Gaia Masterclasses

This masterclass surveys current estimates of how climate change affects human welfare. Comparative static studies show that the modal impact of a 2.5 degree Celsius increase is equivalent to losing some 2% of income - or hundred years of global warming is about as bad as losing one year of economic growth. The uncertainty is large and skewed the wrong way. Poorer countries are much more vulnerable than richer countries. Adding omitted impacts doubles the estimate, and adding growth effects doubles the estimate again. Econometric estimates of the impact of weather shocks on economic growth suffer from fatal conceptual and statistical flaws.

Water is a vital resource, and its use and prioritization can create tension between communities and the assets developed to meet energy demand. Volumetric Water Benefits (VWB) provides a universal, scalable framework to help mitigate these conflicts by quantifying how land and ecological management actions influence water availability, quality, and risk in volumetric terms.

Applicable across industrial settings, including oil and gas operations, VWB is particularly relevant in landscapes where large land areas are impacted and operational decisions directly affect hydrologic processes such as runoff, infiltration, storage, and water use. While much of the service model has been developed in the United States, the underlying framework and benefits are not constrained by geography and are well suited for global application across diverse hydrologic and regulatory environments. By translating these hydrologic changes into measurable outcomes, the framework enables operators to evaluate how specific actions alter water balances and influence both operational performance and surrounding water systems. In addition, quantified volumetric water benefits can be treated as a transferable commodity, enabling organizations to generate credits that may be transacted or leased to willing buyers as part of broader water stewardship and sustainability strategies.

As national water stress increases, legislative restrictions and guidelines around water use are expected, with early signals already emerging at the state level. VWB is well positioned to serve as a universal framework for water management in a more stringent regulatory environment.

Across oil and gas assets (where well spacing, rights-of-way, and infrastructure footprint extend over millions of acres), VWB treats land as a hydrologically active system capable of generating measurable water value. The methodology links practices such as soil health improvement, wetland restoration, and watershed protection to outcomes including increased infiltration, enhanced groundwater recharge, reduced runoff, and improved water quality.

Expressing these outcomes in volumetric terms (e.g., acre-feet or gallons) enables integration with water accounting, operational planning, and risk management systems. In doing so, VWB provides a common language to align operational efficiency with environmental performance and stakeholder expectations. Application of the framework demonstrates the potential to reduce freshwater sourcing requirements, lower produced water handling and disposal volumes, and strengthen resilience in water-constrained basins while addressing community concerns in water-stressed regions.

How do world-changing companies actually get built—especially in sectors where technical complexity, capital intensity, and environmental expectations are all rising? Ian MacGregor will share the hard-earned lessons of a lifetime spent turning ambitious ideas—and sometimes broken ones—into globally significant enterprises. For over four decades, his company North West Capital has followed a simple philosophy: engineers who understand finance can evolve industries through practical innovation. Their ventures focus on lowering both operating costs and environmental impacts, grounded in deep engineering expertise and real operational experience. Ian will speak candidly about:

• How great ideas evolve into large-scale commercial realities
• Why cost reduction and environmental performance must go hand-in-hand 
• Lessons from building complex infrastructure in Alberta and beyond 
• What sustainable development looks like when driven by engineering truth—not buzzwords.

Energy is one of the hot button topics of the day. Our news feeds are filled with energy-related stories, often liberally sprinkled with terms like firming, storage, intermittency and capacity factor, as well as the basic terms “power” and “energy” – which are often confused. Intermingled with the jargon is a plethora of units and acronyms: kW, kWh, PJ, eV, EV, LNG, LCOE, BESS and FESS and hundreds more. Without delving too far into the physics, Nick’s talk will use the Australian Energy Landscape as a case study to provide some clarity around the basic concepts of energy and power, and will dive into some key examples to help sense check some of claims and counter claims that are made in this politically contentious field.

Climate science can often feel inaccessible to engineers, appearing either confined to PhD modelers or oversimplified for journalists and policymakers. John Schopp, a recently retired SPE member and former oil & gas executive, spent six months diving into the physics and data to make sense of it all. He discovered that the core science can be distilled into a few fundamental principles that any engineer can grasp. This 90-minute presentation will provide key rules of thumb to help you calculate the climate outcomes of various emissions scenarios, understand the cause-and-effect of different actions, assess the uncertainty of these predictions, and place them in the context of natural weather and climate variability. By investing 90 minutes, you can avoid six months of research.

The Ipieca-WBCSD Sustainable Development Goals Roadmap for the oil and gas industry identifies how Ipieca, as an industry association, and oil and gas companies, can work towards a low-emissions future while contributing to a healthier and more prosperous world aligned with the 2030 Agenda. This masterclass will provide a progress update from the 2023 report. The Masterclass is led by Ulrike Schopp, Chief of Staff who was instrumental in the development of IPIECA’s SDG Roadmap and Nabaraj Majanta - Sustainability and Social Performance Coordinator at Ipieca who worked on putting the update together.

• Moving Beyond Technical Fixes: Treating the energy transition not merely as a hardware swap (e.g., replacing oil with solar panels), but as a profound restructure of how societies organize daily life, labor, and consumption.
• Systemic Human Needs: Evaluating how energy systems directly map to fundamental human requirements like protection, participation, and creation, rather than just fueling industrial output.
• Ecosocial Transition: Emphasizing that true regeneration requires acknowledging the Earth's physical limits and redesigning organizational systems to prevent societal strain and "evolutionary backsliding".

Regenerative practice is a new concept for the industry which has practiced resource extraction for over a century. Our industry has an unprecedented opportunity to be a major contributor to climate change solutions due to our training and expertise. Regeneration is a natural outcome of resource stewardship. Just as we, as an industry, strive to be more efficient in our use of time, material, and energy, we must also become better stewards of the conditions that enable humans to thrive on the planet. Our industry is crucial for a prosperous future. Regenerative practice is the key. Concepts like the circular economy, bioeconomics, and biomimicry are discussed and examples of their integration into operations are provided.

The key takeaway for this SPE Live is that we all have a role in a regenerative future for the industry.