More than a job

Fabio Montemurro, executive assistant to BP’s head of technology 

Technology and innovation developed at pace are key to making strides towards a low carbon future. Fabio, in his new role, is supporting the implementation of technology strategy across BP. It's a role for which he has a good grounding.

His previous role was in BP’s Alternative Energy developments team, scouting and developing  those ideas that can transform the energy landscape as we know it.

That meant working closely with companies that are developing digital platforms to connect consumers with local, low carbon electricity to power their homes and transport.

BP recently invested in once such company. Grid Edge, a UK-based start-up whose predictive energy management technology enables customers to adapt their energy use, leverage periods of high renewable power generation, and effectively use their building’s flexibility in energy demand and generation like a giant battery, to reduce costs and carbon emissions. The technology typically enables customers to lower carbon emissions by 10 to 15%, with some registering a reduction of more than 30%.

Fabio and his team also worked on the deal that led to BP’s investment in Voltaware, a company that has developed an internet-enabled monitoring system to track energy consumption. Voltaware sensors relay real-time information from individual appliances to a smartphone, allowing the user to adjust their electricity usage, improve efficiency and reduce costs.

Fabio’s work matches his own personal belief that you should leave the world in a better place than you found it. And, as such, he is determined to play his part in the fight against climate change – while working for BP.

Jo Dally, city partnerships lead, Advanced Mobility

The way that people and goods move is changing. These changes in mobility will be most evident in cities, where transport options are likely to change radically in the future.

BP believes it can play a significant role in shaping this future, as we develop smarter and more sustainable ways to move people and the things they need.

In her role, Jo has built BP’s reputation in this area, creating a network of potential partners across the mobility landscape and developing an understanding of what cities need and how we can best work with them in the future.  

Russell Smith, vice president of global concept development

Russell leads a team that helps BP to make the best energy investments. As well as playing his part in developing inherently safe and competitive major projects for BP’s Upstream, he looks at how they can be made more environmentally friendly by design, producing oil and gas in a way that reduces our operational GHG emissions.

That means thinking differently to simplify, standardize and eliminate waste in how projects are conceived and designed.

Remote operations, centralized power, solar and wind integration are all concepts that can cut the carbon footprint of oil and gas development projects. Russell believes BP as an energy business can be part of the solution; finding and developing new sources of energy that are lower carbon. 

Efforts to reduce BP’s emissions from new major projects include providing power for platforms by electric cable from shore or nearby facilities, such as the Cypre unmanned gas production facility offshore Trinidad. Find out more in our ‘Platforms of the future’ feature.

Sophia Nadur, marketing and innovation director, Advanced Mobility Unit

For Sophia, helping to enable the mass adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) is a personal mission.

In her role at BP, she seeks out technologies from around the world that help us to move around in a more sustainable way, because, she says: “If people see more charging infrastructure, they will feel more confident to switch to electric cars.”

As part of efforts to persuade people to make the switch, In June 2018 , we acquired BP Chargemaster, which has the largest public electric vehicle (EV) charging network in the UK. And, we’ve started rolling out ultra-fast charging points on our UK and German forecourts.

We’ve also launched a joint venture with DiDi in China, the world’s largest EV market, to build hundreds of EV charging hubs there.

And, we’ve invested in StoreDot, whose ultra-fast charging battery technology offers the potential to in the future bring down EV charging times to around five minutes.

These technologies are expected to dramatically improve the EV ownership experience and play a key role in their earlier adoption – reducing the environmental impact of transportation as a result.

Kirsty Salmon, senior advisor of new energy frontier technologies and biosciences

A key passion of Kirsty’s is ‘Looping’, meaning she looks for every opportunity for goods to remain in a circular loop, keeping them in use for longer and designing out waste and pollution.

Essentially, Kirsty’s passion and her job at BP is helping us to move away from the linear economy of ‘take, make and waste’ to a more circular economy. 

The ultimate goal of a circular economy is zero waste, which Kirsty believes is achievable. A passionate environmentalist, she says: “My attitude is nature doesn’t waste anything, so why should we?”

In her role at BP, she looks for new ways to take materials that are lost as waste and find new opportunities for turning them into energy or other products. For example, BP has developed an innovative recycling technology called BP Infinia that has the potential to divert billions of items of PET plastic packaging from landfills or incinerators. 

Peter Evans, environmental engineering lead, Upstream Technology

The world’s population is going up and we all need energy, but we have to do it in a different way, says Peter, whose job is to help keep natural gas in the pipe and stop methane, a potent greenhouse gas, escaping.

Thanks to his efforts, BP is testing a range of tools designed to detect and quantify methane emissions at its assets.

From handheld devices to satellites in the sky, the technologies will hopefully allow any changes in emissions to be spotted quickly and prioritized so that we can optimize our efforts to tackle emissions in the fastest, most efficient ways. Find out more in our ‘Mastering methane’ feature.