BE Magazine - Volume 5, Issue 1 - (Page 12) of this must be done in partnership with government to create the appropriate regulatory environment, and with the public to create confidence in the safety and security of these technologies for widespread application. These types of future projects will require us to attain higher levels of collaboration and cooperation than anything we have experienced before. Hydrogen energy is one good example of future complexity, but we also see it in our current operations. Take, for example, BP’s Thunderhorse project in the Gulf of Mexico. The largest drilling and production semisubmersible ever built, tapping into a reservoir lying 6,000 meters beneath mud, rock, and salt, topped by 1,900 meters of ocean. With pressures over 1,200 bar and temperatures of 135 degrees C, everything about this project is pushing the limits of the industry’s experience. And it has been very challenging. Probably the toughest project of its type we have ever undertaken. It will work, and it will open up a whole new province for us. But it illustrates how the challenges are getting tougher and the risks are getting bigger. Then there is the complexity involved in developing new unproven technologies, with high levels of R&D investment and no guarantee of a usable product at the end of it, requiring us to construct new and complex chains that require high levels of collaboration and forcing us to expand the boundaries of our knowledge and capabilities. And then there is the geo-political complexity, which has come to characterize our operations in many parts of the world. Consider, for example, the Baku Tbilisi Cehyan pipeline that has opened up a new energy corridor through the former Soviet Union into Turkey. This is a story of a truly modern complex undertaking. The technical challenge of constructing one of the world’s longest pipelines was far from straightforward. But perhaps the biggest challenge was political—having to align the interests of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, as well as different communities within those countries, and at the same time responding to the concerns of NGOs and numerous other stakeholders, often pulling in very different directions. I regard the completion of this project as one of BP’s greatest accomplishments in recent years. What will it take to succeed in this complex, high-risk environment? The energy companies that succeed in the future will need to have a very particular set of attributes: s They will need to be flexible and respon- New levels of collaboration sive enough to deal with a rapidly evolving environment and seize new opportunities as they arise. s They will need to be eager for risk-taking to deal with multiple levels of uncertainty. s They will need to be visionary so they can understand the wider picture and embrace the future challenges. s They will need to be integrators along the energy supply chain, linking up different skills and industries in new and innovative ways. Underpinning all of these, the key ingredient for success is going to be the ability to collaborate. Collaboration is hardly a new idea. We all know that this is a highly competitive industry, one of the characteristics that has made it so successful in the past. And we will continue to compete strongly to access new resources and supply better and better products to our customers. Competition drives innovation in our industry and creates better value for our customers. But the scale and nature of the challenges we face going forward will require unprecedented levels of collaboration in the future. And it will need to happen on many different levels and with many different partners. Let me give some examples of what I mean. At BP, our university collaborations, including with MIT, Berkeley and Princeton here in the United States, are very important for us. At MIT we have created the Projects Academy to develop leadership skills in our most senior cadre of project managers; at Berkeley and the University of Illinois we are creating the BP Energy Bioscience Institute to apply the rapidly advancing science of biology to the energy challenge. And our collaboration with Princeton has been instrumental in the creation of the hydrogen power concept, which we believe will be one of the key energy sources of the future. These are just a few examples of what we’re doing now and what the future for BP at least looks like. We believe that bringing the best minds and newest ideas together in a truly creative environment will be essential if we are to come up with © BP p.l.c. 12 BE MAGAZINE | Volume 5, Issue 1 © BP p.l.c.
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