The world is what it is.
There is a disconnect between the people who write about how the future will be, and the people who materialize that future. The loudest voices, the people who shape the minds of other people; they rarely have a sufficient comprehension of material realities. The people who do, the people who build; they are too focused in the material that the immaterial (the beliefs people hold) sits within their blind spots.
Every so often, this disconnect manifests itself in strange ways, through the efforts of the people who try to mend it.
Oil companies sanitizing themselves through the disguise of CSR and corpo-speak.
Journalists writing about carbon capture like catching clouds of carbon with nets.
We will stand our ground in honesty.
We believe that decarbonization is the key to securing humanity's future on this planet, yet we also operate in the industry that burns the carbon. We don't think this is a contradiction; if the world is to genuinely decarbonize, the work has to happen inside the industry itself.
Petroleum exists in a world in which people need it. Cement manufacturing. Steelmaking. Plastic bags, shirts, shampoo, lotion, phone cases, surgery gloves, water bottles, dish soap, and a billion other things. To decarbonize does not mean giving up all those things; rather, we should offset the carbon generated in our efforts to chase abundance.
That is why our research focuses on carbon storage, and our products on petroleum management. We believe that in decarbonization, we should make the things we use every day as cheap as possible through abundant petroleum, at the same time preventing the carbon generated from accumulating in the atmosphere through aggressive capture and storage; rather than to cede that ground to either the doomsayers or the everything-is-fine cohort.
And we will materialize that future through the things we build, and how they speak to people.
The world is only what it is.