Rank last year: 21
When asked what he felt the most important investment theme for his sector, Issam Dairanieh, the head of BP Ventures, responded with a one word answer: “digital”.
To respond to this evolution of the oil and gas industy, Dairanieh is attempting to use his role corporate venturing unit to develop a new style of doing business. He said: “BP is leading what I consider to be the next generation of corporate venturing – deep collaborative relationships and alliances.”
He said: “We are thinking about new collaboration models and what people could work with us in our value chain. We have reached out to over 25 strategic investors, including other oil majors, such as ConocoPhillips, Chevron, Shell, Saudi Aramco, Statoil, Total and others such as GE, ABB, BASF, Dow and IBM, to see how we can forge stronger and more strategic collaborations to pool our capabilities to bring capital-intensive technologies to market in shorter times.
“One example is automating drilling technologies. Development of such systems may cost over $30m at a time. And while an individual company may not be able to do it, several companies working within a new funding mechanism may not only make this happen but would structure the development in away where adoption and deployment of such technologies would take place sooner.”
In 2012 he became head of corporate venturing at UK-based oil major BP. Between 2010 and in 2011 he led BP’s US corporate venturing operations and he joined the venture team in 2007. He is a director or observer on the boards of 12 companies, namely Brightsource Energy, GMZ Energy, GMZ Solar, OptoAtmospherics, Liquid Light, Solidia Technologies, Caelux Solar, Skyoni, UpWind Services, Xtreme Power and Oxane. He previously worked at Amoco’s new business development division. He gained a PhD in chemical engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
What is the future of your sector?
Dairanieh said: “Investment in all energy, both clean-tech and conventional, is gaining more and more momentum. Energy investment has gone through difficult times in the past two years, but with more strategics stepping in, commercialisation of emerging technologies will be more probable. The window for initial public offering is still limited but trade sales are more likely options.”