Technology is the foundation for delivering today's business performance and meeting tomorrow's growing energy demand. Managing the energy portfolio will require a combination of accelerated technology development and ingenuity in its application. Here are excerpts from a roundtable discussion among four leading Chevron technologists who are helping expand the boundaries of energy — from conventional oil and natural gas to the resources of the future.

Rajesh: Demand for biofuels is growing, and integrated companies like Chevron are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this growth. We have the full-scale capabilities to develop biofuels to commercial scale and distribute them across our retail network. And we have the experience of doing so reliably and safely. For me, personally, to help make this new technology part of Chevron's long-term energy portfolio is very exciting.

What we don't want to do today is pick a single solution for biofuels, because no one knows what tomorrow is going to bring. So we have multiple pathways that we're trying to develop down the road. No matter which one pans out, we'll be able to succeed in the marketplace.

Innovation and ingenuity have always been part of the Chevron culture. I don't believe that ingenuity is a one-person show. It's all about people talking to people, teams working with teams and collectively coming up with those innovative ideas that add value to our business.

Lynn: Chevron deals with huge amounts of information. Our Information Technology (IT) group serves more than 63,000 network end-users and more than 7,600 servers around the world. We process more than 1 million email transactions a day and about 140 retail transactions a second. Managing information on this scale requires efficiency and integration so that everyone in the enterprise can be more productive.

We apply IT resources to help us function better as an integrated company. We provide the processes and the tools for people to collaborate more effectively and to transfer knowledge and best practices across divisional or geographic boundaries. IT can stimulate business process changes and help unleash the creative potential of Chevron's people.

We also leverage IT to benefit our customers. We created a Web site for our Global Lubricants group that allows its customers and partners, in just a few clicks, to see our products, pricing, safety and training materials, and other information. It makes doing business with Chevron a lot easier.

Ross: Chevron's seismic imaging technology is allowing us to see beneath the earth more clearly and accurately than ever before. Recorded echoes produce huge data volumes, which we process and analyze with some of the world's most powerful computing systems to form a three-dimensional image of the earth. The better we can image challenging environments, the fewer wells we have to drill to produce the same reservoir.

These continuing advances help us find more oil and gas than in the past, especially in frontier areas. For example, Chevron has built a leading capability in imaging the shape of reservoirs beneath massive layers of salt that cover large potential resources in ultradeep water in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico.

Today, we use seismic imaging to help us locate and extract resources. But we can easily imagine how seismic imaging can be applied to carbon sequestration, where we'll want to do the opposite — put greenhouse gases back into the reservoir. Seismic imaging could well play a big role in enabling us to do that. That type of potential innovation is tremendously exciting.

Robert: There are vast reserves of oil shale in the western United States. We are exploring technology — with the help of partners like the Los Alamos National Laboratory — to turn this resource into commercial products in a radically new way. If we can recover the resource underground, it will solve many of the environmental issues associated with the production of oil shale in the past.

This is a new technology platform for resource development that in some ways is similar to the major technological shifts derived from the U.S. space program in the 1960s. This is especially true in terms of the potential scale of the business and resource impact it could have for the United States. The applications of this technology to recover oil shale could have value that extends across the corporation and the industry.

Chevron's philosophy on technology is very clear. We're not looking at repeating the same old technology, because the same old technology gets you what you had in the past. We're looking at developing new processes that will produce new results to unlock the potential of this world-class resource.