Bret Kugelmass
We're here today with Jennifer Hiller, who's a reporter at The Wall Street Journal. And one of her focuses is on energy, so thank you so much for taking the time to join us.

Jennifer Hiller
Thanks so much for having me on.

Bret Kugelmass
Yes. So before we get into the present day topics, we'd love to get to know you a little bit. Tell us, where did you grow up?

Jennifer Hiller
I am in Houston actually, in the Wall Street Journal offices here and we all focus on energy. We've got people, obviously, in other parts of the world who cover energy as well, but most of the Houston team is primarily energy-focused, either in utilities or oil and gas.

Bret Kugelmass
And where are you from originally?

Jennifer Hiller
Oh, I'm from Houston.

Bret Kugelmass
You're from Houston, too.

Jennifer Hiller
Yes.

Bret Kugelmass
And what was it like there? Anything about that area that kind of led you down the space of becoming a reporter?

Jennifer Hiller
I'm not sure if it's anything about Houston in particular. I definitely grew up in a newspaper reading family, so that helped, I think, set me on the path.

Bret Kugelmass
And when did you decide to make that your career?

Jennifer Hiller
I guess in college. I changed my major - like everybody does - probably four or five times in college, but I started off in journalism and then circled back around to it, I guess by my junior year. In high school that's what I had wanted to do.

Bret Kugelmass
All the way back to high school.

Jennifer Hiller
Yeah.

Bret Kugelmass
And did it come from a love of love of writing specifically? A love of reading, maybe just that creative part of your brain?

Jennifer Hiller
I think both both reading and writing.

Bret Kugelmass
And the topics that you covered, let's say post-university...what was the range there?

Jennifer Hiller
Oh, my goodness. I was all over the map in terms of what I covered. I started off at small newspapers and so I did a lot of local politics, local governments, and state government. I was an education reporter for three years. I covered real estate for several years. But I definitely had some sort of small town beats as a young reporter where you just covered whatever was going on, if it was an accident or something with the school or a murder trial or just whatever was happening.

Bret Kugelmass
Different topics... does it require different writing style in fact? Do you have to change up how you present the case to the audience?

Jennifer Hiller
I don't think so. I mean, I think on some topics maybe you have to work a little bit harder to find your audience or just to explain things. But I think if you write- if you've got a good story and a good topic, I think people will read it. I don't know. I'm the kind of reader that I will just- I'll pick up anything and if it's well done, then I'll stick with it and learn something.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah. And you're talking about even through like books and everything?

Jennifer Hiller
Yeah, I think so.

Bret Kugelmass
What about the different publications? When you come- when you go from one publication to another. Actually, we'd love to hear- I know you spent some time at the San Antonio Express. Was that where the majority of your early career was?

Jennifer Hiller
Yes, I spent several years there and I covered real estate for a while. Then I switched over to energy coverage, actually, when the Eagle Ford shale became really big. And that would have been- I think, I probably started covering oil and gas around 2011. And it was mostly because there was an oil boom going on South of town and nobody knew what was going on down there. So they pulled me off of real estate and- because I had done one story about how all the hotel rooms were booked and people were sleeping in their trucks and on the mattresses of boarding house floors and things like that, because there was so much work in South Texas and you could not find an apartment or house or hotel. And so I had done this one story just about, gee, this is crazy. All these people trying to work in South Texas and nowhere to stay. And so that's how I ended up covering oil and gas, because my editor said, Great, just go down there and keep writing stories.

Bret Kugelmass
That's cool. I remember during the later shale boom in like North Dakota and everything, I remember reading similar stories, like exorbitant rates for lodging, but I never understood that. Because why wouldn't then a bunch of people that had like mobile homes just drive them, drop them off, and rent them for 1,000 bucks a month or something?

Jennifer Hiller
Well, that happened in a lot of places. And that certainly happened in South Texas. And it happened- you can see it in kind of all the shale fields in West Texas and eastern New Mexico. But it takes time, so there's just this lag. But absolutely, you saw people who- even people who might have a couple of acres of property who- I met families who had- they would take an acre, two of it, clear it, get the utilities out there, and basically create this pop-up RV park. But you couldn't find- I mean, people were buying FEMA trailers. You could not- you could almost not find stuff fast enough to put it down there. And a lot of the communities had- these are very rural communities where maybe the largest town is somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 people, so there's not a lot of hotels. Some of these counties that saw a lot of oil and gas activity, you might have a couple of hotels or one hotel or something in the entire county. So there's just physically nowhere to put people. A lot of rural communities - and I think this is probably in the case in a lot of areas - they don't have enough housing as it is. And then you send a bunch of people there, so it can be a strange- energy's a strange thing for those communities.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay, so you switched over to oil and gas because of that. Was there a steep learning curve just kind of getting all the vernacular down?

Jennifer Hiller
Yes, I think so. Yeah, I think there's a learning curve for energy. Definitely. And I remember talking to my editor about that saying, I'm going to be on a learning curve here. And the response was, Well, you picked up real estate right away, you won't have a problem. And I thought, Oh, this is gonna be a disaster. I'm gonna do this for a few months and then I'm just gonna go get another job somewhere else.

Bret Kugelmass
But you stuck with it.

Jennifer Hiller
But I stuck with it. I ended up really liking it a lot. But it is- it ended up being a really fun thing to write about and learn about. Energy is just a really dynamic industry.

Bret Kugelmass
It's so funny, just the way you brought that up with your editor, because I feel like I have that conversation a lot, too, like with an employee. They'll be like, Okay, there's gonna be a steep- I'm warning you, there's going to be a steep learning curve. And then my response is always like, I hired you because you're smart. You'll figure it out, stop bothering me. It sounds like-

Jennifer Hiller
Yeah, I think that was my editor's responses was just, That's your job, you're a reporter. Go. We should be able to drop you in anywhere. And truly, if you're smart and if you're- yeah, most people can find their way around.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, exactly. Okay, so then how did oil and gas turn into broader energy? What were some of the other topics that you had to cover? And how did that progress?

Jennifer Hiller
I think the energy space has just changed and become so much more dynamic the last couple of years. You have all different kinds of companies making investments in energy and there's just a lot of focus on renewables and the energy transition and where all different kinds of companies get energy or other types of companies fit into the mix going forward. I feel like there are a lot of conversations happening more broadly about energy in a way that maybe weren't being talked about five or 10 years ago. And it seemed like- it seemed like different parts of the energy business were a little bit more siloed before and now you see oil and gas companies making renewables investments or there's a lot of talk about things like pairing hydrogen with wind, which is kind of a pairing of an oil and gas type area with renewable. I think there's a lot of crossover.

Bret Kugelmass
I guess over the years, you've probably interviewed a bunch of executives in the oil and gas space. And then kind of just seeing how the positioning of these companies has changed to more of adopting clean energy technologies in their portfolio as well, as you just mentioned. Have you seen kind of like a change in tune from people that you know and that you've been talking to for a decade? Have you just like watched them and be like, Wow, I never would have expected you to say that.

Jennifer Hiller
You know, yes and no. I think at the heart of it, oil and gas companies are going to keep producing oil and gas. I think that maybe the biggest change has been coming from investors forcing the conversation of what are your emissions? And how are you lowering those emissions? And those conversations, I feel like, have changed a lot, where not very many years ago, if an oil and gas company - or really any company - was putting out a carbon report, that was kind of a big deal. And then I feel like every year you see companies spending more and more time publicly talking about their footprint or attempts to lower their footprint. And not just on emissions, but on water use and other things. And so I feel like that's just entered the conversation in a very different way. And maybe a few years ago, I think for a lot of companies, it was kind of oh yeah, on their slide deck maybe at the very end. If they had a couple of slides about environmental topics or about emissions and carbon reporting, that was probably considered a lot or they were maybe kind of out there compared to some of their other colleagues. And now it's very routine, I think. But I mean at the heart of it, I don't know how much you're gonna see companies actually change their trajectory of what their core business is, but I think there's definitely an acknowledged that there's sort of a different world that we're living in.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah. And just in terms of like the type of reporting that you do, is it always- does it always have to start with like this event happened? Or do you have the freedom to explore a broader thesis and just write about a topic more broadly?

Jennifer Hiller
I mean we do a mix of coverage. There are always events in journalism. There's always, some kind of event that will spur a story and breaking news will happen that you have to respond to. But usually the better stories are the ones where people have spent a little bit of time thinking about it or you found data or sometimes you hear things maybe here and there in different conversations. And those tend to be, I think, the more fun stories to read, for readers, and to write as well, or maybe something that people haven't thought about before.

Bret Kugelmass
Absolutely. Tell me about the transition to the Wall Street Journal.

Jennifer Hiller
I joined this summer and it's been great. It's been kind of my own personal energy transition, because I'm doing more renewables and utilities coverage, which I have done some have in the past, but that hasn't been my main focus. And so that's been really fun actually, to kind of get to dive in more on a different part of the energy system. And everything is so wrapped up and tangled up together. Nothing is really an island. But I've been doing my own energy transition.

Bret Kugelmass
That's super cool. And does that come from editorial direction? How much of anything that you write about comes from you pitching an idea versus the editor saying this is something we want to look into?

Jennifer Hiller
We do a lot of both of those. There's a lot of discussion always with your editor about things that you're seeing, things that they're seeing, about just where good stories might be. But it's very, I guess, collaborative kind of process. It's pretty rare to just start writing and working on something without at least bouncing it off of your editor. My editor is great and has been editing energy a long time and so you usually- I always want to bounce things off of him and have that discussion, because he's got great ideas and a good perspective on questions that we might want to ask.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, that's awesome. And then how does it work - just for my own personal edification - when I see one author on an article versus several authors? How is the work chopped up and divided? It's like, you write this paragraph, you write this paragraph? Or do you have to get on a whiteboard and brainstorm? What's happening there?

Jennifer Hiller
Usually, we're just dropping- we're either emailing each other or we're dropping things into a shared document. And it's more a function of-

Bret Kugelmass
And who sets the narrative?

Jennifer Hiller
Usually- I mean, whoever the lead byline is the person who's pulled the most together-

Bret Kugelmass
Literally the order, it's the order of just whatever names are up there.

Jennifer Hiller
Yeah, in general. Usually, the lead byline has done more work. But yeah, it's not a super formal process of you write this part, I'll write this part. It's more either you're dividing and conquering to get something done quickly or people have different areas of expertise a lot of times. So maybe I know something about a project that's happening in the US and I pair up with somebody in London who can provide what's going on in the UK and Europe. And so you're just coming at it with different sourcing and kind of that different perspective and then working it together. And the editors are always helpful with that as well.

Bret Kugelmass
Speaking of collaborating with London, one of the articles that you wrote that I gravitated towards was on the UK's trend towards adding more nuclear. Nuclear is a topic that we've been trying to explore, because we think it's like kind of unfairly disparaged and just such like a critical tool in the clean energy transition, so we try to give it extra coverage. I'm wondering, do you have the same impression that nuclear isn't reported on as much? And what gave you kind of the confidence to like start writing on it?

Jennifer Hiller
Yeah, I think- you know, it might be slightly under covered compared to other forms of energy. I've heard that. I have definitely heard that comment from people, that they feel like it doesn't get as much attention. But I think there's been so much growth in other areas that- when it's wind and solar have been really booming and you hear a lot about difficulties either in coal mining or coal plants. I mean, there have definitely been some narratives that have been very dominant in the power industry for the last several years. And so, I don't know, maybe nuclear is just there plugging along or having plant enclosures hasn't gotten the same level of attention. I don't know. It's an interesting space. And it's interesting to see, maybe if things are getting reconsidered or if people are pursuing projects in a different way. Because it does- when you look at the outlook for nuclear, it's just kind of this flat-ish line that maybe goes up kind of a little tick globally.

Bret Kugelmass
I know, that's a real problem.

Jennifer Hiller
Yeah. I mean, that's probably why. If it hasn't gotten as many stories or maybe the stories haven't gotten as much traction, then it might just be that that's not where a lot of investment dollars have gone recently. I don't know. That's a good question.

Bret Kugelmass
And then with the nuclear stories that you've written, what's the origin? How did you decide to write on them? But what about it got you personally interested?

Jennifer Hiller
That's such a hard question, because I don't often think about why am I writing this story? Usually, it's just something that catches our attention that we find, just being new and different.

Bret Kugelmass
How does it catch your attention? Are people writing into the paper like, I'm curious about this? Or is another journalist calling you up and saying, I'm hearing this, what do you think? How does it catch your attention?

Jennifer Hiller
Sometimes. I mean, we get tips on stories quite a lot. There's kind of a whole industry that pitches stories to us and so you do have kind of a river of emails coming in with story ideas or source suggestions and things like that. So some is from stuff like that. Other things are just in conversation with sources and analysts who will mention something, but I think there's an audience certainly out there for stories about nuclear.

Bret Kugelmass
Oh I couldn't agree more.

Jennifer Hiller
I does have some hardcore fans. It's got a hardcore fan base.

Bret Kugelmass
It's got some hardcore fan base. Unfortunately, it's like- boy. I mean, we've been interviewing people about the nuclear sector for quite a while now and I've got some mixed feelings on some of the hardcore fans. I think their instinct is correct, but actually, in many cases, their arguments are incorrect or like inconsistent with a broader- whatever their broader focuses. But I think that hardcoreness stems from the fact that some people naturally intuit that you can do so much with so little when it comes to nuclear energy, right? It's got like 3 million times the energy density advantage of fossil fuels, 1,000 times less material than renewables on a per energy basis. So I think people know that and then they get frustrated and then that frustration manifests itself in different form factors.

Jennifer Hiller
Yeah, I guess so. It's definitely an interesting part of the energy industry. And, like you said, there are definitely a lot of hardcore believers. There are a lot of hardcore detractors. It's got some real positives and real negatives and those seem to really polarize people, I think, in different ways.

Bret Kugelmass
Well then the media should love it.

Jennifer Hiller
It does make it interesting.

Bret Kugelmass
Okay, cool. And I mean, is this a topic that- so you've written a couple articles on it so far that I've really enjoyed. Is this a topic that you think you'll continue to cover moving forward, as well? Are there other ideas that are being floated by your desk?

Jennifer Hiller
Yeah, we've got other stories in the works on nuclear that I can't get into in immense detail, but it's definitely an ongoing area. I think it'll be an ongoing area of coverage. Definitely.

Bret Kugelmass
And then what about just kind of more broadly the clean energy space? Are there other- I mean, I hear a lot about hydrogen. I hear a lot about different types of storage - not battery storage, but all sorts of other interesting ideas. Are these coming across your desk more and more as well? And how do you go about looking into them? If it's like futuristic? If there's not something really happening yet, it's an idea. Maybe it's a startup throwing some money or something. How do you go about writing a lot?

Jennifer Hiller
This is, I think, one of the most difficult areas of being a reporter, because there are so many smart people out there doing cool things and founding companies that have these just wildly creative ideas. And trying to sort out what's real or what's possible or what's likely to go towards adoption is really hard. So this is something that I struggle with, personally, all the time. Because there's a lot of neat ideas and solutions out there. And it's really hard to figure out what could be scaled to be commercial or who has the right kind of backing. I think you see this in oil and gas as well. A lot of times people have really great ideas for mitigating methane. And it sounds really neat, but in practice, who is going to let you on their remote oilfield site to try it out? Who is going to let you test it on their multibillion dollar refinery? And that's a much harder- trying to get some of this stuff tested out in the real world is really difficult. But there is so much there. There is so much incredible tech going on right now.

Bret Kugelmass
I'm glad you brought up that one. I mean, I remember- it's something that- I know it gets reported on every now and then, but I feel like there's still so many unknowns. I remember- I used to run a drone company and we would have people approach us and say, Hey, can you mount a methane sensor and fly over our pipelines? I'm like, Why? And they're like, Well, we actually don't know how much we emit. And I'm like, Oh, that's a problem. Because it's like, I think the threshold for when methane becomes worse than burning CO2 is like at the 3% leakage mark, like might as well not even use natural gas if you're leaking more than 3%. And I think they're reporting like 2% or whatever, but like it's more like 6%. So it's like, can we figure this out?

Jennifer Hiller
Right. And the drones paired with pipelines I think is one of- I've seen some companies out there doing that for several years now. That seems like just a really smart use. And you don't get into that issue of flying my drone over your billion dollar piece of equipment that you don't want it going down a smokestack or whatever the attorneys for your big industrial facility would dream up in terms of things to be worried about, whereas, yeah, flying that pipeline route with a drone to check for leaks seems like a really good pairing that is a realistic one, too, right? But it makes a lot of sense for everybody.

Bret Kugelmass
Beyond what you're reporting on, but just kind of like your general- because given how much you read and how much you talk to people and how much you write, you must have a special mental framework for where you see energy going in general. Do you have any just unique insights that maybe aren't fully fleshed out, but that are trends that just, beyond your reporting, that the public should be thinking about?

Jennifer Hiller
For where I think energy is going?

Bret Kugelmass
Just in general, like unique ideas. Like if I were to take six months to just really dig into something, here would be the topic.

Jennifer Hiller
Ooh, okay. That's a good question. I think I hear so much stuff about energy and read so much stuff about energy, this is gonna sound really probably quite dull. But one of the things that I always think is just that we have this amazingly complex energy system and how fast we can change that is really a big question. There's a lot of talk about how we're going to make this big transformation and kind of overturn the way that we use energy and the way that we interact with energy. It's one of those that I think the more you know about how energy works, you realize it's really hard to just upend the existing system that it's entrenched and it's been there for 100 years. And to just change all of the inputs from one thing to another are going to be- that's a bumpy process.

Bret Kugelmass
Yeah, that's not 10 years. That's 100 years.

Jennifer Hiller
Yeah. And so that's, I think one of the overarching things that-

Bret Kugelmass
That's such a great insight, actually, because this is a frustration I've personally had when I hear about people talking about- I mean, okay, fine, whatever. You're going to create clean electricity, great. Electricity is only a quarter of the carbon emissions. It's one thing if you just want to clean electricity. Okay, great, I think you can do it. But then when it comes to decarbonizing everything else, if your goal is actually climate change, we need to be thinking just as much about that. And I don't like the line like, Oh well, we'll just electrify everything. Because I don't think that people realize how entrenched industrial processes are. And it's hard enough for a chemical company to move from like this one thing that they've been doing, like you said, for 100 years, even a slight variation of that, and be willing to take the capital risk and be willing to- who knows what downstream it'll affect. And so I don't like the rhetoric of, Well, we'll just electrify everything. And I don't think enough thought is being put into if we really do have to move things quickly, what are totally different strategies that we can employ to do that?

Jennifer Hiller
Yeah. Because there is, I mean, there's definitely a huge push towards electrification. It kind of seems like every industry is trying to electrify in different ways. Stuff is changing and changing fairly rapidly, probably more rapidly than it has changed in many decades. But it also implies a lot of infrastructure on that electricity side that may or may not be. That's going to be difficult to update. And then you've got every- you've got so many countries either trying to kind of update their existing system or developing countries that are building out the demand on companies that are supplying things like renewable power or cables and transmission lines is really overwhelming.

Bret Kugelmass
Has anyone done the analysis on that? Just like, if we did electrify everything and then had to build all these electric lines - let's just wave a magic wand and assume that the technology work - what are the other infrastructure challenges? Could we even produce enough electrical transformers in this period of time? Like that kind of stuff? Do people look at that?

Jennifer Hiller
People do break those numbers down in different ways and I think there's a lot of debate as well, among- there's a lot of debate, I think, among analysts as to basically how much more power will be needed or how we will be using that power and if you can incentivize people to use it at particular times of day when you have excess power or when power is cheaper and more abundant. And yeah, there's a lot of debate and questions about that. I have no idea.

Bret Kugelmass
As we wrap up, are there other topics that are just of keen interest to you that you're going to be looking forward to writing about?

Jennifer Hiller
Oh, my gosh, there's so much going on.

Bret Kugelmass
Tell us. Give us some of the laundry list.

Jennifer Hiller
There's not enough time for all- there's not enough time for all of the stories. One of the things that I'm currently fascinated by - and this isn't necessarily electricity focused - but all these supply chain problems that everybody's having. I know that all of those stories are kind of the same. And yet, I will read any supply chain story anybody writes about any industry for some reason. I'm very fascinated about how we- just what the pandemic has done in supply chains and how we're gonna come out of that. And just if it's gonna permanently change or speed up certain changes.

Bret Kugelmass
Can you give us- I'm personally curious about that as well. Can you just give me like the quick primer? What's going on with supply chain?

Jennifer Hiller
I mean, basically, the supply chain - which you know is the system by which we move all of the raw materials and finished products around the world - has been fouled up by the pandemic. And once it got behind, basically catching up has proven to be, it sounds like exponentially more difficult than anybody who doesn't work in logistics, I think thought that it would be.

Bret Kugelmass
What's the main issue?

Jennifer Hiller
You have- it's really everything, but it's basically the movement of people and goods. And so once that gets behind, apparently, we all have been working on this kind of just-in-time system, where- I mean, I'm in Houston. So when a hurricane is on the way, we cannot all go fill up our gas tank and buy bottled water and canned goods at the same time, because everything gets wiped out, so I think there was a little bit of that impact going on. But it's interesting when you talk to companies that are doing projects globally or are buying materials in one country, moving it to a factory in the other, they are having just intense delays at ports. If you need to send a crew of people into another country, often they are quarantined for a period of weeks. And so it slows down things like installations of wind projects in a lot of countries where you've got a lot of local labor that you can hire, but maybe you've got some folks who are specialized who have to go in to oversee that project. And so you've got crews that you're having to sort of house in another country in kind of in a hotel quarantine situation for weeks. And so this just kind of cascades through everything. It's like this giant domino effect that has gone on. And so the companies, it seems like all the companies at least that manufacture things continue to be tearing their hair out trying to figure out how to move product in. And then at the same time, transportation costs have gone up enormously and raw materials prices have gone up, so you have inflation in a lot of different segments, as well. So it's a really difficult time.

Bret Kugelmass
What are people predicting? Or are people predicting that it's just going to take years to recover from it? Or are people saying that, No, eventually it'll catch up and then we'll be back to usual. What are people saying?

Jennifer Hiller
I think this is what is so interesting, because earlier in the year, people had a lot more optimism and you heard a lot of companies talking about how, by year end this would maybe be looking a bit different. And now we're starting to get sort of warnings from companies that this is an issue that has not resolved and that they don't see resolving until at least late next year. Some companies are saying things have gotten worse, not better. And so at some point, we do go back to having a more normal flow of goods and services around the world. At some point, it does work itself out. But what we are hearing from companies right now is that it has- these issues have not resolved and aren't likely to in the next couple of quarters.

Bret Kugelmass
And is there a lesson learned from it do you think? I mean, do you think that we're gonna reflect on this and say, Okay, we need to build some more buffer into the system or even maybe the next time there's a pandemic, we have to weigh the lockdown benefits versus the cost of all of these other things that you couldn't even possibly predict and maybe not be so quick to lock down?

Jennifer Hiller
That's a good question. I'm sure there are going to be a lot of lessons learned from this. And at the same time, it's so hard to have- a couple of years ago, you wouldn't imagine that companies would be dealing with these kind of issues. So I don't know, maybe they're- I mean, certainly they're taking some sort of pandemic and emergency preparation lessons away, but maybe- who knows, maybe it will be more a lesson in flexibility or just emergency response to sort some of these things out, because I don't know how predictable these scenarios would have been.

Bret Kugelmass
I think in general I don't like how so many things operate on such a thin margin. I don't like- I feel like we do need to build- like even the hospitals with COVID and everything. Apparently they got pushed over their limits, because they were operating at the limits. What's up with that? We have all of these policies to protect us. W have national- we spend a third of our budget on national security. We don't think about resilience in logistics as a key part of our defense posture?

Jennifer Hiller
I mean, I think that just generally, probably across industries, you don't over build. Because in a normal market you would be penalized for over building and for having too much capacity. If you have a factory, you want it to be running at capacity at all times. You don't want to have extra or you don't want to have too much or too little. And so we have this kind of Goldilocks situation where just the right amount of stuff shows up everywhere at the right time. And that's what we're designed for.

Bret Kugelmass
It's just like- man, because it's like our banking system, they're mandated by the law to keep a certain amount of reserves. You can imagine for ports being critical infrastructure the government just says, Well, we'll help you out. But you gotta keep 10% reserve always or something. You know what I'm saying? I feel like there's a way to deal with this.

Jennifer Hiller
I'm sure there are very, very smart people who are trying to do that right now.

Bret Kugelmass
Cool. Well, I look forward to reading what you write about it in the future. So on that note, Jennifer Hiller, thank you so much for joining us today. Really enjoyed the conversation.

Jennifer Hiller
Thanks so much. I appreciate being here.