Playing Offense Instead of Defense: Strengthening Sustainability Practices

A bad carpenter, the saying goes, blames his tools. Environmentalists often point the finger at the entire oil and gas industry and, in the process, may be casting aside the means – and minds – needed to solve key climate challenges, an author and lecturer recently told the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE).

Environmental groups have fostered hostility and sometimes openly vilified fossil fuel producers – engendering feelings of hopelessness in the industry’s leaders and rank and file who may be key to solving sustainability challenges, Wayne Visser recently told the SPE during a recent webinar. His perspective: inspire realistic enthusiasm instead.

The author of 42 books, Visser’s latest endeavor – Thriving: The Breakthrough Movement to Regenerate Nature, Society and the Economy – explores reaching and surpassing sustainability targets to fight climate change and, more specifically, how the oil and gas sector can help.

“I know what transformational change looks like and feels like, and I do see some parallels with what's happening in oil and gas or in the energy transition. It has to go through a dramatic change.” – Wayne Visser

Demonizing tactics by some environmentalists may have dispirited professionals within the oil and gas industry and left them unmotivated to help solve sustainability tasks despite having the skills, resources and talent to make significant contributions.

“It's a sector that contributes to the problem and it has an enormous resourcefulness and innovation to contribute to the solution,” Mindset Results founder Marinma Dorado said during an SPE Live discussion with Visser, a fellow at the University of Cambridge.

Moving past defensiveness

Having grown up in South Africa during the transition from apartheid to democracy, Visser is familiar with how quickly dramatic change can occur. While issues such as the energy transition may face several years of resistance – about 45 years, in Visser’s apartheid example – change came about rapidly when it was finally accepted.

“I know what transformational change looks like and feels like, and I do see some parallels with what's happening in oil and gas or in the energy transition,” Visser said. “It has to go through a dramatic change.”

“If you in any way are open to the science of what's happening around climate change, how quickly it's happening, how much worse it is every year that new science comes out than we even predicted according to the models, then you have to face up to the fact that transformation is coming,” he said.

Getting the industry to the tipping point, however, would require a wider range of companies within the oil and gas industry to abandon the “business-as-usual” mindset and explore sustainable solutions to help battle climate change.

“The change will also come from within the oil and gas; it has to so can you get involved in the green hydrogen projects or in the projects that eliminate methane leaks, for example, or the things that will have a dramatic effect,” Visser said. “Move into the solution space rather than the business as usual, defensive continued sort of impact space.”

Changing minds, investment

Aside from shifting away from a defensive mindset, devoting more capital toward clean energy, such as green hydrogen or other renewables, is the best step to becoming sustainable, Visser said.

According to Visser, Denmark’s Ørsted, one of the largest global fossil fuels companies 13 years ago, has emerged as one of the top offshore wind companies through a radical change in its investments.

“It was by changing their investment, going from investing more than most of their money in back into fossil fuels to investing 99% of their annual budget in renewables,” he said. However, “I think this is the tough transition that some people in the industry [have] not yet faced up to and not yet prepared to make.”

“It's not that [they lack] the skills and that it's not that we won't need energy. It's not that we won't need engineers. It's not that we won't need fuels,” he continued, “but we have to make dramatic shifts, and it has to be fast.”

Visser said that he didn’t see “enough ambition” from the industry in reducing carbon emissions and, in turn, reaching net zero targets, but investments made in chemical recycling, green hydrogen and green ammonia can help rectify this.

Additionally, “a lot of those skills are transferrable, especially when you look at offshore,” he continued.

But first, minds need to change – on both sides.