Sue Brown is responsible for driving the sustainability vision and strategy for Worley, a global leader in delivering professional project and asset services across the energy, chemicals, and resources industries. She advises the Board and management on emerging sustainability and climate issues. Prior to this role Sue was Group Director of Corporate Affairs, with responsibility for government engagement, external communications and sustainability performance.

Sue represents Worley on matters with customers, governments, investors, NGOs, and academics, and leads delivery of initiatives to promote Worley’s thought leadership on sustainability, build sustainability culture and support achievement of company purpose and strategy.

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John: Welcome to the Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian, and we’ve got with us today Sue Brown. She’s the executive group director of sustainability and corporate affairs for Worley. Welcome, Sue to the Impact Podcast.

Sue Brown: Thank you very much, John. I’m looking forward to our conversation today,

John: Sue, my memory’s starting to fade as I get older. I’m 62 years old, but I got to tell you this, I think you are our first guest from Australia, so this is a special extra welcome to you.

Sue: Excellent. I’m flying the flag for down under.

John: You are flying the flag for down under. Thank you for doing that and thank you for getting up so early to take this episode with us. Sue, before we get talking about your long and storied and great career in impact career, can you talk a little bit about Sue Brown? Where did you grow up and how’d you even get inspired to get on this journey?

Sue: Yeah, right. Well, I grew up in a little town called Bendigo, which no one on your podcast will probably have heard of about two hours from the city of Melbourne, which is where I live now, and where I’ve lived for the last 30 years. So I grew up in the country. I wasn’t on a farm or anything, I was just in a house and my family had small businesses. So I had a pretty idyllic upbringing, I would say. How I got inspired around the career that I’ve embarked on was actually, I was a teenager and I watched some documentary. I probably watched far too much television in my youth. But anyway, I watched this documentary that was all about pollution from industry and factories, and I got very inspired to want to work to improve that situation. At school I was a math science kind of a kid, and so I found myself in these classes in my latter years of secondary schooling with lots of overseas students from Malaysia and Hong Kong and different parts of Asia that were all aiming to study engineering at university, and I had no idea what engineering was. But as I got a sense from them of what it was and went to university open days, I could see that chemical engineering was a pathway to work with industry to potentially improve the environmental impact of industry. So that was actually my reason for studying engineering, which is pretty unusual. I’ve got teenage kids now myself and they’ve got no idea what they want to do, but I had a very clear idea very early actually and it informed my decision making around what I studied at university. So I did my chemical engineering and science degree, and then my first job out of university was actually with the Environment Protection Authority. I went and learned on the job about what it was to be an environmental regulator, and I was literally learning on the job from lots of different industries what the environmental impacts of those industries were from contamination of soil and groundwater to noise pollution, to air pollution, to water issues. So I was on a really steep learning journey for five and a half years at the EPA. Towards the end of that time, I was working with the big oil companies on a shared contamination issue that they had. I ended up moving across to BP and working for them for a period of years. So that was where I got into the private sector after my first out of uni job with the EPA. So I had seven and a half years with BP, which was all about growing their environmental and sustainability capability beyond simply contamination. They had a huge contamination expertise within the business globally, actually because a really big issue for the oil industry. But there was a whole lot of other regulation coming around emissions to air and volatile organics from storage tanks and what have you. So I got them ready for that. Then I had a couple of years with a GenTrader here in Australia called AGL, which powers utility right through to actually having a retail brand that sells power to people’s homes. Had a couple of years there. They were building a lot of renewable assets, so I got to see the whole environmental impact assessment process for building out renewables assets. Then I came across to Worley Parsons 13 years ago and decided that I would have a go at leading a profit and loss, which I’d never done in my career. So I led a consulting team that was delivering consulting services in the environment and social arena here in Melbourne. Then I moved across into the corporate part of Worley four years ago and now I’m I reporting to our CEO. So effectively you might call me the Chief sustainability officer in other companies. But yeah, I’m really helping to steward Worley’s commitments, policies, driving a culture, and engaging publicly on these issues like I’m doing with you here today.

John: So for our listeners and viewers, first of all, to find Sue and her great colleagues at Worley, you could go to www.worley, W-O-R-L-E-Y.com. It will be in our show notes, so you don’t have to write it down if you’re gardening or going for a walk or driving your car right now, please don’t do that. But also to learn more about Worley just as a 30,000 foot view, you do about $8 billion in revenue with over 52,000 employees in over 45 countries. Worley is a big company. It’s a big company.

Sue: Yeah. We are a big company. What we do is we have a consulting business that provides advisory services to the energy, chemicals and resources sectors. So we very much work in the industrial sectors. So we have a consulting business that does a lot of that advisory work and auctioneering around assets that they might be looking to build or modify right through to then doing the detailed engineering and design work around those sorts of assets or modifications to existing assets right through to EPC services and actually delivering the construction and managing the construction of those sorts of assets for those customers. So we deal with a lot of the big industrial players that many of your listeners would know, the BP, Shell, Exxon Mobil, Chevron the big miners like Rio Tinto and BHP and Vale and big chemicals manufacturers as well. So we’ve grown via a lot of acquisition over the first two, three decades of the company’s history. The most recent one of those was in 2019 when we actually bought a big division of Jacobs Engineering, which is a big American engineering firm. We bought their energy, chemicals, and resources division and doubled in size overnight in April, 2019.

John: Wow. As you and I know Sue, sustainability could be read very narrowly or also very broadly. So you’ve been in this role about four years or so. Given that you are the leader and you’re talking and communicating directly with the CEO, so others are looking to you for direction and also breadth of scope. How do you decide what are the most important issues for your company and your colleagues to tackle?

Sue: Yeah. We’re very much scanning the horizon always in terms of understanding what are the issues of relevance to our sectors and to the role that we play in the value chains of our customers. So clearly we work with some of the most carbon intensive sectors in the world. So climate change, decarbonization, and the energy transition is a major part of what we think about and what we are acting on, and that’s right through from having our own net zero ambitions as a corporate entity, right through to developing training and learning materials so that our engineers can transition their careers and add strings to their bow and get involved in different sorts of projects than what they might’ve worked on for the last 10, 20 years. Right through to doing thought leadership with thought leader partners such as Princeton University, which is something that my team have pioneered. So we’re scanning the horizon always, and there are issues that are on the rise. So we are looking at the issue of single use plastics and the developments around biodiversity and nature at the moment in terms of frameworks that are being developed around how companies should report and talk about their activities in those domains. Human rights is another one and modern slavery. That’s an issue of relevance to our business given some of the locations where we operate and making sure that we’ve got the right processes and procedures in place to make sure that we’re managing that risk appropriately and not getting involved in projects where that could be an issue.

John: When clients come to you now, what’s your prototypical client looking for? Are they looking for help shifting from just the linear to circular economy? Are they looking for help how to make the biggest and most important impact that they can, given the sector they’re in? Are they looking for net zero help? How to get them to net zero or all the above?

Sue: Yeah, look, all of the above. In our list of top 20 customers, 90% of those have a net zero ambition by the middle of the century. So they’re all on some sort of trajectory to net zero and so we are very much working with them. The question of the day at the moment really is how do I make my project economic? There’s a lot of countries and companies that have set themselves ambition, and now the reality of achieving that ambition is really coming home to roost. The economics of some of these projects is quite challenging, particularly in the absence or in an uncertain policy environment in terms of any government support. So that’s a key issue that we’re working with our customers on is how to take cost out of their projects. How can they get to the end outcome and have it be economic so that it can pass that final investment decision and provide the sorts of returns that their shareholders or owners require.

John: Understood. As you know, you are a sustainability OG, you’ve been doing this a long time way before it was ever cool to be working in an environment and sustainability and the new circular economy. Back when people heard sustainability 15, 16, 20 years ago, if a CEO or C-Suite member heard of sustainability, they thought, okay, how much is this going to cost us? But really, it’s turned out that sustainability equals resilience, equals more profit if it’s done the right way. How do you approach that both internally at Worley and then externally with your clients?

Sue: Yeah, it’s a matter of understanding the economics and understanding that that is the frame of reference that many business people will look at these issues through. There is also a broader concept of social license and what do companies have license to do, what does society expect them to be doing? So we’re also continuously monitoring that sentiment and things like the Edelman Trust barometer really give you insights into what are the expectations that people have of companies? Increasingly, they’re expecting their employer to demonstrate leadership in some of these domains, these non-financial domains, actually. So, this resilience issue is a really good one, actually and you can talk about resilience from a number of different perspectives. So there’s resilience to a changing climate actually, and increasingly well, we expect to see a whole lot of more of that. We’re already seeing it now, but to see more of that over time as we see the impacts climate change manifesting. But this issue of resilience in terms of not reliant on other countries or not reliant on the supply chains of other countries is a real issue. I’ve spent a bit of time in the US over the last 12 months, and I know that the US administration has got more than one eye on China at the moment and the moves that China have made to be absolutely dominant in the low carbon technologies that are going to have to be deployed over the coming decades. So this is a real geopolitical risk for not just the US but other western countries and other countries around the world. So I think there is increasing emphasis and value being placed on that diversification of supply chain so that we can get the energy transition done and not have all our eggs in one basket with one country that currently dominates those supply chains. So CEOs are absolutely looking at this from the perspective of resilience. They’re also looking at these investment decisions and governments as well in terms of their policy settings through the lens of the energy trilemma that we need to deliver affordability, energy, security, and we need to deliver a decarbonized solution over time. I think over the period of the pandemic, there was an elevated focus on the environmental dimension of that trilemma coming out of that and post what’s happening in Ukraine and Europe’s reliance on gas coming out of Russia. That really elevated the focus on security of supply and price and the energy trilemma got back into a balance. So I think, in terms of the factors that CEOs and government leaders are thinking about when they think about these big capital investments for energy infrastructure.

John: I read about Worley’s aspiration of deriving 75% of your revenue from sustainability related projects by 2026. How are you tracking towards that goal?

Sue: Yeah, look, I think we’re doing well, John, actually. So that was definitely an aspiration and our financial year is a little bit different here in Australia compared to the US. So the end of financial year ’26 is the middle of 2026 and I think we’re tracking pretty well. So at our half year results this year, so up till the end of December last year, we were sitting at 58% sustainability revenue, our backlog which are projects that we’ve won that we haven’t executed yet. It’s sitting at 62% and then in our open pipeline, we’re sitting at about 85%. So I’ll just say a little bit about how we define that revenue. We work on lots of different types of projects with different sectors and different customers and even customers have portfolios across quite a range of different types of projects. So what we wanted to do was to understand, well, what proportion of our revenue is coming from traditional sources say, so oil projects or base metal mining type projects versus those that are a pure place sustainability type project. So a renewable energy project or electrification project or energy transition critical minerals mining project and what proportion is transitional. So there are some technologies that we are using today that get a better environmental outcome than other technologies. So a classic would be transitioning from a coal fired power asset to a natural gas fired power asset, and here is no economic or technologically ready alternative to that. So we are using gas as a transition ultimately to a lower carbon solution in the future. So what we do is we aggregate the sustainable projects and the transitional projects and call that our sustainability revenue. What we’re seeing is big growth in gas at the moment. This is around this issue of energy security and affordability is the US in particular, but not just the US also here in Australia. Qatar’s a big LNG exporter as well developing gas assets and putting those into the market as an alternative to coal. That’s really driving the health of that pipeline figure that I told you we’re sitting in about 85% sustainability revenue in the pipeline because It covers both transitional and sustainable.

John: Talk about the energy transition. What other forms of credible energy moving away from coal, is nuclear going to be part of our future in the years to come?

Sue: Yeah, nuclear is certainly having a bit of a renaissance at the moment, and I think it was at the Dubai COP a couple of years ago. There are a number of nuclear supportive countries that came out and committed to tripling their nuclear capacity over the coming decade. It’s increasingly being seen as part of the solution. There are technological developments happening there that need to come through and be proven at scale to really make that happen. That’s these small modular reactors, which are much, much smaller capacity than your classic historic big full scale nuclear utility plant. But will just enable development and deployment of those projects that a pace that we’ve not ever been able to do with a large bespoke utility scale nuclear plan. So I think nuclear is on the table as an option, but it’s not an option everywhere. There are some countries where we don’t want them developing that kind of nuclear capability. There are some countries like Australia actually where we simply do not have a legal framework to use nuclear in the power sector. It’s been a bipartisan agreement for decades actually, that Australia wouldn’t develop nuclear capability even though we mine uranium and export it. But we’ve now got one of the major political parties coming out and has nuclear as central to their energy policy actually. So we are in the middle of an election campaign at the moment. That election happens in early May, and the major opposition party at the moment that’s vying to get into government actually has nuclear, is central to their energy policy. So the thinking around nuclear I think is really shifting. Our house view at Worley is that we need to have all options on the table. Actually, all technologically and economically viable options need to be on the table because it’s not one size fits all.

John: Got it. So if you’ve just joined us now, we’ve got Sue Brown with us. She’s the executive group director of sustainability and corporate affairs at Worley. To find Sue and her colleagues, please go to www.worley, W-O-R-L-E-Y.com. That URL will be in our show notes today. Sue, talk about energy companies, as 30,000 feet as an outsider like me, who has nothing to do with the energy industry as a whole energy companies historically, where the fossil fuel companies and they’re not part of the sustainability revolution. Disavow me of my misinformation and bring me back to the reality that energy companies can play a very important and linchpin role in the sustainability revolution that’s upon us now.

Sue: Yeah. I think energy companies have historically mostly been fossil fuel based. We’re coming out of that period of our energy history now, I think. But those same energy companies whose businesses have been built around fossil fuel assets have a skill base and an understanding of energy markets of massive complex capital project delivery the like, of which there’s not many sectors that have. So there’s quite a neat adjacency, I think, to the skill sets that that sector has. Frankly, as we transition, there’s a need for those companies to be decarbonizing their own assets on the way to reducing the carbon footprint of the product that they produce now. They will learn by doing that and then looking at what future energy sources need to look like they can build their business around. So an example of this green hydrogen projects have been quite challenged globally. There’s been a lot of bars around green hydrogen the last couple of years. The biggest projects that are actually happening and that have a guaranteed offtake are oil and gas companies like Shell and BP who are doing projects to supply hydrogen into their oil refining process to reduce the carbon footprint of that process. One of the big challenges with green hydrogen projects has been that there haven’t been any guaranteed off takers to underwrite the viability of projects because the BPs and Shells and Exxons of the world are their own off taker. They’ve got assets that use hydrogen. They are the ones actually doing the largest green hydrogen projects. in the case of ExxonMobil doing a massive blue hydrogen project in the US at the moment called Baytown Blue that we are working on. So there’s technical smarts that reside in that sector. There’s complex capital project delivery smarts that reside in that sector that is transferable to the new energy future.

John: Well, as we saw, in the United States, we have the Investment Recovery Act under the Biden administration. Now we have a different mindset when it comes to sustainability under the Trump administration. How much do politics play a role in organizational and corporate shifts in mindset when it comes to sustainability? Or now is this being self-driven because it’s a compelling fact enough that the constituents of these organizations and corporations really demand responsible sustainable behavior? What’s the high wire act between politics and self-driving behavior when it comes to sustainability?

Sue: Yeah. I think there’s enough momentum in the system now, the energy transition system now that it’s got a life of its own, you know?

John: Right.

Sue: If you accept the science and at Worley we do, we accept the science from the IPCC on climate change, then decarbonization is required. Over a period of decades, that’s the thing we’ve got to remember, this isn’t an energy transition that’s happening over the next five years. This is a multi-decade old energy transition. So my view and our view is that there is enough momentum in the system now driving to that. Our big customers as they weigh up their decisions on capital investments, are looking at things like well, what’s the social license of this asset in 20 years? Is this going to be a stranded asset in 20, 30 years? The banks are absolutely looking at things like that. So there’s a whole range of factors that key players in the ecosystem, the owners, operators, the lenders are looking at that are going to drive decision makers ultimately to a lower carbon future. Now, is it going to happen in the next five minutes? No, but this is a multi-decal transition. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. It’s going to be labored at times and then it’s going to have a real tailwind at times.

John: Yeah. How about when it comes to Worley? Since you are hired to lead so many organizations to the right path of sustainability or net zero or circular behavior, obviously you have to not only talk to talk, but walk the walk. How do you choose inside of Worley what to be attacking and accomplishing from a sustainability perspective? How do you then show it? Do you do an impact report every year that’s published on your website, or what’s the internal mechanisms inside of Worley look like?

Sue: Yeah, in terms of the disclosures just starting there first because there’s a bit happening there in Australia at the moment, so we’ve been disclosing our sustainability performance separate to our annual report, but at the same time as our annual report are now actually incorporated within our annual report on an annual basis for years, so for like eight plus years. We have a new regime coming into play in Australia at the moment that’s giving effect to the ISSB recommendations around climate related financial disclosures. So we are currently gearing up to make disclosures in accordance with that. We undertake a materiality review each year to look at what are our material sustainability issues, and that review takes in the views of our people, investors, what the material issues of our customers are so that we are framing that appropriately. That’s really the frame that drives our effort then internally. So climate change and clean energy have been in the top four forever. So that’s why we’re doing all this work on carbon and decarbonization and of our own business as well as building our skillset to work with our customers. So we are really informed by that materiality assessment. Yeah, that’s the short answer.

John: Right. There’s not a day that goes by Sue, that you and I are reading something online or either in a news portal or some other information that robotics and AI are coming and they’re coming fast. How do you foresee the leveraging for the betterment of AI and robotics to help accelerate the energy transition and the sustainability revolution?

Sue: Yeah. Well, I feel like we’re at the beginning of that particular journey although it is moving at pace, but there is a lot of excitement actually around the opportunity to use AI to make systems more efficient and workplaces more efficient. But in terms of things I’ve heard when I’m in the US, there’s excitement around the opportunity to use it to help your very fragmented electricity distribution systems that are state based in the US talk to each other in a different way and actually help that function as a system rather than 50 separate systems. So I think there’s a real opportunity there to do things like that, to analyze data in a way that is almost impossible for a human being to take in that much data, to really look at trends around things like energy use to look for the opportunities to improve efficiency. So I think there’s a real opportunity there. Then there’s opportunities also in the day-to-day work that we do. So we’re doing work with AI at Worley, looking at, well, how can we deploy it in our business to do some of the grunt work that just has to get done so that our engineers can then bring their higher order thinking to higher order tasks. Which again, is a productivity gain and an efficiency gain in our business. So we are learning by doing on that at the moment and we’ve also announced a partnership with Nvidia and Dell in the last couple of weeks actually, to work together on a platform around how do we transform for the digital age project delivery? What does project delivery of the future look like? That is AI enabled. So there’s a whole lot there. The other thing about AI also, and I’m sure you’re aware of this, is that it’s energy hungry, right?

John: Right.

Sue: The energy demand from data centers that are going to be required to train AI and then deploy AI, it’s a significant energy demand. At the moment there’s two different schools of energy demand. What was the name of the Chinese platform that came out a month ago?

John: DeepSeek.

Sue: DeepSeek. Yeah. It’s claiming to use a 10th kind of the energy of the American version. So I think there’s some water to go under the bridge there, but there is going to be a significant demand from this technology going forward. So there’s also well, how do we power that demand? And what sort of assets are we locking in? We’re seeing things like Microsoft firing up part of three mile Islands a nuclear facility there to power data centers for the purposes of enabling all that digital technology. So there’s two sides to that AI. There’s what efficiencies can it gain within the energy system, and then how much energy is it going to actually use to drive it? How do we do that most efficiently and with lowest impact?

John: You mentioned earlier, we were talking about you do business in over 45 different countries, Sue. Is there ever going to come a point or do you foresee a point in the near future, will there be more harmonization of the rules and regulations around carbon emissions, around net zero goals and all the other things that are encompassed with regards to sustainability? But it seems like that it’s such a patchwork quilt around the world right now that that itself creates a whole need for just a division at your company underneath you managing just that patchwork quilt of disparate regulations.

Sue: Yeah, you’re right. I think everybody got excited after COP26 in Glasgow when the ISSB, the international standards board for financial accounting announced that, sorry, IFRS actually is the accounting body and the ISSB is a sustainability body, but that they were going to develop some consistent disclosure frameworks and then subsequent developments that was going to be embedded within the accounting system. Fantastic. Right?

John: True.

Sue: Everyone thought yay, we’re going to get some consistent requirements here and it’s going to roll out globally because it’s the global accounting system. I think we’re on our way towards that, but the reality is the way that it’s playing out is that we are still at this patchwork quilt situation that you just very eloquently described. So we’ve got the EU requirements coming out and developments last week whereby they’ve now been delayed by a couple of years, but a set of disclosure requirements, reporting requirements based on those ISSB standards, those same standards have been picked up here in Australia and have become law on the 1st of January this year. So we are gearing up to disclose in accordance with those requirements for the first time next year. The US started down a path under Biden, but I think have now left that path with some SEC draft regulations around disclosures that were very challenged and I think now have been walked away from. So there are different requirements, and then you’ve got requirements in California that we need to comply with as Worley because we’ve got operations in California. So it is still messy. I think we’re on a journey towards a consistent framework and that those ISSB requirements really are the gold standard around how should a big company disclose what the climate risk is to their financial results. But it’s not in place everywhere. It has been picked up in a lot of countries. I don’t know what the current number is, but I heard a figure a couple of weeks ago from a lawyer working in this space saying that more than 50% of global GDP is under the ISSB or has committed to implementing the ISSB requirements.

John: Sue, talk a little bit about your from ambition to reality series. What should our listeners and viewers learn about that?

Sue: Yeah, so that’s a partnership that we have with Princeton University’s Andlinger for Energy and the Environment. So they have a corporate partnership program that we are part of. The reason we entered into that partnership is that we saw an incredible piece of work, actually, that Princeton published in 2020 called Net Zero America, that went really deep on the practical realities of what mid-century America would look like in terms of the asset build out that would need to happen on the ground. So electricity transmission lines, carbon dioxide pipelines, hydrogen pipelines, solar arrays, utility scale, solar and wind arrays, et cetera. You took one look at that piece of mapping that they did, and they are really granular. You can go and look at your local county and see what it would look like under their modeling. It’s just really apparent that there’s a major project delivery challenge there. To move as fast as the US and the rest of the world would need to move to actually make that happen by 2050, we can’t keep doing it the way we’re doing it today. So it was really the marriage of that very deep thinking and analysis that Princeton had done without decades of experience of delivering just these sorts of assets for the sorts of companies that are going to have to deliver these assets of the future to come together and say, right, how do we unlock project delivery? How do we make the delivery of capital projects move much faster than it does today? So that was the genesis of the work back in, I think it was ’21. So what we developed was five key shifts in project delivery practice that we say are needed to unlock that pace and scale. The first is around broadening value. So not simply looking at the economics of these projects, but looking at the environmental and social benefit that they deliver as well and sharing that with local communities to help accelerate the projects. It’s about enabling options, not ruling technologies in and out on ideological or whatever grounds there might be. We need all options on the table. I talked about this earlier when we were discussing nuclear. It’s about standardizing the way that we do things. One of the hallmarks of the fossil fuel industry is that every asset is of enormous scale and is largely bespoke. There are no two oil refineries that are exactly the same. As we look to deploy technologies, like direct air capture, or green hydrogen, we need to have a view to standardizing what those modules look like so that we can provide certainty to the manufacturers that are in the supply chain of those technologies and certainty to regulators that need to approve those projects so that it can all just move faster. We need to be fostering partnerships across the value chain to move faster. we need to be using digital technology as an accelerant and we just talked about AI then. So they’re the five shifts. We’ve been really teasing out different ones of those shifts on an annual basis with Princeton since then. So we published our latest piece last September and that was our fourth piece. We really went deep on a theme of trust. This is trust between regulators and developers, developers and their EPC contractors, developers and their financiers. When you have a condition of trust amongst the parties, things move faster. We all know that. We’ve all had experiences of that. If you’ve got someone who you’ve got history with and that you trust, you can just move at a pace that is unlike where you are feeling each other out, don’t quite know how people are going to behave. So how do we build that trust? Princeton are doing some further work on this at the moment, developing some architects and frameworks for trust and how do we build that within these sorts of ecosystems. But last year’s piece just looked at the development of the CCS industry, carbon capture and storage industry in the US which is really struggling off the back of an absence of trust in the technology. What I find about CCS in the US is that you are getting it from, all the developers are getting it from both angles. So they’re getting people on the left and the greens say it’s not a real technology, and what if the CO2 escapes and et cetera, et cetera, and then farmers and shooters and fishes who tend to be a bit more on the right who don’t like it because it’s occupying land that they want to use for other purposes and the CO2 might escape. So there’s this lack of trust around that technology. So we explored that. So it’s interesting for an engineering project delivery, quite technical firm, but it’s actually some of these other issues around trust and partnerships that we actually see as the real unlocks of pace alongside things like standardizing designs. That’s more of a techie angle, but it’s some of these other soft things that actually aren’t that soft. They can put a very hard break on a good project if not managed well.

John: Interesting. With regards to inspiration, where do you get your inspiration? Now, Sue, you’ve been doing this a long time. Where do you look? Do you look inside of your industry energy or engineering, or do you look outside to disparate industries to get your inspiration when it comes to sustainability and what’s going to be the next big thing? Or what should you be focusing on that’s off your radar today?

Sue: Wow, that’s a really good question. I think I’m inspired by people who just do things very differently or just have an ability to frame problems in a very different way. So I wouldn’t say that there’s one person or one company that I look to and take inspiration from, but there are people who have moments in time when they’re doing something really pioneering and interesting. I take inspiration from that as, and when I think Vicki Hollub, who’s the CEO of Occidental there in the US. There’s a company that’s owned by OXY called 1PointFive, which is doing a bunch of direct air capture projects, which is about effectively scrubbing CO2 out of the atmosphere to capture it and then put it underground. We are the engineering and services partner of 1PointFive in that project. The initial full scale project is drawing to a close, actually in Texas at the moment called Project Stratos. They’ll flip the switch on that in the next couple of months. But Vicki, and I’ve had the pleasure to meet Vicki on a couple of occasions over the years. She’s got a vision and she is creating a future for a legacy heritage oil and gas business that is leveraging the technical smarts and understanding of some of the chemistry and the CCS and that type of thing, but completely reframing that skillset into a technology that we all hope is going to be a really key technology for the future. So she’s building on the strengths of what she’s got to create for the future, and I think that’s very inspiring.

John: So you get jazzed and excited about the disruptors, the ones that really have a moment in time to disrupt the legacy way of doing things that can take us in a better and faster direction.

Sue: Yeah. It’s kind of a disruptor, but there’s something I know, and this is my engineering brain but there’s a logic to it as well. I can’t remember if Vicki is an engineer, she might be, but there’s a logic to it. There’s an adjacency to what it is that they do and so it makes sense.

John: Yeah, (because it’s not some recreation[?] [inaudible]

Sue: Yeah, yeah.

John: Yeah. I get you. You brought up a point earlier about more and also about faster, and I get to interview so many cool people like you. I say it’s one of the greatest fraternities in the world, chief sustainability officers, chief impact officers, whatever the titles they give now, but doing very similar type of work. That’s the constant theme I keep hearing from everyone. When I ask them where are we in the journey now I hear more and I hear faster. So you’ve been doing this now for about 25 years, Sue. So where are we? American baseball has nine innings. Are we in the bottom of the first inning, the middle of the fifth inning? Where are we in the sustainability net zero energy transition journey right now? Where do you think we’re at?

Sue: That’s interesting. I still think we’re relatively early in the journey.

John: I agree with you [crosstalk] I agree.

Sue: Yeah. I think that there’s still some awakening to be done amongst the mass populace that hasn’t yet happened. I don’t know what it’s going to take, but I have had some interesting conversation with folks at Princeton around what some of the tipping points in the climate system could look like, and maybe it’s going to take reaching one of those for the penny to really drop about the issues that we need to contend with and the immediacy with which we’re going to have to attend to them. So I think there’s been a lot of great work done. I think there’s a real body of knowledge but there’s something about the mass understanding of and need for change that we haven’t cracked yet.

John: I agree with you. I really agree with you. For our listeners and viewers to find Sue and her great colleagues at Worley, please go to www.worley, W-O-R-L-E-Y.com. Sue, thanks. Not only for spending with us almost an hour today, but more importantly, thank you for a career of great work that not only makes the planet and world more sustainable, but just a better place. Thank you again for your time today, and thanks for all your great work over the last 25 years and the work you’re doing today at the Worley Group.

Sue: Thanks John, and thanks for telling these stories and my story of Worley’s story, but the story of peers and colleagues across lots of different industries, because I think it’s really important to provide inspiration to people around what the art of the possible is. What careers in this domain can look like and then people can carve out their own that looks completely different of course, but you can’t be what you can’t see. So I think that understanding what different people are doing and how these roles manifest in different organizations is really important. So thank you.

John: You’re always welcome back here, Sue. To continued great health and success and Worley as always and you Sue Brown, you’re always welcome back on the Impact podcast.

Sue: Great. Thanks, John. Appreciate it.

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https://www.worley.com/en/insights/our-thinking/energy-transition/from-ambition-to-reality