When asked how the results of the recent presidential election might impact investment in the energy industry, Christopher Spears, principal with bp Ventures was pragmatic.
"My perspective is I shouldn’t talk about politics," Spears said in a panel discussion at the American Carbon Capture Forum in Houston. "The reality is that industry projects we invested in that existed before 2016, and between 2016 and 2020, will continue. There are still bundles of activity in this sector."
Steering clear of politics, he and other panelists focused the discussion on sharing their "wish lists" for evaluating investment proposals.
Eric Rubenstein, founding managing partner with New Climate Ventures, encouraged companies seeking investment to be "more vocal" about their interest in these spaces and express that interest publicly.
Rubenstein added that he believes this more robust approach would go "a long way to driving policy over the coming years. It’s kind of like ‘the squeaky wheel gets the grease,’ right?"
Rubenstein reasoned that "industries that are supported by the coming administration are loud about wanting technologies like this to succeed. That, I think, will move the needle on things, moving in a direction that actually makes them succeed."
Murtuza Marfani, senior VP of Commercial and Business Development with Syzygy Plasmonics, said most of his colleagues are from the "project development side" rather than investment.
"In my organization, most of my folks are PhDs and engineers," he said. "They love to tinker with the technology, but they don’t really think about the commercial aspect of it. That’s a very different skill set for an organization to have, or for an organization to grow — particularly if you’re trying to remain a technology developer model."
Referring to Syzygy’s "ecosystem of partners and parties," Marfani emphasized that his organization is "working hand in hand with experienced project developers" to fully understand their investment processes.
Spears shared that, from his perspective, bp Ventures receives a lot of project proposals that are somewhat removed from the projects the group traditionally invests in.
"There’s a lot of opportunity for increased transparency and openness in the project development field," he said. "There’s a lot of competition, obviously, but it’s very striking to see the differences in assumptions for these projects among different developers."
Spears said he also believes there’s a big opportunity for more collaboration on investment projects "in the sense of being more transparent about how many jobs these projects will create," especially when that job creation sets off potential changes to policy.
"We see there are X-thousands of jobs, so there’s a lot of opportunity to collaborate," he said.
Deanna Zhang, panel moderator and CEO with V1 Climate Solutions, noted that leaders often need more solid information before they can most efficiently proceed with any project, whether it’s an investment, construction or production project.
"Nobody has a good benchmark on what the cost overruns are, and what’s to be expected on pricing power on different markets," Zhang said. "There are just so many unknowns, so usually we have to hire consultants or throw it out to the market to figure that out, but that can be very costly from a time and resources perspective," Zhang said. She is currently working on a "data consortium" project that focuses on how best to "get the estimates and the modeling for these projects on track."
Spears said he agreed and concluded that "if investors had more certainty in terms of what the actual cost modeling would be, there would be a lot more ability to invest in those projects."
