Youth setting the agenda - Transport and Fossil Fuels

Key Takeaways

[Music] welcome everyone hello friends on behalf of our team working on the cop 26 high level champions team in this race to zero on behalf of our dedicated industry speakers who made the time to be with us today on behalf of the other young climate and resilience leaders who are setting the agenda we are delighted you all could join us my name is kaya axelson and i'll be moderating i am the policy engagement fellow at the university of oxford where we are launching a new research program called oxford net zero i also serve as a strategic advisor to the race to xero campaign so my work is to help host the most meaningful dialogues in which people can come together and come away with more information and inspiration than they had before to contribute to our shared goal of a net zero world in the last five years since the signing of the paris agreement through ups and downs in international climate politics with incredible acts of leadership from some countries an outright denial from others my own two things have remained constant we have seen increasing ambition from the private sector with a wave of new net zero commitments from industry leaders like those joining us today thank you for being with us and young people have led the way driving more ambitious action at every level of society i can't underestimate to you the commitment of young people to battle the climate crisis today i once myself spent months living with a community of youth activists who slept on the side of the road moving from camp to camp to prevent deforestation of old growth forests and to resist new pipelines being built through native lands in this community we lived for the cause we shared food stamps and paid for each other's medical bills rent and jail support often it feels like we only lost ground in those efforts and lost nature in the meantime but sometimes we win big speaking of winning big i think we can all afford to take a moment to celebrate last week's u.s election where yet again young people played a key role in pulling more climate ambition out of candidates across the political spectrum and making the debate no longer a question of whether we acknowledge climate change but a question of how many trillions of us dollars constitutes an appropriate response in addition to this a four-fold increase in corporate interest in nature-based carbon credit projects and a more than doubling of net zero commitments since school strikers began taking to the streets is often referred to as the greta effect but greta herself has said that it's a movement much wider than one individual it is especially our young leaders from the global south who are showing the world what it means to step up to the crisis by modeling and scaling regenerative practices and business models while dealing with the present and real impacts of climate change our lead partner in this event is the resilient 40 network a powerful group of youth climate and social activists that provides a formal platform highlighting the work of young people on climate change across the continent of africa since its start in 2019 the group has expanded to over 60 members representing 29 african countries young people bracing ourselves for a future under increased impacts of climate change are committed informed and resilient but we also know that we can't do it alone we need institutional support and of all of the institutions that i have ever been a part of few have offered more opportunities to young global sustainability leaders than oxford's syed business school it is therefore my greatest pleasure to introduce you to our opening speaker and the first person to be brave enough to allow me to host a youth setting the agenda event on his campus over a year ago a beloved professor leader and dean peter tufano thank you so much for joining us thank you kaia thank you for that overly kind introduction and thank you for your leadership um i'd like to frame this event and why i was thrilled although somewhat scared to have kaya host her event at the school and also why i'm thrilled to be here a word that i like to use to describe what we are trying to do inside business school is a word that is not often used when we you know in business schools and that word is justice justice you know if you look it up in the dictionary is about the administration of fairness the administration of fairness so we are called for example in a stakeholder world to administer fairness to allocate resources and across different groups and if we think about the major issues the world is facing are pandemic and economic crisis racial tensions and certainly a climate emergency they bring to the fore issues of divisions between different groups and if we focus on climate in particular there's two dimensions of the of where we're going to have to administer fairness one dimension of administering fairness will be all about how it is that if it's either rich or poor or for example coastal versus england but various geographical areas will find the differential impact of climate we're also finding racial racial impacts on the differential impact of climate but i think the most profound distribution of fairness that we're going to have to deal with will be in fact the distribution that's inter-generational because my generation is the one that will pass along a set of problems to you a youth generation and and that's not fair and so this entered this uh intergenerational question of justice i think is extraordinarily important in places like the u.n and and you know other and boardrooms we might have pretty good representation across geographies but we don't tend to have good representation in this intergenerational way and so therefore when the idea of this youth setting the agenda proposal was made to me um i it seemed obvious that this is a great deal this makes a great deal of sense especially around this climate issue where where else but in this issue can we do we need to get the voices of the youth because ultimately it's not just the greta's and the and the kayas of the world but you know youth across the world that are going to have to address these issues so i'm thrilled to be part of this i'm also thrilled to do this in conjunction not only with all of you but to do this in conjunction with the smith school of the enterprise and the environment at oxford university why is that you know clearly the biggest problems of the world will require many hands to fix them many brains and many hands and therefore we acknowledge that we can't do anything effectively by ourselves that we can do even better if we work with others so working across the boundaries of the smith school and you you know kaya does that and some of the other people that you'll hear from over the course of the series do that so effectively and that to me is part of the solution we will never solve the big problems of the world if we try to do them by ourselves nor if we try to take all the credit for it and so here i am i'm just going to join in this conversation and listen to the great speakers who are going to follow me but i really do want to say how important this agenda is to me personally uh to my school and to the university and so and i'd like to turn it over to uh you know back to kaya and uh as i said kaya thank you for those kind introductions and also for your leadership your tremendous role model for others other young people thank you so much peter that was really lovely introduction and we're so grateful for your leadership at the business school i always tell people that they should apply and so our first speaker of the session is farah chureje farai is a chemical engineer and fry has dedicated his life the last five years working on developing sustainable aviation fuel ferrari would you please feel free to take the stand thank you very much kaya good evening everyone as kaya mentioned i am a chemical engineer with key interests in renewable energy systems technology development and sustainability so i come from south africa a part of the world where most people don't dare dream of traveling far and they don't often buy and burn fuel yet this same people are bearing the brunt of the climate impacts from the global greenhouse gas emissions including those from industry so scientists have warned that south africa and much of sub-saharan africa will warm twice as fast when compared to the global average and this counts more for a lot of africans than it does for those in the north and it puts us at the center of the global climate crisis so to me it means that we will need to define what is necessary travel and to scale solutions to decarbonize flying or else people will begin to ask themselves if the value flying more above people's lives so i personally work on sustainable aviation fuel because i want to be part of scaling solutions so we don't have to dash people's dreams of traveling and to allow them to do so without causing harm long-haul transport companies like queen argo and the airlines involved to the iag are among those that are beginning to ask themselves these questions but we need you and the whole industry to be much more actively involved in bringing sustainable fuel with lower climate impact into our transport system as well as along every single step of the value chain now in order for these projects to take off investors will usually ask for takeoff agreements and from the conversations that i've heard with some airlines you know they ask you bring us the fuel and we'll purchase it but it does not work that way they need to be part of the process so i acknowledge the work of velocis of shell and iag to bring staff to the uk but more of these partnerships and greater ambition to scale up and multiply these projects are required in order to save our climate so i have three questions for speakers today and um my first one is open to all of our panelists and that is what is the total investment your companies are making to develop sustainable fuels and transport technology related to that how are you working collaboratively collaboratively with other industry stakeholders thank you so much ferrai this question seems like it would be a good one for eva from daimler and otto from kuninago would you kick us off with the response to that question ladies first i would say eva or shall i right unfortunately from an automotive perspective um we looked into e-fuels but compared to the other option going to better electric vehicles it seems to be the one we would pursue only if the cost situation really changes so we are right now more pursuing the powers of battery electric passenger cars actually and for the trucks and hydrogen so until kind of the cost situation changes that would be our preference thank you eva could you say more about how you're scaling the electric vehicle work well for every week because we have a clear plan um as nigel already pointed out we have our ambition 2039 um until then we want to be co2 neutral and so we are having a clear plan how we go in steps introducing now all electric battery vehicles and about 20 plug-in hybrid vehicles and then by 2025 um we want to have 25 percent of our sales and battery life all battery electric and 20 30 above 50 percent xavs of our sales so that's the plan we are pursuing but battery electric is the preferred choice for passenger cars thank you so much um otto would you speak next to that question um uh alright if i can answer this we as could deny of course we are involved in freight transportation worldwide and if you think that if you consider that freight transportation about 3 billion tons of co2 is submitted by all freight transport whether it's on trucks whether it's shipping or whether it's through airline transportation and i took the pure freight part and we are involved as we do not own any assets ourselves so we don't know any vessels or planes but we organize transports worldwide but we're heavily involved with uh points and shipping lines there's a getting to zero coalition to have the first vessel non-zero carbon vessel by 2030 on the market uh shipping lines have certain civil lines i've said by 2050 they want to have all their vessels running carbon neutral with carbon neutral fuels so we are partnering with them we are collaborating so there is good news that things are developing from a technical point of view the bad news is it will last at least another 10 to 15 years before we see the first big scale vessels running on non-carbon fuel so that's why we decided we are for instance going on biofuel right now we are selling this to customers uh second-grade buyer fuel and first customers are accepting this although it's quite a bit more expensive uh so we can offer a carbon neutral supply chain right from the beginning but there is not enough biofuels available to run globally of fleets and so the the industry is working on it and that makes me feel optimistic on it on my own hydrogen synthetic fuels but it's still a long way to go so we have to do that's why we for instance department also with organizations where we said we have to invest into uh offsetting projects because two of those vessels are there it will last another 10 to 15 years as i said uh okay now thanks very much uh for for those um responses eva and otto uh if i certainly do agree that maybe for ground transport electrification is the way to go um and auto will you be in a position to give an indication of the kind of investment capital or otherwise that you are putting to develop into this technology as you mentioned it is still some time away or it takes some time to develop now we we ourselves are not investing into this because as i said we do not own any vessels or planes so the airlines are investing into this of course or the shipping lines are investing into this but it will cost money and that's what we are telling our customers of course because we sit between the online and the shipping line and talk to a lot of customers who say this will not come for free so this will increase transport costs especially in the beginning until you build up scale on the new fuels but we see that's a positive thing when we start to sell this now and true freight transport will increase by perhaps 10 20 percent in the beginning i talk about shipping ocean transportation but the first customers are willing to pay for this and that's the good news and so they will be in the beginning more investment needed and it has to come from the airlines from the shipping lines but in the end somebody has to pay for this in the end the end consumer wouldn't wait for this um okay uh thank you very much uh otto i do have another question um this one may be directed to ing and please feel free to also add to what auto has responded so what we are seeing at the moment is that sustainable fuel development is northern centric and my question is what are you doing to develop sustainable fuels in the global south particularly in africa which is a lot of resources we talk about sustainable biomass wind solar because you might have a situation where climate conscious travelers might be able to fly from the uk to cape town summer but how will they be able to get back if there are no sustainable fuels being developed here in africa thank you thank you ferrari that's a it's a great question and uh just to say it's great to be a part of this panel and let me just give you a bit of context around sustainable aviation fuels we we in the industry believe they have a significant role to play up anywhere between 30 and 70 of our fuels could be sustainable aviation fuels by 2050. the way airlines are structured um you have most influence in your hubs because that is where you have the most demand to be able to buy the fuel to get to create the volume you have the knowledge of the local market and also you have the influence over lobbying on policy so for iag our focus is very much in the uk and in spain and so you probably know we have our flagship project with shell to build you know europe's first waste of jet fuel plant here in the uk and we we have committed 400 million dollars of investment to that plant and that's a mix of you've mentioned offtake agreements they're very important but actually to make this happen we've actually got to invest in the plant itself so we're actually willing to you know take a an equity stake in that plant um and so but in terms of how we make this happen around the world i mean the great news is that aviation has got a very strong record of collaboration historically through safety and security and technical standards and now through sustainability so we have a very strong industry association in the name of ayata who have a big focus on sustainable aviation fuels so we take all of our experience and knowledge into iata and we share it with with global airlines and i have to say south african airlines for instance have been very active in this space and i know they've had some development projects in this area um but we also collaborate at an intergovernmental level through icao so you're probably aware you know ko um have a big drive on sustainability uh one of their big focuses will be sustainable aviation fuels so we've got the next big target is the general assembly in 2022 where we're looking to establish a global goal on carbon emissions and i hope that's net zero emissions by 2050 but aligned to that we'd also hope there'd be a sustainable aviation uh target and that will then help all those countries get on board that they have to have to progress their own projects but i mean south africa itself i mean so as i said south african airways they they have great track records in this area and i know they've got development projects but you also have in the in the shape of sassol you know they have fantastic experience with production of synthetic fuels so they've been producing um fisher drops based synthetic fuels not necessarily sustainable fuels because it's cold to liquid but they know the technology which is the technology we're using in our biofuels plants so i think there's a great great ground and foundation for south africa to become one of the leading countries in the production sustained by vision fuels uh thanks very much um jonathan it it it is good to hear industry leaders um seeing that leg and you know if any leg that you can pull to help us here in south africa develop sustainable aviation fuels i think that would be truly awesome i think maybe my last question um to shell and bp just taking or moving on this theme of developing the sustainable aviation fuels so um so one of the quickest and cheapest ways to produce sustainable aviation fuels is using brownfield in infrastructure and currently the only commercial staff facility in the u.s was converted from a fossil refinery so can we expect to see similar investments in africa from xiao and pp perhaps if i'm be if i'm to be specific um the suppress refinery which is co-owned by xiao and bp here in south africa so yes thank you very much for if i might go go first yes i think you know i would agree with the the comments of the previous speakers aviation in particular is a global industry so when you're taking an approach to bringing a new fuel and it has to be something where you have to think about how do you change the entire market or you run into some competitiveness issues and so i think for from our perspective it has to be a solution uh that we think about globally uh you know you know in terms of your point about being northern centric i think we feel that you need to start somewhere and and you know right now sustainable aviation fuels are not cost competitive in fact quite a ways from and so you need to have a policy environment that's able to support uh moving and making uh you know this this fuel more commercial and deploying it and in europe for example we are part of the clean skies for tomorrow initiative which includes airlines airports fuel suppliers like us and the idea there is again what we've done is sort of asked or put our forward our ask to the european commission saying uh can we have a mandate for blending in sustainable aviation fuels starting from 2025 and then ramping it up so you need that kind of mechanism coming in to help drive create the market both for for the off take but also to commercialize these fuels also you need to think about if you have these sort of mandates and the infrastructure that's needed to to refuel etc at airports will also develop so you need to have all these pieces of the puzzle uh moving together now i think you know for us we do think that you have to build up uh capacity in in terms of what kind of sustainable aviation fuel so there are things you can do today which are cheaper but with an eye towards the future where you're looking for genuinely more using advanced biofuels syn fuels etc to meet that demand as the previous uh speaker said we have looking at the waste related uh by you know using waste related fuels to create the initially get the ball rolling on the sustainable aviation fuels so that's a big part of the the process but i think to scale it up and to meet the demand of the scale that we expect by 2050 then we have to look at at other you know sustainable sources uh of these biofuels and as you say uh south africa is obviously quite well endowed uh in in these in this sort of bio resource space so i think you know once we have the frameworks in place then it's it's all to play for in terms of whether you use the brown infrastructure or you use the you know you come up with new facilities production facilities uh to to meet that demand so i think you know it's all it's all in the mix but we need to get the ball rolling at some point uh and start scaling up producing and scaling up sustainable aviation fuels and let me add so alan hayward from bp and thank you for the opportunity thank you for the question the obvious thing for me to say is ditto very much you won't be surprised now what we're thinking will coincide with shellin and other participants on the panel if i just sort of step back i think we would say you know biofuels are a significant part of the current solution biofuels are already there as shell have said particularly in countries like the us or brazil there's biogasoline bioethanol that's an important constituent part elsewhere in the world it tends to be a bit more biodiesel and the question is you know where do those feedstocks come from and i think the important thing is that we understand that those feedstocks have also got to be renewable and sustainable and there's an evolution in the market of feedstocks and i think it's very important and and i would absolutely advocate for you know we must ensure that those feedstocks are certifiable verifiable and you know increasingly of a sustainable nature and actually do good in the countries where we operate whereas you know there have been occasions in the past where they've not been you know good or they've been detrimental to foodstuffs or detrimental to forest or animal life so i think you know moving forward and that takes you into the waste products as was said now and whether that's vegetable oils or um you know tallow or you know increasingly i think biomass and municipal solid waste those technologies are being delivered and one of the original questions was are people investing i think the answer is yes i mean each of the companies that we're talking here i think are investing probably an increasing amount the technology costs have got to come down to make these things viable they do need policy support which tends to mean which countries in which you know it will first exist and we can you know use existing infrastructures as being said so with our refineries we can co-process certain hvo materials we can add hydrotreating and hydrocracking to those refineries they do tend to sort of have a higher yield in biodiesel and i think that is one of the pushes that everybody is trying to sort of increase the cut which could go into the aviation fuels markets because that's clearly where a lot of the demand is but it's also where the substitution from a liquid fuel is probably that bit harder you know and people have talked about you know other fuels going into the transport mix in aviation certainly for the short term i think it does look like a liquid fuel and therefore bio jet i think is important here for eye okay awesome thank you very much for those responses alan and i think what i do get from this is you know the industry does have a roadmap going forward particularly in terms of the sustainability of the feedstocks and the types of feedstocks and in terms of investment and just coming together to move this forward so i'm really excited to see and to move forward towards rio net thank you very much everyone i'm going to pass back to kaya thanks so much everyone our next speaker is my colleague at the environmental change institute eli mitchell larson is an expert in decarbonization of fossil fuels so i think this builds on perfectly eli take it away thanks kaya thanks everybody i'm eli mr larson from the environmental change institute at the university of oxford and i'd love to start a discussion with malika ishwaran senior economist and policy advisor from shell and alan haywood head of group strategy from bp about what it really means for an oil and gas major to go net zero because i think that can be almost a counterintuitive concept for some people and specifically the role of storing carbon in combating climate change so bp and shell are unique in the sense that you're among the first and really only oil and gas majors to include the carbon contained in your products in your net zero plan so for shell that's a 65 reduction in carbon intensity of its products by 2050 for bp that's net zero on carbon in bp's oil and gas production by 2050 or sooner so this is a huge and welcome shift from only focusing on operational emissions of extraction to actually talking about the carbon content of the products that's what happens when the consumer ultimate ultimately burns the fuel because of course that's 85 percent of the life cycle emissions so if we can't address that we can't stop climate change uh it's not just the emissions associated with digging up the fuels so if that's the goal and it's really exciting that that is the goal for companies like shell mdp and your leaders in that sense there's really only two ways to accomplish that goal the first would be reducing oil and gas production and that's something i know bp has hinted it will do by 2030 and that happens by selling fossil fuel assets to other fossil fuel companies primarily the second way to achieve those goals would be to store an amount of co2 that's equal to the amount of co2 that's contained in the fuels that you sell so there you're achieving a balance of sources and sinks and option one of course selling assets to another fossil fuel company doesn't actually stop climate change it just passes on the responsibility so you might be surprised to hear uh from a young person from the from the youth voice especially in light of the divestment movement that if the fossil fuels reserves are going to be owned operated and produced by someone i'd actually rather it be you the publicly traded companies with net zero plans than someone else so my first question is uh briefly could you share how you you're thinking about balancing these two approaches to achieve net zero on the carbon contained in your products so selling off the assets to other oil and gas companies or transforming your product into a safe one that's sort of virtually decarbonized by storing enough carbon to balance what it will emit and as a preview we're going to come back in a moment to how we store the carbon so we'll talk about that next but first uh the balance yes uh so thanks for that uh eli and yes so we when we obviously are uh we announced in april this year in fact that our ambition is to be a net zero emissions energy business by 2050 if not sooner so that's very much uh how we're thinking about our business plans and strategies uh that need to evolve i think the one thing that i would add to the mix of the two things you mentioned is the role of policy in this uh you know there are countries like the eu and the uk that have limited and put targets in on the amount of uh you know sort of emissions uh that they think are is tolerable and that's going to sort of drive down the demand for for more carbon intensive fuels so i think for us you know that's a natural that's a change that will happen and uh you know we've done analysis around you know what's what would a paris compliant pathway for the world look like in terms of the changes in the energy system in terms of the fuels that go into it the technologies that you need and one of the things is that you know we do think there is a role for oil and gas in the transition so it's not tomorrow that you can turn it off so there is that role and for us it's very much about focusing in on the assets that we think in the upstream assets that meet that demand so that declining demand that we very much uh expect and so so that's part of the solution so in in terms of our portfolio and how it evolves over time uh there is the whole uh you know story around the new fuels that come in that are compliant with the trajectories that policy has set in terms of reducing emissions so there's a whole slew of fuels and technologies that you'd want to go into like hydrogen or biofuels which is also going to be very much part of our uh you know frame in terms of what the portfolio looks like and then you have the emissions the removals a bit of it that you you mentioned and again our uh analysis pathways show there's a a sort of really important role for for carbon capture and other sort of emissions removal technologies to pick up the residual emissions that are really difficult to get rid of from the from the system so again i think you know for us we see this as a balance and a process of evolving our strategy and business plan to meet the you know to come to meet the demand and our own ambition to reduce our emissions over time and some of that will involve you know working our upstream assets uh current upstream assets some of that will involve using uh gas as a transition fuel in countries where coal is still dominant uh and some of that will involve you know producing the new fuels that you can start uh sort of deploying in the sort of front leading countries like the eu and the uk and then of course you know there's the whole slew of uh removal technologies so again don't see uh a conflict i think that the challenge is how do you sort of activate all these uh sort of levers in order for the world to be compliant with uh with the paris agreement and for us to meet our ambition yeah and for us eli thank you for the question it is it's right melica's what she says that it you know it's a combination of all of these things now we've set out our ambitions and specifically around carbon categorized it in three different buckets i mean the first is around our operational emissions and there there are interventions that we are making and will make um around you know introducing more electrification of some of the energy sources in our actual operations to be very thoughtful about flaring to cut down on sort of methane leakage you know these sorts of interventions where you know we can manage the emissions associated with our own operations our second aim which is really where fundamentally our net zero exactly as you said eli comes from is that we're saying the carbon associated with our oil and gas production we will by 2050 and sure that's net zero or sooner and we'll do that in a combination of ways one of the ways you say is in some cases we won't be the producer any longer and you know you rightly pointed out that we've said we would anticipate that we'll produce perhaps 40 percent less oil and gas come 2030 relative to now now part of that is because you know we want to put the proceeds from those sales and also by not investing in that oil and gas we can direct proceeds into the new energies you know and that's very important in our transition you know we're changing the balance within bp from you know being very much an oil and gas producer to being a more balanced energy company we talk about from international oil company to integrated energy companies so it's balance and we take some of those proceeds and we take some of the cash generated from the continuing oil and gas production and we're putting that into the transition so some of this is about how we fund that transition and then the third dimension of our aims is in the products which we sell the total market uh materials that we sell and there we use a measure like carbon intensity because i think like shell that we're saying we will sell an increasing amount of non-carbon product there will be an increasing amount of electricity in our portfolio for electric vehicles there'll be an increasing amount of biofuels as we've just been talking about you know we would like to generate more renewable power in our portfolio we'll do more hydrogen as that grows so it's a question of you know what we produce the direct emissions from that production but also in changing the marketing portfolio actually very much in line with the market because ultimately the customer is demanding a different product and we want to be part of that that new energy mix thanks alana moloka so i want to hone in on that idea of what this net zero state looks like because of course to your point alan about a bp second name in 2050 any residual oil and gas that you're still producing unequivocally has to be balanced with commensurate carbon storage if that's not happening we aren't at zero right correct and so i really want to hone on on this this idea of how do we store that carbon yeah sorry sorry excitement to come through so um yeah yeah i i think you know it is a question of i mean firstly no gas so we see gas as an important fuel and again if i can keep picking up on something milika said you know oil and gas we do see having a role in the energy transition for decades to come but we see that role being indeed increasingly decarbonized and gas obviously has to go through a decarbonization process and i think that needs to be accompanied by uh carbon capture use and sequestration and and in fact you know i i think there's been announcements recently about how we'll partner with people in humber side you know how we will use one of the depleted oil fields you know gas fields to store co2 so we'll take the co2 out of the gas mix so that's particularly in sectors and so we'll look to build you know we call it net zero t side we'll look to build industrial parks where particularly some of these hard to abate sectors high temperature industries they're going to need a decarbonized gas product or a hydrogen we take out the co2 we store it underground now i think that storage there are challenges on that that has to be really robust but i think creating a permanent solution to the removal of co2 is important and so ccus i would say that's a part of it hydrogen as a theme the so-called blue hydrogen and there's a role for the green hydrogen as well but the blue hydrogen you know that is a way of still conferring as it were the benefits of natural gas but in a decarbonized form so you know we'll sort of keep that going and then i think that the last dimension is what is the role of offsets and again you know i think we need to be well we have quite categorically said that our initial plans do not uh rely on offsets i mean in other words we want to cut our own emissions and get into these decarbonization products not rely on offsets now there will be offsets in the market we'll work with our customers and there has to be a partnership with customers and offsets have a role to play in that and i think longer term you know one could see offsets playing a role but almost as i was saying around biofuels about how these have to be frankly beyond reproach how things have to be you know of the highest standard and verifiable you know i think offsets have a role to play so you know you start to see these reduction uh techniques technologies and you know offsets and the sequestration i think all comes together now they all need some help they need alignment with policy they need to happen where you know scale can happen and i think very interestingly a lot of these things are happening in partnerships that would be one theme i would have for today eli you know a lot of this stuff needs to be worked in combination with governments and consumers and producers and all the very interested stakeholders you know and that includes you know academia i think academia has an important role to play in helping us to understand and i would say you know we need help i mean we need help to understand what the problem is that's great that's excellent um and i know we have to move on really shortly to our next youth speaker simonetta but just briefly if i could jump in before because i'd love to hear from malika um i think what i'm what i'm sort of getting at is this idea of you know packaging carbon storage with a product that's decarbonized and shallow is already doing this a bit i think at the pump you can basically pay a little bit of extra and what that really means is you know some trees have been planted maybe in southeast asia or something that will capture the carbon that goes into the that that would come out from the emissions from the fuel but i just wanted to sort of draw attention to i think the youth voice that is quite skeptical of that in a lot of ways and and really you know there's no reason why we can't pursue ecosystem restoration and protections against biodiversity all the amazing things that nature-based solutions provide on their own merits right without generating carbon credits because i think there's a lot of uh there's a lot of risk in terms of you know can we really use nature-based solutions to store carbon in perpetuity which is what we're really doing right if we take carbon out of the geosphere where it was stored forever and then we release it presumably the way that we store carbon to balance that should be equally permanent and so i just wanted to say that i think um from the youth perspective for these net zero goals on the embedded carbon to be credible the world really needs to be certain that for each ton of co2 that shell or bp takes out of the ground in the form of gas or oil another ton of co2 is stored in a way that's transparently accounted for it's it's safe from being re-released in perpetuity um so i'd just love to hear from malaka a little bit on that because i know shell has been very uh active in in promoting nature-based solutions and effectively converting fossil carbon into trees uh we'd love to hear about that yes so i think yeah you're right we have the voluntary sort of you know approach of sort of selling the offsets alongside some of our products but i think you know that that's that's one avenue that we that comes out in our thinking and other people's thinking in terms of how do you get to net zero by 2050. i mean ccs's carbon capture and storage is absolutely sort of a fundamental uh technology i mean that said we i mean our approach is to if you can avoid emissions then do so if you can reduce them then do so and then if you don't you can't go beyond that that's when uh the capture and storage element uh comes in so i think it's absolutely fundamental and i think one of the things that always uh strikes me is that carbon caption storage is a technology that doesn't inherently have a value unless you put a value on emissions so you need that carbon price to be able to make uh carbon uh capture uh sort of viable if you like uh and you know and then also we sort of the realization that carbon price is sort of ramping up relatively slowly and so if you want to get projects off the ground today uh that's not going to be enough to sort of make it commercial so you have to start thinking around you know what are the other mechanisms that you need to to support uh the this uh this technology and the whole a bunch of levers that you could have around you know supporting the infrastructure supporting uh you know the the the long-term liabilities you know all sorts of other mechanisms and and what's interesting is in our projects on ccs across the world because we have a whole number of them it's different combination of levers depending on what you know what the policy environment in that particular country is or region that you can then stack together to make a case for for investment so what we do and what makes it viable in the us where in canada where we have a quest program uh which captures is different from what makes it viable say northern lights which is in the north sea in norway so again i think you know to me it is it's absolutely crucial technology there's no i would not disagree but the question is uh you know there are different ways and how do you incentivize it uh to come into to be something commercially investable and i think that's where sort of the the story around the policy environment that helps you get there becomes quite crucial thank you so much for those thoughtful responses and of course you know you mentioned a carbon price many companies who have set in at zero target are bringing in a carbon price into their own companies so they're sort of making it for themselves even if the laws haven't kept up i think we're leapfrogging a bit thank you so much to everyone who has just joined us uh we had a little bit of a power outage at the syed business school and so the live stream was not working on the website now we have a party on zoom so welcome to the almost 100 participants who have just joined us and we're so glad you're here our next speaker promises to bring more difficult wonderful rich questions because that's what she does for a job simonetta spavieri is a responsible investment analyst and a venezuelan activist and also a friend and i'm so happy to bring you on sumonetta take the stage thank you kaya um and thank you eli and ferrari previously i'm sad to hear that not everyone was listening to that amazing exchange that was taking place i'm sure it's all recorded and you can hear it later but um as the event is called uh youth sets the agenda i wanted to make sure that um you take back new business executives and leaders take back from us a clear steer of what we think the agenda for the sector should be and what we are like as youth are expecting from you we're expecting three things and they sound very simple um but they're very hard and i know make net zero happen is the first second is bring the system with you to net zero and the third is act now which is stolen from greta as you know um but first i wanted to share a bit of why i'm here with you today um as kaya said i work as responsible investment analyst and part of my role on my day to day is to shape investor expectations on climate change but my own uh understanding of what expectations entail comes from my experience in venezuela living under the dictatorial regime and the economic collapse of venezuela and in venezuela expectations meant hope hoped for a better future and every now and then they sparked protests and i learned that expectations and hope were dictators worst enemies but sadly i also learned that expectations may never materialize and that decline can be continuous and that the rock doesn't hit the bottom so this thought of continuous decline keeps me awake at night makes me work every day with passion as a responsible investor scrutinizing your climate targets because i cannot believe that we may be in the situation in which all this effort and nigel's and the race to zero and your ambitions don't bring about the change the transformative change that is required and that the planet follows the decline i've seen happen in venezuela and because we can't allow that to happen uh youth are stepping up and we're taking the responsibility and we want you to help us to achieve these three objectives i said early make net zero missions happen and eli has already more or less defined what we mean by net zero it means the emissions from your operations but also from the sale of your products and leaving only net for the permanent removal of residual emissions and by make it happen i mean bring into commercial scale the technology is needed and decarbonizing your business models the second thing bring the system with you to net zero is by working with others and not in silos advocating for policy that enables a faster transition not just stop lobbying and bring with you your supply chains the members of your industry the workers the communities making sure it's also a just transition and the third and most important and it doesn't matter if anything else happens is act now by aligning your strategies your capital investor investment the internal governance and management incentives to what is required for your company to achieve net zero and act now not stopping business as usual but demonstrating leadership act now so we as the youth can get real trust on you and also so the expectations don't happen to be just dreams as in my experience in venezuela so we collectively as a group here for i you i all pitched in and kaya [Music] some actions that we would like you to have happening now and they are for us like the simple building blocks of trust to see well this is what we want to see um eva um we would like to know when is daimler ending the manufacturing of the internal combustion engine globally and alan and malika when can bp and shell tell us that they are that you're stopping all exploration activity and auto and jonathan you're more in sort of providing a service so it's kind of tricky but can your companies commit to placing a cap on offsets to ensure these are used only to address the residual emissions we've been discussing and i'm keen to hear i don't know how kai you want them to respond to this eva will you start all right i'm happy to start and uh thanks for your emotional introduction i can fully understand it um i'm an engineer so maybe i i um answer more like as an engineer we have the ambition 2039 for daimler and that's a very important step because we promised we'd be co2 neutral by 2039 and that's 10 years before you would have to be so we also joined the climate pledge initiative for example that's one important thing and then i agree with you we have to have a specific plan how do we get there and we do by really now we're in the midst of launching a lot of battery electric vehicles additional to the plug-in vehicles and bringing the whole supply chain to also becoming co2 neutral but also bringing the customer to getting used to driving electric because then in 2030 you want to have more than 50 percent of battery electric or plug-in vehicles and we have to have the infrastructure follow because otherwise it's not pragmatic and people won't buy it so we have to bring the whole system there and also um we have to make it a sustainable business it's also something i want to point out here we have a strategy of modern sustainable luxury and i think it fits very well um because we believe that luxury as of now and as of in the future has to be also responsible you cannot sell a car for a lot of money and then be like a co2 sinner doesn't work thank you so much eva for that incredible response i i think i heard you right would you just repeat what your commitment is by 2039 we be co2 neutral and you phase out of the the manufacturing of combustion engine vehicles we'll phase out in stages but i cannot give you the exact date okay thank you when you say in stages the question is also intending to be globally uh i i understand you're prioritizing certain markets because uh the reality that you've all been discussing like policy comes first when it comes first um but it's also in the plans to phase it out globally is it it is a global strategy also the co2 neutral mission is globally 2039. great sumanetta would you repeat your next question sure no it was it was uh uh uh alan and malika can be p and shell tell us when you're stopping all exploration activity um so i'm i'm happy to dive into this one and actually there are a number of themes that you put in simonetta and and i you know they they do resonate i mean i think you have to say you know i want to say you know they resonate and partly they resonate look i have a 13 year old son you know and for three weeks running every single day he basically said to me dad what have you done for the energy transition today and that was before i came into the strategy team and you know actually it was interesting because i was able to say well funny you mention it but we did today approve uh an animal manure digester which will produce biogas in the u.s we did today you know you know get into a forestry project we did to know so i think the important thing is things are happening now whether you know it's enough and fast enough i think that's a very fair question but things are happening and i think you know there is genuine commitment but i also think the point you make about trust is is right so there are people like you who are asking can we trust you you know you may be saying the right things bp are you going to deliver but actually the investors are saying the same thing they're saying we want proof of the pudding you've laid out a strategy we want to see you deliver so what we've tried to do is to lay out some very clear targets and metrics and we know that you and the market and ours