A Shale Oil CEO’s Second Act: Going Green

livemint.com:

For almost a decade, Tony Sanchez III was the epitome of a shale-boom CEO—furiously drilling oil wells, piling on debt and hunting quail and nilgai with fellow executives near his family’s ranch in South Texas. Then tumbling oil prices and heavy debt helped send his company, Sanchez Energy, into bankruptcy in 2019.

Now Sanchez is starting a second act as a CEO, but not in oil and gas. Instead, like many of his peers, he is joining a new-energy boom—this one in climate-friendly businesses that range from building solar farms and manufacturing sustainable jet fuel to cleaning up emissions generated from the use of coal, gas or oil.

In the latest sign of the shifting energy landscape, the annual United Nations climate summit, which ended last week in Dubai, for the first time called for a transition away from fossil fuels as well as a tripling of renewable power capacity in order to keep global warming in check. Sanchez’s new company, OneNexus, is offering what he calls life insurance for oil wells—policies that pay out money needed to shut down and cap wells after they expire.

Currently, many struggling oil-and-gas companies abandon their wells without capping them, leading to tens of thousands of so-called orphan wells that leak methane—a potent greenhouse gas—as well as other toxic fumes. After the bankruptcy, “I was thinking about what I wanted to do as the next phase [of my career], including getting back into oil and gas," Sanchez says from a Houston office where visitors are greeted by a photo of a red-and-white oil rig in front of an enormous full moon.