at nineteen eighty nineteen ninety onward what you'll see is just getting more bigger and faster so deep water becomes ultra deep water thin plastics become ultra thin plastics right horizontal drilling becomes extended reach drilling plastics become specialty plastics and for those of you my age you remember having to change your oil every three thousand miles remember arnold pomeron extractor telling you to change your oil every three thousand miles and now we have mobile one annual protection so this is an innovation cycle where you go from concepts you go to scale and then you continue to push the scale on sometimes called experience curve but you you go down that scale where we are now is we're looking for technologies that can take us to the next uh... to the next uh... generation of solutions and we're going to talk about how we do that a little bit just uh... just real quick we have sites all over the world our core research facility hopefully it's on there isn't right in the middle when it's my chart so it's in the middle okay i'm sure when the guys from houston come here houston is suddenly the center of the universe but clinton for now is the center of the new verse you guys know new jersey everything is an exit so this is exit eighteen on rich seventy eight it's about forty five minutes fifty minutes outside of manhattan and uh... as aroun said it was designed to be an innovation center for energy opened in nineteen eighty three there's actually a science article written on the opening of the building which is a little bit rare for science uh... but it was a concept about driving innovation in energy space and you know it's i started there in eighty seven i still think it's one of the the better places to work and you can see where we are around the world with uh... technology centers a little bit of our people real quick so we do we are a science base we are a technology company uh... you can see the number of engineers and all the other stuff uh... this is uh... off of the patent wall so we have a patent wall in houston that that identifies our people but you know when i come to universities i want to put this chart up because this is a really really important thing to talk about when you talk about challenges that we face the concept of inclusion and diversity and that this is really important so you can see the metrics there i'm gonna channel you know myself a long time ago uh... in a different era where it wasn't talked about as much and i remember my father saying you know that there is the brain has no color so if you if you know science is the ultimate equalizer and so the inclusion diversity challenge we have in the science community is that of thought is we really need to constructively push each other we need to challenge each other but it is one where when you're trying to innovate nothing can stop innovation more than i don't want to hear your idea and so from uh... from an inclusion of diversity thing what we try to do in the r&d community is really really try to drive that uh... the inclusion of thought the inclusion of challenging constructively it is at the end of the end of the essence of academics is the challenge constructively but i think it's important that we continue to uh... to drive inclusion and diversity because i think that is where the innovation is going to come it's going to come from these adjacencies and making sure everybody's comfortable talking about this challenge we have constructively which i think is really really important how are we organized and i give this is just a precursor to to explain why we're working on working so this is essentially how the organization in clinton is set up now if i would have given you guys a pop quiz and it's don't worry about the students are freaking out right now because they think a pop quiz is there's no pop quiz but if i was to give you a pop quiz in the beginning and say well how do you think we're organized the two most common ways people think we're organized are going to be by sector uh... upstream downstream chemicals or by uh... or by application and and the reality is you know our belief is if you want to run a research organization you want to do it by capabilities so you can see that those are somewhat agnostic to the end use but they are the core capabilities from which you you drive energy so you have the physics the computational physics the engineering physics you have the sort of the catalysis and the separations and within the separations you're going to have gas separations you have liquid separations you're going to have gas liquid separations uh... things like that materials materials play such a big role in our world whether it is the actual catalyst or whether it's a membrane or whether it's the final product the polyethylene film the polypropylene film etc so materials are very important and then over on the right you have hydrocarbons and then what we call emerging energy which if this was jeopardy you'd call it the potpourri round right it's the it's the it's the it's the all of the above it's the staying aware of what else is going on because while we're working in our space it is critically important from an r&d standpoint that we know what the adjacent spaces are doing that you don't get the tunnel vision and you're only focused on what you're executing you don't realize that there's a better idea and when you're in a transition as we're in right now it is it is extremely important that you that you're watching around you as you do this and so on the right you see things like organic chemistry climate science aroun mentioned uh... ipcc you know we've been we've been co-authors or authors on many of the reports uh... that come out uh... from their thermodynamics and and more and more bioscience now that that is the newest section in our group we didn't have about actually we had a biosection science in years ago we kind of faded away from it and we've we started back a bioscience section uh... a couple years ago because we see a lot happening in the in the bio conversion in the bio catalysis uh... in trying to understand how biology works and then taking that knowledge and scaling it it's also where the algae program resides because of the biology and the and the capabilities of gene editing and gene sequencing and things like that which are which are huge fundamental enablers for what we're trying to do so that's how we're set up now as good as we are internally we know that we have to collaborate that we have to work outside and so this is just a quick look at how we're working across with uh... these are called energy centers so stanford has one you can see the ones that we're working with across the top and then the y-axis or the column the the three main sections there power transportation industry so this is a great way to stay abreast of what's going on in the state of science and even my discussions today with some of your faculty and some of your students again just reinforces the value of coming out to stanford and talking to the students in the faculty because you guys are right on the cutting edge and you're paying attention to the breakthroughs in in academia and most of what we do in energy started in in academia now just because i know where i am uh... we have a long history with stanford this is a quick chart uh... some of you familiar with g-sept g-sept we were pioneering members of g-sept and it was a very successful area fifteen years of partnership we we put in about a hundred million dollars over those fifteen years but with richard and sally and arounes leadership sanford i think has done a really good thing in moving to the strategic energy alliance to which we were uh... if not the first member one of the first we were the first member we were the first member and that was really exciting and watching just the progress just made since you guys kick that off and you can kind of see the focus areas there and you can see how it's hard to imagine a world of nine billion people where you're mitigating emissions where those four focus areas are not critical and of course the wild card one they're being emerging technology because what a stanford can do is not just develop the dots but can connect the dots and a lot of the solutions and coming from connecting the dots not a single dot uh... that gets there so a lot of good work on on here and we continue to you know we love the relationship we had since oh three and we see this happening for many many years to come so we're excited about being here we also want to talk about the the work we're doing with national labs and also with uh... with smaller companies the rest of the value chain if you will so we signed an agreement with the do we last year a ten year agreement to uh... work with the national labs on developing energy solutions and more and more we're looking with uh... on the right you see two smaller companies synthetic genomics is a partner in algae and fuel cell energy which is a carbonate fuel cell company that we're working on with cap carbon capture and more and more these these uh... what i call smaller companies play a vital role in how we go from lab to scale which i want to talk about now so when you think about the innovation value chain and uh... it looks like i'm photoshopped on that but i'm not okay so this is um that was me uh... and normally i look happy it doesn't look like i'm very happy with my panel right now right uh... i think somebody doctored this picture that uh... so uh... this is an aspen uh... the aspen ideas festival uh... last year and uh... i got to play uh... sort of player coach so i was a panel member and the moderator which i've never done before which is fascinating to do uh... but what we wanted to show was how do you go from lab to scale and what role do we play so with me across there the first one is uh... lin lou and she's head of the anlinger energy center princeton she's on the faculty princeton she leads the energy center and the concept there is universities provide the fundamentals the breakthroughs but more importantly universities have the time and almost the remit to really understand at the basic level what's happening so we want to continue to work with universities martin keller is the director of nrel in golden colorado the national renewable energy lab the national labs have tremendous capabilities to take concepts and do them at the pilot level scale some of the large lab demonstration from which we can then understand some of the modeling and some of the scalability aspects to to the left to your right i guess of oliver that uh... martin is oliver fetzer and he's a ceo synthetic genomics our partner in the algae development so they've got the expertise to do the first demonstration and of course a company like ours then brings the capital the project expertise the engineering expertise to take that and go to scale the key here is we are engaged at all three levels and so instead of doing it from linda martin dolliver what we're trying to do is we're trying to stay in all three of those and so instead of doing it in series do things more and more in parallel and that is one way that you can speed up innovation you can't put a deadline on innovation but you can do things to drive innovation and this concept of this innovation value chain is what we were trying to show there so universities national labs companies and large corporations working together clearly identifying the problem everybody has a role to play and then we try to not only play the role of the final uh... implementer but also the integrator across them and guys like mark disco is sitting here is embedded at stanford to help drive that so we have folks embedded at the universities embedded with the national labs and then working very closely with these companies and we have four five of these types of chains already in place uh... that we're trying to drive let's talk about what we're trying to drive here so i can get to some some questions i'm gonna talk about three areas that were working one for each sector and again they do interconnect so the first one is carbon capture and utilization and i think you all know that today it is practice in fact we've been practicing it for decades uh... it is a liquid chemistry approach so it's an amine uh... liquid amine on the back of a of either a power plant or an industrial uh... facility and as you can see it's power consuming and quite frankly it's complicated it is not modular it's high capital intensive what we're looking for is we're challenging that paradigms and we want lower energy intensive or power generating technology and we'd like it to be modular and so and that's for point source and there we're working on uh... things like a fuel cell uh... different types of uh... capture technologies and then as Arun said and this i'll admit i didn't know if we'd have a direct air capture program a few years ago but again the technology is advancing we see some things that we're liking and uh... so we've we've started looking at direct air capture as well and of course direct air capture and natural sinks are probably the only two ways to really go negative everything else is going to get you at best to net zero but if you have to go negative you need to pull it out of the air either through a you know man-made machine like direct air capture or a natural sink and once you have the co2 you have two options you can sequester it which we've been doing for decades so that's uh... that's one option the other is to somehow take the carbon from the co2 and uh... and reuse it so that's how we're approaching uh... power and to some extent industrial the next one is transportation so while you can electrify uh... cars it is really hard to electrify an airplane uh... in fact i don't see it anytime soon and you know an extension cord from newark to singapore is a really long extension cord okay so batteries electricity is probably going to be hard so you need a c h bond you need it you need a liquid hydrocarbon you need an energy density to do it and of course we get that today from oil but we've been working on biofuels two routes algae and cellulose so the challenge with algae is one of biology so there's two biology steps needed you need uh... photosynthetic efficiency so you need to grow faster and then you need carbon partitioning you want to get the type of oil you want to get the challenge with cellulosic is one of scale so you have to collect the cellulose you have to collect the biomass and then you have to basically break down a very complicated uh... carbon structure to something that you can then turn into a usable oil so we're making progress on both we've had some significant break this analogy we've been working on it since two thousand nine a couple years ago we had some significant publications in in understanding uh... the sequencing enough so we could go in with the crisper cast tools and do some gene editing and drive the carbon partitioning to more lipid uh... we still need uh... you still need improvements in productivity we still need improvements in the carbon partitioning we're making good progress uh... and we've set a target of trying to get to ten thousand barrels a day by twenty twenty five now ten thousand barrels a day when units are usually millions of barrels okay isn't is not a big step but we do believe if you get to that you can then scale from that and so again it's demonstration of a scalable quantity so that we can then go to scale and the cellulose we're still working uh... with several partners and we haven't said that we have not set a target yet so i'll give you some feel for where we are in the development uh... but there is a lot of cellulose and uh... we think that's going to be part of the solution as well on the industrial process last lastly we you know this is steel concrete refining in chemicals and they're all energy intensive and in fact if you look at refining in chemicals at high temperature high pressure for the most part and so how do you do that how do you do separations without using temperature well you could use membranes so advancing membranes with george attack we're working with some other institutes on how to do separations it's a materials game and on the reactor design can you come up with with reactor designs a reactive distillation things like that so you can lower the energy intensity of the reactors again it's a paradigm shift away from where we've been but it's needed if we're going to try to get to the emissions we need an ultimately fuels and chemicals steel concrete those are going to continue to be key key components of our of our society so let me play connect the dots when i left you every little batman episodes where you you had the one episode you didn't know what's going to happen and you had to wait twenty eight minutes or you had to wait a week for the next episode okay so i left you with the dots not quite hitting the line and i said look we got a lot of ideas on efficiency but we don't really see any way to go left we don't have to get the decarbonization so i want to now take those three areas and just show you a hypothetical what what would happen if we did it so we have to continue to be more and more efficient so that is a you know sort of a big big time emerging area at at at the top universities is what's called process intensification so do better heat integration do better better energy management work on better catalyst things like that continue to do process intensification and then as you go to decarbonize two things they can help you get their one is biofuels uh... because algae obviously utilize the c o two uh... and then uh... carbon capture and so that'll turn that'll make you turn left that's what we're working on there's a lot of other science going on there's a lot of other technology what i was trying to do is explain to you how we choose what we work on how we choose who to partner with on what we work on and then how we think it's all part of putting our corporation in a position to compete as the uh... energy transition continues and we get to the point where we can have nine billion people with the emissions targets we want real quick uh... hopefully without being too alarming the current technology sets insufficient this is a research problem this is a technology problem and that's what we're that's how we're addressing it we have a long history of solving these types of problems of being part of the solution at the only solution but part of the solution and so we think we understand how to go from lab to scale we think we understand the types of capabilities we have and how they could apply to the solutions we need so we want to work on that and then we're taking that long history of science and engineering and that commitment to r&d that our corporation has and looking on developing the next generation solutions so that's a quick tour of what's going on outside how we think about it inside and then what we're doing to operationalize our capabilities to address the dual challenge again thanks so much for coming out on a on a on a monday afternoon and i've got a few minutes if uh... if there's any questions thanks very much for jay i think we're all impressed by the depth and breadth of your approach to the problem students first students first that's our well that's actually one of my questions how many of you here because you have to be because there's a tendency to take it okay i mean that's always the humbling part of these talks right you realize it eighty percent don't want to be okay so you mentioned developing countries and affordable energy i'm from a developing country and in addition to all the challenges you mentioned we also have what i would call like a democratic challenge because we we are improving our sustainable energy but our low-income communities they don't have access to it because clean energy simply does not exist to them because they live far away from big cities or from industry zones how do you think technology can address this democratic problem yeah i think i think uh... so again i'm biased i turn everything into a technical problem okay and that's that's i'll just admit my biases here so even that to me boils down to an insufficient set of technologies so even though we have expected mass urbanization to occur over the next twenty thirty years uh... there's still going to be the mix of rural and urban and so a solution for a mega city you know a city of ten million people the type of grid you're going to need the types of solution isn't very different than if you're in a rural area where you might be able to get by with a more distributed uh... solution you might be able to that might be a place depending again on other aspects of the country where solar panels uh... combining with uh... small-scale storage uh... could fit and then for the larger cities where you need the mass quantities of energy might have to have a bigger grid and have different sources so i think it's it comes back to understanding what the problem is and defining the problem and then developing a suite of solutions uh... of which we're developing some and others are developing others uh... but then bring it all those solutions together and figure out which ones you are right now uh... i can draw whatever analogy want i mean i i go back to you know kind of academic things we have the you have on one set you have solutions in a one-set you have problems and right now we have more problems than we have solutions so we've really got to build up our arsenal of options such that your community or any other community can look at those options like a what fits best and that comes back to that equilibrium between technology policy infrastructure because i think we've got to get the technology weight up a little bit and understand a little more what the technical options are as we as we determine what else we need to do it's a really good question it's it's the essence of the challenge it isn't a singular uh... solution it's really focusing on what the problem is that was a good fake-out because it looked like he was asking the question and it's just very good uh... so you gave us some kind of concrete projects you're excited about in carbon capture and biofuels and i was wondering as a non-expert if you could give a project or an example something you're especially excited about in that industrial and adjacent sector so um... so in carbon capture i'm gonna and again if you if you look me up you'll probably see some me talking about these various things but i'm going to talk about the carbonate fuel cell and what what do i like about the carbonate fuel cell and what excites us about that is it is as far as i can tell the only material that can concentrate co2 and generate power so it basically accepts co2 and then as the co2 goes across the film it it concentrates the co2 on the other side and it generates power so that that is a paradigm shift it's modular it's it's it's it's a battery right it's a fuel cell and so the power it the power sector should be comfortable with something that's modular and looks like something they're comfortable with versus having a chemical plant on the back of a power plant so so that's pretty exciting and and uh... you know we've set some targets out to try to uh... advance that technology to where we can understand whether or not it can actually work the challenge with uh... some of these things is okay to work in an industrial setting you have different sets of impurities the problem in in industry is not the the core concept of the chemistry it's the stuff that happens in the real world it's the impurities it's that it's not always you know in a lab it's always the same temperature in the same pressure and everything is ideal and then you go outside and life happens so it's really understanding the robustness of some of these technologies so that would be on carbon capture and then on the on the on the biofield side i'm going to go back to the two things we're very excited about algae again when it comes back to algae algae is an organism that is pretty well understood with the breakthroughs you know that the breakthrough we had an algae we started in oh nine the breakthrough in seventeen was actually enabled by two things that weren't even invented in oh nine uh... the first was a supercomputer so you just sequenced that much faster because there is a bit of trial and error to this and the other is the gene editing tools so part of this challenge that we have is one of the patients so while we could have given up by saying there's no way we can manipulate because we don't know how to actually uh... uh... engineer the the algae here universities like berkeley and mit we're coming up with gene editing tools and that became a huge enabler so so both of those and and again why am i excited because they're modular they're scalable algae is fantastic it doesn't compete for water or food it's brackish water and it typically wants to be around the equator so you're not really competing for for land or for or for water again because to to some of the other things have been said one problem solved another problem open since you try to anticipate as many of these can is as as you can and again last comment on why i like this it's our core capabilities fit well with advancing those technologies so that that's kind of a quick one uh... thank you uh... so i really love the what the work you guys are doing but let's zoom out a little bit so you guys have been in the industry for more than like five six decades and uh... the problem is why would we as a society trust you guys to spearhead the innovations that will actually be both affordable and at the same time solve the climate change issue because the clock is ticking and you guys really need to stay in business to be honest yeah well that's true i mean we we we have shareholders we have uh... interest but again one of the reasons why i wanted to show you a look back was not to not to say that it's it's a guarantee that happens going forward but to show that it's always been this is this is an incredibly technical industry in fact it's underappreciated how hard energy is and i'll just give you a quick example and i'll answer your question if you want to be a pharmacist what do you study you probably study pharmacy if you want to be a chemist you study chemistry if you want to be an energy what do you study and in fact energy may be the only discipline the only industry that requires every sector of engineering and every sector of science so while others may hire a geologist they're hiring a geologist because the geologist is smart we're hiring a geologist because we need to understand rocks we understand how to do we need to understand how to do sequestrations safely so what to solve this problem requires that interdisciplinary approach it also requires to your point project expertise because of the scale and so you need corporations that understand how to uh... put out very complicated chemistry is very complicated engineering solutions at a scale uh... the matters and that's what the energy sector does and now with the challenges do what you've been doing do it with a different set of technologies that we can get on the pathway and uh... you know our our belief is not believe this personally that you've got to be fundamentally sound you've got to understand the fundamentals you've got to have the pathway to scale and then how do you go faster well you can't put a deadline on innovation that's really hard to do but what you can do is you can change up the way you do things and that's what that slide on the innovation pipeline was meant to show that instead of doing things in series and center at Stanford you guys go spend the next ten years and develop your ideas we'll just watch and read the papers and then we'll come back to you no we had active discussions this afternoon saying okay if that's what you're seeing why don't you guys think about this because that's what's going to stop it from being scalable get in there you know sweat equity have people in the lab collaborating at the national labs and then the newest link in this value chain are these small companies i must admit in 87 when i started there weren't many small companies like synthetic genomics like fuel cell energy uh... there are more and more of those popping up and so find the ones that that compliment our capabilities and then try to understand how to cross-pollinate and add capability so that we can get there faster that that to us is the most logical and probably the most probable way to be able to come up with solutions that can be scalable that can get us where we want to go it's a really good question though and i think it's one that quite frankly we ought to challenge ourselves on is how do we do this more efficiently a lot of it is communication a lot of it is how we work together to get this done hi thanks for your uh... overview uh... i'm really interested in your in your assertion that the problems are essentially technology problems i did research myself when i was here and i'm really excited about exxon's continuing engagement it's really important and at the same time uh... i can think of and i'm sure many others can think of maturing technologies that are having a hard time getting a foothold in their respective markets which has a lot to do with market structure and business incentives and so i i guess i want to offer a friendly addition that the technology is is absolutely necessary and sometimes so too are the business incentive structures and the market structure uh... and so and i was particularly interested in when you were showing the four stages uh... that by which exxon engages uh... these questions the first that you had was uh... optimizing exxon's own internal process so uh... so with the broader question in mind of what is driving these from the market perspective i was interested to hear if you can share any insights on what is it what is the internal exxon mobile business case for doing things like reducing methane leakage or for process intensification uh... how does how does that look to the was the investment case for those to the business managers and to sign off the necessary so let's first start with the most logical thing which is um... you'd much rather capture the methane and sell it than not okay so there's obviously an incentive to being as efficient as you can be uh... so it starts there there's never a downside to efficiency and i think what what has happened is is as we understand the various components of efficiency and our analytics get better and our ability to understand where we have value leakage is what we call it uh... you want to try to close those value leakage is a huge business proposition to being more efficient the second part was okay yeah so that's the business case and and then yeah yeah i think it comes down to just that there's there's never rarely is being more efficient to bad thing and it's just how you define more efficient and so we're now looking at that efficiency along those axes which is how do we mitigate emissions and our operations i will say the other thing where i thought you were headed which is look technology and policy have to go together i'm the technology guy so i'm going to talk about technology if we'd have brought my policy the policy guy with us he'd have talked about policy in fact we often give a talk where we go back and forth because it is important and and my belief is the technology guys have to really talk about what is possible and what we're doing to get there to be possible see you after really we're in a pen shirt at stanford i don't see many forty-niners shirts you kind of touched upon a bit but when it comes to carbon sequestration it throws a lot of criticism for being for being too costly and too complex as well as potentially a temporary solution and you kind of uh... went over a bit with the whole carbon so i was wondering what potential avenues do you see in the future solve those problems and what role do you see carbon sequestration carbon capture and sequestration playing in the future yes i actually encourage you to read some of the papers out of stanford uh... that have been written on sequestration because a lot of the pioneering work on understanding how co2 can be sequestered safely and for pick your unit of time but for a long long long time has actually been done at stanford has been done by the department of energy and has also been done by you know and companies like ours have experiential uh... uh... experience with uh... with sequestration so uh... yeah i think uh... co2 sequestration is a is a very good thing to do it's obviously an expertise we have because it's it's kind of reversing what we've done which is instead of taking it out you put it back in and so it is geology it's engineering it's it's moving gas at at pressures and temperatures so it is something that we feel comfortable doing it now it's a question again of getting the other components that are needed for co2 sequestration like infrastructure because if you if you capture co2 on a power plant that's great now you've got it captured it's unlikely that you can sequester right where you capture so you then have to move the co2 that comes in infrastructure that comes in policy and all the other things you said but to me it still starts with uh... i think there's better ways we can't be satisfied with the solutions we have today for carbon capture uh... so we got to get better at co2 capture the rest is more or less straightforward how you move co2 in pipelines is fairly well understood and then there's plenty plenty plenty of studies on where you can safely uh... store uh... co2 and it's been validated a lot by stanford but as well as not just the u.s. government but but governments around the world so i think if we can come up with a scalable reliable affordable way to do carbon capture the other two pieces will come in line thank you so much for your time