Agenda

Keynote Presentation: Houston’s Leadership in the Energy Transition

Our first keynote speaker, Bob Harvey, will discuss how in 2021, the Greater Houston Partnership created a vision to leverage Houston’s energy leadership and accelerate solutions for an energy-abundant, low-carbon future.  Working alongside and on behalf of the energy industry, and in cooperation and collaboration with academia, governments, and other public and private institutions, the Houston Energy Transition Initiative’s goal is to deliver on that vision.  

This session will provide a subjective review of the role that hydrocarbons will play globally. Demand for energy has continued to increase parallel to worldwide industrial development. From a historical perspective, the significant demand for energy has been met through various energy sources, especially during and after the industrial revolution. Hydrocarbons have been instrumental during this time for multiple reasons, from various market price points to their high energy density and abundance. As future energy demand is expected to increase along with population, meeting this demand in a scalable manner poses many challenges.

Carbon capture, and storage (CCS) is viewed as one of the only practical ways to achieve deep decarbonization in some parts of the industrial sector. Most sources agree that large growth in CCS is needed for the world to reach net-zero goals. The CCS industry has reached a tipping point from which it could grow significantly and competitively through favorable climate policy initiatives, increases in carbon price across the globe, and technology developments that combined with large-scale deployments would reduce costs across the value chain. CCS represents a great opportunity for the oil and gas industry to leverage its skillsets to decarbonize its operations and provide a broader climate solution to industrial emitters. This session will give an overview of the CCS value chain, describe new hub models, and discuss the future of CCS while showing a roadmap for O&G professionals to navigate the energy transition.

Offshore wind is on the forefront of the global renewable energy revolution to unlock commercial scale renewable electricity. Nearly 70% of the Earth is covered by the ocean. With nearly half of the world’s population living near the coast, offshore wind and its technology advancements are facilitating a new energy landscape. Offshore wind creates a unique socio-economic benefit in that it leverages decades of the offshore oil and gas experience and supply chain as well as enabling future sustainable energy solutions.

Department of Energy (DOE) studies dating back to the 1970s estimate there is significant geothermal potential in sedimentary rock across the U.S., including the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast where thousands of oil and gas (O&G) wells have been drilled over the years. Challenges in the low- to mid-temperature 'new' geothermal potential include the ability to effectively harvest heat from the rock, efficiently convert that heat to electricity, and deliver this electricity at a competitive cost to other forms of energy. Geothermal is a natural segue for O&G professionals into renewable/clean energy as it leverages existing O&G technology, equipment, and expertise. This session will feature speakers who are intimately involved in the pursuit of geothermal in sedimentary formations across North America.

Keynote Presentation: Shaping Our Energy Transition Future Together

Our second keynote speaker, Michael Edwards, considers 

• Do we have an industry approach to shaping the future of energy?
• What will it take to work together in a forward-thinking strategic way?
  Impactful and sustainable investment trends give us evidence of the future and our opportunities as an industry. Current trends, as well as sustainability financial reporting standards, lend urgency and opportunity for us to come together to act on our future of energy.
• How do we take corporate expectations, and ambitions and practically integrate them into our long-term roadmaps and portfolios?  

Natural gas has been a staple of the energy mix for over a century and will remain a critical tool in decarbonizing the energy sector. Converting natural gas to blue hydrogen and capturing the CO₂ presents a great monetization route in a decarbonized world with versatile applications. It is critical for oil and gas producers to be part of the solution in reducing the carbon intensity of blue hydrogen at the front end of the value chain to enable its growth in the power, transportation, and other industry sectors. To do so, upstream operators must address methane emissions and will need to decarbonize their own assets, with blue hydrogen being an important tool itself. It will be critical for integrated operators to understand how to get the hydrogen to market – where to produce it, how to move it, and where to store it. Finally, blue hydrogen presents an opportunity to export decarbonized natural gas via multiple potential sales vectors. The blue hydrogen symposium will cover how upstream and midstream oil and gas producers can play a critical role in the growth of blue hydrogen.

The energy landscape of the 21st century will be marked by an increasing level of renewables and alternative energy applications. Being able to accurately model the economic benefit and optimization strategy of each technology is critical in determining policy support, research and development efforts, and industry adoption. In some cases, promising future technologies need to be modeled with sparse data. In other cases, analysis of large datasets requires specialized techniques. This session focuses on methods and results from techno-economic analysis of emerging energy applications.

Over the last 150 years, the oil and gas industry has evolved to deliver 328 exajoules of energy globally in 2018, spurred by innovation and new technologies to unlock vast resources, the most recent of which was the shale revolution. Emissions associated with that energy use were 33.8 gigatons of CO2. With the transition to net-zero by 2050, the industry is now entering an era that necessitates the emergence of new technologies that will enable both a viable transition for current operators, as well as wide-scale adoption of novel, revolutionary technologies. This session will explore some of these emerging and enabling technologies around carbon capture, monitoring, and verification, as well as new digital technologies that may play a vital role in this transition.