.png){kind=logo}
In this episode of The Climate Dad, your host Mike Smith will discuss the climate causes and effects of electricity consumption in 2024, focusing on the growth in demand and the role of renewable energy. He'll also be talking about and examining the interaction of a climate worry that many people have – methane coming from permafrost, and how that will interact and is currently interacting with climate policies.
Next, he will be joined by Deb Ryan at S&P Global. She shares her background in the oil and gas industry and her transition to working on emissions reduction. Deb Ryan discusses her experience working in the oil and gas industry and the issue of flaring gas. She highlights the environmental impact of flaring and the need for better practices in the industry, and more. She's a big thinker about complex topics and about how capital flows and engineering enable change. It's an informative, information-dense interview with a personable leader. Enjoy!
00:00 Introduction and Background
12:55 The Role of the Oil and Gas Industry in Emissions Reduction
18:21 The Impact of Emissions and Carbon Pricing on Commodity Markets
21:40 Addressing Emissions to Maintain Social and Regulatory License
35:12 Engineering Challenges in Carbon Capture
37:21 Point Source vs. Direct Air Capture
38:03 The Need for Stable Policies and Funding
42:05 The Shift in Methane Strategy and Carbon Intensity Awareness
44:29 Exploring Carbon Markets and Emissions
Mike Smith (00:00)
Hi everyone and welcome back to The Climate Dad, where we talk about and explain the news and science of climate change. I'm your host, Mike Smith. I'm a father of two great kids and the founder of Aclymate where we help businesses without sustainability teams measure, reduce, report, and offset their footprint without having to become a climate expert. Today is going to be both entertaining and educational. We'll be talking about the climate causes and effects of electricity consumption in 2024, after some recent news came out. We'll also be talking and examining a bit of the interaction of a climate worry that many people have. That's methane coming from permafrost and how that's going to interact and is interacting with climate policies. I'm also going to be joined by Deb Ryan at S&P Global. She's a big thinker about complex topics and about how capital flows and engineering enable change. It's an informative, information -dense interview with a really personable leader. And so you're really not going to want to miss it. Stick around.
Mike Smith (01:06)
So let's begin today with some news about the growth of electricity demand in the United States. As being reported by Inside Climate News, electricity demand in the first seven months of 2024 grew by 5 % from the same period in the previous year. That's a really remarkable growth in demand. It's the highest percentage growth in decades. This is in line with what grid planners had been projecting, but they hadn't really been seeing it yet demonstrated because of improvements in efficiency. So kind of a good news, bad news, which is that...
It's nice to know that the projections are matching reality, but also that we're kind of overcoming some of our efficiency gains. Anyways, what's going into the growth of electricity demands? Well, a few things. First, we've seen a few big demand functions coming online as the economy continues to transition into our climate future. This includes things like the increased need for power for artificial intelligence data centers and the reshoring of manufacturing and industry to the United States. In general, the returning of industry to the US is a good thing.
as we have a more efficient power grid and the footprint of trans -oceanic shipping can really cause climate emissions to jump. So there's a good news there with a bit of a note of caution that we need to keep cleaning the grid up. As for AI, there's just not a ton of good news in that yet. Most AI functions replace lower emissions alternatives. So if you can, when feasible, you might want to think about using those instead. The other thing that is driving our increased electricity demand has been in an abnormally warm year.
That too is in line with climate predictions or actually slightly ahead of them. So that's just bad news as air conditioning usage increases. And that's just what's driving our increased demand. So how do we meet that new demand? Some good news and bad news here too. First, the good news. Renewable energy is growing very rapidly as more facilities are being installed. Again, comparing the first seven months of 2024 with the previous year, we saw an 8 % increase in wind farm
electricity generation and a kind of staggering 30 % increase in solar farm generation. That's just incredible. Across the country, we've seen very few installations of natural gas plants, none of coal and thousands upon thousands of megawatts of solar, wind, batteries, and even a few nuclear facilities coming online. Clean energy is very much on the march. Now, the bad news.
Even with that growth, clean energy only met about 45 % of the increased demand. We're growing our consumption faster than clean generation capacity is growing. So the remaining 55 % roughly was picked up by the mostly existing power sources working at higher capacity factors than we've seen in the recent past. That means coal power plants, gas power plants running at fuller capacity. Success is retreating from us about as fast as we're making progress.
So where do we all go from here? I would expect to see this tension continue through next year. It's only getting warmer. AI and industry really aren't going away. But renewable energy will continue to be as it increases in demand. That will also demonstrate the need for additional funding. So development should continue at pace. The things to look for would be whether governments expedite or remove siting and interconnection regulatory requirements and really help to accelerate.
even further, the adoption of renewable energy. Also, small bittersweet news of this is that a warming world requires less heating. And from a climate perspective, heating is a far higher emission source than air conditioning. It's just a, you tend to burn things for heat. You tend to use air conditioning using electricity. So that should help us on the emissions front some too. We just haven't found a solution for climate change yet.
but we're definitely getting warmer. And that is your Climate Dad joke of the week.
So it's been a bit since we've talked about climate tipping points, but let's look back at one that has worried people for a long time, the melting of Arctic permafrost. If you're not familiar with what permafrost is, it's something that happens in and near the Arctic underground. I should say the underground in and near the Arctic. Most people know that if you dig down into the ground near your home, for example, a few feet down, you get to a point where the temperature becomes pretty constant. This is an effect that is captured for good use in
ground source heat pumps, but more traditionally, and it was why cellars were used to store food and wine and why many cultures live in caves or underground dwellings. It just made things more comfortable. But in the Arctic, the deep cold of winter means that digging down into the soil actually leads you to where the earth is permanently frozen, even in the summer. Because it's so cold, any water that permeates down to that level, which again, is only a few feet down, freezes and makes the earth impermeable.
It's a permanent frost or a permafrost. The dirt essentially becomes just a bunch of frozen mud when you get a few feet down. And this is why if you like a look at pictures of Arctic landscapes in the summer, they're frequently dotted with lots and lots of ponds. There's just really nowhere for the water to seep down into or go away to. But the thing about permafrost is that it's more than dirt and water. Soil in lower, in temperate climates is composed of a lot of organic material.
And that organic material moves lower after it has been into the soil, after it's been digested by microbes and fungi. Permanent carbon sequestration. A lot of other people are talking about how soil can be an incredible sink for carbon. But in permafrost, it's too cold for those microbes to work very well. So much of the organic material becomes buried and frozen and locked in. What ends up happening is when the permafrost melts, that buried material now
is able to decompose and due to the depth, anaerobic digestion would lead it to turn into methane. And as we all know, methane is far worse for the climate, somewhere between 20 and 85 times as bad, depending on your time scale, than carbon dioxide is. People used to worry that there would become a point where permafrost would melt and would hit a tipping point, and that it would essentially drive itself to melting the rest. It would become a feedback loop that would cause a tipping point.
However, a recent paper in Nature Climate Change published just in June posits that this is pretty unlikely, that permafrost melting is mostly linear, which is to say if you warm the Earth some, corresponding amount of permafrost will melt and methane will be released. So it's not great by any stretch, but also not necessarily uncontrollable. What it does mean though is that our efforts to deal with methane need to get better faster because the Earth
is warming and methane is being released from the melting permafrost. A 2021 pledge from about over 100 countries to cut methane emissions is like a great starting point, but it's unfortunately just not enough. Success is retreating from us about as fast as we're making progress. Something like 60 % of methane emissions come from the burning of fossil fuels, farming and landfills, that is to say human sources. So
Wasting less food, eating less meat, and driving fewer miles will help. And as we've illustrated, even an EV has a footprint. The positive side of this is you can do something about it. And the upside of that is it will save you money and make you healthier. So don't let anyone paint this as a sacrifice. It's a benefit. It's not a flaw to be more efficient. It's a feature. We're also finding that fossil fuels release a lot more methane than they're being reported. Overflights of oil fields...
has illustrated that something between four and eight times the emissions that the EPA is estimating from fossil fuel extraction is actually happening. So that only puts a really fine point on that we're going to have to both reduce the consumption of oil in the long term and more immediately in the short term reduce the emissions from its production. It's essential that we fix this. A different report published in Frontiers of Science in July found that rapid reductions in methane emissions
this decade are essential to slowing warming in the near future and keeping low warming carbon budgets within reach.
we're making progress. We just have to keep going.
Alright, a couple of things to ask you all. The first is, if you're learning from this or appreciating what you're hearing on The Climate Dad do me a really big solid right now. Go to your podcast app and like, rate, review, share it. It costs nothing but maybe 30 seconds and it'll help me keep growing my audience. I'd really appreciate it if you'd share it on social media. And then two, if you're ready to be part of what reduces our risk of hitting climate tipping points or melting the permafrost, the power is in your hands.
We'd love to help you over at Aclymate where we have the easiest climate solution for your business. We'll show you ways to reduce your carbon footprint and get you on the path to Net Zero You'll win new customers, keep your most valuable ones that are requiring it now. You'll attract and retain the talent you need from the climate generation. And we have a great green business certification program, which will help you to show your climate bona fides and win certification with B Corp, EcoVadis Green Business Benchmark, CDP, the whole shooting match.
Our smallest customers can even start for $10 a month. It's just about as easy as it gets. And then for our larger customers, we have the full suite of services that you need in order to get ahead and win. Now, it's time to meet with today's guest, Deb Ryan with S&P Global. She's been leading work within the oil and gas industry for methane reductions. And you're going to learn a lot about how commodities interact with fossil fuels and how some of the people we need in the climate fight aren't always who you would expect.
Mike Smith (11:11)
All right, today my guest on The Climate Dad is Deb Ryan. She's the head of emissions insight at SP Global. She's a fascinating conversationalist and she and I get along like a house a fire. I think you're really gonna enjoy meeting her. So Deb, thanks for joining us today on The Climate Dad.
Deb Ryan (11:27)
Mike, thanks so much for having me. I'm excited about the conversation that we're gonna have.
Mike Smith (11:32)
Yeah, absolutely. So, so, you know, tell the listeners at home a little bit about what, you know, who you are, where you're from, what's your background.
Deb Ryan (11:38)
Yeah. So yeah, I'm actually I'm based here in the US and have been for a long time, but I'm originally from Australia. And I'm actually a petroleum engineer by background, I did chemical engineering and petroleum engineering at school. And I've spent my career working in both like upstream oil and gas operators, and then spent a long period of time doing consulting work. And yeah, it was where it was during the consulting work and starting to do a lot of things around
CCUS and looking at how, you know, emissions was really being looked at and stuff like that, that I made the switch across to looking at emissions full time, I guess, and all things carbon markets and stuff, which I know we'll dive into. So yeah, it's been a really interesting journey. I've been at S&P for about three years now, just over. So sometimes it feels like a lot longer. Sometimes it feels really quick. These things happen.
S&P Global is a really large organization. We've got five divisions. A lot of them are really focused on corporate ratings and finance and stuff like that. I sit in our Commodity Insights Division though. So looking at again, taking that commodities background I have and looking at really how does emissions and climate really get impacted through the commodities markets,
Mike Smith (12:55)
Yeah, it's an interesting background. And one of the things I'd love to highlight is about how our climate future kind of depends on everybody and that we can't be stuck with like, there's bad guys and good guys. It's just, that's a very juvenile thinking because our future requires a lot of engineering and a lot of that engineering talent historically has been in oil and gas. And so I love the idea of someone that comes from an oil and gas background moving into sustainability and climate more broadly.
Deb Ryan (13:23)
Yeah. And there's starting to be more and more of us, a lot more of my former colleagues and friends are pivoting as well. And I think, you know, the oil and gas industry, to be honest, has a role to play in this conversation, not just in terms of reducing their emissions and things like that. But, you know, as we're looking at, again, that point around technology and development of things like CCUS, the skill sets there that petroleum engineers learn and really have. And so
It's actually really exciting and it's a pretty good fit in that regard, even though it doesn't, initially on the outset, it doesn't always seem like it.
Mike Smith (13:56)
Yeah, so you used an acronym twice there, CCUS. I'm familiar, but I want you to explain to everybody what it means and then why it lights a fire under you.
Deb Ryan (14:00)
CCUS.
Yeah. So CCUS is carbon capture, utilization and storage. So really around how are we capturing and removing carbon from the atmosphere and from our processes And then the utilization piece is one of the pieces that there's a big question about. Like, do we store, do we just store the CO2, which is what the S stands for, or are there ways to actually use it? And there's a lot of technology that's developing around some of that space, things like mineralization and use in other like materials
CO2 is being used as part of methanol streams now and as feedstocks and things like that. So it's a really interesting kind of space in terms of turning something that's ultimately a waste, CO2, into maybe an opportunity through that utilization. So it is a big piece of the conversation in terms of emissions reduction. And yeah, so that's, I do apologize. There is so many acronyms in this space and it's something.
As we all learn, it's something I definitely learned when I switched, you know, you join a new company and there's new acronyms, but particularly in the climate and carbon world, it is just acronym soup.
Mike Smith (14:57)
No.
but I love because that explanation helped to illustrate about the interaction between this emerging technology and how that's going to affect commodity prices. Historically for oil and gas, it's an extraction that's essentially a different form of mining, if you will. So it's an extraction industry and then supply and demand. If you want to reduce supply, then you just leave it down the hole.
et cetera, but there's a very different sort of thing when it's a technology and you've made an investment in the plant and it has to kind of keep running. And so help introduce us all to how this is changing where commodity prices are going and how commodity markets function.
Deb Ryan (15:50)
Yeah. No, I'd love to. And it is a real key focus of a lot of the work that we're doing at S&P on the commodity side, because we do a lot of pricing in the market. So looking at, you know, what's the price of oil in the market today or gas And we also do a lot of supply demand, like outlooks and things like that to understand, you know, where that price is going to go. And to your point, companies make decisions on these, you know, on future prices and what their economics is going to look like in terms of when they invest and
you know, how much oil and gas or other, you know, it doesn't matter whether it's corn or grain or whatever commodities they're producing, you know, so it's really fundamental. And as we've been looking at it and thinking about it, it's really how do we think about how carbon or emissions is going to get priced into these commodity markets? I did a lot of in my past life at the consulting firm, I did a lot of, looking at
based on how much production and how much oil and gas was going to be produced, what would be that cash flow? And so we're really looking at how do you price emissions into the market? How do you calculate and estimate emissions for a barrel of crude or a tanker of LNG or a metric ton of steel? How do you actually work through that process and look at all the emissions and the impacts of producing those commodities along the supply chain?
And then how do we think about essentially what that liability, for some companies it'll be a liability and also what that cost is. And for other companies, again, I sort of talked about that, CO2 and the emissions might be an opportunity. So there might be a positive cashflow piece there about the value of carbon. essentially I joined S&P to sort of focus on this work because I have that understanding of how oil and gas operations work.
So it's been a really interesting kind of journey, I would say with this. And to be honest at the moment, in terms of pricing, we don't see a lot of pricing being used right now. We're really kind of calculating and look at what do we think it will be, but there's
there's continuing to be regulations put in place in different parts of the world that are really starting to accelerate that conversation. And there's also conversations again around, you know, how do we finance projects thinking about what the emissions footprint is going to be like over a longer period of time. So more and more banks and financial institutions are asking companies to really think about, you know, what is that, you know, cost of carbon or the cost of emissions associated with their operations and
to either reduce it or maybe think about a substitution to get rid of it completely. So it's definitely been a really evolving space and something it's been really, it's been a really fun journey.
Mike Smith (18:21)
I would say so. There's so much to pull apart here. So let's, you know, the first one that you talked to the thing that kind of caught my eye there was, or ear, I should say, is liability. And the idea of like how liability is often associated with risk. And then there's been kind of this broad social discussion around ESG and it's labeled as woke capitalism or something like that. But ultimately at the end of the day, ESG is about identifying risk and it's about identifying liabilities.
Deb Ryan (18:24)
Yeah.
Mike Smith (18:50)
climate constrained world. Where will you have social license and regulatory license to continue to operate? And so maybe you could help me understand about like where you think about risks and social license and about like how those prices are moving forward into the risk pricing is moving forward into commodity pricing.
Deb Ryan (19:12)
It is the conversation around emissions is often framed in terms of risk, particularly when we talk to the banks and some of the portfolio companies and asset managers And there's a couple of different pieces around risk as it relates to climate and emissions and things like that. Like the first one is just purely physical risk. If you're going to build an asset, is it going to get washed away in the ocean or taken out by hurricane or something like that?
there's a there's a piece there's a sort of traditional kind of risk there in terms of financing and capital and thinking about that. The piece that we've been really focused on is more that transition risk. And as as people are kind of looking at again, where they're going to put their money and you know, which companies they might want to invest in, they're really trying to be, you know, trying to be able to compare, okay, maybe this, you know, it's two oil and gas companies operating in the same basin and
One of them might have a lower carbon footprint because of work they've done to make their process really efficient. They're capturing their methane. They're not flaring any gas. And then the company maybe next door maybe hasn't done as much work. And so we can really look at and understand what the emission profile looks like for those operations. And then that can get priced in in terms of what that transition risk might look like
But as more and more governments put compliance carbon markets or regulated carbon prices in place, we're seeing more and more increased cost. And so there's more exposure. And so there is more risk because particularly here in the US, we don't have a federal price on carbon.
There we have some state ones. California has a price of carbon. The Northeast has a price of carbon just for their electricity generation. But we don't have a federal price of carbon. But in Europe, they do. In Canada, they have a carbon tax. And these things increase with time generally. Some of it's market driven in terms of what that looks like. But some of it, like the carbon tax in Canada, is just within the regulation that is just being increased over time.
So you know that you're going to have this cost that's going to be increasing. So thinking about what you're doing to really make sure you can manage your emissions and that you can make them as low as possible to reduce what that sort of cost liability for your business is, is really kind of what we're talking about with that piece of the risk conversation.
Mike Smith (21:40)
It's interesting about how the intersection of like, if you have, you know, carbon pricing markets such as RGGI in the Northeast, and then you have, you know, the WCI in California and Washington. And, but then also you have things like the social cost of carbon and about like how in these non -regulated spaces, such as most of the United States, there's still, it doesn't mean that you've escaped a price of carbon. It just means that you're now directly regulated on a price of carbon, you know? So help me understand about like,
Deb Ryan (22:08)
Exactly.
Mike Smith (22:10)
How do you price in the gaps? That's nuanced thinking.
Deb Ryan (22:14)
It is. And it's so there is a lot of companies are starting to include and a lot of the companies and the clients that we're talking to, even if they operate, say, somewhere like Texas, where there is no mandated or compliant, you know, regulated cost of carbon, they are starting to build carbon in as part of their, you know, their cash flow analysis and how they're actually thinking about their operations.
There is then a whole voluntary carbon market that people and companies can participate with where if they would like to, if they've done everything they can with their operations, you know, you can look as a company to the voluntary carbon market to essentially, you know, buy credits that someone else has generated through doing projects.
Mike Smith (22:55)
So one of the things I think that most people don't fully appreciate if they're not in the space like you and I are, which is that whether you are thinking about carbon pricing or not, it's going to affect you. You were doing business with some organization, I guarantee it, that is either regulated or is voluntarily considering and implementing their own internal carbon pricing mechanisms. And they're building that in as part of their risk portfolio.
so if you want to keep doing business with them, you are going to have to figure this out because you are increasingly a risk. You're a liability to stay doing that bit, work with that company if you weren't addressing your own footprint.
Deb Ryan (23:30)
Yeah. Yeah. And more and more, you know, we saw the SEC put out their Scope 1 and Scope 2 disclosure rules earlier this year. But, you know, there is more and more transparency being asked for that would only affect public companies. But some of the regulations like the California ones affect public and private companies. And so more and more the idea of climate disclosure and emissions disclosure.
is becoming almost table stakes. And exactly to your point, if you as a company are choosing not to just because you don't have to, maybe you become a non -preferred vendor or people are gonna go and look somewhere else. And as the disclosures requirements increase,
particularly if you are a global company, maybe buying from global sources, selling into global sources, some of that starts to play in as well. So it's not even just here within the US. This conversation goes beyond borders, absolutely.
Mike Smith (24:32)
Yeah. So let's switch gears a little bit. Let's talk about you some more. What attracted you to this kind of work? This is not where you started. So earlier you mentioned upstream oil and gas. And for folks that are unfamiliar with the O &G space, upstream is essentially about exploration and extraction associated with it and production of oil.
Deb Ryan (24:44)
No.
in production, yes.
Mike Smith (25:00)
So you were very much not in the climate space when you started. How'd you get here?
Deb Ryan (25:03)
Yep, not at all. Yeah. I mean, as you said, I started my career offshore Western Australia, like on drilling rigs and production facilities and things like that. It's very different. And I've had the pleasure, I guess, of being able to travel the world. I've worked in lots of different countries and through the consulting work as well, worked with clients all over the world.
For me, my interest in this space really started back in about, it was in 2018 really. And here in Colorado, as a lot of people would be familiar with, we've had a lot of rules in place around, in 2014, Colorado passed its first Air Quality Act and something that was done in conjunction with industry and was then adopted and rolled out. But in 2018, we started seeing a lot more conversation about emissions and climate and
I worked for a tiny little eight person consulting firm. And a lot of companies here in Colorado are also, private or really small And, I would be blown away that people would look at me and be like, but you worked for, you know, Big Oil. And I'm like, how is, how is an eight person company at all Big Oil Like, it's, it's kind of crazy. And, but it, it really kind of occurred to me and, and it was something that I spoke to a lot of my colleagues and friends and, and associates here in Colorado. Like there was,
In 2018, there was a BCF of gas a day. So a billion cubic feet of produced gas every day was being flared, burnt, essentially, not put in a pipeline. And some of it, most of it was down in Texas, there was some up in North Dakota, but predominantly down in Texas, because pipeline capacity wasn't available. And so gas wasn't worth very much. So it wasn't worth building the pipeline. But there was nothing to stop companies from just flaring it.
Mike Smith (26:50)
So for the listeners at home, in the production of petroleum, there's a mix of things that come up the pipe from underground. And some of that includes methane, otherwise known as natural gas. And if you don't have the pipeline capacity for that, the practice had been, and it still is in many places, either just to emit it into the atmosphere or to flare it.
Deb Ryan (26:57)
Yeah.
Yeah.
to flare it. Yeah.
particularly as it relates to methane and we can talk about this, but venting it or just releasing it is actually worse for the environment than flaring it. Because methane has a higher greenhouse gas warming potential, but flaring it is no better, to be honest, and particularly not in the quantities that we were seeing here in the US. The US was flaring more gas than some countries were even producing, which is crazy. You know, you've got this exceptionally valuable product.
that was just viewed as again, waste. People were producing, again, the wells that they were producing, the oil was the valuable product. They weren't producing the wells for the gas. And I started talking quite publicly about the fact that here in Colorado, it doesn't matter that we aren't doing some of that practices. And we've got very strict, again, following on from the air quality rules in 2014.
the state has continued to be very strict about its greenhouse gas rules and flaring rules But we're still tarred as an industry, we're still tarred with the same brush. And so we can't sit here in Colorado and be like, well, we're Colorado oil and gas and so we're fine and we're good if our counterparts in Texas are flaring this much gas. And so I started becoming quite vocal about it of like, how do we as an industry
how do we do better? Like it's not acceptable that we're flaring this much volume. we were also starting to see companies looking at things like how were they going to capture the CO2 and store it underground? Like I said, that
skillset was a very transferable skillset for engineers so we started doing a lot of consulting work looking at, you know, are there old reservoirs that are empty, essentially that have been finished that we can put the CO2 back in, So some of my work on the consulting side sort of naturally started moving towards
some of the like climate stuff. But particularly, I think what spurred me was just this conversation around like, what is it that we need to actually, you know, make sure that as an industry, we're doing better. And it's where I'm really passionate about the work we're doing at S&P, because it's a market mechanism.
Like if you can prove that you've got a lower footprint, you know, is that worth something? And that really starts to drive behavior. Cause when you start impacting people's cashflow and economics it drives behavior.
Mike Smith (29:34)
on the nose. there's some fascinating stuff here. So one, my father was in oil and gas, upstream oil and gas for years. And the people that tend to work on offshore oil platforms are referred to in the industry as roughnecks. And so it's a fairly well -deserved moniker for they tend to be usually good -hearted folks, but pretty coarse.
Deb Ryan (29:48)
Mm -hmm.
Mike Smith (29:56)
So it was an interesting experience as a woman going offshore to work on oil platforms, very isolated amongst a bunch of roughnecks. That's an interesting story. There's also this story about like how you have taken this journey and you've been focusing on emissions capture associated with methane. And now you're moving kind of to methane's, you know, cousin, carbon dioxide, and ultimately the waste product, the primary waste product of the combustion of fossil fuels.
and about how you're starting to think about that from a carbon capture and commodities standpoint. Just a lot of little ways to go here. Maybe we can start with like what the experience as being a woman on an offshore platform is like.
Deb Ryan (30:30)
Yeah.
Yep. For sure. so the first time I went offshore, I was 23 and I landed on the rig and the, the, the OFM, the oil field manager who looks after everybody. He was like, what are you here to do? And I was like, what? Like, what? So that's how that was literally my introduction to the rig. And I, I'm just old enough that, cell phones didn't make it far enough. So everyone had to, there was like a single phone booth that everyone had to sign up for to be able to like call home.
So I called, signed up, called my mom and she was like, well, how many people are on the rig? And I was like, there's a hundred. And I knew there was a hundred because there'd been a whole thing about bed space. And could I go out there for the operation that I was out there to actually oversee and work on? And then she's like, how many women? I'm like, it's just me. And she's like, my goodness, come home right now. And it took, I was like, that's why everybody knows my name. It took me two days to figure out that because I was the only woman, that's why every single person on that rig knew my name.
And everyone, I say that and jokingly, right? Everyone was just lovely. You know, like I could ask, I think as well, it gave me permission to go and, you know, I was curious and I'd go and ask questions. I'd go sit with a driller and I'd be like, you know, what's that and what are you doing and all this kind of stuff. And everyone was so willing to like share and like teach and you know, they knew I was very young in my career and they knew that and stuff like that. But they also appreciated, you know, I was out there for a very specific job where we were running.
And so over the course of this sort of year, year and a bit, you know, I got to know a lot of the guys really well and it was really good fun.
actually as we moved to the production facility, because I represented the operating company, not the contractor, it was actually really interesting. So actually both of the company reservoir engineers, myself and my colleague, both female, the head process engineer, female, the head subsea engineer, female. And so it was actually by, you know, in a very short period of time as we moved through some of these different disciplines, I was very quickly not the only.
And I learned so much and it's something I always talk to young engineers about like going out and actually getting out from behind my computer and getting my hands dirty and learning some of this stuff was, it just was so amazing.
Mike Smith (32:46)
a unique experience to be, my career in the Navy obviously I'm male but like we had, women were open increasingly to combat roles within the Navy. And so you saw them increasingly moving in that, but there's that sense of camaraderie of like being on a small machine, you know, with just the people that you know, out in the middle of the ocean. And yeah, same sort of thing. We didn't have a phone booth because ships don't do that, but.
Deb Ryan (32:55)
Yeah.
Yep.
Mike Smith (33:09)
But yeah, the same thing. It was like a sat phone. Well, actually did have a couple of phone booths now that I think about it.
Deb Ryan (33:12)
Yep. Yep. Yep. Exactly. Right. Like the sat phone and again, because they were expensive, there was one of them. And so everyone would like take their turns and stuff. So yeah, it's just like, as I'm just old enough, so that was still a thing. Which is just funny. So but no, it was a really great experience. And again, I think one of the things that and it's been a constant throughout my career as well. Like it's I wasn't there just as a token. I was there because I was the right person to do the job. And I think
you know, as soon as people knew, knew that. And again, you get to know them and stuff like that. I got an amazing compliment from the, the OFM, the oil field manager on the production facility when I left and he was like, you know, can I ask you actually like, please don't be offended. And he was like, I'm really curious how old you are. And I was like, I'm actually only 25. And he was like, are you kidding me? you were
performing at a much higher level. He's like, I thought you were about 30. Like he had me and you know, now I'd be like, you know, don't overage me. But it was a huge compliment, right? Like young in my career that I was performing at a level that he thought I had way more years experience that I did.
So, and it brings that camaraderie, right? Cause then we're all just a team just trying to get a job done.
So, yeah.
Mike Smith (34:22)
So yeah, so let's go to the other end of the career now, the more recent. And so now you're in the point of trying to figure out the engineering of carbon capture. And
correct me if I'm wrong here, but there's roughly two broad categories of carbon capture, point source and kind of like direct air capture. So point source carbon capture is where you capture it out of the flue or exhaust of some facility that's burning fossil fuels, whether it's a power plant or a factory or something along the lines. The engineering is a lot easier in that particular case because you have carbon dioxide and really high concentrations, you know, high double digit percentages.
associated with that. And then there's this emerging field of direct air capture where you're capturing carbon dioxide from the air itself. And the, you know, predominantly that's, you know, measured in parts per million. So a much, much lower concentration. Yeah. And so, what do you feel about like the engineering that's available for those two and the kind of where that those markets are developing right now?
Deb Ryan (35:11)
Yeah, it's pretty low concentrations.
Like the, to be honest, the point source that you're talking about, some of that's been going on for a long time. The oil and gas industry actually uses CO2 to put it back in the ground to actually increase production. That's not considered storage as part of climate solutions by any stretch, but it's sort of just, it just emphasizes that it's a technology that's been available for a long time.
to do that kind of capture. The direct air capture has been really interesting because
the idea of essentially just putting this huge fan out in a field and taking CO2 out of the air is something that is, it's not super efficient, because the concentrations are so low, but it is getting to a point that we have some successful projects around the world doing it. The first successful project that I was aware of was actually in Iceland that started up about two years ago.
So it's a really interesting kind of the challenges between those two types of systems are really interesting.
the issue and it's sort of a little bit like it's the reverse almost of what we were talking about with the flaring and the venting of natural gas. I think some people would be like, well, if we've had this technology for point source for a long time and it's easy to do, why aren't we doing it everywhere? But the same challenge sort of exists that we still need that pipeline infrastructure to take it somewhere. So having concentrated facilities, so.
The US Gulf Coast is an area where there is lots and lots of LNG facilities and refineries and manufacturing facilities and stuff like that. So by having a high concentration of those, you can then put the pipeline infrastructure in and also down around the US Gulf Coast, there's again a lot of old reservoirs that then you don't have to pipe that CO2 very far to be able to then put it in the ground and permanently store it. So for some of the facilities that are maybe more in the center of the country where there isn't some of this infrastructure,
even though they could capture the CO2, then they can't do anything with it. So it's always this challenge of like, OK, we can do one bit of it pretty well, but you have to think about the whole project and the whole design. That's where the flexibility of something like direct air capture comes in, You can put them close to where you want to actually use that CO2 or put that CO2 in the ground.
It's just, again, it's not as efficient and it's a much more expensive process right now. I think we do expect the cost of all this stuff to come down. We see these learning curves all the time as we're developing new technology. But that's sort of, it's some of the things that companies need to look at and think about as the projects are being developed is, yeah, it's not just, it's the whole project. It's not just the actual capture of the CO2 itself.
Mike Smith (38:03)
You know, the industry itself right now is very small and these pilot projects are very expensive. And so I think it's fairly easy to dismiss this as just kind of like the whims of a couple of like environmentalists that are tilting after windmills here. You're a pro in the space. You're obviously you got an O&G background. So you're not some Pollyanna here. Like, where do you see this going?
Deb Ryan (38:26)
It's a really good question, right? And I think we are seeing more and more we're seeing companies bringing like R &D pieces back into their like organizations and things like that. And thinking about how they're also partnering with startups to get.
to get the scale they need. It is actually one of the big challenges of how do you take these pilot projects, whether it's through the utilization of CO2, whether it's some sort of technology to be more efficient, it doesn't matter what it is. But how do you get to scale? Because the company's like, that's a really good technology. Cool, now we need like 1 ,000 of them. Poor small little startups, I can give you like 10.
So there's been a lot of work and actually NREL, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory here in Colorado out in Golden, they do a lot of work through the Wells Fargo Innovation Center to really kind of help bridge that gap and connect.
So it is something we're starting to see more and more capital flowing into this space. And I think that's the momentum, right, that we need. It's not just,
little side projects we're starting to see real money.
it's actually pretty exciting.
Mike Smith (39:35)
Yeah, now you said real money. And for those of us that are not in the space, real money to me is $100 on dinner. But what are we talking about here? What's the scale of capital that's moving into this space now, you think?
Deb Ryan (39:51)
yeah, no, it's a really good question. I think there's been estimates put out there around just how much money is needed to fund the energy transition generally. And people tend to throw around like trillions of dollars, right? To get infrastructure change, to do all of these different things. We're not at that level by any stretch.
But we are starting to see dollars with billions flowing into some of this stuff. Some of these smaller technologies may only need in the millions of dollars, but we are starting to see pretty sizable investments. And particularly around projects like the Direct Air Capture, we are talking about
billions of dollars of investment to get those projects up and running. And those projects are starting to get up and running.
Mike Smith (40:35)
Yeah, the case for optimism that I see here is that like, you know, you might see companies spend thousands or maybe a few million on kind of greenwashing PR campaigns. They don't spend billions casually. You know, like when you, when you start putting that level of capital into something, it builds momentum and it creates its own ecosystem that way. And I think that's the case for like on the regulatory is there's a feedback loop of the ideas that like regulation helped to propel these companies to start to thinking about this.
Deb Ryan (40:47)
No. Exactly.
Mike Smith (41:04)
on the flip side of it is now these companies care about this and they've invested and it's part of their plan of work moving into the future. They're not gonna wanna just write that off. They're gonna want it to move forward and they're gonna advocate for regulatory change to support that.
Deb Ryan (41:15)
Exactly.
And it's that stable policy is something that we've heard from companies all over the world, to be honest, you know, being able to make decisions for a company thinking out five, 10 years without having to change that every, you know, election cycle is really important because otherwise it's just inefficient use of capital exactly to your point.
We are seeing the investment in a lot of these technologies and in big projects for some of this stuff as well. So, yeah.
Mike Smith (41:50)
full circle right on back to risk.
Deb Ryan (41:52)
Exactly. Political risk becomes one of those things that factors into it. Yep, for sure.
Mike Smith (41:59)
What's a status quo that you reject?
Deb Ryan (42:02)
Ooh, One of the things I think is we're seeing is that, for oil and gas operations, you cannot not have a plan for methane. Companies need to have a methane strategy and it's not okay anymore if they don't, to be honest. So like,
that piece, and we've definitely seen a shift from, okay, well, it might be nice to try and measure our methane and look at that to know we have to. And that's been a really cool shift in terms of that sort of status quo change. The other piece for me that's been really interesting when we first started talking about carbon intensity three years ago, when I joined S&P,
people didn't know what their own carbon intensity numbers were for their operations. A lot of people didn't even know what I meant when I said carbon intensity. And for those of you listening, it's looking at what's the emissions per volume of produced product, whether that's again, a barrel of oil or a bag of apples or something, right? Like everything could have a carbon intensity in terms of how efficient is it in terms of its emissions to produce that product.
What we've seen now is that that's starting to the shift in that and what's, you know, it's not okay for companies not to understand what their footprint is anymore, irrespective of what regulatory environment they're operating in. And we saw at one of the biggest energy conferences in the world. You know, we saw CEOs up on stage quoting, openly quoting what their carbon intensity was for their assets and operations. And that, that shift and that pivot.
you know, it's not okay anymore to not know what your footprint is for your operations. And so particularly as it relates to oil and gas, they've been two things that are just like, you know, from I say status quo from sort of like 18 months, two years ago to where we are and what's expected has been monumental for the way the company is operating So that's been, it's been a really kind of
positive shift in that regard, And again, some of that momentum that we've seen really that I don't think is going to get undone.
Mike Smith (44:11)
No, that's fascinating stuff. I when you think about the carbon intensity, if an oil and gas company knows it and you don't, you're probably behind the eight ball on this one, folks. And it's also worth pointing out that what goes into those large companies and their carbon intensity scores is that all of their small suppliers.
and well, we'll have to leave it at that. Again, this has been just, I've really enjoyed this conversation. it's been Deb Ryan. She's the Head of Emissions Insight at S&P Global And if you get a chance to hear her speak in public, you should also, yeah, we'll talk soon.
Deb Ryan (44:43)
I appreciate that, Mike. It's been fun.
Bye.
Mike Smith (44:55)
Deb's a pistol. She and I get lunch from time to time and it's always fun and informative. To wrap up, I want to hear from you. Please go to Aclymate.com or send an email to TheClimateDad@Aclymate.com to submit a question for me or the show. Again, Aclymate is spelled A -C -L -Y -M -A -T -E. If your business needs help measuring, reducing, reporting, or offsetting your company's climate footprint, please reach out to my team at Aclymate and we'll get you set up with the best.
and easiest climate solution out there. Thanks again to Deb Ryan for joining me and thank you all for listening. I'll be back next time with a breakdown of all things climate and with another guest. Do make sure to subscribe to The Climate Dad where you get your podcasts and to like, share, comment on social media. I'm Mike Smith and this was The Climate Dad.
.svg.png)