Engineer Louise Tricoire loves challenges.
“I love learning and I love discovering. I’m quite positive for new stuff in general,” said the new vice president of TotalEnergies Marine Fuels, who has sailed across the Atlantic and has another all-female expedition in the works, told TradeWinds.
Tricoire may need to draw on that quest for adventure in today’s rather fevered and rapidly evolving world of decarbonisation and fuelling choices for the shipping industry.
An engineer from France, she started her working life at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Tricoire joined what was then Total in 2003 and has moved through marketing, business development, fuel retail and into LNG where she was in charge of negotiating the company’s developments in India.
Most recently Tricoire — who describes herself as quite frank in her approach — headed up the major’s CO2 fighting squad which was responsible for challenging the company’s Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions across all its activities as it embraced its decarbonisation targets.
Here she was in charge of a multidisciplinary team. She said she learned much about the company’s carbon capture and storage projects, its renewable activities and hydrogen production.
“It was very insightful and a deep learning expedition of three years with a very interesting goal because it was creating an entity around decarbonisation, which is at the heart of the strategy of our company,” she said.
Tricoire said, with a smile, that throughout her TotalEnergies career: “I have never been into shipping so logically I moved to shipping.”
But the new TMF head job appealed.
“It was back to business,” Tricoire said. “Decarbonisation is exciting but you’re not in the market.”
She is now at the helm of a 50-person team — 30 for TMF in Singapore, with 10 in both France and Geneva.
Tricoire, who is keen on outdoor sports, also enjoys sailing so the engagement with shipping was “quite exciting”, as I was moving to Singapore after five years in France. She has previously been stationed in Romania and Panama for TotalEnergies.
And then there is that decarbonisation link, as TMF tries to supply shipowners with the fuels that will help them move forward with their own emissions targets and those to comply with regulations.
