Angus Foggie

I’m planning to talk about how the oil and gas industry can use social media to influence the way people see it, predominantly on a local level.On a global scale there is massive pressure now on the oil and gas industry to change its ways. The oil and gas industry has to accept this is a transitional period — things are going to change and then they’ve got to see how their role in that change can play out.

There’s a lot of pressure on oil and gas developers to just stop developing right now. The European Investment Bank has just dropped funding for fossil fuelsand invested two billion euros year in fossil fuel development, and €13.4 billion since 2013. Now changed its minds, lots of other people are going to change their minds too and that means less investment and less development.

If we stop investing in new wells they dry out fast. If you find a three hundred million barrels field somewhere in Africa, that’s only enough for the world consumption for three days. If we stop investing in oil and gas now it could precipitate a crisis where the oil price is going to go through the roof. Of course, then you’re into the very complicated world of the interplay between the oil price and the value of renewables, but very high oil prices could seriously damage the world economy which doesn’t help the environment.

I think the first thing is to stop denying it — that strategy was a bad one. They need to accept that it’s going to happen, so they can start having the conversation about which energy sources we are going to need, which energy sources we are going to use and over what time scale.

Again it’s a matter of honesty. We’ll still be using oil and gas a hundred years from now, just not on the same scale. I think where they might have something to really say is by putting some thought into where are we going — What’s the future going to look like? What’s the low carbon world of the next 10 years, 20 years going to look like? What’s the zero carbon world of 50 years from now going to look like?

They could all be doing more, but I think the team at Shell are a good example of using social media pretty effectively. They got 5 million likes on Facebook and have a really global presencelargely built on two themes: motorsport and energy efficiency, and they put those two together. It’s environmental because of the fuel efficiency and it’s also appealing to what people actually like about petrol, which is cars.They were able to do an excellent job of building up this influence. I think had BP done the same with an experienced social media team perhaps they could have handled the Macondo disaster better and not let their CEO say foolish things on Twitter, which probably cost the company a few more billions.

I’have done an analysis of the share prices of oil companies that have strong social media presence and those that don’t, and to be honest I couldn’t see much difference. I’m not sure that it really changes the mind of a hard-nosed investor. They are not going to invest just because the company’s on Twitter. I think social media is more of an asset in influencing and engaging with the public debate and certainly for attracting and recruitingyounger people into the industry.

I think oil industry players should be realistic from the start. They should try and makecredible predictions about where we’re going with energy demand and drawing up carbon emissions profiles for what that’s going to mean. Then they’ve got a point to negotiate from that’s honest and realistic. They’re not going to fool anybody anymore with evasion and platitudes becauseeveryone can go on the internet and have a look for themselves.