When Cindy Taff was a vice president at the giant oil and gas company Shell in Houston, her middle schooler Brianna would sometimes look over her shoulder as she worked from home.
“Why are you still working in oil and gas?” her daughter asked more than once. “Is there a future in it? Why aren’t you moving into something clean?”
The words weighed on Taff.
“As a parent you want to give direction, and was I giving her the right direction?” she recalled.
At Shell, Taff was in charge of drilling wells and bringing them into production. She worked on oil and natural gas that’s called unconventional in the industry, because the oil or natural gas is difficult to get out of the ground — it doesn’t naturally gush out like in movies. It’s a term often used for oily shale rock. Taff was somewhat unconventional for the industry, too. Her coworkers used to tease her for driving an efficient hybrid.