Eight years ago, Bill Gates and group of his closest billionaire acquaintances launched an incredibly well funded venture capital group. Its noble mission was funding and supporting transformative technologies aimed at mitigating climate change. Many of its investments are sound and if commercialized, would assist, at least a bit.
38% of their portfolio by value and investments make little sense to me, but I’m pleased to see that a slight majority of the investments are in good companies, aligned with real problems and doing useful work.Boston Metals is doing excellent work on molten oxide electrolysis of iron as an alternative green steel technique. Electra is toiling in the same space.Pivot Bio is working to decarbonize agriculture by creating mass-brewable microbes that fix nitrogen around the roots of plants.
. A review of all of the billionaires behind BEV found pro-nuclear, renewables-dismissive stances. This was in 2015 when it was clear that renewables had the conditions for success, that nuclear did not have the conditions for significant scaling and that hammering deployment for renewables was the clear path to rapid decarbonization.
If I saw a nation or group of nations intentionally creating the conditions for success for scaling nuclear and following through, I would support that. However, I don’t see any nations, even the ones in the COP nuclear pledge, even acknowledging the real conditions for success or the barriers to scaling nuclear and strategically working to mitigate barriers and create success conditions. The headwinds for renewables are non-existent by comparison.
BEV portfolio CCS firms have accrued $1.4 billion of investment and the only firm worth investing in only received $100 million to date. Most of the $1.4 billion was the ‘successful’ exit of Carbon Engineering when it was bought outright by its only customer, oil and gas major Oxy. As I noted in my, its only natural market was enhanced oil recovery on tapped out oil wells with unmarketable natural gas. That’s what Oxy hired them to build and that’s what Oxy bought them to do.