Hollub is the first woman to receive this distinction and will be presented the award at the 25th WPC Energy Congress in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in April 2026. Here, she talks about what the award means to her and the achievements she is most proud of.
Congratulations! You’re the first woman ever to receive the Dewhurst Award in the nearly 92-year history of WPC Energy. What does this milestone mean to you personally and for women in the energy sector?
Vicki Hollub: I'm really grateful and honoured to be receiving this award. It's a testament to our employees who have done an amazing job helping us through a significant transformation at Oxy. When I was growing up, I wanted to be a geek, but I couldn't quite make it! So instead, I went up the management ladder. But there are a lot of women who did make it, and who have helped transform our industry by doing difficult technical work. I really hope that those coming into our industry see, through this award, the women behind the scenes and the important contributions they have made.
The award recognises exceptional leadership and lifetime contributions to the global energy industry. Looking back on your career, which achievements are you most proud of? What are the biggest challenges you have faced?
Hollub: The achievement that I'm most proud of is helping get our company to where it is today. We are now in a position where we can turn a pollutant, CO₂, into a valuable product that can help get more oil out of reservoirs around the world. We're the only company that's talking about this as a strategy at the moment, but I think others will follow the path that we have forged. We've gone through a transformation, and that transformation has given us the best assets and the highest performing organisation we've ever had. Our employees are a big part of that, thanks to a culture that not only empowers and engages them, but also enables them to drive our company forward by being so aggressively innovative.
Can you expand on the carbon management strategy and your vision for Oxy’s future in the global energy transition?
Hollub: The aim is to build our carbon management initiatives into a viable commercial business for the company. In some ways we've been a carbon management company for 50 years by using CO₂ for enhanced oil recovery. Now we're going to do that in a way using Direct Air Capture (DAC) and CCUS that not only provides CO₂ for use in our own operations, but also provides a valuable product for the maritime and aviation sectors. These sectors can benefit in two ways. They can buy carbon reduction credits from our business to help offset their carbon footprint, or they can use net-zero oil from our reservoirs. Because we have to inject more CO₂ into the reservoir than the incremental barrel that it produces will emit when used, we can produce a net-negative barrel of oil. Some maritime and aviation companies actually prefer to create jet fuel from a net-zero or net-negative barrel of oil rather than buy offsets.
So, we’re establishing a business that improves the environment and enables us and others to continue to produce oil, while making sure that we have a pathway to get to net-zero over time. Nobody else has this strategy where they are addressing Scope 3 emissions in addition to Scope 1 and 2 emissions.
Turning to Direct Air Capture (DAC) in particular, what are the challenges in scaling this technology, and how big a role do you see it playing in the future energy landscape?
Hollub: We have to get the costs down. Right now it’s around $550/t, and we need to get that down to $150/t, at which point it would be economic to use in enhanced oil recovery. That’s part of the reason we decided to buy DAC technology firm Carbon Engineering, rather than just using their technology. They had all sorts of innovative ideas about how they could improve things, but very little cash. Now we’ve bought them, we have a demonstration plant running in Squamish, British Columbia, with some of our technical people on site. The combination of those two teams has been so suc-cessful in bringing down costs that we have decided to build our Stratos DAC plant in two phases. Instead of building 500,000t/yr of capacity straight away, we will build 250,000t/yr initially, followed by a second phase of 250,000t/yr. The second phase will have lower capex and opex than the first phase. When you combine that with the fact that we are now building a digital twin, we believe we will be able to reduce costs even further. Getting DAC costs down to rival point-source capture is really important, because we can build DAC wherever we want—you don’t need to build pipelines for the CO₂, which has become an increasingly difficult thing to do.
What other technologies do you see playing a significant early role in the transition that are not yet scaled, and which technologies might come to the fore, say, after 2040?
Hollub: The one that's closest to being viable for us is lithium. Our subsidiary, TerraLithium, extracts lithium from brine. We have a joint venture with Berkshire Hathaway Energy in the Salton Sea in California and we're planning to build a demonstration plant that will be bigger than what we have there now.
NET Power is another technology that we believe could be transformational for the power industry. It combusts hydrocarbon gas with oxygen instead of air, creating fresh water and CO₂ with no volatile organic emissions. The CO₂ drives the turbine to create electricity, and you end up with an excess stream of CO₂ that you can use to help produce net-zero oil or in products such as sustainable aviation fuel. Having a technology that provides power generation and water for cooling could be vital for the coming boom in datacentre deployment. We are still working on making it commercial, and it’s probably four years until we build the first plant.
Beyond that, there's a process being developed by a company called Cemvita that would convert CO₂ through photosynthesis into bio-ethylene, which is a product needed by chemical plants.
Oil and gas firms have taken different approaches to the transition—and to low-carbon technology investment—with varying degrees of success in recent years. What are the lessons learned from these early attempts to address the energy transition over the last five years or so?
Hollub: First of all, it’s important to say it has been a difficult path for the world to take, because there’s just not enough collaboration between those of us who generate sources of power and those who use it. That has to improve.
There are examples of both companies and countries that went too fast. Many companies got way beyond their skis in terms of what their core competencies were, whereas we stayed focused on what we do best—the management of CO₂ and the extraction of lithium from brine. We’re going to use a lot of solar in our operations to support DAC, but we're going to contract that out to other companies rather than build it ourselves.
Europe, to its credit, wanted to do something meaningful for the environment, but again they got ahead of themselves. Their cap-and-trade system did nothing to incentivise the development of new technologies—it was structured in a way that allowed those companies with more cash to buy their way out of the problem, rather than innovate and create technologies to solve it. What we’re doing is trying to develop a technology that solves the problem. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has helped us a lot in this regard, and thankfully, in the last revision of the IRA, the use of CO₂ for enhanced oil recovery now has parity with sequestration.
Can you talk about your leadership philosophy—do you look to cultivate a particular type of working culture within your organisation?
Hollub: We have a culture where we empower, engage and encourage our employees to work together, and reward teams that work together. Teamwork is, for us, the most important thing, and we want employees who have a high degree of emotional intelligence and who understand how to collaborate effectively. It's a culture of inclusion and belonging that we believe enables employees to succeed.
What advice would you offer to young professionals currently aspiring to leadership roles in energy and sustainability? What does it take to be the CEO of a firm like Oxy?
Hollub: As I just mentioned, I think emotional intelligence is so important. That’s the first thing I tell everybody. I’ve seen brilliant technical people fail because they lacked it. Beyond that, I think it’s important to be curious and collaborative, to make sure you're focusing on things that matter, and to be data-driven in how you pursue them.
Going forward, those that are more collaborative will be the winners. We have been working with tech companies, aviation, maritime and even sports organisations that want to offset their carbon footprint. Finding approaches that enable teams to innovate together—that, to me, is incredibly important.
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