Vijay Swarup, ExxonMobil Vice President Research and Engineering
CERA Panel March 5, 2021
Introduction: Its an honor to be here Carlos.
Question 1:
Yeah well Carlos again, thanks for
including me. Bob, Darryl great to see you guys. Im looking forward to this conversation. You know what Bob and Darryl have already talked about is kind of the challenge, which is how do we provide affordable, scalable energy while addressing
the risks of climate change something that is often called the dual challenge. You know in your company, we are at the core a technical company and so our R&D programs and R&D strategies are very much closely tied to our business
strategy as well as our longer term corporate strategy.
The title of this session is a great title, its Will Energy Innovation
Deliver? And of course the confidence on this panel is very high that energy innovation [call freezes for a couple seconds] by continuing programs and focusing on the deliverables, having sort of a stage gate process so that you can keep track
of where youre going. Its hard to over-schedule innovation. What you have to do is you have to be amenable towards driving innovation have the right milestones, have the right targets, work very closely with your business
partners, with your strategies in order to be able to deliver what is needed, what is being called on, which is a new set of solutions.
The very
essence of this panel implies that we need technology, we need energy innovation, and we need energy innovation tied to, within our company, tied to our corporate strategies, and also broadly tied to what society demands, which is as Darryl pointed
out: affordable, scalable, low emission energy. And the root of that is going to be new technical solutions.
Question 2:
Thats a great question and to build off what Darryl said is, you know energy is tough. Its a very big constant. Its one of the few
industries that requires reform of technical capability from digital to chemistry to math to physics, etc. When you think about carbon capture and storage, youre right Carlos, I think that pretty much everybody agrees that is one of the
critical technologies that are needed to meet the aspirations of society. It is a combination of which you just said it is a perfect example of where there is a technology that works today thats liquid amines. It is deployed today. But
theres better ways to do it and theres research needed to improve upon it. Today, carbon capture, which weve been practicing for over 30 years, and we understand this space very well, so we feel confident when we say there are
better ways to do it. We need to continue to do research to find better ways to do it. We need to find ways to make it less energy intensive. We need to find ways to make it modular. Were working on things anywhere from electro-chemical routes
like a fuel cell to direct air capture, which is taking CO2 directly out of the air, which is a synthetic route to negative emissions. So I think carbon capture is going to be needed, is needed today, and to answer your question on whats it
going to, its going to take everything. Its going to take technology, its going to take policy, its going to take infrastructure, its going to take digital and enablement: its going to take all of those working
together. And youre not going to time it so they all come together. What we believe is you want the best technology to win. You want the technology that can provide the best route to affordable and scalable. And then the policy piece can come
and complement the technology. But we really need to advance the best technologies and I think it starts with the humility that we have a technology gap and we need to work on technical solutions that can be broadly deployed because we have regional
aspects we have to think about, we have all sorts of other dynamics. But at the end, carbon capture is a technology. We believe it, weve been doing it for years and we continue to do research on how to improve the way we do carbon capture and
storage.