Former BP Exec Cynthia Warner Left Big Oil for Big Algae - And She's Not Alone

How a high-ranking veteran of BP was won over by the potential of pond scum.

BY Anya Kamenetz | July 1, 2010

ABOUT-FACE: Former BP refining chief Cynthia Warner, now president of Sapphire Energy, decided "it was better to create the key to the future than to nurse along the dying past." | Photograph by Noah Webb

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Biorefinery, 2018: Sapphire Energy plans to produce renewable "green crude" from algae grown in open pools in the New Mexico desert. | Courtesy of Sapphire Energy

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Cynthia Warner was in Morocco on April 20 celebrating International Earth Day, when a friend emailed her with the news:
An explosion at a BP oil well off the Louisiana coast had killed 11 men and ruptured a pipeline almost a mile underwater, sending waves of crude into the Gulf of Mexico. "My first thoughts were for the people who died and the men there witnessing it and the horror of all that," she says. "My heart sank. This is the kind of nightmare that everyone works hard to prevent from every angle."

Warner, known as CJ, has a more informed perspective on this species of nightmare than most observers. As the former head of global refining for BP, she was one of Big Oil's highest-ranking woman executives until she abandoned petroleum to become president of Sapphire Energy in 2009. "I was never directly involved in drilling," she says. "I couldn't represent myself as an expert on this." But as efforts to halt the spill failed, phone calls, text messages, and emails from the network Warner built during her 28 years in the oil business kept her in touch with what she calls the "huge drama underneath the surface -- all the technical people who are working night and day, trying to figure out what to do. This one is really tough because it's extremely deep water." In such challenging situations, "it is just so much harder to resolve any problems that arise."

And that difficulty, she says, was at the heart of her decision to leave Big Oil. "They have to drill this deep because it's getting harder and harder to find new sources of oil. The harder you work to find additional crude, the more environmental impact there is. What this does from a big perspective is illustrate the urgency of continuing to work to get solutions that are more in harmony with the earth's cycles and more controllable."

Warner is not the only former BP executive to have come to this conclusion. For more than a decade, the company's award-winning "Beyond Petroleum" campaign, with that heartwarming sunburst logo, seemed to promise a future of planet-friendly energy. Although alternative energy remained a very small part of BP's business, that campaign may have succeeded all too well in raising expectations inside the company -- expectations that were frustrated as new CEO Tony Hayward backed away from the clean-energy positioning. "Former colleagues of mine are all over renewables," says Warner. Among them: John Melo of Amyris, Janet Roemer of Verenium, Mark Niederschulte of Ineos Bio, Richard Wilson of Cobalt Technologies, Lee Edwards of Virent, and K'Lynne Johnson of Elevance Renewable Sciences. "They're the Beyond Petroleum generation," says Jim Lane, editor of Biofuels Digest, "and Warner's at the forefront of it."

The move from Big Oil to Big Algae, says Stephen Mayfield -- aka "Dr. Pond Scum," a founder of Sapphire and director of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology -- "might get CJ out of hell. She worked for, what, more than 20 years at BP and Amoco? That's what I tell her: 'CJ, keep working at this and you might not go down.' "

Two weeks after the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, with the oil still spilling into the Gulf, I meet Warner, 51, over Diet Cokes in Sapphire's modest headquarters in an ocean-side biotech office park in La Jolla, California. She is a rangy woman with a warm smile and a flat Midwestern accent who runs three miles every morning with her dog. She dresses demurely in pastels and modest jewelry, like the wife of a Western politician.

A chemical engineering major at Vanderbilt, Warner has become known for a collaborative approach to leadership even as she has fought against attempts to limit her career because of her gender. "Velvet hammer" is a phrase I hear more than once from her colleagues past and present.

"I was kind of at that front end of the women's-lib movement, where we started thinking everything is going to be equal," Warner says. "My graduating class at Vandy was 10% women. But many of them dropped out as I was going on in my career. They were perfectly capable, but you just get tired of competing and having to prove yourself for the 15-millionth time." Warner, however, was dogged. She set her sights on the oil industry, attracted by its technical challenges and by the teamwork required to get good results in such a complex business. "I wanted to know how to throw a wrench around a pipe and be able to crack a valve," she says. "I had a refinery manager tell me it was over his dead body that I'd get out in operations. It wasn't until he retired that I got out in the field." She worked her way up slowly, at refining company UOP, Amoco, and then BP. "By the time I was running the whole refining system for BP, I pretty much knew almost every job."

From Issue 147 | July 2010