Chevron Technology Ventures (CTV) is interested in startup technology and how it might benefit Chevron, says Jim Gable, the company’s vice president of innovation and CTV’s president. CTV is also acutely interested in the management team of the startups it considers for investments.

Gable has been at Chevron in different roles for 26 years and took the top role at CTV three years ago. He was also managing executive of venture capital for CTV from 2003 to 2007.

He said the management teams are much stronger now.

“Back then you had really interested entrepreneurs with an altruistic bent who really wanted to help the world's challenges related to delivering affordable, reliable, and ever cleaner energy. But they didn't really have the entrepreneurial experience in energy or they didn't have entrepreneurial experience at all,” he said.

Nowadays, the entrepreneurs in energy startups have succeeded and failed. They’ve gone through the cycle, and have learned a lot along the way, he said.

CTV is the longest continuously corporate venture fund in energy, with more than 150 investments over the past quarter century.

Gable spoke with Richard Stubbe, Hart Energy’s senior technology writer, about CTV’s “inside-out” investment decisions; its dual focus on oil and gas and lower carbon; and the importance of scaling technologies at the 2025 CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston.

Richard Stubbe: What does CTV do?

Jim Gable, CTV: We're the primary on-ramp for early-stage external technology to get into the company, have been for 25 years. We invest—this is unusual to some of our peers—across all technology spaces, so not just the shiny penny of lower carbon, but also oil and gas. Our primary metric is to transfer technology into the company and help the business units capture value. So we do a lot of that in oil and gas. That helps us on lower carbon as well. We also partner closely with Chevron New Energies on commercializing lower-carbon technologies and with the oil products and gas group, primarily on incremental advances.

RS: What's been your biggest hit?

JG: Every year we have a couple important wins on transferring technology into Chevron, as you might expect with our deployment path. A lot of that is around commercial and upstream opportunities. We have downhole tools, we have production logging tools, we have fiber, we have cybersecurity that we've transferred.

RS: How do you measure success?

JG: The key to this industry is really all about scaling and how do you take something the size of what we do and how do you leverage what incumbents have in terms of the assets, the capabilities, the customer relationships, the distribution of the brand, and how do you get the best of both worlds with the academics, the entrepreneurs, the ideas, the management teams.

RS: How does the process work internally?

JG: We have two venture funds. We have a future energy venture fund that talks about and targets low carbon solutions as you might expect. And then we have a core oil and gas group and that targets the oil and gas system itself.

Each one's a different ecosystem, each one's [a] different group of academics, different group of startups, different group of investors as you might expect. And we will scout thousands of opportunities a year on the inbound side.

RS: How do you sort through the opportunities?

JG: We're most powerful when we're inside-out driven, when we start with an internal problem that we're trying to solve and then go out and find an external solution as opposed to just being passive and being receptive to all these business plans coming our way. We've got about two dozen people working internally with our business units and about a dozen externally on either investing or not investing.

RS: What happens when you take an initial interest in a company?

JG: Investment is a means to achieve greater influence on product development, on application development to help the entrepreneur get early customer feedback on what works and what doesn't work, systems engineering issues, things like that. But we will spend a lot of time working with companies we haven't invested in. We will focus our transfer efforts on any technology of interest that we come across. So we transfer a lot of technology that we've not invested in.

RS: It sounds like even a conversation with CTV would be beneficial to a startup.

JG: Absolutely. What you see in the lower-carbon space is that everyone talks about ‘we need more capital to scale,’ and we have the valley of death between early adopters and full commercial deployments. And how do you make sure you put capital in that space to bridge that gap? I've always said it's not a capital issue, it's a risk issue.

Large companies like Chevron can bridge the risk and reduce the risk. One way we do this is customer feedback. Over 25 years, we've trialed about two-thirds of the companies we've invested in the solutions from those companies. That gives early customer feedback.

We also have excellent systems engineering capabilities, balance sheet scale, brand credibility in the marketplace to backstop demand, construction risk, those other ways to de-risk the overall effort because risk is the problem, not capital. The world's awash in capital.

RS: You said you’re most effective when you identify a priority for the company and then look for companies in that space. Still, you must get a bunch of pitches. How do you evaluate them?

JG: We absolutely get a lot of pitches. I’ve been at Chevron 26 years. I started in CTV a long time ago, and I was one of the scouts externally. And what we would always say was, we're really looking for the management team. Back then you had really interested entrepreneurs with an altruistic bent who really wanted to help the world's challenges related to delivering affordable, reliable and ever cleaner energy. But they didn't really have the entrepreneurial experience in energy or they didn't have entrepreneurial experience at all.

Now several iterations of entrepreneurs have succeeded and failed. They've got a lot more experience to leverage in energy in startups. They're more effective and more accomplished now and they've learned a lot.

We also look at the technology, the potential impact of Chevron. We invest probably 20% of what we do, our capital, outside of our core strategic areas, in areas that might intersect us in the future.

RS: Can you give an example of that?

JB: When we started looking at carbon capture in 2012 and we came across a company called Svante, which is an absorption technology. It's a metal organic framework. We invested in them in 2014 on the venture side, and I'm sure if you had asked our senior team then, they would have said that’s not strategic.

Now 10 years later, think about how strategic carbon capture sequestration is for society and also Chevron. And we invested through the 2014, 2016, 2020 timeframe. We ended up also working with the DOE [ Department of Energy] loan program office on building a 25 ton-per-day pilot at our San Joaquin Valley business unit in California that got up and running two years ago.

It's a really good area where we're leveraging and helping lower-carbon technology scale, and it's got a great future. We're now working with them through Chevron New Energies, which participated in their latest large funding round. Chevron's working with Svante on how to apply this technology to larger units, potentially FCCs [fluidized catalytic cracking units], potentially refining equipment, other areas of Chevron.

RS: What does 2035 look like?

JG: Predicting technology in the short term is always a challenge long term. It always goes much farther, much faster than you think. The way I encourage our teams is think about what we have done in our existing value chains with lower-carbon technologies. Think about renewable diesel in California and the fact that that has taken over more than 50% of the market because of subsidies and because it's a drop-in fuel that takes advantage of existing infrastructure.

The technologies where you have to rebuild an entire market, a whole new value chain, those are the challenging ones. With the existing infrastructure we have, I think about SAF [sustainable aviation fuel], which needs to move on the cost curve, or areas to put more product through the existing infrastructure footprint, like grid optimization. In 10 years, I'm hopeful that you will have long-distance transmission of superconducting wires that are above liquid nitrogen temperature.

RS: What about oil and gas?

JG: Chevron certainly is going to be a leader in AI and energy, and we're looking at a variety of use cases related to wells and well location and well drilling, related to predictive maintenance, related to energy trading, related to molecular discovery. We have a lot of work underway and that's also exciting technology.