[Later]
So
youve put your finger on what is we have often referred to as the dual challenge, which [is] continuing to meet this demand critical demand for oil and gas as the world grows and prosperity levels rise. But at the same time,
addressing the challenge of emissions and the risks associated with climate change. One of the challenges with gas is the lack of alternatives in all applications and all areas of the world. Obviously, solar and wind play a really important role,
they will continue to grow, but they are challenged with intermittency and theyre challenged with, what I would say is resource quality, the intensity of solar energy and wind power at different locations around the world. So you have to have
a more secure source of energy and supply. I would say gas will play a role in that but with gas comes the emissions. So thats a challenge industrial applications. Also difficult to back out gas given the, what I call the energy density of
that which is required for a lot of temperature intense processes. So those are the challenges and I think the work weve been doing is focused on technologies that address the emissions associated with the use of those products, recognizing
the difficulty of replacing them lets focus on what the issue is, which is the emissions I think we have been doing research for over a decade on carbon capture and storage, to try to make that more economic, more effective, to allow us to
capture the emissions that are generated in power generation and/or industrial applications. We feel pretty good about the progress weve been making in that space. Weve got work going on with respect to hydrogen and making hydrogen,
which could also be used as a substitute in those spaces. So low carbon solutions is an opportunity to basically leverage into what we see as a converging set of forces in this space. One, the technology evolving to a point where were
beginning to see the economics work for the deployment of more effective technology in this space, government policy around the world
. Particularly here in the U.S. is beginning to more and more recognize the important role of carbon capture
and storage and other technology advances and so are more focused on advancing the right policy frameworks to support that. You see venture funds around the world, money looking for an opportunity to invest and opportunities to reduce carbon and
then you see a carbon offset market beginning to develop, kind of emerging, so the idea with our low carbon solution is to take all four of those forces together
to basically bring this emergency technology to market and help society
transition to a lower carbon future taking advantage and working with these other forces.
[Later]
Well, I think the answer to both of the challenges associated with those is around the development of technology. I think today the different types of hydrogen
blue, green, gray, however you want to think about that the technology is expensive and will work in certain applications but frankly, to do the job thats required to help society get to net zero, were going to need more
advances and a lower cost associated with that. Weve been doing, as I said, a lot of work in trying to find technologies that allow us to move down that cost curve. We think by starting to deploy some of those technologies, we can get on the
experience curve and drive some of those costs down so I think thats going to be critically important to finding a role an effective role and a scalable role for hydrogen in the economy. With respect to fugitive emissions in
methane, I think theres a lot of work going on in that space in partnership that ExxonMobil is involved with and others to drive better technologies at surveilling and evaluating and identifying and then mitigating these fugitive methane. And
I think the industry, with time, will close that down, and that will be much less of a concern going forward.
[Later]
Well, you know Dan, weve always felt, from the very beginning of the corporation that technologys going to play this very fundamental role in the
industry and in the evolution of the company, to continue to meet the needs of society. People often think of us as just being an oil and gas company but if you go all the way back to our very roots, we started off by making kerosene to replace well
oil in lamps and then Edison invented the light bulb and electricity came and then electric lighting and so then we moved to automotive fuel and then the war came and [we] ran out of rubber and we invented the butyl rubber process. So weve
been evolving, and then that grew into an even bigger Chemical business, so weve