TOMBARI STEPS DOWN AS PRESIDENT OF SCHLUMBERGER CARBON SERVICES

North American Business Manager Dwight Peters to Take Over as Head 

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
11/16/12

John Tombari stepped down from his role as president of Schlumberger Carbon Services this week after serving in a leadership capacity since the group’s inception seven years ago. Tombari said he is transitioning within the company to work as Vice President for Sales for a new joint venture formed with Liquid Robotics Oil & Gas, a California-based company that builds wave-powered marine robots that can provide environmental measurement services for offshore oil and gas operations. “I was involved in building our Carbon Services business from scratch up to what it is today, which is pretty strong. This is an opportunity for me to get on at the ground floor and do it again, which is what I like to do,” Tombari told GHG Monitor. “I’m leaving the Carbon Services business healthy.” Tombari had served as President of the group, which, with a staff of about 35 manages services and technologies that help design, construct, operate and monitor CO2 storage sites, since 2009.

North American Business Manager Dwight Peters will take the helm as President beginning next week, Tombari said. In an interview, Peters said that nothing will change within the company as he transitions into the position. “We will still have the same goals and the same focus: to look for opportunities for any optimization of CO2 placement in the subsurface. Whether that’s through utilization or sequestration, there’s going to be business opportunities and that’s where we want to be,” he said. Peters added that the company will continue moving forward with work on all seven of the Department of Energy’s regional carbon sequestration partnerships, as well as with Aquistore, industrial capture work at Archer Daniels Midland’s ethanol production facility in Decatur, Ill., and several of DOE’s Clean Coal Power Initiative CCS projects. “Over the next three years there’s a huge amount of stuff we have to get done,” he said.

Peters: Building Public Acceptance Will Continue to be a Focus

Peters said one of the biggest challenges his company, as well as others in the CO2 storage industry, faces is managing risk and gaining public acceptance of CCS, a focus he said he will continue to work on as President. “Oil businesses for years have learned to manage uncertainty and risk. Sometimes they do it poorly and the results are catastrophic, so we can’t take it lightly,” he said. “There needs to be a huge effort for very trustworthy public engagement early on. We’ve learned that the hard way with many projects around the world as an industry.” Peters said Schlumberger will continue to push for industry to adopt thorough characterization practices to minimize risk early on in a project lifecycle. “John left big shoes to fill,” he said. “I can only hope that I can be as visible and as trusted as he was and carry the torch for CCS as something that can be done safely as well as he did.”