Zoe Yujnovich, chairman, Shell Australia: ‘I really believe in what we do’
She’s the passionate engineer who runs marathons in her spare time. Meet the boss at Shell Australia.
Whether she’s inspecting her teenage son’s bedroom at home in Perth or strolling around one of the multibillion-dollar resources projects she oversees, Zoe Yujnovich can be expected to apply the same exacting standards. A stickler for cleanliness, the energetic Shell Australia boss reckons she can tell almost instantly whether a site is safe and efficient simply by looking at it.
“It’s always the marker of whether we are in control or not in control,” says Yujnovich, the 43-year-old engineer whose appointment as Shell’s country chair last year surprised many insiders at the Australian headquarters of the Dutch colossus.
“If we’ve got too much stuff crated up in the corner, there’s a pretty good chance we haven’t got a good sense of being lean in our inventory levels.
“And I want to know if we are actually taking the time to clean up, to ensure there are no tripping hazards. I ask my 14-year-old the same question about his bedroom.”
Yujnovich laughs at the exaggerated comparison, but it’s a revealing insight into a highly driven woman whose attention to detail, resilience and leadership ability helped land the role as head of one of the biggest foreign investors in Australia.
While she admits to “pinching myself” over her appointment to run the local arm of Shell, which is easily Australia’s biggest oil and gas producer and has a workforce of more than 2000 people, it’s clear that the prospect of new challenges doesn’t faze her.
In fact, change has been a constant in her life. During a 23-year career she has worked in five countries: Australia, the US, the UK, Brazil and Canada.
As a child, she also lived in Hong Kong, Indonesia and Singapore (her father was in the air force) before her family moved to Perth and she was enrolled at her local primary school in Karrinyup, in the city’s northern suburbs.
Years later, on her first day of engineering studies at the University of Western Australia, she froze when she looked around the lecture theatre and realised it was full of male faces. Yet her love of the discipline was undimmed.
Days after graduating from university and impatient to launch her career, she left home in Perth for Launceston, where she joined a Rio Tinto graduate program.
Yujnovich excelled at Rio and rose rapidly through the ranks, with stints in the US and at the company’s Paraburdoo iron ore mine in the Pilbara.
By her early 30s she was working in London as the executive adviser to chief executive Tom Albanese – a post given to rising stars of the company – during the tumult of rival miner BHP’s hostile takeover bid.
After that post ended, Rio Tinto’s then iron ore chief, Sam Walsh, appointed her to run the Brazil operations, with the directive to spend $2 billion on a major iron ore expansion project.
She also happened to be six months’ pregnant at the time.
Almost immediately, however, the global financial crisis hit and Yujnovich found herself having to sell assets.
“The expansion I desired to lead turned into a divestment,” she recalled in a 2013 speech. “I was left having a baby in a strange country, with a language I didn’t speak, to divest a business with a future of great uncertainty.
“This was a turning point for me in testing my resilience and confidence to pave a new path forward. The experience was exhilarating and I grew as a leader enormously through that year. I am also proud of the leaders at Rio Tinto for not looking at my belly or my age as they offered me the role, but instead at my credentials and adaptability, and then supporting me through the transition.”
After Brazil, Yujnovich became president of Rio’s iron ore operations in Canada before joining Shell to run its Canadian oil sands business in 2014. She then made the move, with husband Jason and their three school-aged children, back to Perth, about 18 months ago.
“It’s the first time I’ve lived here since I left university in 1995,” she says during an interview in Shell’s gleaming new office tower in the city’s CBD.
‘Shell’s decision to award its top job in Australia to a young woman was considered left-field by some insiders.’
For all its encouragement of diversity, the oil and gas industry is still led mainly by older men. So Shell’s decision to award its top job in Australia to a young woman – she was 41 at the time – who had only been at the company for three years was considered by some insiders to be a left-field move.
Yujnovich now has responsibility for managing assets that comprise about one-quarter of Shell’s global investment portfolio, including the ground-breaking Prelude project (see breakout) off the West Australian coast – the first time Shell has used radical floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) technology.
The pressure is on for Prelude to begin producing gas, as promised, by the end of the year.
Yujnovich is also in charge of the Shell-QGC venture in Queensland, the world’s first coal-bed methane to LNG project. In addition, Shell is developing the Arrow resource in Queensland, and has interests in two other massive WA gas projects, Gorgon and the North West Shelf.
So how did she get the job?
“Shell really likes to have people from the country leading the country, [but] hopefully it’s more than my citizenship that helped me land the role,” she says.
“I also come from a technical background and companies like Shell like that content knowledge within their leaders. Of course there’s always a debate about the benefits of having deep content versus people with much better softer skills. I think now I’m more of a balance of the two.”
Senior members of the Perth business community who’ve come to know Yujnovich over the past 18 months have no doubt she was an ideal choice for the job.
They also marvel at her superior energy levels. A fitness fanatic, she has run marathons and half-marathons, and once completed a 21-day hike to the base camp of Mount Everest.
When she’s in Perth, her mornings are spent at the gym and dropping children at school before she arrives at the office about 8.30am. (She won’t even check her emails before getting to work lest it distracts from the immediate task at hand.)
Despite the travel demands of her job, she is also a director of the West Coast Eagles AFL club, the University of WA business school and Christ Church Grammar School.
Somehow she also finds time to be chairman of the industry’s peak body, the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, a role that has thrust her into the spotlight as the federal government has grappled with its response to east-coast gas shortages. Of her hectic schedule, she says: “I shouldn’t complain because for the most part I am back for the weekend. I can be with the family across the weekend – that’s a place for me to recuperate and reconnect.”
‘Unless there is money to be made, don’t expect Shell to dive head-first into renewables.’
Her ex-boss, Sam Walsh, says Yujnovich undoubtedly has a high IQ but he was also struck by her emotional intelligence. “It’s not always you get IQ and EQ in a person, but she scores very highly on both,” he says.
Former Fortescue Metals Group chief executive Nev Power says Yujnovich is highly intelligent and brings passion to her role.
“You need to have that level of energy in those roles,” he says. “You have to have a person who loves what they’re doing. I’m a great believer in infectious passion and Zoe has that in spades. She’s also a wonderful role model for other women.”
Yujnovich says she derives passion for her work from the knowledge that Shell is helping to contribute to a lower-carbon future, whether through its existing LNG projects or future investment possibilities in renewable energy.
She is excited about a potential Shell investment in a 120-megawatt solar energy project near Wandoan in Queensland.
“I really deeply believe in what we do,” she says.
“What I have loved about joining Shell is their incredibly strong leadership as an energy company in how we might lead through the energy transition.
“For our kids’ generation, really managing the footprint and the impact that we have as a result of the energy we consume, and how that energy is produced, is going to be so important.
“We have to produce more energy because there are still people without energy. We live with larger demand for energy, so how do we do that in light of climate change and air quality issues, particularly in Asia?”
Unless there is money to be made, however, don’t expect Shell to dive head-first into renewables. This is where Yujnovich’s enthusiasm is replaced by a hard-headed pragmatism.
“These things are all very sexy and lots of people want to play in this space of renewables. But we haven’t seen anybody being particularly successful at it yet,” she says.
“I’d hate to be in a position where we are just investing lots of money and we don’t have a clue how we’re going to get a return from that. That’s not good for our communities, our employees or our shareholders. I think it will require some prudence.”
-
PRELUDE TO GREATNESS
Australia has never seen anything like the Prelude project.
First, the jaw-dropping stats: the $US12 billion ($16 billion) vessel, built in South Korea, is 488m long and 74m wide, making it the largest offshore floating facility ever built.
It contains five times the amount of steel used to build the Sydney Harbour Bridge. For those who prefer Parisian comparisons, that’s the equivalent of 36 Eiffel Towers.
The Prelude vessel – which is moored to the sea bed, almost 500km north-north-east of Broome off the Kimberley coast – will extract, liquefy and store natural gas, removing the need to bring the gas to an onshore processing plant via a pipeline.
Sitting in the stormy waters between Australia and Asia, it has been designed to withstand a “one-in-10,000-year” cyclone.
Once it is operating, the Prelude facility will produce 3.6 million tonnes a year of LNG.
Shell Australia chair Zoe Yujnovich says she relishes the chance to visit Prelude to be updated on a project that is critical to the company’s fortunes.
And when she’s there, she likes to sample the highlights of the ship, including the daily yoga classes.
“They run a yoga class on the heli-deck,” she says. “It’s amazing. There are 360-degree views of the ocean, you’re 200km north of any landfall, a gentle breeze, a beautiful clear day.”
Another crucial element for the 1000 workers on board is the food.
“I always go to the kitchen because the quality of the food must be good on a facility like that, where people are away from home for three to four weeks,” Yujnovich says.
“I always drop in to the kitchen to say thanks and just to make sure they feel that they’re appreciated. It’s often those peripheral roles that make the biggest deference to morale.
“We have to get the hydrocarbon streams right, but from a cultural perspective there’s nothing like having a chef that has his eye on the ball.”
Last month, Prelude went “live” after LNG and liquefied petroleum gas were successfully introduced into the plant.
The project is now in the tricky commissioning phase, with first production slated for this year.
And despite doubts in the market, Yujnovich insists it’s all on track.
“We are in commissioning, which is a really risky phase as we introduce hydrocarbons,” she says. “We are in the final 10 per cent, but the final 10 per cent is often the hardest because you’re not done and you’ve just got to keep the laser focus on what needs to be done.”