Allyson Anderson Book
Editor's note: This profile is part of Hart Energy's 50th anniversary Hall of Fame series honoring industry pioneers of the past 50 years and the Agents of Change (ACEs) who are leading the energy sector into the future.
Allyson Anderson Book walks the walk when it comes to sustainability.
Named chief sustainability officer for Baker Hughes in September 2022, she won’t ask the company’s 55,000 employees to do something she herself is unwilling to do.
“I don’t talk about doing things. I do the things,” Book said. “If I say Baker Hughes is going to get to net zero, I am working on how I personally take my emissions out and how I operate more sustainably. It is actually not convenient or easy, but if I don’t do it, how’s anybody else going to do it?”
In her personal life, she has worked to eliminate unnecessary purchases, and when she does vote with her dollars, she is making deliberate choices about the types of businesses she supports.
Reid Morrison, global energy consulting leader at PwC, worked with Book on Baker Hughes’s “All In, Carbon Out” program to reduce the service company’s carbon footprint. The program asked the company’s employees to look at daily activities and propose ideas that would reduce emissions.
“Ultimately, there were over 500 ideas, all legit,” he said. “This workforce turned on around decarbonization as their job.”
Book understands how fragile and complex the energy system is and knows the industry can do better, Morrison said.
“She is working in the most important industry on the most important issues,” he added.
Book, who earned a B.S. in geology and a B.A. in music from the University of Northern Iowa, didn’t intend to enter the oil and gas industry. While pursuing a Ph.D at the University of Kansas, she was working on a project related to an oil and gas leak in Hutchinson, Kan., and had the opportunity to pursue an internship with Exxon Mobil. She said she almost didn’t take the interview because she’d decided she was “going to be an environmentalist.”
In the end, she said, she went for the interview, landed the internship and the position led to a job offer. Book left the doctoral program to join Exxon Mobil full time.
Shortly after that, she got into policy work. She worked on the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources for Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) as a congressional science fellow with sponsorship from the American Geological Institute. There, she helped develop legislation and policy for geothermal, and carbon capture and sequestration activity, among other issues.
She went on to serve as associate director for strategic engagement at the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, where she helped institute reforms in the aftermath of the 2010 Macondo disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
“I had to look at everything from training to rebuilding our international presence,” she said. “I oversaw and helped technically contribute on six of the major rulemakings.”
She later served as executive director of the American Geosciences Institute and helped modernize the organization. Then, in December 2019, she joined Baker Hughes as vice president for energy transition and was promoted to CSO in 2022.
“In every role that I’ve had,” Book said, “there’s been some sort of a mandate to figure out how to solve a problem.”
