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Interview with Emil Jacobs, Vice President Research & Development at ExxonMobil
For a company like ExxonMobil, whose investment strategy focuses on long term ventures and research opportunities, it is essential to have an understanding of what the future could look like. That’s why the company each year develops a comprehensive study, which helps to provide a foundation for ExxonMobil's own business planning to prepare for the future energy marketplace.
 Emil Jacobs, Vice President Research & Development, ExxonMobil Research & Engineering Company (EMRE), speaks on the recently published edition of the Energy Outlook and on the importance of technology in providing energy to the world. “We aren't fortune tellers. We have an outlook”.
The latest edition of ExxonMobil’s annual futures study: The Outlook for Energy: A View to 2030, carries forward the key finding that energy demand will continue to increase in the coming decades despite significant gains in energy efficiency. A significant percentage of the supply for this demand will continue to come from the production of oil, natural gas and coal, which will inevitably lead to increasing, instead of decreasing, CO2 emissions. This will occur despite the undeniable progress in energy efficiency or the fast growing investments in alternative renewable energy sources. As head of ExxonMobil’s Research and Development organization Emil Jacobs fills a key post within the corporation - as the future of companies such as ExxonMobil increasingly depends heavily on their innovation capacity.
Mark Twain once said: “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future”. Many predictions about energy from the past turned out to be wrong. Why does ExxonMobil think their forecasts are valid?
First of all: We do not think we can predict the future at all. It is wrong to view the Outlook as a forecast of what will be. In fact, we long ago deleted the word "forecast" from our vocabulary because that does not truly convey what the Outlook does. The Outlook is just that - an expectation. It's an estimate based on the best available data with all the uncertainties that go along with it. We aren't fortune tellers! What we have is an outlook for the future, based on an analysis of data gleaned from all over the world; we build the energy outlook from the bottom up, based on all the facts we can find. We gather our information from 100 countries and 15 differing energy sectors. We look at economic and demographic developments, and at the progress made in energy efficiency. And that is how we arrive at our annual Energy Outlook. [...]
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