Brian Jones<\/p>\n
Brian Jones is the Founder and Managing Principle of Windmill Capital Management and has an extensive history in the field of Carbon Credits and the general field of sustainable investing. Prior to the interview, Brian had informed me that his expertise was more specific to carbon credits than to carbon capture tech, therefore our conversation revolved around this topic exclusively.<\/p>\n
Brian\u2019s focus and the largest complaint was the process of acquiring the credits. This process presents many risks such as incorrect validation, the originator revoking the credits before the end of the process, and most of all the duration of the acquisition process being anywhere from 6-9 months. These issues are obviously rather large and scare off many that are considering getting involved in this market. For these problems specifically, Brian felt strongly that the involvement of blockchain to control and document this process could dramatically speed up the process.<\/p>\n
Although Brian had many complaints about the process, his feelings towards this market were far from negative. More specifically Brian described the current global market for carbon credits to be at 200 billion and within the next 20 years, this could increase as far as 50-fold. To conclude brian said something that really interested me, he said that Carbon Credits are not a new tech or a replacement for something that exists but rather an offsetting transition that isn’t too dramatic for the market to currently handle.<\/p>\n
Brad Tyson<\/p>\n
Brad Tyson is a member of CITI Bank’s Clean Energy, Agriculture, and Sustainability Project Finance investment banking team. Brad has a distinguished career in Environmental Science and Sustainable Investing, He has a bachelor’s and Masters’s distinction in environmental science and finance from Tulane.<\/p>\n
My conversation with Brad covered both Carbon Credits and Carbon capture tech but for the majority revolved around his thoughts on carbon credits from an institutional investor point of view vs. his personal and passionate environmental science major point of view.<\/p>\n
Brad made a point to me that In Banking ESG goals and company appearance are very important and many banks boast extremely ambitious goals to seem more committed to helping the environment than they actually are. For example, his company, CITI bank, has promised to be carbon neutral by 2050. The plan to accomplish this goal is through two specific ways, the first being through internally planned offsetting projects like planting trees and the other being directly buying carbon credits. From the perspective of an institution, this is fantastic, they can call themselves net zero, but in reality, they did very little other than fund a third-party offsetting project that is unlikely to reach the necessary number.<\/p>\n
Professionally Brad is involved heavily in researching growth-stage companies in sustainability that seem both successful in their intentions and retaining a solid ROI throughout their progress as a company. He has only been involved in underwriting one company which he was unable to name that used carbon capture tech. This company used funding from Carbon Off-setting projects like the one at CITI bank to collect and disposed of Laughing gas (which is 300 times more potent than C02) and repackage and store it.<\/p>\n
In conclusion, Brad liked the idea of carbon offsetting from an institutional point of view however personally he believed carbon capture has aways to go before it is entirely affective.<\/p>\n
Dilip Kumar<\/p>\n
Dilip Kumar is the Director and Founder of Inspire Clean Energy. Dilip\u2019s knowledge of carbon credits and carbon capture was limited as he specializes in the solar energy space however his macro-economics view of the sustainable investing and environmental tech field was insightful. In addition, when I initially reached out to Dilip I was unaware his firm was based in India as was he. This actually made our conversation much more interesting as the population density in India makes sustainability and environmental tech significantly more important. <\/p>\n
Dilip grew up in Mumbai which today has a population of about 12 million, to describe how large this is, Boston has a population of under 700,000 and NYC has a population of 8.5 million. On top of mere size, Mumbai is almost only half the size in the area of NYC.<\/p>\n
Dilip really began to take interest in India disproportionate urban population problem while he was in college. He told me that it felt as though the cities had no concern for the health and safety of their population as a whole nor the future of their nation. <\/p>\n
Dilip pointed out a major problem with a population density of this scale, that being infrastructure, as supplying energy in the necessary quantity to a city of this size is extremely draining both on the environment and the nation, and this realization is what ultimately lead him to change the focus of his career into creating and developing greater alternatives to clean energy in areas that need change.<\/p>\n
After letting Dilip give me an overview of himself and his career moved onto the questions pertaining to my thesis.<\/p>\n
Shane Grovue<\/p>\n
Shane Grovue is the Managing Principle at Pacific Impact Partners, He has extensive knowledge on the Investments side of both carbon credits and Carbon Capture tech as well as a deep understanding and experience from the engineering side of the technology. In the first portion of our discussion, we discussed the nature of Carbon Credits in today’s current market and its potential for growth and in the second portion of our conversation, we discussed Shane\u2019s EXTENSIVE knowledge of Carbon Capture tech on top of the variation and confusion surrounding the topic and its connection to carbon credits.<\/p>\n
Shane informed me of an important aspect of the distinction between the different variations of carbon credits. That being said there are four types of ways to generate carbon credits, reduction in deforestation, in correlation to deforestation is essentially the replacement of harvested trees and other nature, the reduction of methane production or capture, and the direct removal of carbon gases from the air. Now all of these activities must directly be responsible for removing or avoiding 1 metric ton of carbon gases in order to be awarded a full credit. Shane also was hopeful that the U.N. as well as the U.S. government will make an effort to expedite and advance the process of generation and broader the audience that are able to both purchase and sell.<\/p>\n
On the side of the actual tech that is involved in direct carbon capture, Shane was very passionate. Shane has been involved in several projects over the years some of which have succeeded and some of which have failed due to lack of capital and investors in the field. Companies that build technology that removes carbon gases from the air essentially only produce carbon credits as well as the occasional plant that packages carbon to be sold. Because of this the focus of investors is the difficulties in the processing and generation of the final product (that being the credits). So although the technology may be successful it is challenging to source the necessary capital to fund the development of the plants.<\/p>\n
However, Shane was extremely confident that not only is the tech for Carbon Capture effective now but in ten years it will be significantly more efficient along with the generation process making it an extremely attractive long-term investment. He pointed me toward a company called archaea energy which specializes in acquiring landfills and harvesting the produced carbon gases. He believes that reducing methane pollution from landfills using this method will be a large part of this industry’s future.<\/p>\n
Ross Kennedy<\/p>\n
Ross Kennedy is a Policy Officer at the Carbon Capture and Storage Association. He holds a master’s distinction in petroleum geoscience. My discussion with Ross became informational for both of us as I was able to speak with him after already having spoken with several others which presented as an interest to him. Upon our initial discussion, I told him that I had spoken to several other individuals with significant knowledge within this field and he immediately asked me what I had been informed by them. I gave him a brief summary of each discussion and any important information and ideas I had picked up. He was excited that there was as much interest in the area as I had expressed to him. <\/p>\n
After explaining my knowledge from the interviews to him he explained his perspective and where he sees the future of technology specifically. He first extinguished the theories i had been told by others that carbon off-setting had a long-term negative impact because of the challenge in evaluation, as these companies would likely produce the same amount of carbon either way although, with the carbon off-setting program, thousands of environmental projects are able to take place and make a positive impact that would otherwise not be possible.<\/p>\n
For the majority plus of the interview Ross dived into what he believed to be the best solution, and his so-called \u201csolution to climate change\u201d. Ross believes that the only way to make direct CCaS (Carbon Capture and Storage) 100% effective would be direct global funding. He compared this to things like our educational systems, our militaries, and our infrastructure as our environment should be just as much of a necessary priority and likewise should receive the correct amount of funding. The amount of Carbon capture plants struggle to advance and grow because of their lack of funding as the only way it can be acquired is through carbon off-setting programs, government grants, and charities. However, he believed that the U.N. should create a program that directly funds the production of global CCaS plants and their technological advancement.<\/p>\n
Henry Wykowski<\/p>\n
Henry Wykowski is a Senior Staff of the Parks, Forests, and Public Lands sector of the U.S. House of representatives. Henry has extensive knowledge of environmental tech as well as the U.S. domestic priorities and agenda in Environmental Sustainability. Of the several people I had the opportunity to interview Henry was the first and only person with a negative outlook of both Carbon Capture and Carbon Credits.<\/p>\n
Henry\u2019s Negative view was both well backed up and insightful. First and foremost Henry refused to refer to the product as a carbon credit and would only refer to them as carbon offsets. The reason for this is that in a literal sense carbon credits are not responsible for directly getting rid of carbon gas as they are rewarded to an institution when they make an effort to offset their own carbon footprint. There are many problems with this, for example, Institutions like JP Morgan are able to purchase carbon credits to allow them to actually increase the size of carbon gas-producing projects because the credits offset their maximum as far as current regulations go.<\/p>\n
Surprisingly Henry\u2019s knowledge of the public parks plays a large role in his negative feelings about carbon credits. Carbon credits can be produced by sanctioning off the development and deforestation of areas of forest (as well as purchasing forest areas simply for preservation). The challenge of this is quantifying the legitimate number and value of credits and the amount of carbon gas offset. Because of this over-simplified evaluation process, it is likely that the many projects producing carbon credits have a negative effect on the environment as they are not correctly quantified and upon their purchase, the buying company may create or be responsible for the production of more carbon gas then they may have without the purchase of the credits.<\/p>\n
Henry did not feel as negatively about direct carbon capture tech however, he did feel as though the outcome of its ideology would not be efficient. Henry felt that because the immediate product that most carbon capture plants produce and monetize in order to maintain the income for operating costs is carbon credits it is essentially doing nothing. Those who often purchase carbon credits are large institutions that wish to be able to say on paper that they have a lower carbon footprint than they legitimately do. And as a result they are able get away with being responsible for the production of more carbon gas.<\/p>\n
All of that being said Henry thinks that the technology itself is incredible and has a fantastic future however there must be another way to fund this technology and avoid the use of carbon credits unless there is immediate change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Brian Jones Brian Jones is the Founder and Managing Principle of Windmill Capital Management and has an extensive history in the field of Carbon Credits and the general field of sustainable investing. Prior to the interview, Brian had informed me that his expertise was more specific to carbon credits than to carbon capture tech, therefore […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-105809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-paper-writing","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105809\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}