How technology and innovation are enabling the energy transition
Myrtle Dawes, CEO of the Net Zero Technology Centre, explains how her not-for-profit organisation is helping to accelerate the energy transition to net-zero through cutting-edge technology.
If it hadn’t been for an inspirational teacher, Myrtle Dawes’ career might have gone in a completely different direction.
A stellar student with a love of maths, she was studying for her A-levels at South London College when her physical chemistry tutor, Dr Croft, asked her which university she was planning to go to.
“I said ‘I’m not going to university,’” recalls Dawes. “I’m going to be a dancer.”
Dr Croft thought otherwise, recommending that she go to Imperial College London to study chemical engineering and chemical technology. She took his advice and has gone on to have a hugely successful career, first as an engineer and more recently as a leading voice on the energy transition – the shift from fossil-based systems of energy, production and consumption to renewable energy.
“I was very lucky to have someone steer me in a direction in which I would never have gone otherwise,” she says. “I’m really grateful for his advice.”
Dawes is now CEO of the Net Zero Technology Centre (NZTC), a not-for-profit organisation driven by its mission to accelerate the energy transition to net-zero through the use of cutting-edge technology. NZTC is committed to helping Scotland, the United Kingdom as a whole, and other countries around the world to achieve their net-zero ambitions, while also contributing to economic growth and energy security.
Dawes began her career 30 years ago as an offshore engineer for BP. She went on to leadership roles in engineering, project management, technology and digital transformation.
As a chartered chemical engineer, her first job was focused on effluent control – “cleaning the wastewater before it gets discharged into the sea” – at BP’s Forties platform, 110 miles east of Aberdeen.
Dawes later switched to the consultancy side of engineering, taking a series of technical and leadership jobs in high-hazard industries and managing large capital projects. She spent 10 years at Centrica, including roles as a project manager in Norway and in customer-facing roles, which involved leading a team of more than 1,200 customer-facing staff and successfully delivering 11m customer visits per year.
“The role that was key to me was when I came back from Norway and I was a capital projects director at Centrica for their upstream division,” she says. “The job really helped me to grow as a leader. It was a very large team, multi-site and with a capital project budget of over a billion pounds a year.
“Then I went to Centrica’s British Gas division, which helped me grow in ways that I didn’t expect. You realise that the role isn’t just a technical or management challenge – there are real people at the end of what you do. Getting a bit more customer-focused and realising that we’re serving people here in the UK and that it’s not just about the balance sheet and the P&L [profit and loss] was very important for me in terms of my growth.”
Like many people in her position who have worked in the oil and gas industry, Dawes had “a desire to respond to climate change” and decided that her next job would either involve being part of building “essential infrastructure in the UK” or “going back to my roots in chemical engineering and seeing what I could do in terms of net-zero”.
She chose the latter and in 2019 joined the Aberdeen-based NZTC as Solution Centre Director, collaborating with industry to develop the technology required to move to net-zero emissions by 2050.
The organisation was created in 2017 as part of the Aberdeen City Region Deal, with £180m of UK and Scottish government funding and the aim of becoming “the go-to technology centre” for the North Sea energy industry. To date, it has co-invested £430m in nearly 350 research and technology development projects.
Even though NZTC is based in Aberdeen, the organisation works locally, nationally and internationally with universities such as Strathclyde and Durham; energy majors such as BP, Equinor, Shell, Centrica and National Grid; energy supply chain companies like Subsea7, Siemens and SLB; and European partners such as Kellas Midstream, Port of Rotterdam, ESB and Storegga.
As a result of NZTC’s work, nearly 60 technologies have been commercialised and its TechX Accelerator programme has accelerated 69 clean energy start-ups. In the process, it has created and safeguarded 1,500 jobs in north-east Scotland.
“In conjunction with industry, who match funds with the government funding NZTC receives, we help early developers prove up their technology,” says Dawes. “Our focus is twofold: aiding industries in reducing carbon emissions and advancing clean energy innovations. This encompasses a broad spectrum, from validating hydrogen electrolysers to deploying robots for offshore ventures, and exploring how alternative fuels can be effective in existing engines.
“We want to make sure that we’re contributing to the global issue around resolving net-zero – because it is a global issue. When I travel around the world, everyone wants a centre like ours, which is a combination of government, industry and academia working together to get technology proven, adopted by industry and scaled as quickly as possible.
“There is a certain excitement that comes with being at the forefront of technology innovation. We’re involved across the entire spectrum, from someone with a good idea to helping a company build a prototype and working with a university’s expertise to validate it scientifically or technologically.
“There is a real satisfaction that comes from helping solutions progress to the deployment stage. This includes technology readiness level seven to nine, where we demonstrate the functionality of the technology in operation in a real-world setting.”
As well as overseeing NZTC’s strategic direction, innovation and management, Dawes sees projects firsthand, such as a project led jointly by Edinburgh company Mocean Energy and Aberdeen intelligent energy management specialists Verlume to power subsea equipment with wave power and subsea energy storage.
Another current project is the Hydrogen Backbone Link, an ambitious collaboration to scope out and build a pipeline to stimulate hydrogen production and provide storage and supply of green hydrogen to the UK and Europe.
“Some of the ideas are so fantastic. Not only are they going to significantly benefit the economy; they are going to abate millions of tonnes of CO2e,” says Dawes. “If we can accelerate our move towards using some of this technology, it not only helps us reduce emissions in the quest for net-zero but gives us export potential.
“Back in 2021, the International Energy Agency said that to get to net-zero, probably 50 per cent of the effort lay with technology which was not yet commercialised. Whilst this has now come down to 35 per cent, there is still a long way to go. The UK needs to play to its strengths, lean into it and see closing this gap as an opportunity. ”
As well as her CEO role at NZTC, Dawes is a non-executive board member of FirstGroup and an advisory board member for the Association of Black and Minority Engineers.
She has won a host of awards for her contribution to business, was selected as one of 100 Women to Watch in the Cranfield FTSE Board Report of 2017, and in 2021 was recognised by TE:100 as one of the Women of the Energy Transition. When she first started working as an engineer, there weren’t many women in the sector, and she is passionate about encouraging more women and girls to pursue STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) careers.
“It’s good when you can give one-to-one support and advice to people,” she says. “If someone says ‘I want a job that pays well, where you get to travel and do lots of stuff’, I say ‘engineering is the job for you’.
“Engineering is a fantastic profession, but if teachers like Dr Croft and Miss Eve Sheldon, my chemistry teacher at Warwick Park School in Peckham, hadn’t helped me, I wouldn’t be here at NZTC. My life was transformed by education and the kindness of others.”
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