From Chevron to Climate Tech with Barbara Burger
Barbara Burger is the former president of Chevron Technology Ventures and describes herself as a "corporate graduate." She now spends her time advising and helping startups and venture funds working on the energy transition, including Greentown Labs, Energy Impact Partners, Emerald Technology Ventures, Syzygy Plasmonics, Heliogen, and many more.
In this episode, we discuss her multifaceted career journey and her current role in guiding startups and venture funds in the energy sector. The conversation covers the technological advancements driving the energy transition, the dynamics between large energy companies and startups, and the specific roles of natural gas and hydrogen. Barbara also sheds light on generational shifts in the energy industry, global energy geopolitics, and offers valuable advice for women in the sector.
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Episode recorded on Dec 18, 2023 (Published on Jan 15, 2024)
In this episode, we cover:
[03:45]: Barbara's book recommendation, "The West Texas Power Plant That Saved the World"
[06:47]: Barbara's career journey, starting at Chevron after graduate school
[07:41]: Learning and growing in the energy sector, from industrial chemistry to energy economics
[09:26]: Shift to Chevron Technology Ventures, focusing on biofuels, renewable fuels, and digitalization
[11:14]: Evolution of Chevron Technology Ventures' investment focus
[14:46]: The potential of renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel
[17:07]: Barbara's insights on the emerging hydrogen value chain
[20:21]: Innovations in shale exploration and their impact on the energy industry
[22:23]: The integration of oil and gas companies in the clean tech venture space
[27:21]: Post-Chevron activities: advising startups and venture funds in the energy transition
[31:54]: Advice for large companies working with startups and vice versa
[35:00]: The critical role of speed in energy transition
[40:11]: Geopolitical aspects of energy in different regions: China, India, Africa
[42:11]: Future of natural gas, role of CCUS, and economic factors
[47:10]: Generational shifts impacting the energy industry
[50:35]: Barbara's career advice for women in energy and tech
[53:04]: The necessity of affordable, reliable, and low-impact energy solutions
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Cody Simms (00:00):
Today on My Climate Journey, our guest is Barbara Burger. Barbara describes herself as a corporate graduate and now spends her time advising and helping startups and venture funds working on the energy transition, including Greentown Labs, Energy Impact Partners, Emerald Technology Ventures, Syzygy Plasmonics, Heliogen, and many more. Barbara spent multiple decades of her career at Chevron with her final stent as president of Chevron Technology Ventures from the period of 2013 to 2022. Given her extensive experience in energy, Barbara and I have a wide-ranging conversation about her own journey, the role of technology in the energy transition, and how startups should engage with large energy companies and vice versa. We also went as narrow as the role of natural gas and the role of hydrogen in the energy transition and as broad as the impacts of generational shifts in the energy industry, the global geopolitics of energy, and her advice for women working in the energy sector.
(01:08):
And we started the whole thing off with a year-end book recommendation from her that you'll probably want to check out. I also learned a new phrase that I didn't know, which is that "unconventionals is code word for shale gas". There's so much packed into this one, I hope you enjoy it. But before we start.
(01:28):
I'm Cody Sims.
Yin Lu (01:29):
I'm Yin Lu.
Jason Jacobs (01:30):
And I'm Jason Jacobs. And welcome to My Climate Journey.
Yin Lu (01:36):
This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms (01:42):
In this podcast, we traverse disciplines, industries, and opinions to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and all the ways people like you and I can help.
(01:55):
Barbara, welcome to the show.
Barbara Burger (01:56):
Hey, thanks a lot.
Cody Simms (01:58):
I'm really excited to learn from you today. Barbara, you have spent a good chunk of your career in the trenches working in and around energy. I got to know you and my partners and I got to know you earlier this year in Houston as we were making a concerted effort at MCJ to get to know the Houston community because Houston plays such a pivotal role in the energy transition. So I look forward to getting a chance to hear more about your background, hear more about the work you're doing today and hear more about where you see everything headed. With that, why don't you quickly give us a little bit about who you are?
Barbara Burger (02:33):
So when I'm asked to describe who I am, I usually say a couple of things, maybe they'll resonate. So first of all, I'm a three-coaster. So I came from the Northeast. I lived on the West Coast for a long time and this is my second rodeo, as they would say, in Houston. So I've been here for about 10 years. And actually being on all three coasts gives me some perspective as well as many, many, many years working internationally. So that's number one.
(03:02):
Number two is I'm a middle child of a large family and everything I do reflects that. So I share, well, because I never had anything of my own really, and I'm pretty comfortable in crowds.
(03:14):
And number three is I love libraries, but we probably won't talk about that unless we run out of conversations around energy.
Cody Simms (03:20):
Well, let's start right there. It's the end of the year. You got to have a book recommendation. So as we record this, it's December. Tell us what you think everyone here should pick up on. Actually, I'm going to answer this for you because I saw a great book recommendation you did on LinkedIn the other day, and I sent it to someone else who was looking for a book recommendation. I said, "I haven't read this, but Barbara sure seems to advocate for it. So maybe start there and add anything else you want onto the list as well."
Barbara Burger (03:45):
I read a lot, mostly nonfiction, but a bunch of fiction. But the book review I did, it must have been a slow night on LinkedIn or I just have some really great people in my network that amplified that because I think I've had 170,000 impressions and it's now the number one book in Solar Energy and it's a first time author. How cool is that? So I happen to go to, I'll just tell you the beginning part of it, it's called "The West Texas Power Plant That Saved the World." And I went to a dinner that was hosted by just one of my favorite friends and they were all talking about this book and I hadn't read it, I hadn't heard of it, and I didn't even know who the author was and he was there. So I realized I was a remedial student and all of that. I went and bought the book.
(04:32):
And the reason why they highlight this particular power plant is not because it was big and not because it was in a place that was so amazingly center of the earth, but it was the first one that was financed based on merchant economics. So solar had arrived, but he really broadens it out and it really talks about some of the challenges of energy and the economy and the environment. And I really appreciated the writing. So I wrote a small review and it went viral. So if you haven't read that book, if they still have it in, the bookstores are online, you can order it.
Cody Simms (05:08):
The West Texas Power Plant That Saved the World, is that the name of it?
Barbara Burger (05:12):
That's right by Andy Bowman.
Cody Simms (05:14):
I love it.
Barbara Burger (05:15):
Who's now a rockstar thanks to my review, I think.
Cody Simms (05:18):
There we go. Any other emerging authors you want to blow up while you're here on the pod?
Barbara Burger (05:24):
No, but I will say I read a lot of history and stuff, so I read two this year from Walter Isaacson, he's one of my favorite authors and I hope he knows I'm one of his favorite readers. He wrote obviously the Elon Musk book, which I think it's a really good book to read. You get the good, bad and ugly on that. But he also wrote Ben Franklin. And Ben Franklin for us that think about innovation and history and stuff, he's a favorite character. And those are two really different reads from Walter Isaacson. Obviously one of them has been gone for 200 years and one of them still with us.
Cody Simms (05:56):
Amazing. I've read the Steve Jobs one and it's fantastic. So I definitely need to grab the Elon one for sure and Ben Franklin. Okay, well thanks for that.
(06:04):
And as an aside, I know when we had a dinner in Houston earlier this summer, my partner David sat next to you and after the dinner he said, "Barbara and I talked the whole night about books that we read." So I'm sure we could probably go back and forth on this for a long time, but thanks for giving a couple shout-outs there.
(06:20):
Why don't we start with the professional endeavors that you left a few years ago? After quite some time, you were at Chevron from 1987, I believe, until 2022, I think including most recently for the last decade or so as the president of Chevron Technology Ventures and the VP of innovation at Chevron. Could you maybe trace what your time was like at Chevron?
Barbara Burger (06:47):
You gave the year, so you can do the math. I came out of graduate school at Caltech and I got a job offer from Chevron and all the reasons that I went to work for Chevron were really good and I knew actually quite little about energy at that point. I actually went to work in the chemicals division, which is what a PhD in chemist probably does, and I'll just give a couple of snippets. I spent 25 years in parts of the base business in local roles and then regional roles and then international and global roles. So I was really able to see the world from Chevron's business perspective. And one of the things that really taught me was that energy is pervasive and that energy looks different depending on where you are in the world, and I continue to learn about that. But I came into Chevron and I didn't know very much about industrial chemistry.
(07:41):
I didn't know very much about energy. And one of the smarter things I did, because I've made a lot of mistakes in my career was I was willing to learn. I was always a supervisor, so I learned from the people that were reporting to me. Many of them were my dad's age. And I will tell you that summer I called my dad a lot, "Dad, is this how you act at work? Because that's what these guys are telling me and stuff." But they taught me a lot about it. And throughout my career as I progressed and I worked in operations and I worked in sales and I ran various businesses, I continued to learn more about how energy fit into the economy. And I think about energy as "those who make move and use," which I think when we start to think about changing the energy system, we have to think across all of that, not just generation, but you got to move it and store it and then you got to use it. It's pretty much the whole economy.
(08:36):
So 25 years in the base business of Chevron and then I was asked to come to Houston and run tech ventures. I'll tell you that first of all, I ask them, so why me? Which is a really good question to ask a selection team, why did you pick me? And one of the selection team members said, "You have the ability to say both yes and no, and when you are working on investments and it's a volume game, you see a lot of stuff. The ability to say yes and no are really important." Anyway, I came down here and into Houston. I'd come from the Bay Area. I had to learn a lot about the upstream business, but quickly, because I had come from the downstream. I had worked in businesses that had products and customers and things like that. Right away I started to learn about two aspects related to the energy transition.
(09:26):
One was biofuels and renewable fuels. And we were Standard Oil of California. So Chevron was already trying to understand, so how could we use renewable feedstocks into our products? And the second was that we had a large growing LNG business and we produced gas, so I had to learn about solar and wind because they weren't competitive at the time, but the costs were coming down and so they were starting to compete from a power generation perspective. So I thought I was going to have to learn just about upstream. I ended up having to learn or getting a chance to learn a lot about power, which was one of the early, I'll give a shout-out to the guy who organized the dinner that ended up with me reading the book from Andy, was Pat Wood and I met him, he was former head of FERC and I met him early on in my time and it was people like that, people that grew up in the utilities and people that grew up in oil and gas. Those are two different worlds and now we're seeing some coming together of that. So it was really helpful to be able to understand a bit better about that segment, because they were starting to compete with the fossil based generation. So that's kind of a flyover.
Cody Simms (10:43):
And from an investing perspective, you came in knowing more like you said about the upstream oil and gas space and evolved your understanding and focus it sounds like in energy broadly during your time there, did you see Chevron Technology Ventures focus from an investment perspective also evolve during that time? It sounds like maybe a lot of biofuels focused at the beginning, and then it shifts toward more power generation focus during the latter part of your time. Is that correct?
Barbara Burger (11:14):
Just at the high level, if I think about back in 2013 when I came in, first of all, crude oil was $100 a barrel. Houston and Texas in general, the economy was quite hot, so we probably were investing in about four different things at that time, just four big buckets. One was thinking about how to integrate renewables into the oil field for electrification reasons. They weren't economically competitive yet, but we saw the cost curves and we wanted to see, so could you do this? That was one. The second was biofuels.
Cody Simms (11:47):
Interesting. So almost like eating your own dog food to some extent. Can you actually build the business using this stuff before you decide if it's industrial scale to scale out everywhere else? Is a little bit what I'm hearing.
Barbara Burger (11:58):
Chevron's strategy, and I think to this day was wholesale power producer into the merchant market. That really wasn't it. But these big industrial companies, whether it's oil and gas or petrochemical, steel, cement, whatever, they use a lot of energy. And so, one aspect of decarbonization is to electrify. And if you can electrify, then you'll have a choice of fuels. So there was biofuels, electrification or integration of renewables. There was a whole digital play. And cutting across this 10 years was digital for workflows, for being able to do remote monitoring. If you can just imagine energy, the land component of energy is just huge. So being able to monitor things remotely. And then I think the fourth piece at that point was oil was $100 a barrel, so how could you speed up your production, increase your margins and so forth? On the fourth one, very much so the Permian base in the unconventionals, that story, and it really led to the US being an oil exporter and increased our production, but a lot of that came out of the unconventionals. A lot of it was aided by various technologies.
(13:16):
So that was the case in 2013. As we evolved, the biofuels, renewable fuels, that went on to be part of the downstream business and an integral part of it. So it was never intended that we would grow the businesses, we would start things out and see where they would pan out, and that went out to the downstream. The oil fields have a number of different commercial relationships with renewables players and then obviously digital. It's grown and grown and grown. There was less technology just for pure play oil and gas production, and what filled in behind that was decarbonization like carbon capture, there were the ideas that there could be new businesses in geothermal or hydrogen and things like that. So yes, it changed over time. Because I think if you're in corporate venture, your job is to be the pointy end of the spear out there, what's happening at the edges and really discerning how do we think about this? Why should we care about it, whether it's a threat, an opportunity and stuff. So it did change. It was nine years, so lots of things happened in nine years.
Cody Simms (14:26):
In retrospect, how do you feel the biofuel focus at that time of when you started ultimately played out and where do you think that space goes? It's one you don't hear a ton of conversation about anymore, and I'm curious, but it's still a substantial chunk of business for I think many oil and gas companies. I'm curious how you view that evolving.
Barbara Burger (14:46):
Well, I do think renewable diesel is a big play. And sustainable aviation fuel. Those two, so diesel and jet, I think regardless of what the feedstock is. Now, what you don't want is the feedstock to have anything to do with the food value chain. And there's a lot of aspects of this that I think you have to be careful about is the use of land, the use of water, and the use of feedstocks that could go into food. And so if you can separate all those, I think there's still a fuels component, particularly aviation. And the good thing about those renewable fuels is that they were drop-in replacements. So if United Airlines put 5% in, they've done all the studies and they don't have to build new infrastructure to do that. Building new infrastructure, what we're finding out is a major challenge. So if you can do dropped-ins, if you can replace one for another, it will facilitate it.
(15:41):
So depending on where you are, there's a lot of activity in that. There's another piece of that which is, and this isn't for really making the products, but renewable natural gas. So if you can capture methane from not just really oil and gas, but also from ag and municipal waste, a lot of things when they decompose, they produce methane. And so if you can trap that it doesn't add a meaningful amount to the gas that goes into industry or into power, but it prevents it from going into the atmosphere, those two businesses have scaled a lot.
Cody Simms (16:17):
It's funny you talk about the drop in replacement potential of sustainable aviation fuel and how the nice thing about that is that you don't have to build out infrastructure, and I suppose that's back to your make move and use rubric of the three things that you have to do as an energy company. One area that I didn't hear you talk a lot about in terms of your focus at the time when you were running Chevron Technology Ventures is hydrogen nor some of the petrochemical replacements or petrochemical alternatives that we're seeing now, both of which in many cases are not drop-in replacements and do require substantial amounts of infrastructure to be built up around the production of these materials, or the utilization of these material, I guess more importantly on the downstream consumer side. I'm curious how you see these playing out given some of the lessons you've learned in your past.
Barbara Burger (17:07):
And my make move and use is really the energy system. There's going to be different companies along that, and the use part even includes you and me, but hydrogen, we got involved with that towards the latter end of that. And it's a new value chain we're trying to build because there's what? 10 million tons of hydrogen produced in the US right now, mostly from steam methane reforming. And the DOE has put their liftoff reports and they say, here's what it would take to get 10 million tons of green or blue. So a lot of generation. Hydrogen is not easy to move. It's a gas. It's a tiny little molecule. There's pipelines down here on the Gulf Coast, you can stick it onto organic molecules and make liquids and move them. You can condense it. So there's a lot of extra work that makes it harder than say, moving diesel or gasoline, which are liquids and you can appreciate that.
(18:01):
And then the use part, the hydrogen value chain is not just intended to provide hydrogen for current applications, because it's used in petrochemicals, it's used in ammonia and that stuff. It's to create new markets, transportation, industry, some people say aviation, as well as a storage medium for power. Hydrogen has a lot of promise. I heard a podcast about three years ago that I really liked the description of hydrogen. And depending on the technology developments, the infrastructure, but also the economics, energy, ultimately it's about economics. And they said, hydrogen will have a use in the energy system, but think about it as it's either going to be table wine or the champagne at your daughter's wedding. And it really depends on how the value chain scales, and ultimately the cost of it. And it's the relative cost relative to all the other solutions. So the jury's out on how big the market will be.
Cody Simms (19:04):
Meaning that there's a chance that there's always a premium for it and it's only used for very bespoke use cases is a little bit what I'm hearing that analogy to mean, is that correct?
Barbara Burger (19:12):
Yeah. And again, if it's used in power like storage, well there's lots of other technologies that are being developed for storage. A good example is if it's used in heavy duty transport, so long haul trucks, but also renewable diesel, but also electrification. I think we solve for a couple of things. We solve for economics, we solve for carbon intensity or lifecycle analysis, and then we solve for the ease in which we scale this thing, which infrastructure plays a role in. So I think we're going to need all of these things, but I'm not willing to bet on how much of each one because I think that we have a lot of pathways and some of it's going to happen just because whether we get pipelines built, whether we get wires built, that kind of thing.
Cody Simms (19:58):
One area I also didn't hear you mention in laying out the things that you focused on during your time there, which I was actually surprised, I would've thought this would've been a decent chunk of Chevron Technology Ventures focus area, at least during the timeframe when you were running, it would've been shale exploration. It was right during the middle of the shale boom of the 20 teens. Was that not an area you were making a lot of new venture scale investing into?
Barbara Burger (20:21):
So I mentioned that the oil, the unconventionals, that's I guess code for shale. So directional drilling, fiber optics, which here's an interesting one, and you probably met the furrow guys when you were down here. Fiber optics down hole and with horizontal drilling allows you to have sensors, allows you to understand what's going on down there. So there were investments made in that. There were trials done and they really helped you design the operations teams, design the drilling and production plans. Those same technologies are being used in geothermal. So there's a couple of lessons in all of that, but for sure the name of the game in shale or unconventionals was fast and cheap. All those technologies helped do that, and they talk about it as a factory play so that you're drilling every well the same way, so that way you can cut down on your costs, increase your speed. So yes, there were definitely some technologies. And then our work was to invest in them, try them, see whether they work and work with operations obviously to trial them. But then we weren't an operator. The Chevron operations did that work.
Cody Simms (21:37):
My observation being relatively new to the whole climate tech clean tech space over the last few years, I've been in tech for a long time, but newer to this space is it feels like the oil and gas strategics, like Chevron Technology Ventures and some of your competitive firms in the space, early on really were focused on a lot of these oil and gas exploration technologies. And then you had this completely separate class of investors that were the clean tech venture firms. And somewhere along the lines now these groups have started collaborating and co-investing on a lot of things, and it feels that Venn diagram has gotten much more overlapy in the last few years than it maybe was 10 or 12 years ago. Is that an accurate understanding or do you think I am rewriting history with that?
Barbara Burger (22:23):
Well, I'm sure hoping that that's the way the world works. Listen, if you watched COP at all or watched the headlines from COP, the biggest challenge is do you let the incumbents in? Are they a part of the solution? Or do you exclude them? I have spoken many times that if you want to be part of the solution, you are welcome. I think it's required because if we're trying to decarbonize industry, don't you think you should have industry there? And we can't throw away the current energy system, we will evolve it. Hopefully, we will repurpose a lot of infrastructure because we sure won't build all brand new. All of us know that from the cities that we live in and how difficult it has been to build, whether you're talking about wires or pipes or things like that.
(23:12):
I think that I don't work for Chevron anymore, but I would say I hope that people think that we were a good co-investor. I think the thing that we could bring was one, we have a lot of science engineers, so we know what it is the company's trying to do, the startup company, but we could also trial it. And I think the other piece is that we actually wanted the company to succeed because we saw them having a solution to a problem that we wanted to be solved. But this is tough, and I live in Houston where we've worked hard to build an ecosystem here. When I came here in 2013, and I've said this a number of times, I have no portfolio companies that were based in Houston. I had more from Stavanger, Norway and the Norwegians are happy that I say that, but we didn't have it. And part of it was we had a lot of big businesses and we didn't necessarily have a model that says, how do big businesses work with small businesses or what I call the dance of the elephant and the mice.
(24:15):
And it's really hard. But if we're going to get change, if we're going to change the big guys, if we're going to grow some new businesses, we've got to collaborate. And I'm proud of the work we've done here. That's not the case everywhere. There are places where we want to villainize the incumbents, and I'm all for throwing rocks at people that don't want to change and stuff. But for ones that really want to be part of the solution, they have so much to offer. And if they can decarbonize their operations, that will be progress towards the targets that we need to get to in any event.
Cody Simms (24:50):
It's an interesting question about what some of the end goals are because if the end goal is decarbonization of industry, then obviously partnering, working together, collaborating, engaging on solutions ultimately is a necessity there it seems. If the end goal is make a ton of money as an investor, then I suppose investors would want to hope that companies can be born that can be bigger than any of the incumbents on their own, that they would actually exceed them as new technology players in the marketplace. In reality, it's probably going to be a little bit of both. You're going to have a lot of collaboration and you probably will have a handful of companies that get to escape velocity somewhere.
Barbara Burger (25:28):
I would hope that is the case. I think when you're a corporate venture and hopefully when you're even a financial venture, to be honest, these are little companies. They're not producing energy today. They have hope. There's a lot of potential and promise, thank goodness we have a well-established venture ecosystem across the US and beyond because these companies burn through a lot of money before they even get to meaningful revenue and stuff. There's a lot of support from a lot of different places to help grow them. Once they're out there and they're in the marketplace selling whatever it is they're selling and everything, then marketplaces will take care of that. But if we don't help them in the early days, for sure they're not going to grow.
Yin Lu (26:12):
Hey everyone, I'm Yin a partner at MCJ Collective. Here to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ membership community, which was born out of a collective thirst for peer-to-peer learning. And doing that goes beyond just listening to the podcast. We started in 2019 and have grown to thousands of members globally each week. We're inspired by people who join with different backgrounds and points of view. What we all share is a deep curiosity to learn and a bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change. Some awesome initiatives have come out of the community. A number of founding teams have met, several nonprofits have been established, and a bunch of hiring has been done. Many early stage investments have been made, as well as ongoing events and programming like monthly women in climate meetups, idea jam sessions for early stage founders, climate book club, art workshops and more.
(26:58):
Whether you've been in the climate space for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important. If you want to learn more, head over to mcjcollective.com and click on the members tab at the top. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the show.
Cody Simms (27:13):
All right, let's trace your time a little bit post Chevron. So you left in 2022, what are you spending your time and attention on right now?
Barbara Burger (27:21):
Maybe just a little bit. So I had at some point really thought, well, there's an end to this from a Chevron perspective and I feel very good about all that we did. The job was not done, but it'll never be done. I had built incredible capabilities and networks, but also a real interest in this area and an understanding of how energy and the environment and equity and equity in so many dimensions came together. So I really wanted to work in that. COVID was a really great transition for me because I had been either on a business tripper in the office for 34 years, and all of a sudden I was home and I started to get some flexibility that I had never had. And when you've never had it, you actually don't know that you need it. And when I spent two years sitting in my living room where I'm behind my desk, I realized, wow, I flourished in that.
(28:16):
So I wound things down and it wasn't about not working because that wasn't what I wanted to do and I wanted to contribute and everything, but there were a couple of things I said. One, I didn't want to do anything full-time because I had done that since kindergarten and I thought it was time to do something different than I had been management for a long time. I loved that. But every morning I woke up and within a minute, maybe 30 seconds, I knew what my job was. That is heavyweight on you. And so I looked for roles where I could be an advisor, a coach, a mentor, a director, but not management.
Cody Simms (28:55):
You have a big list of those by the way. That is incredibly impressive. Energy Impact Partners, Greentown Labs, Lazard, Heliogen, Emerald Technology Ventures, Syzygy, you are engaged with a lot of very impactful organizations right now.
Barbara Burger (29:10):
Well, and I'm very thankful that they see some value that I can add to it. But I spent 25 years in the base business and many times just looking down every day, narrow one business and everything. And then I spent nine years in a role where I saw broad the breadth of the energy system and it turns out I like to do both. And so some of my roles are with companies and you mentioned Syzygy and I have a few others like that. Helping them grow and helping them at that real inflection point where they've developed technology but now they need to be a business. That's a really important place, because we won't get any impact if we don't get these things out there in a business setting.
(29:55):
But then I also wanted to see breadth. And so the three funds you mentioned, Energy Impact Partners at Emerald, there's one in Japan, [inaudible 00:30:03]. And those really reflect the fact that at the end of the day, I'm a student of history and geography, the energy transition is going to look different depending on where you are in the world, and I wanted to see that.
(30:16):
So I'm very fortunate that I've been able to pick some really interesting roles. And I think it is the fact that I have a bunch of them that I get to see lots of stuff, the connection points that I make. I see trends because I see a bunch of it. So I just wrote my holiday letter and I did say my smile is a lot bigger than it used to be, and I think it's because of the flexibility and the variety. And to be honest, I'm working with some really great people. So that makes it all good.
Cody Simms (30:44):
What do you do differently from how you help the companies, the organizations you work with standpoint?
Barbara Burger (30:50):
So being management and being an advisor is totally different. First of all, think about it, the manager, they're in the driver's seat, their hands are on the wheel. And the advisor is sitting in the passenger car. So I'm a sounding board. I facilitate connections. Show me something, and then I say, "Well, what do you think about it?" I know what these companies do. So sometimes it's a matter of have you thought about asking these nine questions? It's everything but actually executed.
Cody Simms (31:22):
So thinking back to when you were in the strategic investor seat at Chevron and were engaging with startups, and now the startups you're engaging with, when you're no longer in that seat, do you have advice you would give yourself a few years ago about what is this company really trying to tell you, or how can you as somebody who works at a big company, lean in and actually get more insight out of the business you're working with or be more helpful to the startup you're working with? I'm curious how you're thinking has evolved and how you might go back and advise your former self in that regard.
Barbara Burger (31:54):
Well, spoiler alert, when you're running the organization, you don't get to do the fun things like sit in board meetings, so your employees get to do all of that. I think there's so much learning and engagement with the portfolio companies, and I hope that I did this, but I would do it times 10, which is are we supporting the people that are spending time working with the startups and everything? It's not easy and yet that's where the value is and stuff. So it's not the number of clicks you do, it's the value of the interaction with each one. And that's the role of a strategic. So that means you got to spend time preparing, you got to spend time thinking, you really have to, how do I help them? And I think we probably loaded it on with people and they just ran out of time more than anything else. I'm now sitting where they were in some respects, it's a lot of fun, but I hope that we gave them enough time and bandwidth to be able to do it.
Cody Simms (32:55):
Well, let's go the opposite direction then. What advice do you give startups today who are looking to work with big companies? What do you advise them to do? What are the things they need to keep in mind, et cetera?
Barbara Burger (33:08):
And I speak about this in the dance of the elephant and the mice, the startups see that is part of their pathway. I'll distill it down to a couple of things. First of all, what stage are you at? And that's going to help inform where in the company you might want to go. If you're at the prototype stage and stuff like that, don't go to operations. What do you think they're going to do with it? Is it R&D? Is there corporate VC? Don't go to the M&A department, because they're not going to try to buy you when you're a little startup. So it's really the phase that you're at. And then the second is, a startup CEOs showed me this about a month ago, they're actually getting taught how do you map what the organogram of a corporate is because they're huge.
(33:50):
There's tens of thousands of people. And so trying to figure out how do you get inside of there? One of my CEOs calls it the belly of the beast. Yeah, if you've been in this, you understand it. And if you haven't been, how do you do that? And part of it is you've got to find somebody that will hold your hand and help you on that. And that's what corporate venture can do. A good corporate venture is not just an investor. They are an on-ramp. Finding those people, finding the champions because this is upstream of the normal execution of the company.
Cody Simms (34:22):
One thing with startups is time is money because with time they will run out of money. And so startups by definition are wired to need to move very quickly. Corporations even the most well-intentioned ones aren't necessarily, you could be doing in your opinion, a startup a favor by introducing them around to five people in your company, but that's putting many hours of burden of time on that startup for something that may not go anywhere anyway. And if you zoom out on that broad construct, what is the role of speed in this broader transition that we're under in general?
Barbara Burger (35:00):
First of all, I discount or maybe even doubt that the comment that corporations can't move fast because when there is an incident, they will move fast. So you go to a refinery and they need to shut down, they will do it right, but they will not take any more time than they have or need. But when you're talking about non-operational things and change, I agree with you, but I did want to say that.
Cody Simms (35:25):
It's great point.
Barbara Burger (35:26):
And the other thing is, these industries are not risk-free. And so we grew up thinking there's always time to do it right. And it really means you don't take shortcuts that you don't know what the risk associated with it, because dealing with things that can impact the environment, things that can impact safety and health. But back to your point, I think there's a couple of things. One is getting things in the wrong hands, getting things in the hands of somebody that is not a decision maker. But the other thing that corporate culture aside, because I agree with you, it's like watching paint dry sometimes, but one thing I ask startups is this is really important, this potential relationship's really important to you, but do you know how important solving that problem is to the corporate? And how important it is that your solution is implemented?
(36:20):
I'll give you an example. So say you've got something that can help me decarbonize my operation. Well, thank God you're not the only one that has something because actually the energy transition is screwed if you're the only one that has the solution and you've got 15 people in your company. But if I do a Pareto diagram, are you my best shot or are you one of six or is there another one over here that actually one of my existing suppliers can help me and in terms of the amount of CO2 impact, I can get it from them. And so understanding how important you are to the corporation is the $64,000 question. If you're really important, they can move mountains. If you're not that important, okay, then you could put the shoe on your foot and you would say, yeah, there's been times when something's not that important to me and so I slow walk it, and they do.
Cody Simms (37:12):
Asking the question almost without even thinking about startups or the tech space, and some of this was very much the hot topic of discussion at COP 28. How fast should the transition happen? And relatedly, can we and or how do we ultimately retire fossil fuels? What does that look like?
Barbara Burger (37:34):
Well, these are how fast it goes. I think we have to balance the economy and the environment. I'm of a belief that we spend more on incidents than we do upfront, so we probably should spend more upfront. I'm also a believer that this is about emissions, not necessarily that there are times when a gas generation is going to be the right thing to do and a gas generation with CCUS is the right thing to do. So I don't like to pick technologies on that stuff. But listen, I think we should've start in 50 years ago, and we didn't. This has got so many difficult questions. This is where being a student of history and geography, what do you say to the country that hasn't quite reached their inflection point on their development? Our country has been developed using cheap energy. Even if you're not in the energy business, you are because you buy it.
(38:30):
So we have benefited by having stuff that was cheap. Even though we complain about our infrastructure and the ability to build new infrastructure, we got pretty good infrastructure. So do you have rolling transition and you transition some geographies faster than others? I mean, I think these are really big topics to talk about. And that to me is part of the equity issue, which is equity not just between the haves and have-nots, but it's also between the yesterday and tomorrow. I don't think anyone has a perfect answer on all of this stuff, but we should all be working to progress this and do everything we can to balance all of this stuff and move in the right direction.
Cody Simms (39:13):
I have so many different directions I want to go off of your remarks there, which was awesome. Let's start with the last piece you just mentioned, which is how do you manage the equity and time to development in these countries? If you look at, let's take three different regions of the world, China, India, Africa, very different situations. China. China has rapidly grown over the last 30, 40 years, now emits more than the United States, less per capita, but more than the United States cumulatively on an annual basis. India on the same path that China is on. And India and China, their big natural resources as countries are coal. So when you talk about energy security, coal is actually where they have a geopolitical advantage, unfortunately from an emissions perspective. And then you have Africa, which is going to population boom over the next 50 years, but to date is responsible for nearly nothing from an emissions perspective. Just interested in your thoughts on any of those parts of the world and how you see change happening.
Barbara Burger (40:11):
Wow. And by the way, I'm reading this book right now. I haven't written a review because I haven't finished it called Africa Is Not a Country, it's actually 54 of them, which I think is a pretty good book. All the resources are laid out in uneven ways. It's one of the reasons that I wanted to make sure I wasn't just doing things in the US. But also manufacturing isn't laid out evenly and people aren't spread evenly.
(40:37):
And so I think the notion that everyone makes the same progress is a non-starter, because we're not starting from the same place. I like the idea that there's certain commitment areas, but that the country has to look at what it can do and balance all of these things. Andy Bowman's book does a really nice job of talking about why are all the solar panels made in China and it illuminates. This isn't just energy is the economy. So the economy has security issues, it has how do you take care of the people in your country and stuff?
(41:13):
So you and I could have a long discussion, we would probably need to have some smart people join us that have really studied this. I think it's an area where we continue to learn and try to figure out the right way to go, but it's not easy and it's not simple and it's not this is good and this is bad, and the fact that coal is still being used in countries, you can't just say it's bad, because you have to look at the whole balancing act of all the things that that country is trying to do.
Cody Simms (41:42):
In the United States in particular, there's been a heavy shift over the last couple decades from using coal as a primary base load power to using natural gas as a primary base load power. Do you think that gas will retain its status there with CCUS, to use your example, for the foreseeable future? Or do you think that renewables will solve base load issue as storage matures over the next couple of decades?
Barbara Burger (42:11):
So for sure, as the unconventionals, as shale came up and everything, we had this opportunity in the country and we did have a lot of switching. It's going to come down to economics. It's also going to come down to how much new build we can do versus continue to run what we have. I think the interest rate increases gave us a wake up call that when things get more expensive, you just wear last year's clothes one more year. Well, it's the same in infrastructure.
(42:38):
I think the one piece of natural gas that I have to say is that methane is solvable. Methane emissions. We as a country need to do a lot more of that, and the technology exists, the operating practices exist. To me, that's one where there's lots of carrots out there for all of this stuff. That one needs to have some sticks, in my opinion.
Cody Simms (43:00):
There aren't a lot of carrots on methane emissions today, actually either, are there? It was a big topic at COP 28 now, but if you look at everything in the Inflation Reduction Act and whatnot, even methane capture or methane prevention isn't an area that is heavily tax credited, for example, relative to CO2. Interesting, I feel like that's an area that's going to get a lot more attention over the next few years from a policy perspective in general.
Barbara Burger (43:27):
Well, I think there's methane from oil and gas and it's been mostly sticks. And again, the technology, the practices exist. There's policy support for renewable and natural gas from dairy digesters, landfill, et cetera. So there is carrots there. But I think the biggest part of this is the technology now is pretty good at both detecting, but how do you abate it? And the one thing that I think probably could have some carrots is, well, if you have to replace valves, if you have to replace equipment, is there an incentive to be able to replace the equipment? And is there financial incentive for that? For some operators, it's not an issue for the big operators. But I have been reading some things here that some of the small operators, this is where they may sell out because they aren't big enough to be able to justify the work that would be required there. More to tell on that.
Cody Simms (44:28):
There's an interesting, justice is the right word for this, but economic justice angle to what you just said, that I've seen come up in discussions about the shift to EVs from a trucking perspective, which is that a lot of trucking companies are very small, family-owned, single operator, or maybe they own two trucks or something and all of a sudden telling them they can't drive this diesel truck anymore, they need to go buy a $400,000 new EV cab is a tough pill to swallow for a small family-owned company.
(44:57):
My guess is a lot of our listeners don't know the full breadth of the economic breakdown with oil and gas. When you talk about oil and gas, you often think of Chevron, you think of Shell, you think of Exxon, you think of these big giant companies, but actually there are lots and lots of small businesses in the industry as well that incur a lot of costs on this stuff. I'm curious, and I know this wasn't the area you particularly worked on, but maybe even just taking a minute to explain a little bit about, when you say upstream, downstream, et cetera, where do the big companies play? Where do the small companies play? What does the space from a breakdown perspective look like?
Barbara Burger (45:33):
I'll just try to have a few highlights. One is, I don't know who has this statistic, but I'm sure it's a Greater Houston Partnership, 5,000 energy related firms in Houston. Take that one out for a test drive. I probably can name 200. So we have little companies in the upstream, small exploration companies. We have little companies in the services, all over it. The one thing you don't have as much of is you don't have little companies owning refineries. You do have some, not brand new refineries, but maybe refineries that are on their third or fourth or fifth owner. But yes, it's a very distributed, and those are the people making the stuff.
(46:12):
And then you have distribution. And by the way, the service stations are typically not owned by the company. So there's a long chain after that with a lot of companies. Some are public companies, there's private companies that are backed by sponsors, and then there's family owned businesses.
(46:30):
I'll make a pitch. And it's in general telling people that they have to buy something or telling people that they can no longer buy something, those are hard things. They're hard things as a consumer to hear. So if you're going to tell me I have to buy something and it's expensive and I'm going to have to do capital outlay and the thing I'm using still works, how are you going to help me? And so I do think we got to wrestle with all of those things, whether it's in transportation or in the built environment. There's lots of things you could do in buildings, but how are we helping either in the residential area or in buildings to be more energy efficient?
Cody Simms (47:10):
One thing I hear a lot about is generational shift of younger people putting their hands up saying they want to work in clean energy, they want to work in renewables in places like Houston. And I'm interested how that landscape that you just laid out will somewhat just change out of sheer inertia of young talented people, instead of going into the family business, pursuing a side pathway to find an alternative solution for the family business over time. That could be in the renewable space or could be in alternate energy. And it's almost this transition of oil and gas companies to energy companies, as they rethink what they want their businesses to be over time, maybe organically, small business shifts that way as well. Perhaps, I don't know
Barbara Burger (47:55):
A lot of questions in that one.
Cody Simms (47:57):
I'm apt to do that. Sorry.
Barbara Burger (48:00):
No, that's okay. So I think two areas there. One is, next generations come into family businesses. They use today's technology, whether it's communications, whether it's more software, tech and so forth. But they're also going to look at hardware that is today's and not last generation. I think on the other piece is when I was at Chevron, I would go to universities and I'm a university trustee, and if you've ever seen me when I'm on campus, I get a big smile because they are our future and they're going to hopefully solve all these problems that we've created. But students would say, well, why would I go work for Chevron? And I'd say, well, first of all, that's not the question that we should be talking about.
(48:41):
Let's first talk about whether or not you should work in energy, and I mean energy, the whole thing. And I want to convince you that it's big, it's impactful, it's going to change over your career. I can tell you what it was like when I started. I can tell you now.
(48:57):
And this is a problem that matters and the things that you and I have been talking about, Cody, it's not just science. Look, there's stuff in there that is history. There's stuff in there that's philosophical, equity issues. This is whole society stuff. And once I've got you on energy and not anything else, then you can work to build new stuff or you can work from the inside out and try to change an organization.
(49:25):
And there's pros and cons on those. Startups, they have their good days and bad days incumbent, they have good days and bad days. If you decide you're going to work for a large company, then I'm going to talk to you about the one that I think you should do. But I think we need all of these. And my hope is that new people to the workforce will look at this challenge that we have and they'll say, I'm in. I can do it in lots of different ways.
(49:49):
And by the way, throughout your career you can play different roles. And so just because you started out in a startup or an investor or an operator, it is the sum total of all those experiences that will result in somebody who can provide a lot of value into the industry.
Cody Simms (50:08):
The individual evolution is such a good point. And that's actually one of the last questions I want to ask you, Barbara, which is you have spent your career as a woman in oil, and gas as a woman in tech, hard tech, science. What advice do you have for women getting into this space today and how they can best navigate their careers around how this space is or isn't changing?
Barbara Burger (50:35):
So 100 years ago this year, my grandmother graduated from college, right?
Cody Simms (50:40):
Wow.
Barbara Burger (50:41):
And her daughter graduated from med school. So I was fortunate that I had people in my family that always let me know I could do anything that I set my mind to. And I bring that up because a lot of kids don't have that. And so number one, if you've been successful, be a role model because you have to work hard and everything, but you have to believe it's possible. Then I come back to the fact that I'm a middle child of a large family, and there are brothers and sisters in that. So I have many brothers. I have two of them that have the same mother as me, but lots of other ones. Listen, we learned how to work together. Could I tell you a hundred stories of where I was treated differently because I was a woman, whether it was here in the US or international? Yes.
(51:31):
I will tell you, it gets easier as your career goes on because you've built credibility as to who you are. People stop with silly things about whether or not you're capable of doing the work. Your sense of humor probably grows about laughing when you hear some of this stuff, and probably compassion and empathy that sometimes it's just we're goofy and we say stuff that we really don't mean, but well-intentioned. So I was frequently the only woman, the other women that were around when I was in undergraduate or graduate or in the company, I am really good friends with. So the sisterhood is alive and well, and I would say, Hey, just follow your passions and find those role models and find those allies. And I really got introduced to the concept of allies when I was at Chevron, it's really helpful to have somebody that's watching out and making sure that if you were interrupting me, this whole thing, it would be nice to have somebody who say, "Well, Cody, why don't you let her talk?" Because it's harder for me to say it. Now, I could say it, because I would do it. But the allies are important. And some of the allies that I had early in my career, they were men with daughters. Hugely important. So I don't know if you have a daughter.
Cody Simms (52:45):
I do not have a daughter.
Barbara Burger (52:49):
Okay. Well, if you did, then you would know what I was talking about.
Cody Simms (52:53):
I love the sentiment. That's amazing. Barbara, what else should I have asked? We've gone long, we've talked about so much. Is there anything else that you think it's important for us to cover today?
Barbara Burger (53:04):
The one thing I'd leave you with, because we started with investments and technology-based investments and stuff. At the end of the day, energy is like a commodity. And it needs to be cheap and it needs to be reliable. And now we've put this additional requirement, which is a really important requirement of, I would say low or no impact to the environment, which is not just we focused on carbon, but there's water, there's a number of other aspects to it. So whatever we're developing, it cannot be the niche product. It has to be something that's available to all, and it has to eventually be cheap.
(53:46):
And so I think that's the part about taking technology and actually then pivoting to a business. That's really hard, but that's what we're up against here. The good thing is there are so many people that want to be part of this and be part of the solution, and some of them are just like me, where we just want to sit in the passenger seat and help you.
Cody Simms (54:07):
I love that you said we have created a new requirement. That clearly humans have voted with their wallets and with their own preferences that energy needs to be cheap and needs to be reliable. But the fact that you said, and we collectively as a human race have added this third requirement, which is that it also needs to be low impact is a really powerful way to think about it because it means we're all trying to solve this together and that we've all essentially, and I don't know that I would agree that we all have agreed, but the way you have described it, it feels like it's an inevitability that humans are agreeing toward this.
Barbara Burger (54:43):
Well, listen, not everybody sits and thinks about this all day long, but if their electricity or their gasoline prices are too high. If they've got blackouts, if it's cold and their heater doesn't work, if it's hot and their air conditioning doesn't work, or if they have storms, they understand all of those things, they want those things to go away, and so you can translate that to be, hey, what is causing those things? So that's why you should work in energy.
Cody Simms (55:13):
I love it. It's complicated. Well, hey, I really appreciate your time today, Barbara. Thank you so much, and I got a ton out of this conversation. I'm sure those listening did as well. Have a wonderful holiday. This'll air after the holidays, but I have to say that anyway, and thanks for your time.
Barbara Burger (55:29):
I'll talk to you later.
Jason Jacobs (55:30):
Thanks again for joining us on My Climate Journey podcast.
Cody Simms (55:34):
At MCJ Collective, we're all about powering collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem solving capacity.
Jason Jacobs (55:43):
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Yin Lu (55:56):
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Cody Simms (56:06):
Thanks, and see you next episode.
