ESG Council Program – A View from the C-Suite
ESG Council Program – A View from the C-Suite
A View from the C-Suite: When it comes to energy companies, how exactly is the conversation evolving around ESG in the C-Suite and Board Room? During June’s ESG Series, our guest speakers will come together for an in-depth discussion. They’ll share their expertise and experiences around a topic that has been paving the way toward a great deal of movement, shifts, and transformation within the industry.
Key Takeaways
• ESG in board rooms - Corporations are thinking more about who they are, what they stand for, and what role they want to play in the world.
• How adopting standardized frameworks across sectors is key to moving forward.
• Why developing a strong ESG platform is helpful for attracting talent to your organization.
• Investors nowadays are looking at how boards are addressing issues like climate and understanding what their efforts are when it comes to diversity and inclusion initiatives.
• C-suites looking into the future / looking forward.
Panelists
Hillary Holmes
Co-partner,
Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP
Hillary Holmes is the founder and presenting sponsor of the ALLY Energy ESG Council and “Exploring ESG in Energy” Series. Hillary is co-partner in charge of the Houston office of global law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, co-chair of the firm’s Capital Markets practice group and a member of the firm’s Securities Regulation and Corporate Governance, Mergers & Acquisitions, ESG, and Energy Practice Groups.
Hillary advises corporations, investment banks and institutional investors on capital raising transactions, M&A transactions, governance, securities laws and ESG issues. She also counsels boards of directors in special situations. She brings over two decades of deep expertise in the energy industry.
Chambers Global consistently ranks her in the highest tier for energy capital markets, as well as for energy M&A and corporate counseling. She has been named an Energy MVP twice by Law 360, one of the 25 Most Influential Women in Energy by Hart Energy, a Capital Markets Trailblazer by The National Law Journal, a Most Effective Dealmaker by Texas Lawyer, a Woman Who Means Business by the Houston Business Journal, a Leading Dealmaker in the US by LawDragon 500, and Corporate Lawyer of the Year (Houston) by her peers through Best Lawyers.
Hillary regularly writes and speaks on topics relating to the U.S. capital markets, ESG issues, and the state of the energy industry. Hillary is an officer of the Society for Corporate Governance Houston Chapter and a member of the Executive Council of the KBH Center for Law, Energy and Policy at the University of Texas. Hillary also currently serves on the Editorial Board of Insights: Securities Regulation, on the Advisory Board and the ESG Strategies Committee of the Institute for Energy Law, as a Co-Editor of the Securities Regulation and Corporate Governance Monitor, and as founder and host of ALLY Energy’s Exploring ESG in Energy series.
Bill Shireman
President
Future 500
President, Future 500. Co-Chair, In This Together and the Donor Roundtable. Chairman, BridgeUSA. Lecturer, UC Berkeley Haas School of Business Bill Shireman is a serial social entrepreneur, policy innovator, and conflict mediator who brings together capitalists, activists, conservatives, progressives, and other unusual bedfellows to overcome challenges that often divide them. As President of the non-profit Future 500, he invites Greenpeace, ExxonMobil, Rainforest Action Network (RAN), Mitsubishi and other corporate and environmental leaders to work together. He brokered agreements to create the world’s first corporate supply chain standards for sustainable forestry (between Mitsubishi, RAN, and then 400 other companies), the most effective beverage container recycling program (the California CRV deposit system and its progeny), and the 2008 agreement by both Greenpeace and Exxon-Mobil to support precisely the same federal tax on carbon, which went absolutely nowhere.
To tackle political polarization and help revitalize democracy, Shireman co-chairs with Trammell S. Crow, the Donor Roundtable and its citizen recruitment initiative, In This Together. He helps philanthropists use best-in-class proprietary data, analytics, deliberative polling, and communication tools to mobilize pragmatic “solution citizens” behind practical policies that work.
So others can take up where he eventually leaves off, he teaches leadership and negotiations at the UC Berkeley Haas Business School, and serves as chairman and a surrogate founding father of BridgeUSA, where young progressives, conservatives, libertarians, and independents all register decline-to-hate, and engage in democracy by listening, speaking, learning, teaching, and then solving problems together.
Professor Shireman is the author of 7 books. His latest, In This Together: How Republicans, Democrats, Capitalists, and Activists are uniting to tackle climate change and more, can be found on Amazon and in leading bookstores.
When he’s not traveling around the country engaging and inspiring corporate, academic and NGO audiences, he lives in San Francisco with his wife and children. Bill has a soft spot for green tea lattes and meeting people from faraway places who stay at his Airbnb.
Sarah Delille
Vice President of Country Management
Equinor US
Sarah Delille has close to 20 years of experience in technical, commercial and leadership roles in the energy sector.
She is currently Vice President of Country Management for Equinor US. Her current responsibilities include setting Equinor’s strategy in the US, managing enterprise risks and ensuring a holistic approach to sustainability, social investment, and external stakeholders, to position Equinor for success in the country.
Sarah was previously Vice President of Workplace and Operational Excellence (WOX) in Equinor, a special 1,5-year assignment role to lead return to office post COVID for the entire organization, supporting the flexible work strategy, rightsizing Equinor’s real estate portfolio and adapting Equinor’s workplaces to the new ways of working. During that time, she became a crisis manager and led and organization of 150+ employees and 500+ contractors.
Before taking on this special assignment, Sarah was Vice President for Business Development (BD) in Equinor, with teams across the globe leading BD projects and negotiating and closing deals in oil and gas, renewables, and low carbon solutions.
Sarah has in addition held operational and P&L roles in Equinor both in the US and Norway, as asset manager, technology manager and leader of the US engineering teams. She has also worked as project controls manager for major offshore projects in Norway and was a member of the Equinor Investment Arena, as a technical and commercial adviser to the CEO and the Corporate Executive Committee in Equinor.
Prior to Joining Equinor, sarah worked for both Total Energies and McDermott, has lived internationally in six countries and speaks multiple languages. Sarah is a registered Professional Engineer in the State of Texas, she earned a bachelor’s degree in Math and Physics, a master’s degree in mechanical engineering with honors, and an MBA with a major in Finance / Marketing with high honors, all from French universities.
Paula Whitten-Doolin
General Counsel
Houston First Corporation
Paula Whitten-Doolin currently serves as the General Counsel for Houston First Corporation, the official destination marketing organization for the country's fourth largest city. Previously, as the General Counsel of Ideanomics, a multinational eV company, Paula oversaw the legal, human resources, and environmental, social, and governance departments. Paula led her teams as the organization went through significant changes and major challenges, including the acquisition and divestiture of subsidiaries and multiple capital raises. As the Head of Legal, Americas for Neste, Paula served on the boards of four Neste subsidiary companies, including the board of Neste’s largest acquisition in the United States to present, Mahoney Environmental. She successfully built a legal team in the Americas and helped to establish Neste as the pre-eminent sustainable aviation fuel supplier worldwide by negotiating contracts with companies including Delta Airlines, United Airlines, Southwest Airlines, JetBlue, and others. She also worked on the initial stages of the multibillion-dollar joint venture with Marathon which will provide Neste’s first physical refinery in the United States when completed.
Paula began her career as a litigator at Weil, Gotshal and Manges LLP in San Francisco. She holds a JD from Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and a BS from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). In addition to her board service at Neste, she has previously served on the boards of several charitable organizations in Houston, Texas, where she resides and is currently standing for election to the board of VUZIX, a publicly-traded corporation based out of Rochester, NY.