Sapphire Energy, Inc.

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

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."

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