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Yes, fossil fuels will be with us for some time… but solar energy already employs roughly twice as many people as coal mining. Hiring is brisk in the wind sector, too. And clean tech – which helps avoid the need to burn fossil fuels –is no longer “a rounding error,” as one observer puts it. "We're definitely moving away from a carbon economy,” says Charles Sussman ’01, co-head of oil derivatives trading for Bank of America Merrill Lynch. “It’s a question of how long these things” – renewables and other energy alternatives – “will take to gain widespread adoption.” He and other alumni describe, from their different perspectives, huge changes in prospect: in the way we power our economy, in the way we get around (hello, selfdriving electric cars!) and even in the way we eat. Even someone like Sussman, whose livelihood is in the oil industry, permits himself to recount how he and his wife, proud new parents of a baby daughter, found themselves musing together about her not long ago, “Will she ever have a driver's license?” A common thread through all these sectors, from the old to the new to the still-being-invented, is that the energy business has become the technology business, and the data business.
“I fell in love with the energy space, and realized I didn’t want to be just the finance guy.” –Zachary Fenton ’99
Robert Mosbacher Jr. ’69 clearly represents “old” energy. In 1949, his father, Robert Sr. ’44, founded Mosbacher Energy Company, the privately held oil and gas exploration and production company of which the son is chairman today. He’s seen what technology can do for his industry. “The business continues to get more predictable and precise,” he says. The introduction of three-dimensional seismic imaging, and more recently, so-called 4D imaging (time-lapse comparisons of 3D imaging) has been “transformational.” His own firm remains focused on conventional (vertical) oil drilling. But as a director of a publicly held firm involved in horizontal drilling, he’s been impressed at the way engineers nowadays can go after a “seam” or slice of oil-bearing rock a mere 10 to 20 feet wide, by drilling laterally for 10,000 feet. Zachary Fenton ’99 is another Choate alumnus using new technology in old energy, to get new production out of not-so-new assets. He’s Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of UpCurve Energy in Houston. The name embodies the company’s ambition to reverse the characteristic “decline curve” so familiar from charts of well production as it declines over time. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, as a way to coax hydrocarbons out of the earth has been on the scene for a few years now. The technology has continued to evolve – so fast, in fact, Fenton and his colleagues, many of them veterans of ConocoPhillips, know that a well fracked just a few years ago was likely developed “suboptimally,” as he says. And so UpCurve has found a niche refracking such