Sustainable Change Management in the Oil & Gas Industry and Beyond with Flora Moon

Trailblazer Interview with Flora Moon, Sustainability Practice Director at Expressworks International, October 2022

Flora is an experienced sustainability change management consultant and thought leader with over 20 years of experience working with oil and gas companies. She has shepherded fortune 500 companies to design and implement strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and develop industrial regenerative practices, and is one of the co-designers of the Society of Petroleum Engineers Gaia Sustainability program.

Hi Flora, great to meet you. Thank you for the opportunity to talk. What are you currently working on?

I'm working on several different projects on an industry and community level. 

I've gotten very involved with an industry group called the Society of Petroleum Engineers, which invited me to participate after a client requested I join an industry-insider training. The group soon realized that my background is uniquely beneficial in engineering since I can zoom out, apply broader perspectives, and apply concepts that integrate sustainability and engineering. I helped create a sustainability platform/program for this organization, which includes about 124,800 members in 134 countries - petroleum engineers and oil and gas professionals, of which approximately a quarter are young professionals. 

I am also researching and writing papers about regenerative practices and sustainability and how organizations can evolve their strategies to become sustainable. 

On the community level, I do a couple of different things. I maintain a public-private partnership with the City of Houston that supports an after-school enrichment program that teaches kids ages six to 12 about gardening so they get hands-on experience growing edible vegetables such as tomatoes and green peas. Making the connection between health and food is very important at that age and helps form healthy eating habits that will last a lifetime.

My third community-level project is engaging people with Climate Fresks, an online game created in France. The program is available globally in a Creative Commons license and includes a group of about 20,000 facilitators worldwide. I'm part of a cohort of 100 facilitators in the US who are working at corporate, educational, and general public levels to help people understand the complexity of climate change and generate agency on the actions we can take.

What's your professional story? How did you come to work on climate?

I began working at PBS as a documentary filmmaker. After some time, I came to Houston, was hired at TimeWarner to set up their high-speed internet service, and ended up in the.com era as an E-commerce specialist. Then I transitioned to business development for ERP, allowing me to interface closely with C-level executives. As much as I like technology, I wanted to focus more on work that would help save the planet, so I ended up pivoting. Because I live in Houston, I decided to see what I could do in the energy industry around sustainability. That decision came a little over 20 years ago, and that's what I've been doing ever since.

At this transition point, the Baker Institute drafted me to build their internet presence. After that, I began working in Change Management at Expressworks, a consulting firm. 

“Over time, I learned that change management and being successful in sustainability is a lot about facilitating mindset change, behavior shifts, and culture transformation.”

I could contract or expand that sphere of sustainability-focused influence depending on my position in the company or project.

How did you work in sustainability in the oil and gas industry? 

I came in as a general change management consultant, though I was always working on sustainability. My clients got sustainability consulting, whether they wanted it or not. Nice, because you don't need a sustainability title. 

“To work as a sustainability agent, you have to have priming questions in mind: will this decision negatively impact people or the environment? If so, is there a different decision that can be made that is acceptable for the business requirements?“

That's the simple priming question I've always had as I navigated the oil and gas industry.

Within the energy industry, how did you present the concept of sustainability?

In the energy industry, particularly 20 years ago, few people were interested in sustainability. Early on, sustainability was often a threatening idea. I would let clients know that my interest is sustainability and that I'd be happy to talk to them but wasn't there to convert them. Because I work in change management, I often help people navigate change on many levels: professional, personal, and emotional. I develop relationships where clients get to know who you are and that they can trust you. Often, I ended up being in a very privileged position of trust so that people felt comfortable enough to ask me questions. People are often afraid of asking questions and showing that their expertise is limited. That is one of the problems with highly specialized careers. But people could ask me, and I would try to answer as best I could or say, I don't know, but let me see what I can find. Over the years, I was able to build a cadre of people who, when they had a sustainability question, would ask me what I thought or invite me to sit in on meetings and request my feedback.

Then there were several champions where we would combine our skills and work on projects to help engineers think about risk differently. Risk was traditionally defined in a very narrow sense of safety or catastrophic environmental failure, causing issues such as bodily harm. Instead, we said, let's think about nontraditional risk. 

For example, shale exploration often happens in populated areas. The footprint of a shale operation is pretty small and compact compared to traditional oil extraction. Somebody might sell 20 acres in the middle of what used to be pasture land but is now a suburb. A lot of Colorado looks like this. The problems with licensing and operating become apparent quickly because you still have to service the facility. That means there will be truck traffic, dust, noise, and sometimes noise from the facility itself. You have risks that engineers designing extraction systems didn't have to consider 100 years ago. Risk has evolved. 

Risk is a powerful frame of reference to communicate climate risk and incentivize action. I would help figure out how to share ideas of sustainability and more holistic risk with a broader population, not just engineers but anybody working with concepts of traditional risk. You get attention by communicating that risk is something you can't ignore because it is an externality. Externalized risk will eventually become your problem and your company's problem. So how do you think about risk at a systems level and reduce exposure to issues that present risk to companies license to operate? 

How did you communicate risk in your work?

There's a system-level analysis called life-cycle assessment in the engineering and industrial realms. You look at everything required, inputs and outputs, for the life of a product, the life of a building, the life of a process, and you weigh the benefits of choices. In sustainability, you don't want to disadvantage the environment or people to make a profit. For many years, decades, maybe centuries, capitalism focused purely on profit. With the idea of sustainability, you make trade-offs during decisions. You need to think about the beginning, the middle, and the reuse and plan out the end of life, much like emulating nature. Life-cycle assessment is one compelling model. Some people will call it a digital twin. But it's really about understanding the full impact of business decisions and all of the contributing assumptions.

Can you tell me more about your focus on climate regeneration and the relationship with industry? 

The industrialized world and the Age of Enlightenment, when man was the center of the universe, created an artificial wall between nature and man. Now, during unprecedented climate change, we need to re-examine our thinking and systems. 

“Regeneration is about having to restore resources that we've taken from the planet for the planet to continue to support human life and the life of a lot of other living beings.”

Natural carbon sinks are a vital area for taking action. Forests, for example, facilitate our climate, weather, and moisture. I focus most on regeneration for natural carbon sinks because we have exceeded the planet's natural carbon sequestration ability, which is causing climate change. 

Given the current oversaturation of natural carbon sinks, what are the most impactful actions we can take?

The most significant opportunity is to reduce the volume of carbon emitted into the atmosphere. We need to reduce the amount of carbon we expect the earth and man-made carbon sequestration interventions to remove. 

And how do you think we can best reduce the volume of output?

Reducing emissions output volume will require government action with fiat and regulation. We've had a license to overuse the planet. We use 1.7 Earths yearly in terms of resources, including what we emit into the air for the Earth to process. Our industrial systems and the earth are not in equilibrium, so we will need to see interventions at the government level. The Inflation Reduction Act in the US was a meaningful step forward. New Zealand is another interesting example of a country evaluating if nature is a citizen and what the rights of nature are.

What do you think is the role of business in driving sustainability-focused change?

Business is an antithetical ally. In the larger global sense, business is fundamentally oriented toward profitability. It's tough to request that people exchange the idea of profit, which is self-serving on many levels, for public benefit. More and more companies are creating public benefit corporations instead of C corporations, where the primary driver is a public benefit, which doesn't mean you're not going to make a profit. There are textbook cases of CEOs who suddenly understand that profit at the expense of everyone and everything is a Pyrrhic victory, where long-term costs are much higher than short-term benefits. Another way to drive business change is to influence boards at public companies, either by voting at annual general meetings or lobbying at the C-level.

I think that there is also particular promise in the financial world. Companies appease financial powers to borrow money to operate and build investors’ confidence. There is a growing focus on the US SEC, which now requires financial reporting to include environmental and climate risks. Finance has many opportunities to drive change, particularly as banks and financial institutions now understand that climate risk is a direct financial risk, quantified at around $30 trillion. As risk gets quantified more, the benefit of acting sooner grows. The other key area of opportunity is in financial reporting. There was always this concept called an externality. Externalities were inconvenient things companies didn't want to account for in their risk calculation, such as the environment, climate change, or pandemics. Now, companies have to include externalities because of the current state of the world. The finance industry is one of the most significant levers to change corporate America.

What are other levers for change?

A lot of times, the public individual feels disempowered. Climate change provides an opportunity for regular people to find agency. Agency, in aggregate, makes people stand up and take notice. It's personal relationships that help people move when they're stuck. Being able to process eco-anxiety or grief together helps people understand our dire situation and act. Paying attention to your community and thinking about what changes you can make on a community level is very powerful. For example, Houston is a city of about two and a half to 3 million people. If I can personally influence 1% of the population, who will then influence another 1, we begin a geometric progression. There's a lot of opportunity there.

Okay. And lastly, what would you advise someone entering the sustainability space wanting to make an impact?

First, you have to understand what moves you. What keeps you engaged and excited? If your work in sustainability doesn't align with your purpose, it's a job. You need to be passionate about what you do. It's first aligning yourself, understanding yourself, and then finding work that aligns with you. There's no one magic solution for everyone or anyone. You have to try on a lot of things. Looking at my path, I experimented and gathered diverse experiences. The first sustainability job I had was building websites for a sustainability nonprofit. 

Approach your work in sustainability one step at a time. Pick something you know that you think you can stick with for a little while you get to know what it is. It's not all fun, and it will take hard work. If your work is fueling your passion, stick with it as long as it’s beneficial to you. Then look for something else to continue your journey.