When it comes to technology, there is no shortage in the energy transition space. In fact, there might just be too much.

What is lacking, however, is technologies that cost-effectively scale, according to upstream and service company executives speaking at an SPE Energy Transition Symposium.

“There is a lot of promising technology ideas. There’s a gap … Scale is not being tested on a lot of these technologies,” said David Reid, CTO and chief marketing officer for NOV, adding that costs need to come down.

“Proving [technology] at bench scale is one thing. Proving deployed reliability and uptime over a 20-year project life is absolutely a completely different thing,” added Doug Conquest, vice president of Occidental’s Oxy Low Carbon Ventures.

Rob Wingo, executive vice president of corporate ventures for EQT Corp., compared the plethora of technologies to “the Manhattan Project on steroids.”

“I feel like every other day there’s a new technology that comes,” Wingo said. “They’re looking for an investment or they want you to use it or try it out. It’s crazy.”

And risky.

The discussion among executives from oil and gas companies active in advancing lower-emission technologies took place amid ongoing global net-zero emissions 2050 ambitions. The transition will require new infrastructure; equipment capable of running on cleaner burning fuels; establishing new and strengthening existing supply chains; and technology that can be scaled quickly and economically.

Think carbon capture and storage (CCS) and hydrogen.

Making decisions on whether to deploy capital is big for most companies, especially public ones who answer to shareholders. “So, the level of confidence in the technology has to be high,” Conquest said, after noting that hundreds of millions to billions of dollars are poured into projects.

It’s the normal state of play with nearly every technology, he said, pointing out “we have a clock on us because of the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.” Companies must decide whether to wait for optimal technology or move forward and develop technology in parallel, he said.

Regardless, each move—or inaction—comes with a certain amount of risk.

Risk multipliers

When it comes to technology, EQT sees different types of risks, according to Wingo.

“You’ve got the individual technology risk, but you also have the risk of all of these new technologies working together as a system,” Wingo said. “And that’s a big risk that the industry is trying to piece together right now.”

He used CCS as an example, saying “putting those two things together hasn’t really been done in a lot of places,” he added. “And so, we’re going to try for the first time as an industry and see how it goes. I guarantee you we’re going to learn things.”

Lessons may be learned as the U.S. works to establish hydrogen hubs, including those that utilize CCS to trap and sequester emissions from hydrogen production processes that use natural gas as feedstock. EQT is among the companies involved in standing up the Appalachian Hydrogen Hub in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania. EQT plans to construct and operate a clean hydrogen production facility to convert natural gas into syngas using autothermal reforming, as well as low-carbon aviation fuel and other liquids.

“The biggest problem that I see with hydrogen is that it’s about a third of the energy content is natural gas. So, if you want to use your existing natural gas pipeline network to get it to end users, you're going to need three times the size, three times as much capacity as we have today to get the same amount of energy to the end user,” Wingo said. “Obviously that’s not viable. So you’re going to have to find a way to get it from the point of generation to the point of use in an economic way. And right now, the only way to do that is compressing it, which is very expensive and building pipelines that can handle it, which is very expensive, especially in an age where developing any infrastructure is very difficult.”

Hopes are co-locating supply and demand via connected hubs across the U.S. could help alleviate the challenge. However, sectors—such as steel manufacturers and power companies—still need equipment capable of using hydrogen.

“All of these costs money for every point in the value chain, and we’re trying to find ways to do that economically,” Wingo said, adding it is challenging.

Reid also pointed out barriers with hydrogen and distribution, adding many think hydrogen is the “magic fuel.”

“Everyone has to talk about openly where we’re are and what we can do,” Reid said.

Collaboration

The oil and gas industry is “perfectly placed for solving problems,” according to Reid.

NOV is known for its oilfield rig, wellbore, completion and production technologies. However, like some of its peers, the company has become active in energy transition-related technologies. It is putting its money and expertise to use in areas that include biogas, geothermal, hydrogen, solar and nuclear energy.

Collaboration has a key role to play.

The renewables business is “wildly different” than oil and gas, Reid said.

“Having money isn’t the secret to the renewables business; being able to do something is,” Reid said. “We help many projects go forward by bringing in other partners. …. There is a need for collaboration especially when you don’t know how you’re going to execute.”

The oil and gas industry is changing in its transition, Reid said, “because we all have to work together.”

That is also something to which Wingo can relate.

“We spent over a year trying to bring 50 organizations together to go chase money from the DOE [U.S. Department of Energy] and that was an incredible collaboration effort,” Wingo said, referring to ARCH2’s pursuit of federal dollars to create a hydrogen hub.

“We all had to come together to figure out how we were going to link up the components of the value chain, and that’s happening industry wide right now,” he said. “It’s not quite the same as [being] a producer of natural gas” where being secret and moving under the radar to capture good acreage in the core is the norm.

Imagine the core being the size of the US. and no way one company could produce it alone, Wingo said.

“That’s how I view the energy transition space. There’s so much room for growth. There’s so many possibilities, and there’s so many ways to play in the game,” he said.

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