Session Five

Lord Browne holds degrees in Natural Sciences from Cambridge and an MS in Business from Stanford. He joined BP in 1966 as a university apprentice, between 1969 and 1983 held a variety of exploration and production posts globally, and in 1984 was appointed Group Treasurer. He was Chief Financial Officer of the Standard Oil Company of Ohio during the BP/Standard merger of 1987, and served as Group Chief Executive of BP from 1995 – 2007. During that period he created the world’s first supermajor through a series of mergers and acquisitions, including BP’s merger with Amoco in 1998. His landmark speech at Stanford University in 1997 established BP as a global leader in the way it thought about, and sought to address, climate change. Lord Browne is Chairman of the Francis Crick Institute, a Fellow and past President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and Chairman of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and an Honorary Fellow of a number of institutions.

In 2007 he joined Riverstone, where he was co-head of the world’s largest renewable energy private equity fund until 2015. He is currently Senior Advisor on Climate and Net Zero to the growth equity firm General Atlantic, and Chairman of Wintershall Dea, Europe’s largest independent gas and oil company. He sits on the boards of IHS Markit and SparkCognition, and is Chairman of Pattern Energy, Stanhope Capital and Windward. Lord Browne is a member of the advisory boards of Edelman, Schillings, Blue Bear Capital, the Angeleno Group, Hyperloop TT, Kayrros and Loop Energy. He is an investor in numerous companies operating at the intersection of science, engineering, energy and climate change, including ChargePoint and Independent Energy Standards (IES).

Professor Sir David King is Emeritus Professor of Chemistry, University of Cambridge; Founder and Chair of the Centre for Climate Repair in the University; an Affiliate Partner of SYSTEMIQ Limited; and Senior Strategy Adviser to the President of Rwanda.

He was the UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser, 2000-2007, the Foreign Secretary’s Special Representative on Climate Change, 2013-2017. He has travelled widely to persuade all countries to take action on climate change. He initiated an in depth risk analysis approach to climate change, working with the Governments of China and India in particular, and initiated a collaborative programme, now known as Mission Innovation, to create a £23bn pa research and development international exercise, which involves 22 countries and the EC, to deliver all technologies needed to complete the transition into a fossil-fuel-free world economy. As Govt Chief Scientific Adviser he raised the need for governments to act on climate change and was instrumental in creating the British £1 billion Energy Technologies Institute.

Elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1991; Foreign Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002; knighted in 2003; made “Officier dans l’ordre national de la Légion d’Honneur” in 2009.

Professor Susan Krumdieck MNZM is a New Zealand engineering academic. She was the first woman appointed to full professor in engineering in 2014 at the University of Canterbury. She is currently Professor and Chair in Energy Transition at Heriot-Watt University, where she leads the academic programme of the Islands Centre for Net Zero.

Susan’s research and teaching since 2000 at Canterbury University in New Zealand focused on developing the engineering methods and innovative technologies for adaptation to reduced fossil fuel production and consumption. She is an expert in developing new ideas for achieving decarbonization in transportation systems and through urban regeneration of buildings for creating integrated activity systems. Susan is the leader of a group of engineering professionals and academics establishing the field of Transition Engineering. She is the co-founder and a Trustee of the Global Association for Transition Engineering (GATE). Transition Engineering is a new movement in all disciplines. She has worked with Professor Frank Kreith on the first energy engineering text with coverage of Transition Engineering. Her new book, Transition Engineering, Building a Sustainable Future, was published in 2019 and she was awarded the UC Sustainability Award in recognition. Professor Krumdieck was awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2020 New Year’s Honours. Professor Krumdieck has more than 160 peer-reviewed publications, supervised a total of 29 PhD students, and been awarded over $7M in research grants as principle investigator.

Professor R. A. Williams is Principal & Vice-Chancellor of Heriot-Watt University, a multi-national institution based in five locations in Malaysia, UAE and Scotland. He is a graduate of Imperial College London and has held posts at University of Manchester (UMIST), University of Exeter (Camborne School of Mines), and as Pro Vice-Chancellor at the University of Leeds and at the University of Birmingham.  His background is an academic and entrepreneur in mineral & chemical engineering, energy storage systems and environmental technologies and critical minerals.  He has driven developments in process imaging instrumentation used to enhance safety and environmental impact in mining, chemical manufacturing and marine technologies, and in development of technology and adoption of cryogenic energy storage and green refrigeration technology. He is an academician and Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng), the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) and the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE). He is an Honorary Fellow of the Manufacturing Technology Centre. He has twice held the role of Vice-President of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a recipient of the Academy’s President’s Prize.

He has worked extensively in establishing new educational and research collaborations in the Middle East, Africa, Singapore, Malaysia and China. He is a visiting professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tianjin University of Finance & Economics and at Southeast University. He is Non-Executive Director of the ‘British Geological Survey’, Chair & Non-Executive Director of the ‘Scottish Institute for Enterprise’ and co-chair of the ‘UAE-UK Business Council for Education, Vocational Skills and Training, Social and Cultural Development’. He is an Advisory Board member of the ‘Lloyds Register Foundation’; ’Converge Challenge’, ‘Association of Chinese British Professors’ and ‘IFC TechEmerge Group’ of the World Bank.