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Columbia Energy Exchange

Columbia Energy Exchange features in-depth conversations with the world’s top energy and climate leaders from government, business, academia and civil society. The program explores today’s most pressing opportunities and challenges across energy sources, financial markets, geopolitics and climate change as well as their implications for both the U.S. and the world.
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Now displaying: May, 2019
May 27, 2019

Wintershall DEA became the largest independent oil and gas group in Europe following a merger last month. It bridged the international exploration and production of oil and gas company, DEA, with the energy unit of the German chemical group BASF, which now has operations in Europe, Russia, Latin America, and the MENA region.

On this episode of Columbia Energy Exchange, host Jason Bordoff talks to Maria Moræus Hanssen, Chief Operating Officer and Deputy CEO of Wintershall DEA. From 2018, she was Chairwoman of the Management Board and CEO of DEA Deutsche Erdoel AG. Maria Moræus joined DEA after serving as CEO of ENGIE E&P and has held numerous management roles at Aker, Statoil, and Hydro.

In an interview conducted prior to the Wintershall DEA merger, Jason sat down with Maria Moræus at CERAWeek in Houston, Texas. They discussed the potential merger, the future of off-shore oil drilling and exploration in Europe, the push for corporate responsibility on sustainability across the oil and gas sector, addressing the challenge of climate change and more.

May 20, 2019
The world has seen remarkable advances in clean energy technology in recent years, from increasingly cheaper ways to produce solar and wind energy to breakthroughs in energy storage that suggest even bigger advances soon. So, what will it take to keep that pace going?
 
In this episode, host Bill Loveless joins Arun Majumdar, a materials scientist and engineer whose distinguished career spans the classroom, the laboratory and Washington. Arun is now a member of the faculty at Stanford University’s Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering and the co-director of the Precourt Institute for Energy, which coordinates research and education across all seven schools and the Hoover Institution at Stanford.
 
In 2009, Arun was nominated by President Obama to become the founding director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) at the U.S. Department of Energy, and later served as an acting Under Secretary at DOE.
 
After leaving DOE and before joining Stanford he was Vice President for Energy at Google. And among other stops in his career, he taught at the University of California at Berkeley and worked as an associate director at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
 
Bill caught up with Arun outside the Center on Global Energy Policy’s recent Summit in New York to talk about advances in clean energy technology and the roles that government and the private sector have played in those developments. Along those lines, they looked specifically at ARPA-E, which he helped make a model of innovation and which the Trump administration would abolish.
 
They also talked about some of the new dynamics in energy policy in Washington, including the Green New Deal.
May 13, 2019
The U.S. Department of Energy is a powerhouse for energy research and development, serving as the lead government agency for fundamental scientific research and the nation’s biggest supporter of basic research in physical sciences. And that’s not all. Since its founding in 1977, DOE has also contributed significantly to breakthroughs in energy technologies like solar power and the production of oil and natural gas from shale formations.
 
In this episode of Columbia Energy Exchange, host Bill Loveless talks to Paul Dabbar, the Under Secretary for Science at the Department of Energy. Paul is DOE’s principal adviser on fundamental energy research, energy technologies, and science, with oversight of programs that include nuclear and high-energy particle physics, basic energy, advanced computing, fusion, and biological and environmental management.
 
He also supervises most of DOE’s national laboratories, including technology commercialization activities at those crown jewels of innovation.
 
Bill and Paul sat down at the Columbia Global Energy Summit in New York to discuss the changing energy landscape and how the Trump administration prioritizes resources when it comes to energy research and science. They also talked about some of the technologies he finds most exciting now and how his previous experiences as an investment banker and a nuclear submarine officer influence his work at DOE.
 
Before his nomination by President Trump in 2017, Paul was managing director for mergers and acquisitions at J.P. Morgan, where he handled transactions involving power plants and utilities. All told, his experience at the bank involved more than $400 billion in investments across all energy sectors. 
 
Before that, he was a nuclear submarine officer, having graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and later earning an M.B.A. degree from Columbia University.
 
He’s had a hand at research, too, having done work at the North Pole while in the Navy and at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory after leaving the Navy. He’s also served on the DOE Energy Environmental Management Advisory Board and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
May 6, 2019

When it comes to the Green New Deal, Washington is still trying to sort out what the movement means and what steps can be taken to address the dangers posed by climate change. And a similar case is happening in some states, like New York, where Governor Andrew Cuomo has announced a Green New Deal and bold steps he says are necessary to achieve it.

In this episode of Columbia Energy Exchange, host Bill Loveless talks to Alicia Barton, the president and CEO of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. NYSERDA is a public corporation dedicated to energy innovations that would improve New York’s economy and environment – and an agency that will play a big part in the state’s Green New Deal.

Bill sat down with Alicia outside the Center on Global Energy Policy’s summit in New York recently to talk about the governor’s energy agenda, including its call for an ambitious ramp-up in renewable energy deployments in New York as the state aims for 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2040 and ultimately the elimination of its carbon footprint. It’s not without controversy; some state lawmakers and some interest groups say Cuomo’s Green New Deal doesn’t go far enough. But one way or another, the Empire State seems likely to follow through on a plan of this sort.

Alicia has held public and private sector leadership roles in clean energy for more than a decade, including serving as co-chair of the energy and clean tech practice at the law firm Foley Hoag, chief operations officer of the global utility business unit at SunEdison, and CEO of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, a publicly supported agency in Massachusetts.

In Massachusetts, she was also the deputy commissioner for policy and planning at the Department of Environmental Protection and the deputy general counsel at the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs.

During their conversation, Bill and Alicia talked about various elements of New York’s Green New Deal, like its ambitious goals for offshore wind power, distributed solar energy and energy storage, and what her agency and the rest of the state’s government, not to mention the private sector, can do to meet them. They also touched on the growing significance of states like New York acting on energy and climate change in the absence of policy in Washington.

Just as important was their discussion of women in energy and the gender imbalance still seen across much of the energy apparatus in the U.S.

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