Baker Hughes AM Keynote Underscores Sustainable, Scalable Energy

The 2025 Baker Hughes Annual Meeting is the largest meeting to date, with more than 2,300 delegates from 85 countries from sectors beyond oil and gas, including mining, steel, aerospace, hard-to-abate sectors, and data centers.

Lorenzo Simonelli, Chairman and CEO of Baker Hughes, outlined the theme and goals of the two-day meeting in his opening keynote on Monday, Feb. 3, 2025: what's happening in the energy landscape, the challenges and opportunities, and how to meet the demands of the energy future.

What’s clear is that energy demand is increasing, as are the industry's requirements going forward. Simonelli cited factors such as the 26% increase in U.S. energy consumption by 2028, the growth of generative AI, and the increasing data center population. These factors are surrounded by the geopolitical background, new tariffs, and policy confusion: “Over 75 carbon pricing models covering 24% of CO₂ emissions globally—how do we manage this confusing environment?” Simonelli said.

According to McKinsey, over the next 30 years, $275 trillion is needed for the energy infrastructure of the future, to manage the energy development of the future. Climate change continues to be a reality: 2024 was the hottest year on record. The question remains: How do we manage these complex aspects of the energy future and achieve sustainable, affordable, and secure energy and abundance for the future?

Simonelli said it’s through sustainable energy development: “It's through efficiencies and effectiveness of how we use innovations and apply them to the energy infrastructure. It's how we go through the energy expansion, using all fuel types: oil, hydrogen, renewables, continuing to increase nuclear and gas.”

It’s the age of gas: “Gas is not a transition fuel; it is a destination fuel to ensure we have energy abundance as we go forward. Gas is sustainable, affordable, and secure and uses energy responsibly, driving efficiencies and reducing waste,” Simonelli said.

Underscoring the meeting’s theme of progress at scale and looking at a sustainable energy development plan, he said we need to take past learnings and apply them at scale. “As we look at progress at scale, it's about replicating and scaling innovations,” Simonelli said. “It's about building and integrating solutions with digital—what we've learned from the algorithms and the capabilities of preventive analytics, generative AI, and establishing and leveraging partnerships across the ecosystem of governments, companies, NGOs, and regulators, and making sure that we've got the foundations in place for going forward.”

He gave some examples of how Baker Hughes is achieving progress at scale through industry partnerships:

Well Interventions

Baker Hughes’s partnership with Shell Nigeria Exploration Co. (SNEPCo)—Rystad said by 2027, 260,000 well interventions are necessary. Through this partnership:

• Operational efficiencies enabled scope expansion from three to seven wells.
• There was an 8% cost reduction through operational efficiencies.
• The partnership saved 88% uptime during the campaign.

How do we become more efficient, how do we scale and innovate?

LNG

In LNG, the company’s 15-year partnership with Cheniere of continuous injection of technology and services innovation culminated in 2024 with a capacity of 45 million tons of LNG being produced, which is 50% of the U.S. exports of LNG.

Baker Hughes’s new partnership with Argent LNG to innovate modular LNG and the application of the LM9000.

Baker Hughes and Hanwha Power Systems, announced yesterday, are partnering on small-scale ammonia turbines for use in marine applications and beyond.

How do we magnify and take this forward?

ExxonMobil

Its partnership with ExxonMobil enabled a 300% improvement in the intervals between service requirements for critical gas turbines, going from six months to two years and saving nine days of LNG production by eliminating shutdowns and associated costs.

How do we scale that across maintenance requirements?

Digital

Baker Hughes’s digital partnerships, such as with Microsoft, are scaling innovation and integration.

In Qatar with QAFCO, applying the digital insights through Cordant, a 1.08% increase in daily ammonia production, i.e., 50 tons of incremental ammonia to enable fertilizers.

Scaling that to other places, Brascan: reduced maintenance costs, yielding a $50 million reduction in costs as well as incremental production.

Simonelli closed the keynote on a hopeful and forward-looking note: “Together, we will be able to solve the challenges of providing the energy that's required for tomorrow: affordable, sustainable, and secure. Together, we will be able to progress at scale and make sure that we're ahead of the curve and meeting the demands of tomorrow.”