The Return of Decarbon Weekly: The Rockefeller-like Rise of India’s Green Energy King, The Man Shaping How the World Thinks About Energy and More.
Rayyan Islam
Co-Founder and General Partner at 8090 Industries. Merchant of Decarbonization. Neo-Industrialist
Fellow Agents of Change:
I've decided to officially bring our decarbonization-focused weekly newsletter on Substack directly to Linkedin today. Before I begin, I wanted to thank you for taking a moment to read through our curated stories and the latest developments in regards to the decarbonization transition. Today marks a little over 2 years since we first began, and yet a new chapter awaits.
I had taken a hiatus for a bit this year, busy with the launch of my fund focused on industrial decarbonization at 8090 Partners where we’ve focused on investing in and supporting category defining companies decarbonizing every industrial sector (from Cemvita Factory, Infinium, Circ, Quaise, Addionics and many more) and taking some time to properly acclimate into my new life as a father with my newborn son, Zaidyn.
Newsletter 2.0
We’re now taking this newsletter to the next level with an exciting new set of additions including individual profiles and exclusive Q&As with founders and entrepreneurs, industry executives and investors who each are playing critical roles across the decarbonization landscape. We’ll also be introducing more content and launching an exciting new job board purely focused on galvanizing and directing today’s leading talent into the most bold and innovative companies making a serious dent on decarbonization today. Plus, we have some news for you.
A fresh new launch and rebrand:
DeCarbon Weekly
As we step forward into a new chapter, we felt it was the perfect opportunity to go ahead and launch a fresh new brand for our newsletter: Decarbon Weekly. Our new name and brand reflects both our committed focus as a go-to source for the latest and long read developments in decarbonization and our ambitions to build a key community of change agents making a major dent on the climate crisis.
Thank you all for being part of our journey. We’re just getting started.
WHAT CAUGHT OUR EYE:
— The Aussie Tech Billionaire Who Bet Big Against Coal, Making Enemies At Home And Admirers In The U.S
WHAT CAUGHT OUR EYE:
Recommended by LinkedIn
Meet the Man Who Quietly Shapes How the World Thinks About Energy including Bill Gates: Throughout his career, Vaclav Smil, perhaps the world's foremost thinker on energy of all kinds, has sought clarity. From his home office near Winnipeg, Canada, the 74-year-old academic has produced dozens of books over the past 4 decades covering everything from China's environmental problems and Japan's dietary transition from plants to meat. But some of his books—particularly those exploring how societies have transitioned from relying on one source of energy, such as wood, to another, such as coal—are profoundly influencing generations of scientists, policymakers, executives, and philanthropists. Now, as the world faces the challenge of curbing climate change, Smil's work on energy transitions is getting more attention than ever.
“One ardent fan, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in Redmond, Washington, claims to have read nearly all of Smil's work. "I wait for new Smil books," Gates wrote last December, "the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie."
Adani: The Rockefeller-like Rise of India’s Green Energy King: One would have to be living under a rock to not be aware of Adani’s meteoric rise on the Forbe’s Billionaire list. As of this week, worth over $152B, he officially knocked off Jeff Bezos to be the 2nd richest man on the planet behind only Elon Musk. An industrial titan, the likes we haven’t seen since perhaps Musk or even Carnegie or Rockefeller themselves, Gautam Adani has now bet $70 billion on green energy. This deep dive gem of a story from Fortune India pulls back the curtain on Adani’s empire and how he built it and what exactly are the factors that drive his ambition.
“Green is where Adani’s heart is now. He sees India’s energy landscape transitioning in just 10-20 years, opening up numerous opportunities in the country. It could also position India and the Adani group for a shot at world markets, just like China did. “Climate change is one of the biggest challenges. It also opens up huge business opportunities. The opportunity here is energy transition—from fossil fuels to renewables and hydrogen. That is what the whole game is about. What the world has seen in the last 100 years of energy forms is set to change in the next 30-40 years,” says Adani as he explains his vision — and mission."
Texas: The Industrial $100B Hydrogen Superhub w/180k jobs by 2050: Texas could build a $100bn hydrogen economy and create 180,000 jobs along its Gulf coast, transforming the network of oil and petrochemical industrial complexes currently in operation there into a national H2 export superhub competitive with emerging global market players, according to a new report based on research by McKinsey & Company.
The report highlights a baseline view: “Texas would be producing 21 million tons a year of clean hydrogen (45% for export) versus the present 3.6 million tons of grey hydrogen from conventional process routes, which would represent 220 million tons of CO2 abatement, by 2050.”
Can Natural Gas Be Used to Create Power With Fewer Emissions? One evening last November, NET Power’s generator synchronized with the Texas grid, a major step toward providing power to homes and businesses — pioneering a novel way of generating electricity that burns natural gas but doesn’t generate greenhouse gas emissions as fossil fuels. Could this company be a core solution for decarbonizing the country’s national grid?
"In other power plants, capturing carbon dioxide means adding separate equipment that draws considerable energy. NET Power’s system captures the carbon dioxide it creates as part of its cycle, not as an add-on. The excess carbon dioxide can then be drawn off and stored underground or used in other industrial processes. The plant’s operations produce none of the health-damaging particulates, or the smog-producing gases like oxides of nitrogen and sodium, that coal plants spew."
Graphite: The Surprising Climate Cost of the Humblest Battery Material: Graphite is made in blazing-hot furnaces powered by dirty energy. Until recently, there has been no good tally of the carbon emissions. When a battery is powered up, lithium ions rush toward this positively-charged end. It is often said that the cathode—that’s the other end of the battery—is where the magic happens. It’s home to an arrangement of metals like cobalt, nickel, and manganese. But each of those metals is negotiable, depending on the specific battery design. Humble graphite isn’t. Graphite makes up roughy 25% of the batteries weight, helps define how much energy a battery can hold and how fast it charges up, yet faces little solutions to decarbonize. Here at 8090 we’re incubating a company to do just that in the coming months.
"And if the anode itself is overlooked, so is its carbon footprint. It doesn’t make much sense to produce the world’s cleanest battery if the graphite inside it involves 20 kilograms of CO2 equivalent."
The Aussie Tech Billionaire Who Bet Big Against Coal, Making Enemies At Home And Admirers In The U.S.: Atlassian co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes is putting his money behind an effort to make Australia’s biggest power company stop spewing carbon. Wearing blue jeans and a black pair of R.M. Williams boots, with his signature unkempt beard and ponytail, Mike Cannon-Brookes looks more like an Aussie wheat farmer than a tech billionaire, yet that didn’t stop him from backing down from his months-long fight to force AGL, Australia’s biggest power company and largest carbon polluter, to fast-track ridding itself of coal. This is the story of a renewal in activist capitalism sprung up from the coal mine world of Australia.
“Cannon-Brookes’ bare-knuckle, kick-down-doors approach to activist investing — attempting to buy a country’s largest polluter and speed its coal plant closures — has forged a new playbook for addressing climate change and spurred a more urgent realization beyond Australia: Could billionaires, especially those in America, be doing more?”
Could Coal Waste be Used to Make Sustainable Batteries? Coal waste contains critical minerals and materials, including cobalt, manganese, and lithium, and rare-earth elements, such as neodymium — essential to a wide range of high-tech products, including the magnets used in wind turbines and the ultra-lightweight batteries used in computers, smartphones, and a variety of modern weaponry. The last several years, American scientists have succeeded in extracting critical minerals and materials from coal waste. If this effort proves efficient and effective, we may be able to simultaneously clean up polluted places and secure access to rare resources which could provide supplies for military technologies and help create more sustainable energy sources.
“Fossil communities are solving something Silicon Valley can’t,” Jennifer Wilcox, the principal deputy assistant secretary of the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management at the Department of Energy, told me. “This does more than restore the environment. It also restores these communities that have paid so much for America’s energy.”