INSIDER MAGAZINE: Fresh from merger success, Woodside Energy’s Meg O’Neill ready for even bigger challenge

It makes sense that the woman who now heads up one of the world’s largest energy companies used to dream of working on big things as a child. On the back of closing off a mega deal to add BHP’s petroleum assets to Woodside, and in the process creating a $60 billion oil and gas giant, Meg O’Neill may have got more than she bargained for. But she’s relishing the opportunity to lead the new Woodside Energy, which ranks among the top 10 global independent energy companies by production with operations spanning from Australia to the US Gulf of Mexico, Canada, Myanmar, and Trinidad and Tobago. In her role as chief executive — a position she’s been in less than a year — O’Neill now oversees a global workforce of 4700 people, including an additional 100 staff in Perth. But O’Neill has always been good at managing numbers. Growing up as the eldest of three studious siblings in Boulder, Colorado, she found her passion in maths and science at school. “My dad was an engineer. I thought, that seems like a way to build on my passion . . . and do something that would be a job where I could create things and add value, and use my skills to drive progress,” she tells Insider. “He worked on different scale stuff than I wanted to work on. I studied chemical engineering and ocean engineering (at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) because I wanted to work on big things, and he worked on phone systems, which are small things. “But technical creativity and the ability to see the world and make an impact was something that he valued that inspired me.” A chance to reset Weeks after one of the biggest accomplishments of her career so far, O’Neill is rightly basking in the success of the tie-up with BHP. She is spreading the message of the new Woodside Energy — “to provide the low-cost, lower-carbon energy our world needs” — in Houston, Texas. Her days are busy with meeting the new team, investors and external stakeholders. It is satisfying work. Having thrown herself into the technical side of the merger for the better part of the year, ironing out approvals process and integration planning, O’Neill has finally arrived at the fun part. “It’s fantastic to get to the point where we can start acting as one company and delivering the results that we expect we can achieve,” she says. “The merger ... really does give us a chance to reset who we are as a company. “We’ve got a much bigger global reach, we’ve a more diversified portfolio, and with the merger we’re bringing together two extraordinarily talented teams, so I look forward to seeing what we can do with the power of the two teams combined.” Unexpected homecoming Incidentally, Houston is also where the chief executive started her career in 1994 as a research engineer at ExxonMobil. She has lived there, on and off, for about 12 years. “It’s a bit of a homecoming as well,” O’Neill says, speaking from the energy capital of the world. Did she ever imagine she would return to Houston in the position she holds now? “Probably not.” In addition to the BHP merger, since taking over the reins from Peter Coleman in August last year O’Neill has also helped secure the approval of the $US12b ($16b) Scarborough gas project off WA’s North West. All this at a time when public calls for action on climate change have reached fever pitch, with activists demanding oil and gas companies halt production of fossil fuels to meet fast approaching emissions reduction targets. Woodside is on the frontline — even more so after picking up $27b worth of BHP’s oil and gas assets. The company copped a big protest vote against its climate plan at its annual general meeting last month when 49 per cent of the shareholder vote rejected the blueprint. If climate challenges on the home front were not challenging enough, O’Neill has also had to navigate the turmoil in global energy markets being driven by the war in Ukraine. Like other global energy producers, Woodside is treading a fine line between balancing the needs of fuel-hungry customers while attempting to appease demands from green-minded groups and shareholders. From the outside, it would appear that her tenure in the position so far has been nothing short of a baptism of fire. But O’Neill, who has experienced her fair share of market shocks, believes it is just part and parcel of working in the volatile energy industry. It’s not the first rodeo for O’Neill. She has 28 years experience in oil and gas and has worked in a range of countries including Canada, Norway and Indonesia. O’Neill was recruited to Woodside as chief operations officer by her predecessor, Coleman, in May 2018 following a 23-year stint with Exxon. “Over the course of my career there have been a number of highs and lows, and there have been points in time where we were really kind of tightening our belts,” she says. “Only a few years ago when oil prices and gas prices dropped to record lows, we were wondering whether or not we’d be able to kind of get through the period, and now prices are obviously in a much higher situation. “But as we lead organisations in this kind of industry, we have to think about the long-term and just have that steady approach through the highs and lows.” Travel bug O’Neill and her brothers were all academically-oriented, a trait they inherited from their parents, and sporty. “They probably viewed me as the bossy big sister but I thought I was just kind of helping manage the family,” she says. Her mother held a masters in communications and went on to do in-house journalism for large American companies, while her father worked as an electrical engineer before becoming an entrepreneur. He had more than 20 patents to his name. Along with sharing her father’s love of creating, O’Neill’s other big passion in life is travel. She’s done so much of it she can’t remember how many countries she has visited. “I haven’t counted,” she admits. O’Neill does a lot of it for work, especially now that the world has reopened. But spending most of her business trips in big cities means that when she travels for leisure, it is often to places that are off the beaten track. Two of her favourite trips have been hiking adventures: one to the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, in the Eastern Himalayas, and the other to Patagonia, which straddles Argentina and Chile on the southernmost tip of South America. “Just getting out, getting into nature or getting some fresh air, being somewhere with no cell service, you know, really being able to disconnect — I value that,” she says. The pandemic has seen her spend more time exploring Australia over the past two years. O’Neill says she loved visiting the mining town of Kalgoorlie, and getting out to Uluru. She endeavours to travel with her wife, Vicky Hayes, and their 19-year-old daughter when she can. But her daughter’s studies at Curtin University take priority, O’Neill says, and trips are booked around her. The family have put down solid roots in Perth since moving back from the US four years ago. They share a love of music, with O’Neill on the board of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, and anything sports-related. “We go to the Dockers and the West Coast Fever as often as we can,” O’Neill says. Like other Fremantle supporters, she has been excited by a stellar performance from the Dockers this season. O’Neill admits that while she hasn’t booked flights yet to Melbourne in September — partly because she has more work trips around that time — she will be watching closely and “may have to adjust” her plans if it looks like the Dockers are in with a shot at the grand final. “It’s been really quite a cracking season thus far and it’s great to see them have success after a few years of building up this young group of players that they have now,” she says. O’Neill also enjoys playing sport herself, although the demands of the job mean she has less time for it than she used to. She plays netball, favouring defensive positions like goal keeper or goal defence, and heads to the gym. Work, exercise and spending time with her wife and daughter is a balancing act, she says, but “it is important to balance that investment in yourself with the investment in the company”. “With a global business, the draws of the job are increasing, but again, you’ve got to maintain that balance of work and personal,” she adds. Level 29 On her very first day as acting chief executive, O’Neill opened up the exclusive 29th floor — usually reserved for the CEO and their direct reports — at Woodside’s Mia Yellagonga headquarters to all employees. While confessing she “hasn’t been flooded by visitors” — yet — O’Neill says the symbolism of having an open and transparent workplace was important to her. “It’s symbolic more than anything, people knowing that if they have something they want to connect with their senior leaders about or concerns that they want to raise, then they can do it.” Asked what she wants her legacy at Woodside to be, O’Neill says it is to leave the company stronger than when she found it. That includes the success of the business but also the company’s culture. “Obviously as an energy provider, we’ve got two really important tasks that we need to accomplish: one is to help meet the world’s need for energy today, but secondly is to help provide lower carbon energy for the world in the future,” O’Neill says. “I want the business to be well positioned on both of those fronts. “From a cultural perspective, we need to have a workplace where people are respected, valued, able to put their ideas on the table, where we have a can-do culture, where people feel empowered to get after the business and make the sort of change that we want. Those are the two priorities for me.” Empowering workers O’Neill knows all too well the importance of feeling respected and empowered at work. When she joined the workplace in the US — in the highly conservative State of Texas, no less — in the 1990s, being openly gay was frowned upon. “There was an era in the US where ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ was the approach to gays in the military and that in some ways was the approach of many corporates to gays in their workplace,” she says. “For me, my journey has been one that’s probably had its ups and downs. But one of the things that has been important to me since I joined Woodside is to be out and visible because I do recognise the importance of those visible role models. “I think it is important for me as a senior gay woman in the industry to be visible so young, queer people can look up and say, ‘look, there’s somebody like me. I should be comfortable bringing myself to work’.” Much has changed in the corporate world since then, with a growing number of large businesses now even offering paid “gender affirmation leave” for trans and gender diverse people. O’Neill says it is something Woodside will look at. She points out Woodside also has parental leave policies that are “gender-blind” with the same rights for queer families as straight families. Woodside also has a strong commitment to improving the gender balance in its workforce, something that is close to O’Neill through her membership of Chief Executive Women, which she joined in 2019, as well as lifting the representation of Indigenous and neuro-diverse people. Time to execute O’Neill says the next couple of years will be critical for Woodside to demonstrate it is serious about building out its portfolio of offerings — which include hydrogen, ammonia and solar opportunities — and executing plans it has committed to. Among those plans is H2Perth, a proposal to establish a world-scale hydrogen and ammonia production facility on 130ha of vacant industrial land in Kwinana, south of Perth. At full capacity, H2 could produce up to 1500 tonnes per day of hydrogen for export in the form of ammonia and liquid hydrogen. O’Neill says Woodside’s role is two-fold: ensuring it is reducing its emissions over time and offering oil and gas customers products that will allow them to decarbonise their own businesses. The company is targeting net zero by 2050 or sooner. “Australia has been blessed with tremendous resource endowments ... and can play a very important role in helping address climate change, not just within Australia but for the nations that buy our gas today and will buy our gas into the future,” O’Neill says. “I think one of the things that we’ve seen with Ukraine is that realisation that energy security is important and where you are getting your energy from is important.” But in the clean energy transition, O’Neill emphasises the latter word should not be overlooked. “We can’t abruptly go from A to B, which is what we’re seeing played out on the east coast to some degree,” she says. “We’ve got to be measured and managed in how we go through the change, otherwise the prices are going to continue to be quite challenging for many consumers and that’s not a good outcome for anybody.”