The Circular Economy in Oil and Gas Part 2

September 27, 2023

Jordan Yates & Lizzie Hurt interview Peter Evans, PhD & Chief Strategy Officer at McFadyen Digital, on the topic of Circular Economy in the world of Oil and Gas. This is Part 2 of the series.

 

 

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The Circular Economy in Oil and Gas Part 2 - Ep 16 - Transcript

 

00:00:00 Jordan Yates
This episode of The Energy Pipeline is sponsored by Caterpillar Oil& Gas. Since the 1930s, Caterpillar's manufactured engines for drilling, production, well service and gas compression. With more than 2100 dealer locations worldwide, caterpillar offers customers a dedicated support team to assist with their premier power solutions.

00:00:26 Speaker 2
The Energy Pipeline is your lifeline to all things oil and gas, to drill down deep into the issues impacting our industry. From the frack site to the future of sustainability, hear more about industry issues, tools, and resources to streamline and modernize the future of oil and gas. Welcome to The Energy Pipeline.

00:00:49 Jordan Yates
Hey everybody. Welcome back to part two of our discussion on The Circular Economy with Peter Evans. I hope if you're listening this week that you already got to enjoy the episode from last week, but I will not keep you guys any longer. I just wanted to welcome you back to another episode of The Energy Pipeline. Let's get into it. And it honestly sounds like there can be a lot of money to be made through implementing circular. It's funny because a lot of times we think if we're going to try to be more sustainable or we're trying to do good things for the environment, that we are essentially giving up a cash flow that it costs money. But it sounds like if somebody were to come in, and they're probably already many companies doing it, but implementing that in between facilitator piece, that it could actually be profitable. And it's not always just about, " Are we doing good for the environment?" Because at the end of the day, businesses need to make money to grow and actually be able to accomplish things. And a lot of thing is, a lot of these decisions are hinged on the dollar value. So I think it is good that this could have the potential to be so profitable, not only for the economy, but for the environment. And I think that's really cool. And personally, I think this really is where it overlaps with where we are today of platforms because this isn't something that's just always been around. The internet is still relatively new in comparison to the oil and gas industry manufacturing. So I think it's pretty cool that we now have this added layer of the data analysis, how we can interact with each other. And that's why having you on being a platform expert I thought was special to this. I don't have a question. I'm just going on a rant.

00:02:30 Peter Evans
Yeah. Well, I'll give you another interesting example. You look at Southeast Asia right now, it's growing dramatically. A lot of new vehicles are coming into the marketplace, which is creating more demand for lubricants. But on the back end of that, something like 60% of that motor oil, which is a valuable commodity, which could be actually reused, is ending up in bunker fuel for marine shipping. And the reason is that motor oil has a lower sulfur content than bunker fuel. And the marine ships are facing restrictions on going into ports. And so they down blend their bunker fuel with motor oil. So there is a market there, but it's not the right market. And so if we could create a marketplace for used lubricants, and then what is the marketplace there? It's often the reverse logistics. So what you need to do is have a player come in and organize the pickup of that material and then create incentives for them to send it to a recycler versus sending it to be burned. So that's a great, because motor oil can be reused, and the reality is we need motor oil to run the modern economy. It is absolutely essential for all machinery to have that motor oil. I think the US market is something like a $ 60 billion market for motor oil. It's a big, big market. And so how do we create a marketplace that would deal with the plastic containers and recycle the motor oil in a more efficient way? So that's a great example of how a marketplace could come in and create efficiencies in a system and stop some of the kind of practices that are leading to environmental problems.

00:04:24 Jordan Yates
Yeah. Do you have anything on that?

00:04:28 Lizzie Hurt
How do you measure really success from circular economy? What do you think is the biggest metric to look at or watch out for?

00:04:38 Peter Evans
Yeah. So super big picture. It would be, right now the oil and gas industry is creating a lot of value, but it's also creating a lot of externalities. For the environment, for hazardous wastes that aren't remediated properly. There's a bunch of reasons. So the circular economy, I think can help reduce the amount of externalities created by the industry and lead to more efficient reuse of the materials that the industry uses on a daily, whether it be machinery or the products that can be reused and recycled. And then if there's a marketplace, I think the whole point is that it makes these things easier. One of the reasons, and you asked me about the barriers, is there's a lot of friction in the system right now because there isn't easy. It's not like Amazon. When you want something, you can go on Amazon and find it and it gets delivered really quickly. If you could make the circular economy as easy and as frictionless as the linear economy platformed, wow, then you reduce some of the challenges and make it easier for companies to do it.

00:05:53 Jordan Yates
Yeah. I heard a point this morning on that podcast I mentioned earlier that was saying, " If you are kind of not willing to adapt the whole processing of the data for the circular economy, and you're like, Gung Ho on, " I want to stick with the way things are." Then as a manufacturer, what you should be trying to do is make your product so much better that it's life is longer, and it is so much further away from having to be recycled." So whether that's an electronic or it's a rubber or something that's intended to be used like a vehicle, make it last longer.

00:06:28 Peter Evans
Let's introduce a new idea here.

00:06:29 Jordan Yates
Okay.

00:06:30 Peter Evans
When you go to a circular economy, you actually can potentially change the business model itself. So in a linear economy, because you don't pay for externalities, it makes sense to sell something, because then you're done. However, if you become responsible through extended producer responsibility laws and other forces, suddenly selling something may not make sense, it may make more sense to lease it, because you're already responsible for taking it back. So you can imagine Caterpillar going out into the market, in the old days, they sold it and then they're done with it. But if they're responsible for taking back the equipment at some point, it may make a whole lot of sense. And so leasing models become a lot more attractive. And you can imagine for batteries, even the mining industry, which typically mine something, and then they're done with it. Because if lithium can be recycled, why would you ever sell it?

00:07:28 Jordan Yates
Yeah. That's my lithium, it's my baby. I'm going to hold onto it. Watch it grow.

00:07:33 Peter Evans
Yeah, exactly. So what's really interesting is that there's new technologies that are needed to make the circular economy work, and it can reduce transaction costs and have these other benefits, but it also changes the way the businesses think about how they make money. And so we could see a shift to a more circular economy actually causing companies to think more about leasing models, and yeah.

00:07:59 Lizzie Hurt
That's fascinating. I typically have, from my own viewpoint, I look at it from an engineering standpoint, like, " Oh, think about all the innovation, and if you have to make something easier to recycle, you have to go back into the design and look at the design teams, and get all of those players together too." But I didn't even think about that from a sales perspective though. Interesting.

00:08:18 Peter Evans
Yeah. Totally different sales model. And then the other way that you can incentivize circular is to create tokens.

00:08:28 Jordan Yates
Quiet expensive.

00:08:29 Peter Evans
Yeah. But what happens here is that then the companies get a royalty on the secondary sales. So that's really interesting. And this is happening in the apparel industry. So that incentivizes because one of the pushbacks or resistances is that, this will cannibalize your new sales if you create a secondary sale. And so we know from the history of companies like De Beers, they frown upon you reselling your diamonds. Even if you get divorced, you should keep it, right? Why? Because they want those. Second, they don't want these diamonds going into the secondary market and depressing prices. But there's interesting-

00:09:10 Jordan Yates
They have so many diamonds, they just don't have to-

00:09:12 Peter Evans
Yeah. They have so many diamonds.

00:09:14 Jordan Yates
No, not too much of a problem for me personally, but I imagine it's hard.

00:09:16 Peter Evans
What's interesting is there's now marketplaces popping up to refurbish phones.

00:09:22 Jordan Yates
Yeah. Yeah.

00:09:23 Peter Evans
And there's a company in Europe called Swappie. They've done over a million iPhones, and they create a marketplace. So when people have reached end of life or they want to upgrade to another one, they give it to Swappie, they refurbish it. And it turns out that there are different, there's a market segmentation going on, that the people buying the first generation phone are different from the people buying secondary generation. And even within companies, you can imagine in oil and gas, there are some projects that they're going to do. They're going to want to buy new equipment. But there's probably quite a number of projects where they're just fine with having used equipment. It serves the purpose just as well. And so the idea that a circular economy is always going to cannibalize your primary sales, is quite questionable because there are these, I guess, differences in buyers and what they buy for.

00:10:19 Jordan Yates
That makes sense. Peter, I'm going to try to keep you on your mic if you stay.

00:10:23 Peter Evans
Sure.

00:10:23 Jordan Yates
It's so hard whenever we have multiple people, we want to turn in and talk to them. But just because you're saying such good things, I want the listeners to hear you.

00:10:31 Peter Evans
Sure.

00:10:32 Jordan Yates
Okay. So before this, you, as you always do, send us educational information, because Peter is just, he's a, what's the word for it?

00:10:43 Peter Evans
I'm a data exchanger.

00:10:44 Jordan Yates
Like a scholar. You actually started the conversation by pointing out how Caterpillar is doing a really cool thing in this circular economy. You seem to do a decent amount of research on it. This is a Caterpillar sponsored podcast, so I'd like to shamelessly plug them a little bit. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? And Lizzie, if you know anything about this program, just chime in at any point. I am so curious to hear what Caterpillar's doing in the circular economy.

00:11:09 Peter Evans
Well, very simply, if you go and Google Caterpillar and circular economy, you get webpages pop up.

00:11:15 Lizzie Hurt
Yeah. It's amazing.

00:11:16 Peter Evans
Because Caterpillar's actually doing stuff in this area. Machinery, it has a life and things get broken. And so Caterpillar has a pretty robust program that's been in place for quite a number of years. I think in 20 years or so, or even longer.

00:11:33 Lizzie Hurt
I think it's been longer than that for certain components. Wow.

00:11:36 Peter Evans
So it has built in a system to take back and repair and refurbish, and in some case, totally remanufacture the goods. And so actually Caterpillars, the nature of the machinery and the equipment that it produces, it actually lends itself fairly easily compared to some other manufacturers that have a hard time recycling the plastics, for example. Single use plastics. So Caterpillar is actually, and it's probably one of the reasons they launched this program so long ago, is that there was real value to be had there, and customers wanted this and were willing to engage and pay for it. So I don't know exactly the volume, and I think what Caterpillar is doing is great. The big issue now is how do we learn from it and then scale it and make it a larger thing? And then would that induce more of the oil and gas industry to turn to these marketplaces to support circularity? I think they're looking for them. The other thing that's really interesting is 20 years ago, carbon wasn't an issue, but now it is. And it turns out that if we reuse material, the carbon emissions are much lower. So the circular economy becomes another vehicle for meeting your carbon reduction goals. And that's really big because what's going to happen is that the low hanging fruit is going to get exploited and taken advantage of, and then the companies are going to struggle to where do we find the next round of carbon reductions? And that can happen through the use of reuse of material.

00:13:16 Lizzie Hurt
Yeah, absolutely. Even if you don't have to buy a new material and you can reuse something or remachine it, or factory remanufactured products, they're not just lightly repaired. They're received, inspected, cleaned, remanufactured, remachined. There's a lot that goes into it to bring it back to life.

00:13:42 Peter Evans
Sure. Sure.

00:13:42 Lizzie Hurt
That saves, if you can reuse a part and you don't have to machine it from just the basin material, then that saves energy.

00:13:53 Peter Evans
So this is getting into supply chain. So now this gets really interesting.

00:13:57 Jordan Yates
Sticky.

00:13:57 Peter Evans
So we know that over the last several years, there've been a lot of disruptions to the global supply chain. And companies like Caterpillar have had a hard time getting the materials that they need. So another benefit of the circular economy is to de- risk your supply chain, which is that instead of just relying on virgin material, in the future it'll increasing be a combination of reused material and virgin material.

00:14:22 Jordan Yates
Okay.

00:14:23 Peter Evans
And so the supply chain system hasn't kind of adjusted completely to that. Partly, because there haven't been marketplaces that are deep enough and liquid enough that you can depend upon them. And that's why you need a marketplace because you need lots of buyers and sellers to create that liquidity, so you can trust it. If you're just relying on one supplier who's doing a little pet project. And I'll give you an example of one. BMW has made a corporate commitment to use more recycled plastics. It's done a deal with a company in Norway, which collects fishing nets out of the ocean, and then pelletizes them, sends them to BMW supply chain, and they use for the moldings and plastic and floor mats and stuff like that, recycled plastics. So you can imagine that's helped differentiate or create more, I guess, differentiation in the supply chain or what some people call resilience in the supply chain. So I think the oil and gas industry, if you're buying$ 800 billion worth of stuff every year, you're going to want a diversified supply source. And especially if you go into these rare earth metals that are hard to get. So that's why there's a lot of interest in recycling the lithium and things of that nature.

00:15:43 Jordan Yates
Now that makes sense.

00:15:44 Peter Evans
But creating that deeper liquid market would help, I think, facilitate confidence on the part of the manufacturers, that they can rely on that marketplace to find that material.

00:15:57 Jordan Yates
For sure. And a big portion of all this is education and letting people in on this whole idea of circular economy. Lizzie, not going to ask you a hard question. Simple one, I swear. Before us actually bringing up this conversation of having this podcast, were you aware of the Caterpillar Circular Economy program?

00:16:20 Lizzie Hurt
I was definitely aware of it. I never thought of it as being circular economy. I think everybody has an understanding of what the circular economy is. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Recycle, recycle, recycle. But I just don't know that I had the name of circular economy to go with it. But Caterpillar remanufacturing has always been a really cool program, and it's good for our customers, it's good for us, it's good for the environment. So it's something that we do like to highlight and customers ask about it. But when you put, " Is it part of the circular economy?" Yes, but I didn't necessarily think about it like-

00:17:01 Peter Evans
There you go.

00:17:01 Lizzie Hurt
... circulareconomy until this podcast type deal. You know what I mean?

00:17:04 Jordan Yates
Yeah. No, I like that because I think the point I was getting to, was it may be happening already so much around us, we're just finding verbiage for it to make it a more centralized idea to where people who aren't doing it, have a word for it. Because I think sometimes we do so much, but we don't categorize it or we don't have a movement behind it. And a lot of times we'll do things on accident or we just do it because it made sense, but we don't give someone else the opportunity to learn from it because we did not clearly define it. And then write out the practices and then show how other people could do it. I think Caterpillar is obviously huge industry leader and influence on many other companies that are similar. So I am leading into a question about the educational aspect. When did this even become a topic of discussion? Do you remember it coming up? Have you heard of any community outreach programs or people trying to educate on this idea of circular economy?

00:18:05 Peter Evans
Oh, yeah. So there's been a lot of work for the last decade on this idea of circular, and there's quite a number of countries that have adopted circular policies. The United Arab Emirates is a most recent one. They've just annunciated 21 policy initiatives around this. South Korea has as well. France has a pretty robust program, and the European Union has a circular program. So there are various initiatives, and the breadth is very large. So it's important for apparel, it's important for plastics, it's important for electronics. I think what we're talking about is a space that hasn't gotten a lot of attention, which is oil and gas, but there's huge potential for it. And I think what I've started to focus on is to distinguish between what I call linear marketplaces and circular marketplaces. And so how can circular marketplaces come into the oil and gas space? And I think we've talked about a bunch of opportunities with carbon sequestration, with reuse of manufacturing goods, with surplus material from big mega projects. There's just a ton of things. And drawing attention is part of education to help people realize, " Oh, this is it." And then put a little, what do you call it, encouragement or pressure to use these marketplaces so that they grow-

00:19:40 Lizzie Hurt
Encouragement.

00:19:41 Peter Evans
...and become utilized by the industry. There's another one that I've heard that the oil and gas industry is looking at, is using 3D printing for parts manufacturing around the world, which is super interesting. And so I don't know if that's fully circular, but you can imagine maybe the powders or the inputs that they put into making those parts could come from recycled materials.

00:20:09 Jordan Yates
A lot of them do. I'm obsessed with these reels on Instagram where this guy will go out and he'll just collect bottles, and then he has this very manual thing, where cut up the bottle and then you feed the string of plastic from the bottle into the thing that melts it, and then it turns it into this string that you use to feed into your 3D printer, like, " People, if they could do it at home, I guarantee a manufacturer to figure it out."

00:20:31 Peter Evans
Can you imagine a marketplace that would allow oil and gas producers to be able to 3D print, which require the architecture, which exists to be able to send CAD files to places like Angola or Mozambique or wherever they're doing their production, that would save on transportation costs? It would allow them to print those materials on the spot and so they wouldn't have to wait for them to fly in.

00:21:00 Jordan Yates
That's smart.

00:21:00 Peter Evans
So there's huge advantages of doing this, but what if we created a marketplace, so the feed stock for those powders were made from recycled materials? Well, then you would have what the industry has been talking about a bit, but add in a circular dimension to it.

00:21:18 Jordan Yates
I'm just going to throw it out there. If you are a student or you are a young person or a person considering gaining more skills or going back to school. If you want to be in the oil and gas industry, getting an engineering degree is not the only way. Data is so big right now. Data analytics, if you want to study something or you want to level up your career, I would highly suggest that because I've seen from this conversation alone and everything else, data is so important in making these changes happen.

00:21:46 Peter Evans
Sure. Well, and it's going to move to AI increasingly. So we've had big data and then we had machine learning, and now we're moving increasingly into AI applications, of this where you put the data in a data lake and the AI is able to generate it. And so let me give you another example where AI could be very valuable. In mechanic shops, when they changed the oil and in the past, and it's still practice in some places. They have a big vat and they take them, used motor oil, throw it in there, but they also take the brake fluid and throw it in there. And the minute that this stuff gets combined, it has less value. So if you had a chatbot or some kind of other mechanism that would help with maintaining that sorting and making sure that these materials are kept separate, and that's true through all sorts of materials, then the recycling and the reuse becomes much less expensive and much more viable. So they're really interesting ways in which, because it's partly analyzing machines in that thing, but it's also changing people's behavior.

00:23:00 Jordan Yates
That's hard to do.

00:23:01 Peter Evans
Then you get into... Yeah, but there's ways of nudging people and encouraging them to do the right thing by alerts, alarms, or just government regulations.

00:23:10 Jordan Yates
Government regulations.

00:23:11 Peter Evans
Yeah, exactly. Anyway, there's a human component to this and how do we ensure that humans do the right thing and they aren't playing. So lots of, I was just here in Houston for a couple days, and it's different from the rest of the world because you have a training and safety discussion before every meeting in Houston, but that training and safety could incorporate some elements of how do we promote a circular economy.

00:23:39 Jordan Yates
Absolutely. Peter, as we're getting to the end of the discussion, I just wanted to ask you, because I kind of skipped over this and got straight to the meat of the conversation. Is there something you can highlight in what you do today of your company that you work at, or anything you're doing on the side that relates to circular economy?

00:23:59 Peter Evans
Of course.

00:24:00 Jordan Yates
In your professional life, if somebody were to reach out to you and want to ask you about this, and they're like, " Okay, I found someone who knows all this stuff. How do I actually utilize him? Because I want to do this with my company." Is that something you're integrated in with?

00:24:14 Peter Evans
Totally.

00:24:15 Jordan Yates
Yeah. Can you explain that for us?

00:24:16 Peter Evans
So I lead the strategy practice for a company that specializes in building marketplaces.

00:24:22 Jordan Yates
Is that the McFadyen? Is that what they do?

00:24:24 Peter Evans
McFadyen Digital. Yeah. So McFadyen Digital has been around for 30 years and used to do just e- commerce, which is one company selling a product right on their e- commerce sites. And then as we've evolved and gotten more sophisticated, we see more and more marketplaces happening across all sorts of industries. And so I advise and my team help to advise companies on what is your marketplace strategy. We also do technology assessments, and then we have the capability to do the actual implementation. So we have teams in India and Brazil that will actually do the coding and the customization needed for that. And so I'm quite interested in working with companies that are interested in applying these platform and marketplace principles to circular activities. So I've just been in the process of building a database to understand where these circular marketplaces are globally, and I'm up to about 110 and cutting across all sorts of sectors. I would say that they're not that many in the oil and gas space, but given what we've discussed today, huge potential to deploy them there. So very happy to engage anybody on a conversation. In fact, tonight I am going to give a webinar at the Asian Development Bank. And so they're very much into project lending related to promoting the circular economy. But I'd like to have a discussion about would they fund a marketplace, for example, on batteries or lubricants or plastics and things of that nature. So yes, huge opportunity to explore how this business model can be deployed to help companies really address these issues in a more efficient way, kind of a more dynamic way, and leverage all of the things that we talked about, data analytics and new technologies like AI and computer vision that can support circular.

00:26:29 Jordan Yates
Absolutely. Lizzie, what do you think about that?

00:26:31 Lizzie Hurt
I just have to say that this is fascinating conversation to talk about all of it. And it's very big picture too, about, " Okay, where could we go?" And just to make a comment on, you talked about education. I think it's just important to talk about this and get people thinking, because once you design something or you implement something, it's always hard to go back and redo work. You want to get it right. And if you can plan for it in the beginning of a project or business or whatever it is.

00:26:59 Peter Evans
Right. Well, think about this. Let's say that there was a big circular marketplace, and you could do a lot of sales by participating in that circular marketplace, that would create incentives for companies to design products, so that they could be sold on that marketplace. And I'll give you a concrete example. So right now, there's concern that the OEMs producing automobiles are starting to create battery packs that are very difficult to take apart.

00:27:26 Jordan Yates
Yeah. Because it's all the vertical integration, there's so much there.

00:27:28 Peter Evans
So that means that they're going to end up in the landfill. However, if they redesign them in such a way that the components can be taken apart more easily. But that happens if, for example, they shift to a leasing model or some sort of secondary royalty sales. And if that happens, then suddenly they have an economic incentive to design it in such a way that it can be decomposed, because they make money on those secondary sales, or they make money because they've leased that material instead of recycling it. So these things are interconnected, and I guess through the insights that I'm trying to understand and begin to talk about, and thank you for having me, is how do we build these systems that create the right incentives across all of them? We talked about upstream, we talked about the midstream, but also even the supply chain. So then the supply chain folks are, in another element we actually haven't talked about is, is that you can begin to embed the amount of carbon associated with these products.

00:28:30 Jordan Yates
Oh, goodness.

00:28:31 Peter Evans
Okay? So that when they go to buy material, they see the price, they see the quality, but they also see the carbon emissions related to that.

00:28:38 Lizzie Hurt
That's really cool.

00:28:39 Peter Evans
So then that would incentivize potentially more purchases of these reused materials, which then would flow upstream to the design of those materials. So these things are all interconnected.

00:28:50 Jordan Yates
Totally.

00:28:51 Peter Evans
Yeah, yeah. But Caterpillar's a big company. I would love to see, take, again, tremendous lessons learned. You don't want to keep them bottled up just in Caterpillar. They could become the template for helping the industry overall. And then I'm sure Caterpillar could be a pretty interesting player in joining a larger marketplace that could benefit the oil and gas industry overall.

00:29:19 Lizzie Hurt
Yeah. We'll have to get you connected with the folks in our remanufacturing division.

00:29:25 Peter Evans
Sounds good to me. And connect them with the digital guys.

00:29:27 Lizzie Hurt
That's you.

00:29:27 Jordan Yates
That's you.

00:29:29 Peter Evans
Because they tend to be over here, and then these guys are over here. Let's bring them together.

00:29:32 Lizzie Hurt
Going to get all the right people.

00:29:33 Peter Evans
Yeah.

00:29:33 Lizzie Hurt
It's hard to do.

00:29:35 Jordan Yates
One big circular economy hangout sesh.

00:29:39 Peter Evans
Big companies tend to operate in these silos. So how do we bring them together and get that cross- fertilization?

00:29:48 Jordan Yates
Typically, free food and t-shirts.

00:29:51 Peter Evans
And pizza.

00:29:52 Jordan Yates
That'll do it. If you buy 20 pizzas, you'll solve all of the issues right there.

00:29:57 Peter Evans
And then, we all know that attracting great talent to the oil and gas industry is a challenge. And you put them on projects like this, suddenly-

00:30:05 Jordan Yates
That's rewarding.

00:30:06 Peter Evans
...their whole mindset about the impact that they can have in the careers that they can build, totally change. In fact, I wrote a paper, if I can make a plug, called Preparing the Next Generation of Platform Professionals. And so what are the characteristics that you need and what is the skills and training and education you need to be a great platform professional? And there is no one course, there's actually no degree in the world right now-

00:30:34 Jordan Yates
Interesting.

00:30:35 Peter Evans
...for platform professionals. You have to sort of assemble that capability. But if you're interested in that, I kind of have some ideas about how to do that.

00:30:45 Jordan Yates
Yeah. You'll just have to email me all these things we're talking about. I'm going to link it in the show notes for you guys because-

00:30:50 Peter Evans
Okay. I'm happy to do that.

00:30:52 Jordan Yates
...that's where the information lives, is the show note. So that's where we always try to get everything our guest tells us and put it in there so the listeners can have actionable things. Because I know it's very fun to be able to listen to a podcast, feel inspired, and then take that next step. And I hate when I listen to a podcast, I'm inspired. There's nothing like, " Where do I go now? What next?" That'll be perfect.

00:31:15 Peter Evans
Example, I'm doing a project right now with Dartmouth. It's a class on platform strategy, and all the students have to do a project with a company. And so I've put in a proposal, I had to pitch it on Monday in which they investigate the viability of a marketplace for batteries.

00:31:34 Jordan Yates
I like that.

00:31:36 Peter Evans
So one, I need them to go out and do interviews would be interesting, is to have them interview your battery division to say, " Hey, would you-"

00:31:45 Jordan Yates
Do you have a battery division here?

00:31:45 Lizzie Hurt
Do you have an electronic?

00:31:46 Jordan Yates
What don't you have? What don't you have?

00:31:48 Lizzie Hurt
There's a lot of things going on in oil and gas.

00:31:50 Peter Evans
What's going to happen is that heavy duty machinery is going to get electrified.

00:31:55 Jordan Yates
Yeah. Yeah, it already is.

00:31:57 Peter Evans
And so they need batteries. And so what happens to those end- of- life batteries? And so it'd be really interesting. So I've already set up interviews with some of the big recyclers. So a company called Redwood Materials has just raised a billion dollars to build battery factories. There's a lot of investment going into this space, but there needs to be a marketplace to help facilitate the buyers and sellers in exchange.

00:32:24 Jordan Yates
Absolutely. Well, Peter, this has been an absolute pleasure. As always, I am feeling inspired, but also a little tired because I have a lot of ideas running through my head. So guys, let's just take a nap and sleep on this, get it going through our heads, and let's implement that circular economy. Lizzie, anything you want to leave us with?

00:32:45 Lizzie Hurt
No. Great conversation. Thanks for coming over, Peter.

00:32:47 Peter Evans
Sure, my pleasure. My pleasure. Happy to come again.

00:32:49 Jordan Yates
Amazing. Well, guys, thank you so much for listening to another episode of The Energy Pipeline. I'm your host, Jordan Yates, and I'll see you next week. Bye- bye.

00:32:59 Speaker 2
Come back next week for another episode of The Energy Pipeline, a production of the Oil and Gas Global Network. To learn more, go to oggn. com.

 

 

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Erick Pomrenke Bio Image

 

Peter Evans

Guest

Peter C. Evans is Chief Strategy Officer at McFadyen Digital. He has over 25 years of experience leading teams in identifying, framing, assessing, and communicating high-priority marketplace trends and disruptions that support business planning and investment prioritization.

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Lizzie Hurt - Co-host - Bio


Lizzie Hurt

Co-host

Lizzie Hurt provides great insight to The Energy Pipeline as co-host and Sales Support Engineer at Caterpillar Oil & Gas. She has over 5 years of experience within engineering, application, and installation. Every oil & gas operation is different and Lizzie brings this understanding and a keen engineering perspective to The Energy Pipeline.

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Jordan Yates Bio Image


Jordan YATES

Host

Jordan Yates is a Marketing Engineer at a specialty ceramic capacitors company. Her interest in the sales and marketing side of the Manufacturing & Energy Industry have gained her recognition in the digital space, specifically LinkedIn. She is the host of her podcast, 'Failing For You' and The Energy Pipeline.