麻豆传媒

Patricia Scozzafave is Decarbonisation Consultancy Services Manager for Shell Catalysts & Technologies, based in Houston, Texas. A chemical engineer by trade, Scozzafave has worked under the Shell umbrella since first joining the company as an intern in 2000.

In this interview on 鈥�How I Make Every Molecule Matter鈥�, Patricia discusses how she helps customers develop their decarbonisation pathways and why she is excited by the accelerating pace of change in the energy transition.

1. What excites you most about your current work?

I work in consulting services, primarily supporting companies in different sectors and stages of their energy transition journey. As a Consultancy Services Manager, I work with customers to understand their decarbonisation ambitions, their drivers for decarbonisation such as market pull, future regulations, government incentives and customer boundaries around this topic. Once we paint this picture, we can then review the options available to our customers and help with the development of their pathways and subsequent roadmaps that will take them into the implementation phase.

It is fascinating to work across multiple sectors 鈥� from oil and gas companies of different sizes and complexities, to hard-to-abate industries such as cement and steel and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). The approach to decarbonisation varies tremendously, but if you look at the common building blocks such as energy efficiency, low-carbon energy and fuels and carbon capture, what these different companies are trying to achieve is very similar 鈥� reducing the carbon impact of their products and services.

Most of the companies we are working with are trying to set net-zero targets or have ambitions to understand the impact of Energy Transition on their business. Each one tracks the pace of change, how regulations and policies evolve in different countries and how the technology landscape is unfolding. Company leaders also follow how those factors impact customer demand and future market trends. The challenge is to put together the pieces of this puzzle and turn them into a comprehensive pathway that will remain resilient for the next 10-15 years.

2. What challenges do you address when developing pathways? How do you find inspiration for solutions?

While establishing the building blocks of decarbonisation pathways, the method is primarily the same. However, we see differences in our customers鈥� drivers and approaches. They have different perspectives regarding the market evolution, technology routes, risk appetite, industry collaboration and the financial impact of decarbonisation.

When working with our customers, we collaborate cross-functionally across a diverse team of experts from different parts of the business. Teams often include people from technology, operations, regulatory, sustainability, economics, planning and finance.

Each of these stakeholders has individual expectations about what a decarbonisation pathway should look like for their organisation, be it through energy efficiency gains, electrification, carbon sequestration or through the use of renewable fuels, for example. Everyone in the organisation has the same goal, but how we get there causes divergence, and our challenge is to bring everyone back together on a single and unified pathway. That divergence, while challenging, is also quite inspirational and provides the Shell Catalysts & Technologies team a chance to understand what the stakeholders find relevant and their views on how the energy system will evolve. My inspiration is to learn from these different perspectives and look for potential solutions that fit a particular view or challenges they have set.

3. What is a project that you worked on that you found particularly interesting or rewarding?

In the last twelve months, I have worked closely with a few companies to support them in developing their decarbonisation pathways.

One particularly interesting project was a refining company with two refineries in two different locations. We had to work within the constraints of regulations in those two different geographical areas. Furthermore, each asset had different units and product slates which meant the pathways would be different at each site. As the energy system changes around the assets, we need to understand what local options each site has and how the asset integrates into the future energy system. Decarbonisation is a global movement with local solutions.

Once we navigated the regulations in those areas, as well as feedstock availability, customer demand, the technology landscape and the company鈥檚 risk appetite, we developed decarbonisation pathways that were relevant for both locations, which was incredibly satisfying work.

4. What do you find most exciting or innovative when it comes to?

I think the most unique thing happening today is the pace of change and how fast technology is evolving. For Shell, this creates opportunities to focus heavily on technology deployment. We look for ways to shorten the time it takes to get a technology to market, allowing us to de-risk future technologies at a faster pace. We are also seeing an increase in industry collaboration across multiple sectors to develop decarbonisation solutions and infrastructure such as industrial hubs.

5. What decarbonisation developments do you anticipate in the next 5, 10 and 20 years?

In the next five years, I believe many companies will focus on energy efficiency, electrification and/or a switch to low carbon energy sources while the infrastructure for future value chains, such as H2 and CCS are being developed in industrial hubs.

In the next ten years, I think there will be more ample investments made in . CO₂ capture technologies will evolve to expand their application within multiple sectors. In addition, the regulations on CO2 transportation and storage globally will also progress as well as potential CO2 utilization technologies.

If you think of hard-to-abate sectors such as steel and cement, unless we find alternative ways to produce these products, carbon capture and storage will continue to develop 20 years from now. Hydrogen infrastructure will be mature in different countries and breakthrough technologies will continue to emerge.