In the new Universum ranking to be published in Les Echos START on Monday, TotalEnergies is in the top 10 of the most committed CAC 40 companies according to students and young workers, what does that inspire you?

This is good news, the efforts are starting to bear fruit. And it was not won. TotalEnergies is a powerful company, which has become a global giant, which has long unleashed passions and fueled fantasies, particularly in France with smear campaigns.

The opinion of young people is very important to me. On the major challenge of climate change, they want to accelerate. I hear it with Greta Thunberg or even with my children, the subject has become existential. They want the categorical imperative described by the scientists to be taken into account, and I understand them because they will still be here in fifty years...

We see growing, in a fringe of the youth, a distrust of you. Some assure him: "I will never go to work at Total." How do you receive these radical positions?

First of all, this fringe benefits from a very strong media echo, but I note that young people continue to want to join us. That said, when I go to the big schools, I notice this radicalism in some of them, which reinforces my desire and my conviction that we must continue to convince them of our commitment.

Are we to understand that these young people, worried about the future of the planet, are mistaken when they oppose your company?

Young people have a capacity to have more ideals, and we must respect that. Only, this radicalism frustrates me when it refuses to see the facts. TotalEnergies is changing profoundly: for example, we are devoting more than 25% of our investments to renewable energies!

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But I must say that these positions also lead us to evolve. We have initiated a major corporate reform by creating OneTech, a technology division that brings together our 3,300 engineers, technicians and researchers, whether they work on oil, gas or renewables. Why? Because the internal skills developed in our historical activities must be put to the benefit of new energies. For example, we realized that the mathematical optimization of an oil reservoir is very close to that of a wind deposit for technical studies of offshore wind power.

We also created it to attract young people. TotalEnergies doesn't offer them either to join the refining branch, for example, where they may have less desire to go, but to join a “Total multi-energy” structure and respond to energy challenges.

To ensure this energy shift, what are your recruitment needs?

In 2021, the voluntary departure plan for 1,200 people has accelerated the recruitment of young people. Over two years, we are committed to recruiting 700, half of them in jobs related to the energy transition. A part will be made via the OneTech structure, to which I gave an instruction: to recruit only people under 35 years old. I want young people to build the TotalEnergies of tomorrow!

A reader, who wishes to remain anonymous, would like to know: "Will the most prominent positions continue to be monopolized by graduates of Polytechnique, Mines, etc., or do you want to promote diversity of career paths?"

First, we are far from recruiting only polytechnicians, I believe that in fact there are two or three a year. Then, we actually seek to diversify the profiles. Just because you got a degree doesn't mean you're smarter than someone else. You just showed that you're better at math or physics, but life isn't just about math and physics. It's courage, an ability to listen and convince, to have charisma, to train others...

I can therefore assure you that recruitment is done in all ranges of schools and universities and that there is no quota for the big schools. Any young person who leaves these higher education studies and who is interested in energy can send us their application. What interests me? Committed personalities, capable of listening and playing collectively.

What levers do you use to convince them to join you?

Decarbonizing a global energy system is a Promethean task. Joining a company of our size, in full transformation, is the assurance of having more technical skills and financial means, and therefore more levers for action.

Regarding teleworking, you say that the pandemic has encouraged you to leave more flexibility to employees. Another idea is currently gaining ground: the four-day week. Could it be a measure deployed at TotalEnergies to recruit and retain?

I am ready to watch this subject closely. With the Covid-19 crisis, since September, we have noticed that the occupancy rate of our offices is 65% from Monday to Thursday. Friday is half as much. I wonder if we shouldn't free up half a day, or even a whole day, to allow employees to take care of their personal tasks so that the rest of the week can be dedicated to their professional mission. But I am also ready to trust the responsibility of our employees so that telework is fully integrated into our operating methods.

There are those you want to recruit and those internally who may also wonder about the meaning of their work...

Indeed, it is not because they joined TotalEnergies that they no longer ask questions. I am also convinced that some employees wonder why the general management takes such and such a decision. Well, this year, we are going to organize a campus for young people: 300 employees under 35, volunteers then drawn by lot, will face 30 company managers, and we will ask them what they would do at our place: how to attract young people, our presence in Myanmar, our projects in the Arctic or in Uganda. I also want to know the subjects on which they want the company to accelerate.

The risk of this type of initiative is that their proposals remain at the stage of good ideas. Are you committed to making them happen?

Good ideas will be turned into actions. I would add that, if we are going to listen to them a lot, we also have things to make them hear. They will understand that the subjects are not so simple and that in a large company they cannot know everything. When you're young, it's easy to say, "Up there, on the ^44th floor, what nonsense did they do again!?" This campus will be a useful step in the transformation of the company.

On your transformation, precisely, a question from Dany (21 years old): “Renewable energies today represent a very small percentage of your activities, contrary to what your new name and advertising campaigns suggest. Ok, the transitions are long, but isn't TotalEnergies greenwashing?”

Not at all. This year, we will finance renewable energy projects to the tune of 7 billion dollars, including more than 3 billion in equity. We are talking here about 6 gigawatts of electricity from renewable sources commissioned in 2022, or 2% of this global market. That's more than 60 billion in green investments by 2030. Our transformation is real! You can't call it greenwashing.

At the same time, TotalEnergies continues to invest 75% in hydrocarbons…

Yes, and I assume it. Today, our society needs it. I am convinced that if we abandon these activities, someone else will come and produce the oil in our place, given that the demand does not fall, on the contrary. The question I would like to ask your readers then: what are you willing to give up? Are you, for example, ready to stop taking your car or the plane? Because yes, the first thing to do to achieve carbon neutrality is to save energy.

To be concrete about your transformation, in 2025, what will the distribution of investments according to the company's different types of energy look like?

Half of our investments are devoted to oil, in order to maintain our production capacities. Gas will concentrate 20 to 25% and the rest, 25 to 30%, will be dedicated to renewable energies. Remember that it is thanks to oil money that we can today invest massively in renewables.

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Is this strategy sufficient to achieve carbon neutrality?

TotalEnergies is aiming for carbon neutrality for its global emissions, scope 1, 2 and 3, by 2050, in line with society. If they are still present, fossil fuels should not represent more than 25% of our portfolio. And this is not incompatible with the objectives. When we look at the scenario of 1.5 degrees of increase in temperatures carried out by the International Energy Agency, the objective is not "zero oil, zero gas" but a production of these energies divided by four .

How does this ambition translate concretely into your current exploration projects?

In 2021, we proposed to our shareholders to focus on low-cost, low-emission hydrocarbons. Concretely, this means no longer undertaking projects in the oil sands or heavy oil in Venezuela, nor that which lies at sea at a depth of more than 3,000 meters. Renewing our oil reserves is therefore becoming more and more complicated, but in reality, this is no longer our main objective. Because the future is not oil.

Baptiste (23 years old): “If tomorrow Total geologists discover the largest oil deposit in history in the center of the Amazon, would you decide to extract it at the risk of biodiversity?”

Our explorers simply won't be able to find out because we have a biodiversity policy that prohibits us from exploring such protected ecosystems.

Maxence (25) asks a management question: “What is the best way to initiate such a massive change of strategy in such a large company? Should the importance be given to small internal projects or to the vertical vision?”

Both, General! Collective intelligence works very well, and we use it regularly at TotalEnergies, but in the end decisions have to be made to implement them. My management can be strong because you also have to know how to execute. I also want all employees to feel good in the company and to think that they are contributing to an exciting adventure. So come on young people!

TotalEnergies had planned to set up a research center on the Polytechnique campus, which provoked an outcry from associations and some of the students and alumni, denouncing a conflict of interest between your position as administrator at school and your position as CEO. How do you answer them?

France has taken the very good initiative of wanting to bring together universities and companies on the same site, in Saclay, on the model of MIT. TotalEnergies had been approached by the Ecole polytechnique, and we accepted because our objective is to set up our New Energies & Electricity R&D center in the scientific and technological ecosystem of Saclay. It was the State that offered me to bring my skills to the board of directors of the Ecole Polytechnique, it was not I who asked for it. I remind you that the installation of the research center was decided before my arrival on the board of directors of the school and, naturally, I did not participate in the decisions on this subject within the board of Polytechnique. I only intervened once to answer questions from other directors on the project as CEO of TotalEnergies.

As for the concerns of young people, don't you find it legitimate for them to wonder whether their school will remain independent vis-à-vis the interests of TotalEnergies?

I have too much respect for the thousands of researchers, professors and students to think that they would be weak minds whose judgment would not withstand a laboratory of 200 researchers! When I was at Polytechnique, I was taught to make allowances and form my own judgement. It's not because a boss came to speak in the amphitheater that I believed everything he said!

However, due to appeals, the building project has been delayed and cannot be delivered for several years. However, the energy transition cannot wait and neither can the transformation of TotalEnergies! Because we have recruited the research teams and we are therefore going to set them up as planned, starting this year, on the Saclay plateau in premises intended to house business innovation centres. Consequently, to put an end to this frustrating but damaging controversy to our reputation, we are abandoning the building project near the Polytechnique campus, while of course maintaining scientific partnerships. Once again, our objective was not a building with a TotalEnergies flag, but to develop the technologies needed for carbon neutrality by collaborating with the laboratories of universities and schools, companies and start-ups based in Saclay. .

Last October, researchers published a study in which one could read that Total and Elf were aware of the risks associated with climate change as early as the 1970s, but that they, during the 1990s, financed research to instill the doubt about the causes of global warming: is it true that one or other of these companies participated in such financing when, as early as 1990 (first IPCC report), scientific unanimity was built around the causes of global warming?

I do not understand this media hype about what happened in the 1970s. This “scientific study” is based on an article by an external scientist published in an internal journal of Total on the subject. Somehow, I find it remarkable that the company opened up about this in those years. To my knowledge, Total or Elf have never funded internal or external studies to spread doubt about the climate. These were two companies in tune with the times that were trying to understand the climate subject because there were then scientific uncertainties that the IPCC reports themselves underlined.

I remind you that the first COP on the climate was only held in Berlin in 1995. I was there as the Prime Minister's environment adviser. I can confirm that since I joined this company in 1997, I have never heard doubts about the reality of climate change. I remember several conferences organized on the subject by Total in the early 2000s with climate scientists and that Thierry Desmarest (CEO of Total from 1995 to 2010) was committed to sustainable development. All of this is a publicity stunt aimed at denigrating our company. But what matters is what we do today… and TotalEnergies is moving towards carbon neutrality!