Energy Symposium: Prominent Figures Speak to Unlimited Opportunities in Sector
Justin Dawe (NJ), Contributing Writer
Issue date: 11/14/05 Section: News
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Under the theme of "The Biggest Opportunity in the World", a lineup of top-level speakers visited HBS this past Wednesday for the annual Energy Symposium. The event was hosted by the HBS Energy Club, and from the record turnout and record number of speakers it was clear that interest in the subject matter has climbed in lockstep with the increasing price of oil.
True to its theme, the 2005 Symposium reflected the diversity of opportunities in the energy industry. Some of the subjects covered at the Symposium included the complexities of integrating strategy at a firm as huge as British Petroleum, the implications of building energy infrastructure for the economic growth of the developing world, and a sketch of how the U.S. could begin to transition its economy away from oil.
In addition to representatives from energy-focused firms, the presence of speakers from McKinsey & Co, Morgan Stanley, and Boston Consulting Group made it clear that energy as a sector is garnering significant attention from HBS' traditional recruiters as well.
Atul Arya, Vice-President of Group Strategic Analysis at BP, kicked the event off with a big-picture view of the global energy game. He talked about the challenges of developing strategy in an industry where even a firm worth hundreds of billions of dollars doesn't control more than a few percent of the market, and in which the development of substitute products such as biofuels or even natural gas requires incredibly huge commitments.
Artis Brown from ExxonMobil followed Mr. Arya's presentation with a discussion of the increasingly important role that Asia will play in shaping global energy demand. In the next fifteen to twenty years, Mr. Brown predicted that the number of cars and the amount of energy consumed in Asia will catch and then surpass those quantities in the US or Europe.
The next speaker, Reliance Industries' Executive Director Hital Meswani, described the extraordinary contributions that his firm has made to the growth of India's energy sector. To provide a sense of perspective, Mr. Meswani described his company's $6 billion petroleum refinery at Jamnagar as being two hundred times the size of the Harvard campus, and as having made a significant contribution to the GDP of the entire country.
True to its theme, the 2005 Symposium reflected the diversity of opportunities in the energy industry. Some of the subjects covered at the Symposium included the complexities of integrating strategy at a firm as huge as British Petroleum, the implications of building energy infrastructure for the economic growth of the developing world, and a sketch of how the U.S. could begin to transition its economy away from oil.
In addition to representatives from energy-focused firms, the presence of speakers from McKinsey & Co, Morgan Stanley, and Boston Consulting Group made it clear that energy as a sector is garnering significant attention from HBS' traditional recruiters as well.
Atul Arya, Vice-President of Group Strategic Analysis at BP, kicked the event off with a big-picture view of the global energy game. He talked about the challenges of developing strategy in an industry where even a firm worth hundreds of billions of dollars doesn't control more than a few percent of the market, and in which the development of substitute products such as biofuels or even natural gas requires incredibly huge commitments.
Artis Brown from ExxonMobil followed Mr. Arya's presentation with a discussion of the increasingly important role that Asia will play in shaping global energy demand. In the next fifteen to twenty years, Mr. Brown predicted that the number of cars and the amount of energy consumed in Asia will catch and then surpass those quantities in the US or Europe.
The next speaker, Reliance Industries' Executive Director Hital Meswani, described the extraordinary contributions that his firm has made to the growth of India's energy sector. To provide a sense of perspective, Mr. Meswani described his company's $6 billion petroleum refinery at Jamnagar as being two hundred times the size of the Harvard campus, and as having made a significant contribution to the GDP of the entire country.