• CERAWeek
  • March 18 - 22, 2024
  • About

Barbara Burger

Lazard

Senior Advisor

Barbara J. Burger, PhD., is a “recent graduate” from Chevron where she ended her time as the Vice President, Innovation and President of Chevron Technology Ventures (CTV). During her career, Burger held management positions across a number of the company’s businesses as well as a wide range of civic and industry board and advisory positions including the MIT Energy Initiative, Houston Symphony Society, Oil and Gas Climate Initiative Climate Investment LLP, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. In this new chapter, she remains focused on the big challenges in energy transition, equity, and access to education. She has been recently named as a Senior Advisor to Lazard, to the Heliogen Board of Directors, Emerald Technology Ventures Advisory Council, Greentown Labs Board of Directors, and Advisor to Syzygy Plasmonics and Epicore Biosystems. Burger is a proud alumnus of the University of Rochester where she serves on the Board of Trustees and chairs the River Campus Libraries National Council. She established the Barbara J. Burger Endowed Scholarship in the Sciences and founded the Barbara J. Burger iZone, where students generate, refine, and communicate ideas for social, cultural, community, and economic impact. At Caltech, she supports graduate women in Chemistry who aim to contribute through careers beyond academia and serves on the Strategic Advisory Board for the Resnick Sustainability Institute. Burger holds a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Rochester, a doctoral degree in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology and an academic honor MBA in finance from the University of California, Berkeley.

Sessions With Barbara Burger

Monday, 6 March

  • 02:00pm - 02:30pm (CST) / 06/mar/2023 08:00 pm - 06/mar/2023 08:30 pm

    Low-carbon Solutions versus Low-emissions Solutions

    This session will explore the role of fossil fuels in the energy mix in a net-zero world. Do fossil fuels combined with CCUS offer a pathway to move toward lower emission future? Can we bring to bear the engineering and technical skills of the oil and gas industry to reduce emissions at scale? Or do we need to decarbonize and move to renewable energy to address climate change?

Wednesday, 8 March

  • 07:15am - 08:20am (CST) / 08/mar/2023 01:15 pm - 08/mar/2023 02:20 pm

    The Role of Private Capital in Funding the Energy Transition
    Finance & Investment/Trading & Risk Management/ESG
    While public market funds run by institutional investors have been shifting allocations toward cleantech companies, they are often hamstrung by a limited universe of pure-play cleantech equities and index-tracking methodologies that limit their ability to take longer-duration bets. The real action for energy transition investors to date has been in private equity, where funds can take duration risk and have overcome liquidity limitations by successfully raising historically large funds. The pace of private equity dealmaking, which slowed in early 2022, has accelerated sharply again for cleantech since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States. How much of the pent-up private equity capital remains to be run through, and how will the even larger universe of public market investors gain access to these growing markets?
  • 03:30pm - 04:10pm (CST) / 08/mar/2023 09:30 pm - 08/mar/2023 10:10 pm

    Voices of Innovation: Reginald DesRoches
    A conversation with Barbara Burger and Reginald DesRoches.

Thursday, 9 March

  • 03:30pm - 04:10pm (CST) / 09/mar/2023 09:30 pm - 09/mar/2023 10:10 pm

    Thinking Systematically About Energy Transition
    The energy system is vast, complex and essential—a multitude of intertwined value chains that operate on a local, regional and global level with an installed infrastructure network that addresses movement across time and distance. We expect the system and the energy produced to be accessible, affordable, reliable, resilient, secure and increasingly low carbon. Ensuring the future energy system addresses these economic, environmental and equity expectations is one of the greatest challenges in our lifetime. And we expect this to happen in the next 25 years!