The question is not easy, it's not easy because there are many characteristics that a leader must have. I believe there is one very important one: honesty and credibility. People do not do what we say they should do; they do what they see us do. And therefore, you have to be credible. I believe you have to love people, you have to trust people, you have to trust the members of the team, the people who accompany you in an organization. And that is helping them grow, encouraging them to make decisions, letting them make them, letting them make mistakes because it is the only way to learn from that culture of error. And then I believe in fostering a series of values that are, of course, responsibility, truly taking one's own decisions with courage also when things go wrong, cooperation between people, transparency. I think these are characteristics, and then it depends on the type of function you have to carry out. Well, there are many more, but I believe that a person who meets these requirements or these values will truly be a good leader.
Talking about Spain in energy today is talking about Europe because we are practically a shared space, and a large part of energy policies are defined in Europe. I believe we have a very important challenge: covering the three needs that energy requires. First, security of supply. We need energy. We cannot let happen what happened to us with Russia, where we suddenly realized we had an unreliable supplier. And we have to make sure it doesn't happen with China, where today we are building many supply chains from batteries to electric mobility, access to many scarce metals or rare earths that have supply chains in China. We need security of supply. We need to promote our own energy sources or supply chains from countries that are, let's say, close or reliable. Second, we need to make energy that is competitive, cheap, that families can afford, that companies can buy in order to have competitive industries and generate industrial jobs in Spain, in Europe, compared to those who invest in Turkey, India, or China. Therefore, energy also has to be affordable. We have to ensure that the energy sources we are betting on, people can pay for them. And then, of course, we have to do all this in a sustainable, decarbonized way so that the next generation can have access to the same resources we have had. And I believe these are the great challenges of energy for the coming times.
Well, we perhaps have an advantage that other sectors, like telecommunications or electricity, are more regulated by their nature. Of our core businesses, only a few are regulated, but they are a minority. Therefore, of course we are attentive to the indications of the public authorities, in this case European or Spanish. We are very sensitive, evidently, to the need to reduce the carbon intensity of our company and our products. And we are doing it effectively. Moreover, in our case, this often comes not from regulation but from the investors themselves who invest in Repsol, they invest with an indication that we have better sustainability parameters. And also our clients. We are now launching a product that we already have and will have in different service stations by the end of this year: 100% renewable fuels made from waste. It is a diesel that clients want to use. Therefore, we also have to be sensitive to what consumers are promoting and pushing for. So I would say regulation is a part that in many cases, and in our sector, is not fundamental, although it is important. But we have to see society, consumers, and the general social trends, where they are going, because we have to adapt to them. Otherwise, we would not accompany society.
It is important the intermediate targets we have declared and are meeting. We see a 15% reduction in what we call the carbon intensity index of the company. Ultimately, it is our own emissions plus the emissions of the products when our consumers use them. When someone uses gasoline in a car or uses other sources we produce, we are going to reduce this footprint by 15% compared to 2017, for next year, 2025, and 28% for 2030. Therefore, we have very clear compliance. All company objectives, long-term variable compensation for people, are 40% linked to this objective. That is, we are indicating to people that this is what we value. And then operationally, of course, there are multiple measures. For example, we have reduced our methane emissions by 75% in the last 5 years. How is methane emitted? Methane has an even worse impact on global warming than CO2 because, although it eventually degrades in the atmosphere, its immediate effect is eight times greater than CO2. When natural gas is produced in the world, methane is emitted. So with a lot of technology, controlling fugitive emissions, controlling flaring, with exhaustive operational control, we have reduced 75% of those emissions. In our refineries, we have reduced CO2 emissions by 35% over the last 12 years. How is this done? Because ultimately, CO2 is emitted when energy is used, when gas is burned to run industrial plants. So we are doing it with more efficient processes, investing in technology, improving operations from a technical point of view to be more efficient. Because, of course, it is not only about stopping emitting CO2, it is about stopping consuming energy and therefore being more competitive so that in Spain we have refineries with more industrial jobs than our French, Italian, or Persian Gulf competitors. So there is a pairing of competitiveness and sustainability. Also, we are increasingly using waste to produce things. For example, to produce fuels. In Cartagena, we have a plant that we started up in January, producing 250,000 tons—a lot—where we only use recycled oils, animal fats, or pyrolyzed plastics, i.e., waste, to produce a diesel that is subsequently renewable. This single plant reduces the same CO2 emissions in Spanish cars as 400,000 electric vehicles, which is the total electric vehicle fleet in Spain. So this is a contribution to that CO2 reduction. And beyond that, we are investing in technology to make synthetic fuels in the future. We have a pioneering project in Bilbao, unique in Europe, where we will produce, with hydrogen and CO2 taken from industrial streams, combining them into a hydrocarbon that will burn like gasoline or diesel but with zero emissions, because the CO2 it emits when burned is exactly the same amount that the industrial stream absorbed previously. We are entering renewable generation. We already have 3000 MW, a significant amount in operation. And today, Repsol, which is an oil and gas company—very proud of producing oil and gas because the world needs them—today, 35-40% of all our investment year after year is focused on low-carbon technologies, which is a unique case in our sector in the global industry. No other company has those levels of investment in low-carbon technologies. And we believe that is the path. We have to sustain what exists. Because someone might say 'stop producing oil.' If we want to stop producing oil tomorrow, but the only thing we would achieve in a world that still demands it is less production, prices would rise, and that would negatively impact consumers and people, and on decarbonization it would cause many industrial activities to emigrate to the global south, especially to coal, paradoxically increasing CO2 emissions. That is not the path. We have to continue doing this more responsibly, reducing the CO2 emissions we emit, and at the same time introducing other products to the consumer that no longer have a CO2 footprint. It is a difficult path but absolutely necessary. And we see it as a growth opportunity for the company.
First, invest a lot in people. By invest, I mean in training, also in following the career of people to accompany them, because ultimately it is much more practical to take care of what you have. It's like an improper simile: it's like in football, you have to take care of the youth academy, then occasionally you have to bring in a Mbappé or a [someone], but basically you have to take care of the youth academy and bet on our people. And also, as we are changing as a company, entering new technologies, we are of course needing profiles we didn't have. For example, we are possibly in our sector a company recognized for being leaders in the digitalization of our industrial processes. This has brought us mathematicians, physicists, engineers, people from fields we didn't have in the company. And sometimes it's not easy. It's not obvious to think why they would go to Repsol because we compete with Google, we compete with Amazon. But I believe there are many people and we are being able to attract them, first because I think they see a beautiful project, and second because there are people who say, 'Well, this change is an important professional challenge,' and they come with us. Then we are also making a very important commitment to diversity, to all types of diversity, but in this case I want to focus on gender diversity. Why? First, because socially it is fair and necessary, but also from a competitive point of view. If we need talent, 50% of society's well-trained talent is women. We have to focus on it because we can have a competitive advantage as well. It is true that the industry comes from another era, but today we are, I think not satisfied yet, but practically 50% of hires are women. We are at 50-51% of new hires. We already have what we call leaders in the organization; we are slightly above 30% women. It is not enough, but we have to think that we come from some sectors where, even what I am going to say may sound outrageous, but it was like that: in 1987 in Spain, the Hydrocarbons Law itself, passed by Congress, required that a woman work in a refinery theoretically as health protection. I finished my degree in petrochemical engineering in 1985, and the girls who were almost half of my class who specialized in petrochemicals could not work in a refinery because the law did not allow it. All that was, of course, today seems an aberration, possibly also at that time, but it has changed. And it has changed to the point that today, of the five refineries we have in Spain, Natalia Barreiro runs the refinery in A Coruña, we have had another woman running the refinery in Puertollano. And this is a brutal change. And that is also a way to attract an important part of talent to society. In the field of digitalization, which now includes artificial intelligence, some of the projects: we have more than 200 projects implemented over the last 5 or 6 years, of all types. I will give some examples. For instance, in the scheduling of refineries, it is a process that starts when a trader is sitting at a table and sees that a ship with a certain crude oil is being sold in some part of the world, and based on the price, the characteristics of that crude, how we have characterized it, how much energy it consumes in its process, where we can transform it, when it will arrive, what it will be fragmented into based on the type of product, how the futures market for those products will be two months out. The optimization through digital tools of that entire process has allowed us to improve by 30-40 cents per barrel of oil we process in our refineries in Spain. I can tell you, 40 cents, 50 cents is nothing. But if you process 280 million barrels a year, it means an improvement, a cost reduction of 140-150 million euros per year, through technological tools that allow these refineries to compete better. But from this to commercial tools, we have Waylet, a tool with 8 million users that we use mainly to make personalized offers to our clients. And then, just to give one example, in a company like ours we do many things and we are big bread sellers. We sell a lot of bread in Spain at service stations. And of course, when you get up in the morning and live in La Rioja and see that the weather is good, it's June, and you say, 'Well, good weather, today we all take the car and go to the coast,' and then we buy bread at a gas station. And so the adaptation of the baking flows to the customers arriving can generate a lot of optimization so that people don't have to queue, you sell more, you reduce waste. We have applied digitalization with data processing and artificial intelligence to our baking processes at service stations, and we have improved bread sales by 14% at our service stations, which are many thousands of loaves a day. We have improved customer service and reduced waste. These are small things but they are different examples because sometimes when you talk about refineries and traders, it seems like this is for large companies, not small things. And because this is so important, a group of companies that already have experience in this, for example, Inditex, Telefónica, Gestamp, Repsol, and others, we have created an association called Hesia, which aims to share all the experiences we have with artificial intelligence in our companies, and even access to certain data, of course with protection of that data in its individuality, so that the small Spanish industrial company can start developing practical cases. We are working in this direction because we are convinced that to the extent that Spanish SMEs adopt these technologies, it will help us have a more competitive fabric with more employment opportunities for everyone. I know that when we talk about artificial intelligence, many people focus on the risks. I will not be the one to deny them, but my vision is that normally these technological experiences in recent decades, when they arrived, those who did not adopt them lost competitiveness and ended up losing jobs, and those who adopted them ended up creating more jobs, more technological jobs, and higher quality jobs. Evidently, what we must do is ensure that if there can be social losers in this matter, let's say there is accompaniment and support for these people. But at Repsol we have been applying this for many years, and today we have more industrial jobs in Spain than we had in 2008. So we are doing what we say.
I have known success and failure. I have known in my life, I can say, up to a couple of notable failures. And when you have gone up the stairs, you have gone down. I sometimes joke: when you have gone in a week from the official car to the Boston subway, well, you have seen it all, and it puts things in perspective. It relativizes things a lot. But ultimately, success in life is first having a personal life how you want, how you like, with which you identify, with which you are comfortable, and that the people around you, you live with, you love them, they love you, you argue, and you have a normal life. And then I used to say that when you pass in front of the mirror at night and see a face, you say, 'Well, I'm not exactly me, but I recognize myself.' I mean, in life we often have to do many things that sometimes you have to do them, you don't feel completely satisfied, but you have to maintain a principle of authenticity, which is never 100%. It is like pure water: pure water, without salts, causes cretinism. Water has to have a little bit of salts, not be contaminated, but have a little bit of impurities so that it can be drunk. And I believe that one in his life also has to end up recognizing himself in what he does. There will be times when you are more or less comfortable with yourself, but I believe success is recognizing yourself at night and saying, 'Look, that person who left this morning and what I am seeing now is not so different.'
First, I feel a bit paternalistic because, of course, I imagine myself 35-38 years ago and someone giving me advice, and I would have said, 'What is this about?' Well, I try, I don't know if I succeed, but I try to apply it with my children. I still have a young one who just turned 18, and I always tell them the same thing: follow your passion. I know there are people who don't share this, but I have always said, it doesn't matter what you do. My wife is a chemist, I am a chemist, she is a scientist, and she always had a tendency towards science. Science is the same. Do whatever: music, science, or any area of life, but whatever you do, do it with passion, believe in it, and put effort into it. I think that is the best advice. In life, you have to follow the drive of passion for what you like, because that is when you will try to do things well. And then, if I may allow another piece of advice: for those who, by their function, their work, their possibilities can do it, go abroad. I mean, I was in times when we didn't even have the possibilities that some have today, but with 22-23 years old, as soon as I could, I went to work at a technology center in France. You didn't know exactly where you were going, you didn't know how you would be treated, you didn't know if you would return and how you would return. But you have to do these things because ultimately it will open your world. And then you will return or not, which is also fine, because others will come. And if you meet a boy or a girl in London or wherever, then your personal life may change. I think you have to go out, open yourself to other realities, other cultures. The world is very wide. Ours is very beautiful, but there are also other very beautiful things in life.
