It was 1986, and Canada’s Union Gas was growing fast. Jerry Norcia, then a young engineer fresh out of university, had opportunities come his way that would be unheard of for most young people starting out in an industry today.
It was an exciting time to be in the natural gas industry. “I had no fear,” said Norcia. “No matter how complex the assignment was, I was always willing to do jobs that other people didn’t want to do or were afraid to do. … We worked really hard and learned really fast, made some mistakes along the way … [but] it was exhilarating.”
That first job would become a 37-plus-year career in energy. Norcia, now chairman and CEO of DTE Energy, a Detroit-based diversified energy company serving 1.3 million gas customers and 2.3 million electric customers, has never forgotten the values he learned early on—of hard work, honesty and integrity. “You’ve got to work hard, but you’ve got to be smart about it,” he said. “You need to move and get things done in order to make progress.”
As he steps into the role of 2024 board chair for the American Gas Association, progress is also on his mind. “Decarbonization is one of the preeminent imperatives of our time,” he said. “And I view natural gas as a key enabler, both from a power production perspective and as a low-carbon-emitting source. Now, with more modern technologies that are evolving, we’re also able to use that fuel source, which is abundant, in a carbon-free way. My role this year as chair will be to continue to advocate for natural gas as an enabler of decarbonizing our economy reliably and affordably.”
When Norcia was 6 years old, his family—Italian immigrants who had settled in Toronto—returned to Italy. Norcia grew up running around the rocky slopes on his grandfather’s farm, in the Apennine Mountains between Rome and Naples. It was an idyllic existence, except for the fact there was no natural gas and no running water.
So, three years later, the family returned to Canada, this time settling in Windsor, Ontario, just across the river from the American city of Detroit, where Norcia’s father, Luigi, worked in construction and at a local automotive assembly plant, and his mother, Palmerina, worked as a housekeeper at a local hospital. “It was ingrained in me … how important it was to do an honest day’s job for an honest day’s pay,” he said.
Norcia thought about becoming a lawyer. “I was an argumentative guy,” he said with a laugh, “and I liked to debate things.” But with his skills in physics and math and his background in construction—he often worked with his father and uncles—a teacher convinced him to look at engineering.
“He was right,” Norcia said. Norcia enrolled at the University of Windsor for chemical engineering, and during his senior year, Union Gas was recruiting heavily on campus. Norcia liked the recruiter—a Union Gas operations manager who was the son of Italian immigrants like him—and he liked the president, Stephen Bellringer, then 39, who would go on to double the size of the company over the next five years. “I had my final exam on May 2, and I was working May 5,” Norcia said.
As a young engineer working at the quickly growing company, Norcia remembers watching and learning from Bellringer. He also found a mentor in George Pappas, who headed up Union Gas’ construction and engineering department. Norcia spent a few years in system planning, doing hydraulic modeling of the gas system, but he was eager to work under Pappas in construction. One day, Pappas came into his office and said, “You work for me now,” and handed Norcia the assignment of building two compressor stations about 50 miles away.
“I’d never built anything like this before,” said Norcia, but Pappas told him, “You’re going to learn.”
With the support of other seasoned professionals, Norcia worked 14-hour days to get the projects up and running. “I really learned the value of people, and how motivating and leading people in the right way creates success. … And also the art of listening,” he said.
After working in construction for about four years, Norcia moved into operations, a valuable experience “in the sense that as a young engineer, you want to engineer a lot, but you learn that if you keep it simple, it runs a lot better.” Next came business development, and Norcia spent eight years on a $1 billion, 650-mile pipeline project on Canada’s east coast, running from Sable Island near Nova Scotia down into the United States to Boston. Fresh off that success, Norcia found his career going into overdrive. He was soon promoted to vice president of engineering and business development. Then, when Union Gas merged with Duke Energy in 2001, he had the chance to take a bigger job in Houston.
With a young family and roots in Detroit and nearby Windsor, he didn’t want to move. “My family is always first for me,” said Norcia. So, when DTE began to knock on his door, he decided to answer, accepting the role of president of the gas storage and pipelines business. Friend and past AGA Chair Steve Ewing was president of DTE Gas at the time. Ewing was in his 60s then and nearing retirement, and Norcia remembers one of the first things Ewing said to him: “If you do a great job with this pipelines business, you’ll have my job in three or four years.”
It was another opportune time. Detroit Edison and MichCon had just merged to form DTE. The new utility had a strong startup mentality, which appealed to Norcia’s entrepreneurial nature. And ever since he’d first joined the gas industry at Union Gas, in the back of his mind, Norcia wanted to become president of a gas company.
That happened in 2006, when Norcia was named president of DTE Gas, accomplishing what Ewing had predicted. Under Norcia’s guidance, over time, DTE built an $8 billion pipeline business. But he says he’s even more proud of building the gas company’s culture.
Going back to his lessons at Union Gas on the value of people, Norcia—with support from CEO Gerry Anderson—helped drive a complete turnaround in employee engagement and customer satisfaction at DTE. As measured by Gallup, the company went from being in the 15th percentile in employee engagement to the 90th, among thousands of companies surveyed around the world. Then, on the JD Power scale, the company moved up from second to last in customer satisfaction to regularly being in the first, second or third spot. “We fundamentally reshaped the culture, both in service to one another and also service to our customers,” he said. “What I learned on that journey is that you have to serve each other with excellence before you can be great on the outside.”
AT DTE, Norcia’s career continued to advance. He took on the role of president of its electric operations—a big change for the gas executive, but “a good learning opportunity.” From there, he became president of DTE, overseeing gas and electric operations, pipelines and DTE’s non-utility business, Vantage. Then, in three years, when Anderson retired, Norcia was named DTE’s CEO.
His greatest challenge came almost immediately, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck. The values that Norcia held close—including putting people first—were never more important. Early in the pandemic, Detroit was an epicenter of the infection because so many flights come in from Asia and Italy due to the automotive industry. As Norcia met with his team to decide DTE’s next move, he called a few friends—CEOs of Detroit hospitals—to ask how the pandemic was really going. The answer, as we all know now, was sobering: Hospitals were running out of both beds and ventilators, with health care workers scrambling to stay on top of the waves of sick people flowing into emergency rooms.
So, Norcia made the tough decision to halt work. Within a day or two, thousands of DTE workers had transitioned to working from home, with skeleton crews responding to outages or other emergency calls. “That was four to six weeks,” said Norcia. “It was really based on the premise of deep care for our people. I was convinced that if we did what was right for our people, they would come back to work with a passion to dig us out of the hole that we were digging for ourselves. And they did—because the company had taken care of them, and they were going to take care of the company.”
Norcia followed that up by suspending shutoffs, personally overseeing the streamlining of energy assistance response time from the normal month to less than a week, securing and delivering 3 million KN95 respirator masks to first responders and hospital workers, and working with General Motors, Quicken Loans, the Skillman Foundation and the Kellogg Foundation to purchase and deliver 51,000 tablets with cellular access to help Detroit inner-city students learn from home. As it did for most of us, “the biggest lesson COVID reinforced for me is how important it is to take care of people,” said Norcia.
Norcia’s “people first” philosophy feeds naturally into his management style, which he centers around three principles: “Know your people, care about your people and lead them.”
“And it doesn’t mean you’re always nice,” he said. "Leading means you lead through good times and you lead through tough times. I drive pretty hard, but my people will follow me because they know I care about them. “
Today, under Norcia, the company continues to live up to its purpose: “To improve lives with our energy.” That energy supports economic development and fuels people’s daily lives, but DTE is taking the idea beyond that. “Working to improve the lives of all people in our community is something we strive to do,” said Norcia. “We started to think about what moves people out of circumstances of not being able to afford basic daily needs such as energy, and really it was access to employment and great jobs and education. So, we started to focus on creating that access.”
As part of its dedication to the revitalization of Detroit, the utility—one of the city’s largest employers—has created partnerships with institutions including Henry Ford Community College, the nonprofit Focus: HOPE and local unions to create apprenticeships and boot camps for jobs such as gas fitter. Along the way, DTE is eliminating barriers to employment, such as helping people obtain driver’s licenses or upskilling them in reading and math. The result is a steppingstone for people from disadvantaged neighborhoods to begin a career where salaries can range from $80,000 to $100,000 and more.
At the same time, Norcia is still an engineer and a builder. Today, he’s building a company with a focus on decarbonization.
In 2017, DTE was one of the first to publicly announce its commitment to significant carbon reductions and now is well on its way to its 2050 net-zero goals in both its gas and electric operations. As the energy landscape changes and a greater attention is paid to renewables and other new fuels, he continues to recognize “the role that natural gas plays as an enabler in decarbonizing the economy. … You have to find a way to get to net zero, and that’s where all technologies matter. I’m a proponent of using natural gas with carbon capture, using natural gas to produce hydrogen, and also renewables. We’re also making a big investment into batteries. … If we don’t use those technologies and don’t avail ourselves of an all-of-the-above strategy, I don’t think we make it as a country or as an industry.”
As an example, in terms of moving the dial to net zero in its electric operations, an early win for DTE was retiring three coalfired plants and replacing that coal with natural gas. “Just by taking that action alone, using the most technologically advanced gas turbines, we were able to reduce our carbon emissions by 80%,” Norcia said.
In the face of calls for 100% electrification, Norcia points out two key considerations: reliability and affordability. “You have to do the math,” he said. “A tremendous amount of energy flows in the form of natural gas. To replace that with electrification is going to be a nearly impossible task in terms of being able to do it in a way that’s reliable and affordable. You can’t create a situation where we have a destabilized grid and a grid that’s not affordable for our customers. Let’s not let purity stand in the way of progress. As the technology evolves, let’s see where it takes us.”
With an eye toward a future where natural gas—or natural gas mixed with a percentage of hydrogen—continues to fuel our economy, DTE is investing in its natural gas pipeline infrastructure, directing about $500 million annually to replace legacy cast iron and steel pipeline. Roughly 200 miles are replaced annually, putting DTE on track to completing its infrastructure replacement program within the next decade, well ahead of initial estimates.
In the coming year, DTE will also continue the rollout of its CleanVision Natural Gas Balance program. It’s the first in the country to include both carbon offsets and renewable natural gas as a way for residential and small business customers to reduce their carbon footprints. DTE is also close to initiating its first carbon capture and storage project through Vantage, its nonutility company.
It’s with all these initiatives in mind that Norcia steps into the role of 2024 AGA board chair. He says he’s honored to take the lead in continuing the ongoing theme supported by past AGA chairs, as defined by AGA President and CEO Karen Harbert: to protect the people, preserve the planet and picture the potential.
The people and our planet have already been a major focus of Norcia’s work at DTE and within the industry. And for him, the potential is endless. “I like making the impossible possible,” he said with a laugh. “That can be a lot of fun.”
But more seriously, “The future looks very optimistic. There will be tremendous opportunity to continue to use natural gas as a great source of energy. We’re blessed with abundance in this country in that we’re self-sufficient from a natural gas perspective. Not only is it going to create tremendous value for America, but it’s also starting to create tremendous value across the world.”
The Long Ride
Jerry Norcia’s passion is spending time with his family: wife, Josie; his three children; and “four beautiful grandchildren.” Then there’s his other passion: motorcycles.
When it’s time to rest and recoup, Norcia often spends that time on the back of a Harley, riding down Midwestern back roads. Usually, he takes multi-day trips around Michigan and up along the coast of the Great Lakes. His longest ride has been a few thousand miles from Detroit down to Tennessee, then looping back up through the Blue Ridge Mountains and Ohio on the way home. “It’s pretty cool and relaxing to get to see parts of America I’ve never seen on these back roads,” he said.