Vijay Swarup
IP Week Conference: Feb 24th, 2021
Speech Transcript
Moderator:
What are the challenges and opportunities in research, innovation and development? Something really close to my heart. I sit on the Board of Innovate UK and I
dont think we spend enough on innovation in the energy sector. So our next speaker is going to tell us what hes up to.
Doctor Vijay Swarup
from ExxonMobil. A lifer at ExxonMobil from what I can see from your CV. Youve been through every single part, engineer, management, planning and now Vice President for Research and Development. So Vijay, I will hand over to you as youre
going to give us a presentation and then we can come back to questions at the end, yes?
Swarup:
OK, thanks Juliet (moderator), thank you very much for the invitation to speak here.
It is truly an honor to be part of this and I certainly hope everybody is doing well and faring well through these unprecedented times.
I am also very passionate about innovation. And as I listened to the talks and I listen to what is being discussed this week, I think about technology and I
think about the need for technology and the technology gap in the need for innovation. And thats what I want to talk about it. I want to talk about innovation for the energy transition. I want to talk about how we do it today? What are the
opportunities to do it differently ... to do it in a more innovative way, a more collaborative way, in order to get the technologies that are needed.
What I want to do is start with just a simple scene set. Energy is equal to quality of life. We take it for granted in the developed nations. In developing
nations they are still striving for it. The chart on the left is a very simple chart that shows the UN Human Development Index on the Y-axis, which is essentially quality of life. So its living
standards, its education, its access to televisions, washing machines, things like that. And the X-axis shows the energy used per capita. The trend is clear. Quality of life, living standards, and
energy go hand in hand. The developed nations shown in blue dots tend to be in the upper right of that arrow. The developing nations who strive to be in the upper right are working their way up. Thats going to require energy. And that in
itself is enabled by technology. So the energy solutions we have today, whether its oil and gas, whether its renewables, we have energy solutions today that we did not have 20 or 30 years ago. Much of that is enabled by technology and by
innovation.
The challenge we have, of course, is shown on the right. So while were delivering the energy to a growing middle class, to a growing
population, we need to be cognizant of the emissions and we need to work the emissions down. And so what the chart on the right shows is the various sectors that account for the energy related emissions and you can see that it covers from power to
industry, transportation and residential.
So we have a regional difference. So countries will have unique solutions and we have sector differences. What
that means, of course, is that its not going to be a single solution. Its going to be a suite of solutions. And it also means its going to be a suite of technologies and the technologies have to evolve and the technologies have to
get better.
So whether it is systems and measurements like we just heard from the previous talk, talking about how do we not only do the simple things
today but also the more sophisticated things, we have to look sector by sector and challenge ourselves to say, how could we do what we do today? Keep doing it, keep doing it better, keep doing it more efficiently because efficiency of course is one
of the best technologies we