Voices of progress: Barry Engle

Hi, I'm Elizabeth Hay, currently the enablement manager for carbon capture and storage in Low Carbon Solutions. Welcome to Voices of Progress. It is my distinct pleasure to be joined today by Mr. Barry Angle, the current president of Low Carbon Solutions.

Barry, welcome.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

In the past year, as you've been leading LCS, what surprised you most about the customer demand?

Certainly here in the United States, we've seen from a political standpoint, and in terms of public sentiment, a fairly big shift in terms of how people think about, climate ambition and, you know, what is the objective for society. And amongst all that, what we see is that customers themselves on a real-time basis are, are thinking about this as well. And what does this mean for me? What do I do? How do I manage this? And so I, I think when it comes to customer demand, the what we're seeing is that customers real time are trying to figure it out themselves, and that we need to be there for them and kind of help them through that process. And what we're talking about, without exception, are long life assets that we're looking to deploy, and our customers are pretty sophisticated themselves, and they know that we're all in this for the long haul. And so we've got customers who are thinking long term, and they may pace and moderate a little bit what they're doing today. But as you talk to the senior leadership of these companies, you know, they too are taking a long-term perspective, which gives us the ability to keep moving and maybe a slightly different pace, but we can keep moving and keep building.

If we take a bit of a zoom out say in the past five years, as you look back over that time, what are you most proud of for Low Carbon Solutions?

I think probably most proud of the organization itself and what we've built there. And when I look at the organization and I see a group that is incredibly capable and also incredibly resilient. And when you look at what we're trying to do, we've picked industries and businesses that we're trying to enter that just by the nature of what they are, are really high complexity, which makes it even more challenging. And so going back to this idea of having capable people and resiliency, that becomes ever more important. And we got that. We got it in spades. We got people that are incredibly creative. They show up every day ready to solve problems, make things happen, and just put it all out there in the field.

That's a really great foundation to start to build from. One of the things that you've emphasized and we really rely upon as we build a new business, which means we're learning as we go, is having some foundational strategies both for LCS and also for the individual verticals. So how do we keep those fresh? Where have you seen those change and why in the past year? 

There was quite an extensive body of work that was led across the team to develop a formal LCS strategy. But along the way, there have been external changes and other developments that have caused us to repace a little bit so some of our deployments. So the fundamental strategy holds, but we may be repacing the timing of the execution.

So keeping on the theme of growing a new business, what are the real world indicators you're watching for low carbon and maybe specifically in carbon capture and storage-that help you know we're beyond early stage development here?

CCS is one of those businesses that is exciting because we're, we're in that phase where we're executing and we can see real world progress. And we see it from a commercial standpoint with the contracts that we have already and that we continue to develop and sign and execute. We see it operationally. We're flowing gas. We've started now our first two customers. We started one in the middle of last year, another one just now recently, with a couple more hopefully coming yet this year. This is real. We're doing it, right. Gas is flowing. Like it doesn't get any more real than that.

Let's maybe take our last question and look forward.

Sure.

Five years from now, as you're looking back or looking at what we've built, what tells you we've built something durable?

For every one of our core businesses, we should be up and running and, you know, well beyond the, the project planning phase. They all need to be up and running, generating revenue. And importantly, as we are operating, we're figuring out how to get the cost down. And that's how ultimately we're gonna open markets even further and as we make our offerings, our products more affordable, that really is what's gonna fuel growth for the long term.

Great. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Barry. It's been a real pleasure speaking with you.

Thank you. Good to be with you.