meet the problem solvers

Chevron collaborated with T Brand, the content studio of New York Times Advertising on this piece.

The complex and pressing requirements tied to meeting the energy needs of today while remaking the energy system for the future call for breakthrough technologies, novel business models, efficient execution, supportive policy and more.

None of this can happen without tapping the full power of human ingenuity.

“I’m incredibly competitive,” Courtney Heard says with a smile. A fierce athlete and strategic thinker, she accepted a management position in Chevron’s shale and tight operations — which unearths oil and gas trapped in low permeability rock — after a succession of internships with the company during college. “I didn’t have it all figured out, but majoring in petroleum engineering seemed like a good way to get a job at the time,” she explains.

Turns out, West Texas was exactly where Heard was meant to be. For over 100 years, Chevron has operated in the Permian Basin straddling Texas and New Mexico, and the area is so important to the company’s financial success that it’s mentioned in every earnings call. “We wanted to be the best, and that resonated with me personally,” she says.

Working on a team in the Permian Basin, the country’s largest oil field, comes with high expectations. In the Permian, that means producing nearly a million barrels of oil equivalent per day while limiting emissions to one-third the global average. It’s all about efficiency.

One of Heard’s early challenges was coming up with new ways to lower price-per-barrel production costs. She and her colleagues achieved their goal by radically rethinking well stimulation and production, and she credits a company culture that encourages questioning how things have always been done.

That culture will be crucial as Chevron continues to explore ways to reduce the carbon intensity of its oil and gas operations while developing and commercializing lower-carbon energy solutions — including hydrogen, carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS), renewable natural gas and sustainable aviation fuel.

The company’s efforts to pursue lower carbon intensity businesses are continuing as it undertakes a global restructuring. Between 2021 and 2028, Chevron has allocated a total of $10 billion in lower carbon investments. For her part, Heard believes how Chevron seeks to scale new business lines and improve operational efficiency will determine its long-term success. “Because if you’re not winning the right way,” she says, “you’re not going to be winning for long.”

Balancing the need to meet growing energy demand while developing new lower carbon sources is a challenge. Each year there are record deployments of renewable energy, but the gap between demand and supplies of renewable energy remains wide. Globally, renewables accounted for only about 13 percent of final energy consumption in 2023 and are forecast to reach 20 percent in 2030. So even an aggressive energy transition has fossil fuels in the mix.

Societies can’t turn off their existing supply until there’s something to replace it, and problem solvers like Zoe Zhang are working on solutions to all of the above.

Zoe Zhang, who grew up in rural China, embodies the energy transition on several levels. Her family burned coal indoors until they were connected to a natural gas grid, and she worked in Chevron’s conventional business before pivoting to renewable fuels. “I’m a firm believer that energy is essential to humanity,” she says, explaining that access to reliable energy helps people pursue their dreams and a better quality of life.

Zhang, who has a Ph.D. in computational geophysics and a master’s degree in systems engineering, builds machine learning models to identify where to put Chevron’s compressed natural gas (CNG) fueling stations. Placing CNG stations where demand is high helps scale the use of a transportation fuel that has lower carbon emissions than traditional diesel or gasoline.

She’s also working to make the CNG Chevron produces even more attractive to corporate customers eager to further reduce emissions intensity from their vehicle fleets by taking into consideration the renewable natural gas (RNG) that Chevron produces into that CNG. This involves capturing methane from farm manure to make RNG, which is then piped into the national gas grid.

Zhang assumed that her current job would be totally different from her previous role applying data analytics, machine learning and subsurface expertise to pinpoint the best locations to drill wells. Instead, she has found the same skills help her succeed now. “It’s all about location, location, location,” she says, “and using data to find the best location to do our business.”

Jack Pollard shares the belief in the transformative power of energy access. After joining Chevron, Pollard, who began his career as a civil/structural engineer, worked in post-civil war Angola and saw for himself the high stakes of energy access. “In some locations, an electric pump may be providing water from a well,” he says. “If there’s no access to reliable energy sources to power the pumps, it can very much be a life-or-death situation.”

Pollard’s experience working in Africa, the Middle East, Europe and the U.S. has taught him something else: There is no single solution to providing energy that applies everywhere. Some locations, he says, have abundant sun or wind for energy sources, while others are more conducive to geothermal or conventional oil and natural gas. “There’s no silver bullet for the energy transition. It has to be an integrated system of existing, emerging and breakthrough energy sources yet to be developed,” he says.

In many places, the energy transition is slower because of a lack of infrastructure, while others benefit from increasing investments and international partnerships. “This is how we get started and then we advance and satisfy those energy needs with increasingly lower carbon sources of energy,” he says.

Pollard’s global lessons motivate and guide him in his work to improve the efficiency of Chevron’s deepwater business. The large scale of deepwater wells and facilities targets larger volumes and production rates, which helps reduce carbon emissions intensity because they need less energy to extract each barrel of oil.

But Pollard also embraces an incremental approach to reducing carbon intensity by using remote operations capabilities, using technology to minimize flaring and venting, and electrifying equipment where possible.

As a descendant of one of the key engineers who designed the Galveston seawall after the devastating 1900 storm, Pollard takes cross-functional collaboration seriously and prioritizes long-term solutions. “That lineage set me on this path,” he explains.

Investor and customer confidence is important for large-scale deployment of promising new technologies. That’s where Scott McLemore comes in. A lifelong resident of Bakersfield, Calif., McLemore has plenty of experience solving problems. He grew up fixing the family appliances and cars with his father and paid for college while working full time.

Today, McLemore spends his time demonstrating that lower carbon technologies can work in challenging real-world conditions. “To make reliable, lower carbon solutions accessible to more customers, you have to get technologies out of the lab where you can control everything,” he explains.

One of McLemore’s projects tested the performance of a carbon capture filter that could capture emissions more cost effectively compared to previous generations of carbon capture and removal technologies. Another project is exploring the market for lower carbon intensity hydrogen as a transportation fuel in California. “We have a solar field that can power this facility. We have land that we already own and we have water that we can treat and use to generate hydrogen,” he explains.

Working on lower carbon intensity energy projects appeals to McLemore’s desire to tackle new engineering challenges. And they’re also personally satisfying. “I feel proud that my kids may drive a car powered by hydrogen, and I’m helping build one of the first facilities in the state designed to produce hydrogen using solar power,” he says. “Knowing that I'm working on making that happen, that's pretty cool.”

Illustration by Aleksandar Savić