The Future of Energy Is Abundance - Mark LaCour

Mark LaCour has spent more than 35 years around the oil and gas industry and is now Editor in Chief of the Oil and Gas Global Network, which has grown into a network of more than 30 industry podcasts. What I enjoyed about this conversation is that we covered an enormous amount of ground. Mark takes me back to how he accidentally found his way into oil and gas, what decades of working internationally have taught him about the culture of the industry and why he believes oil and gas has done such a poor job of telling its own story. We get into the extraordinary level of activity taking place in the Permian Basin, the growing importance of natural gas, LNG and what Mark means when he talks about the need for energy abundance. From there, the conversation moves into AI and data centres, renewables, offshore wind, nuclear power and why trying to apply the same energy solution everywhere simply does not work. We also discuss why selling technology into oil and gas is so different from almost every other industry, the importance of trust, the huge amounts of capital involved and why some genuinely useful technology never gets adopted because nobody knows how to sell it properly. Closer to home, I ask Mark about BP moving away from the North Sea, the impact of taxation and politics on investment and what he thinks the future could look like for places such as Aberdeen. We also talk podcasting, sponsorship, getting things wrong publicly and being willing to change your mind when the evidence changes. And towards the end, things go somewhere I definitely was not expecting. Space. Mark explains why he believes the skills, companies and technology developed by the oil and gas industry could eventually play a major role in commercial space travel and even mining the asteroid belt. A wide ranging conversation about energy, technology, business and where this industry could be heading next.