This is Dana Perkins and you're listening to Switched on the BNF podcast, and today we bring you a recording from our summit in London, which took place on the eighth and ninth of October. The panel featured on today's show is titled Cleaning Up Heavy Transport. So while electrification has been well established in other parts of the transport sector like passenger vehicles, there are some limits to how far the technology can reach, and heavy transport is one
of the tougher ones for it to decarbonize. Cleaning up aviation, maritime shipping, and long haul trucking will likely require clean fuels like biofuels, resulting in sustainable aviation fuels or saff
for short or ammonia methanol and synthetic fuels. This variety of options gives us a lot of pathways to a lower carbon heavy transport sector, but it's also with its own challenges, including elevated prices and some confusion among investors as they struggle to understand exactly which technologies they should
be putting their money behind. So with all of this to consider, the panelists you'll hear from on this recording explore which clean fuels are currently seeing the greatest uptake and whether existing government policy is extensive enough and clear enough to support growth in the sector. They also discuss what feedback they have been receiving from investors, and this results in some suggestions on how to stimulate growth across
the wider sector. You'll hear from Freya Burton, chief sustainability Officer at Lanztech, Chris Johnson, chief commercial officer at C two X, and Lara Nashquinbondi, chief executive officer at ET Fuels. The panel was moderated by Colin mccherricer Bloomberg, nef's head
of Transport and Energy Storage. For more information regarding BNF's summits, including our upcoming BNF Summit taking place in Shanghai on the third and fourth of December, and to view recordings from this and other events in the past, head to about dot BNF dot com forward Slash Summit. Now let's hear from our panel on cleaning up heavy trains and sport from the BNF Summit, London.
We've heard a little bit about clean fuels and shipping in aviation throughout the session so far, but we're going to get a little further into it right now, and just to kind of set the scene. Right now, both shipping and aviation are around two and a half percent of global CEO two emissions, but that share is set to rise, depending on the forecast to use maybe double
over the next ten or twenty years. Right now, aviation uses about ninety three billion gallons of jet fuel a year, and three hundred and twenty million of that is saf so less than zero point five percent. On the shipping side, eighty four billion gallons of marine fuel used and for low carbon fuels, and that's being a bit generous with the definitions. It's about one hundred and thirty million gallons, so less than zero point two percent. So a lot of work to do, but luckily there's a lot of
people on the case. So I want to ask, as a sort of opener to each of you, where you're seeing the most activity, interest uptake on the clean fuel side. So Laura will start with you.
Sure, well, it feels like a kind of funny time. So by way of background, we co founded ety fuel's green fuels developer a couple of years ago, and I remember when we did that, there was this huge buzz around hydrogen you know, we like to say that we co founded the company the day that Merce could come out with this big announcement, And there were all these projects and it was just this really exciting, optimistic time in the hydrogen space. And I think sort of two
and a half years on, i'm much aged. But beyond that, I think on the supply side, you've seen a real shakeout. So you know, we as a developer would often get other developers coming to us saying, do you want to partner up or co invest or whatever. And I'd look at the projects and you'd see that someone maybe done an engineering study, or they got an option over a field that happened to be a bit sunny, but the.
Projects were not robust.
You know, the feedstock hadn't been secured, maybe the engineering hadn't been done at all, the TRL of the technology was a bit dodgy. But there was just this huge hype that was kind of providing this wave to all these on the supply side. And I think what you're seeing now is two years on, maybe people have got a bit of seed funding, but that's run out, and so you're really just seeing a bit of the wheat separating from the chaff on the supply side. On the
demand side, it's also quite different. So obviously we're targeting the marine sector and a lot of discussion around, you know, demand signals, is anyone going to buy the fuel. The conversations that we're having, though are really also quite different
to where they were two years ago. So whereas two years ago people were talking about, you know, I want to buy my green fuels, and the way I'll price them will be here's how much I play for a heavy fuel oil, and then I'll pay a bit for EUETS, and then I'll pay for debucks more just to be a good citizen. Right now, the conversations are either one of two one type of conversation with that let's just
call them less sophisticated or less resource shipping companies. Is I'm dealing with the eu ETS, I'm being told it's leg it's biofuels, it's e methanol, it's ammonia. I have no idea what's going on, and quite frankly, it doesn't matter. I'll wait until twenty thirty somebody will figure out nuclear fusion. I'll be fine, and anyway, I'll just pass the whole thing onto my end customer. It's the one size fits
or tax. We'll all deal with it together. The more sophisticated are doing a few things, so they are running the maths on fuel EU, which is bloody complicated regulation but actually does some amazing things to incentivize e fuels.
So they're running the mass on that.
They are waiting for IMO, and they are looking, at least in our space around this shortage of fuel supply where some people have done the maths on the lack of biofuels have not, and they are thinking about how they're going to secure their supply. But everyone's still kind of waiting because we haven't quite got there yet on IMO.
So it's kind of a funny time.
So those are quite big shifts on both the supply and demand picture. Chris, does that kind of line up with what you're seeing.
I think there's a consistency of you there. But first of all, thank you for the opportunity to be here, particularly as a very young company.
We might be a young company.
C two x our roots and is a company with one hundred and twenty year history, and that's mrsk On the shipping company.
You know.
Interestingly, we heard yesterday afternoon and one of the panels you're talking about, you know, a lot of it is driven by supply. We're very much as a company. It came from the demand musk. We're making the commitments to to green methanol container vessels and needed to assure that the supply was in place. And you know we were spun out about a year ago is away per by ap Mala Holdings and twenty percent now a ap mil a MRSK. But being driven actually by a customer on
setting this up. It meant we were coming in at this technology agnostic. So you know, there's a lot of work being done over the last year or two to try and think through the most competitive pathways to producing
green methanol. And I think for me that's really where the interest is in particular, you know, Lara's describing the more sophisticated customers who are really beginning to understand this is we need to demonstrate we can be competitive, and we're driven by one of our chahlders is very focused
on that this is a highly competitive industry. Someone was saying to me yesterday pointing out they're harder to debate sexors are those with some of the thinnest margins and the customers are very sensitive and authorship shift a container from one shipping line to another if those rates change, so they're very cost focus. So we had to make sure we were building the most competitive pathways. So that's what we're getting in our interests is by demonstrating that
we do have those pathways. Now we've gone down a route initially, we've we've got three projects Egypt, Spain, but our focus at the moment is on us and looking at the gasification of biomass, which we see as being one of the best pathways. It's a well proven technology in other services and we are now seeing some of the cost space to produce methanol that way. Now, the interesting thing is we look at it. We've gone for methanol. It is driven by shipping and that's where a lot
of the conversation is today. But methanol has a big advantage. It is a pathway whether it's into the chemical sectors, and we do expect it in a similar way for sort of landstect to play into the sustainable aviation fuels on the methanol to jet in a later stage. But the conversation as well, we're having this, how do you get these projects off the ground? How do you get these commitments of the ground, Because all of these projects depend on long term commitments.
So a lot of our conversation on where's the right right.
Price point to actually make those commitments, which is going to get those projects off the ground and get those products off the ground at scale because scale is going to be important to keep in those costloads. There's a real sort of tension here to actually to originate those projects.
So yeah, even when you feel like you've identified the right pathway, that that's only the start of the journey, and it's a start, yeah for it. I want to come to you on that. What are you seeing right now?
Well, I think one of the things too, I'm sort of reflecting back what it was like sort of ten plus years ago and what it's like today. And I think back to some events where they were investors coming to see technology producers and we literally had to bribe people to come into the room who were doing fuels because everyone wanted to talk about solar and wind. Nobody was interested to yours because everyone was terrified after clean Take one point zero and they're like, oh god, no,
don't want to go there. Fast forward to today, everybody, No, I'm not being disparaging to marine, but SAFF is the sexy fuel. Everybody's talking about saf We love marine and we're working on marine as well, but everybody comes to us wanting to talk about SAFF. And so sustainable aviation fuel has had the most incredible rise in attention that we've ever seen. But I think we still have a problem in that we're still looking at one sort of silver bullet hope, one solution.
And.
To the point of finding the right pathway, there are lots of right pathways and so today, unfortunately, there are still sort of focuses, either from the investor community or from a policy standpoint, that we're really focusing on single solutions when there are no single solutions. There are lots of solutions, And there is a slight realization coming now because you're having these broader discussions going, hey, it's not just fisher trops technology.
There's alcohol to jet.
Yes, Heifer's probably king right now, but that will transition as more pathways sort of scale up. So it's really interesting to see that there is more interest in fuels today, but there's still this kind of focus on trying to find a winner, and if we do.
That, we're all going to lose. That's really interesting that you bring up sort of cleantech one point zero. I started out my career in biofuels early two thousands, and yeah, there was this huge amount of interesting time time straight down shortly after that. So a lot of people got burned, and that reverberated for quite a while. Let's stay on this pathway discussion a bit, because I understand that, as you say, there's many different pathways, many of them are viable.
But at the same time, you've got to put a stake in the ground and you have to do something, and you have to get investors on board. And so how do you manage that tension between saying, yeah, there's these different pathways and there's lots of different things we can do with we have to do something now, Laura.
I mean, maybe I don't think this is a controversial statement to say, I don't think there are maybe rephrase, there aren't.
That many end states.
The end state has to be e fuels, and the simple reason is fussiled and decarbonize and bifuels are in short supply, right, so we can talk about the pathways and whether it's energy or biofuels. But in my personal, completely unbiased opinion, they're all just really faffing around.
Because the end of to day it has to be e fuels.
That's the only way you get the scale on the decarbonization you need, right and so you know, two percent decarbonization, six percent here or there. Really what we need to focus on is how do we get the e fuels up and running as quickly as possible. And my view on that is there's really two things. One is, of course, we need the demand signals. We need the off takers.
You know, as Frey has said, it's already happening in saf and you can sort of see the explosion in terms of the investment pouring into that sector.
In marine.
I mean bluntly, it will happen because the fuely you maritime legislation is already incredibly incentivizing for ethuels. I know this sounds ridiculous. People have not done the matter yet. When they do the math and they figured out how to actually put that into contracts, that will incent ethuels. One of the issues I think though, in the e fuel space is that often the developers are approaching it
the wrong way. So when we started the business, i'd sort of I mean just by way of careers, so I'd done a lot of stuff in finance, banking, pe hedge fund. I then spent most of my career in the commodities industry, and I was sick of commodities because all we were doing for ten years was five percent cost reduction, doing the same thing that we've been doing, and it just got boring.
So I went to Google and I was like, I'm done with this. I'm going to go and sell advertising.
But I guess the learning from my journey is if you want to win in the commodity space, the only thing that matters is where you are on the cost curve and do you have scale. And so we actually didn't necessarily come at this from how do we get a green hydrogen productup and running. I knew nothing about hydrogen. We just came at this and thought, how do you
produce e fuels in the absolute cheapest way? And really, all you know the way you do things cheaply in commodities you find the cheapest feed dark or the best resource. And so I think one of the challenges has been much of the innovation in the space has happened in places that are not particularly cost effective to produce e fuels, So you know, it's an amazing pioneering work. For example,
that it's not particularly a sunny or windy place. And so I think, you know, as Chris has sort of said, the regions now where people are focusing the US, Egypt, these are much more cost effective places to produce the fuels, and I think that will actually help us get some more traction.
I'm going to come back to the cost curve part, but Chris, do you want to weigh in on that, On that same question of sort of tension between pathways and doing something now.
The first thing to say is I fully agree with what Freyer said. There isn't a silver bullet out here, you know, and it is a transition for the industry. I mean, it takes shipping. It has been one fuel for most of those years until I was involved putting energy in the ships in my shoulders ten.
Twelve years ago. But before that there really wasn't a fuel choice.
It was fuel, and I think we're now in a world where there are multiple fuels that will go into whether it's pathways, into aviation, or whether it is into the marine sector.
But you know, I think for companies.
Such as ourselves, yeah, the focus is important whilst we have options and we you know, I would say it's pathways for us on the methanol into two different sort of markets, which is a good set of options to have. But you know, we have some options. Our project in Egypt is around e methanol by going through gasification, you actually have some options because of the imbalance of the
carbon dioxide and the hydrogen and the sincastream. So we sequestraight biogenic carbon and generate BEX or we can add green hydrogen into that to create a combination of biomethanol and emethanol. So we have some options. So we do have some options on the pathways there. But I think this cost point is we've got absolutely clear that we've got to hit the right cost points for the customers.
You know, lots of people say it's all down to subsidies. Well, it's a lot easier to have those conversations if you're at the right cost point on the cost curve, and so we've been very very focused on that, on meeting the customers needs. We're not pushing a technology. We're not pushing a location. We're we're trying to.
Find the roots which actually solve for the customer's needs.
Yeah, and I mean, Freya, let's talk a bit about Lends of Jet and what for the people who are not aware Alcohol to jet technology plants up and running and invest taken on external investment as well. Tell us a bit about that journey in building that up, because you've been at Lens of Tech since the beginning and that's a more recent part of the business sort of spun out. How has that gone.
Yeah, so you know, we spun out Lands of Jet in twenty twenty, probably the worst time to spin out an aviation furel company, but we structured it with a sort of an interesting investment opportunity for the investors to sort of invest in early and then we build the demo and then there'd be a sort of cash call so we could move forward in a faster way. We can really show how we can accelerate the scale up
of the Alcoulta jet process. But again it comes down to the off takes, the long term agreements, but also the environment that you're producing the fuel in. So to Lara's point on the you know, having policies that can create incentives. You know, the US is an attractive location for SAFF producers with the blenders tax credit. You know, provisions made in the IRA for certain carbon utilization technologies still not given as much money as ccs, but that's
a different discussion. You know, these are the things that support that kind of scale up. So you know, sadly, you know, I'm talking to you in a week where we're getting the second massive hurricane hitting that part of the US and the area where our facility has been hit really badly by Helene over the last couple of weeks, and so there's a lot of cleanup and devas station in the community. So our focus right now is not on the operating of the facility but just you know,
getting the community back on its feet. But you know, I know we don't often talk about climate change. You know, in these environments we're all we all know what's going on. But I mean, this is if we look at it from an energy transition perspective, and this is another massive climate event. And if any of you saw the pictures from the space station last night, I mean it looked
like the beginning of a disaster. Movie, you know, but it's real and it's happening, and it's impacting not just lives and communities, but also the technologies that are building the energy transition.
You know, first time i'd really.
Learned about the courts, mining and the Appalachians, which is so important for chips, you know. So we've got to think about the broader picture, not just how we're going to meet our targets, because I mean, that ship's almost sailed for the industry, but how we're going to stop these massively devastating events happening again and again.
It's a good reminder that none of this stuff is abstract. It's getting very, very real, and as John our CEO said in the opener yesterday, we're sort of midway through this decisive decade and some of this stuff really has to pick up quickly. I want to just stay for a second on corporate structure. Because Chris owned your C two X, owned by am A. Miller is the largest shareholder lands of jet spun out.
What what what?
What were the advantages and what was the decision process in treating those as separate entities rather than just keeping them as part of the parent.
Happy to take it I think it's it's one of focus, skill set and a breadth of customer base. You know, I think we've I probably would say this, but I think we've got a good balance. We call that support from a very strong corporate and a customer but we've you know, separately, we're building up a capability and we're focused and I think Mark has been a very innovative company over the years. The parent Apemal Holdings are major parent.
You're supporting a lot of growth projects in different businesses. They announced last week, you know, a method of green methano or to plastics.
Business for example.
So we've got that support and we've got that commitment to the transition there. But we've got that focus and the ability to operate more entrepreneurially, much more as a sort of startup type theme, but with a slight sort of corporate overpinning and support. So there's a balance there to I think bring in some of that capability and we may work with other investors over time as you know as well. And we're not just focused you know now on sort of one customer. We've broadened our base.
We're thinking about those other pathways, other marine customers, other sectorial customers and beginning to think, you know, longer term and you know, methanol to jet a different alcohol to jet.
And for any other comment on just the decision to make that a separate spine.
Echoing Chris's thoughts on the skills side, I mean, Lansa Jet was really focused on the aviation sector and while we've got a great team with sort of history of working in the space, we really wanted to hire into this entity, you know, the skills to scale it. And you know, Lanser Tech is building facilities around the world to get the feedstock. So in our case alcohol ethanol, you know, a low cost as I said, is you know, got to have a low cost feedstock, especially for something
like jet fuel. And you know we're focused on that side. So Lansa Jet is focused on that second part, the conversion from the ethanol to the jet fuel. And again the attracting investment into bad entity. And we were talking backstage. I mean Chris was actually involved back in the day in its shell days, as we're part of one of those investors Interjet. It's one big happy family in this space.
Lo's of crossover. Laura, I want to you mentioned sort of the lower cost and your commodity background coming in and just being like that is the critical thing when you look at coming back to this pathways question, sometimes when we've looked at the economics of some of the things for both shipping and aviation, there's also this question of whether some sort of book and credit system with VEX or CCS or director capture might be more competitive
in the long term than the fuels. I don't know what's your what's your view on that.
I guess yeah, I mean there's a lot of space between now and the long term, right, and I mean I'm hoping to be retired in the long term, So I guess the way I see it, right is there's actually a disconnect between what people think they need to do now. I want to say people the shipping industry does go with that what they think they need to do now, what they actually need to do in the relatively short term.
Maybe to talk to that.
So, you know, I don't know if Chris would agree, but I get the sense that most whether it's aviation or marine, what they're doing now is kind of let's do some stuff that looks good, doesn't cost us too much, and we'll deal with this by twenty thirty five. Reality is they kind of need to act by twenty thirty to meet their targets.
And I'll talk about that in a second.
Now, if you're in a world in twenty thirty where you've got six percent, you know, in marine you've got a six percent carbon intensity reduction target in twenty thirty, you cannot do that with energy because you basically have to replace out half of your half of your fleet almost to do that. You can't do that with bi fuels, and I'll talk about why, and so you have to do that with V fuels E fuels projects take I think the panelist said, or any guy said three to five years.
It's not three to five years, it's six years.
Six She has minimum in Texas, which is one of the best places in the world to do business. And so what that means is if you want to secure your supply in twenty thirty, you have.
To be acting now.
And most in the shipping industry are not drawing those dots together and maybe to sort of put some numbers to that, right. So one of the things I that I the shipping industry loves to do is to talk about the flavor of the month. You know, people wake up and there's a new podcast and now we're all doing LNG. And then you wake up next month and it's biofuels is where the future?
And then you know ammonia.
And the reality is when you look at the landscape, ammonia is not ready for twenty thirty. If shipping was to meet it's IMO targets for twenty thirty using biofuels, the numbers are just baffling, right, So you'd have to go from a world where shipping today uses about zero point two zero point three percent of the.
World's global biofuels to.
Meet the low end of what the im I was talking about by twenty thirty, you'd have to see that go from about zero point two zero point three percent to sixty percent of the world's global biofuels. I mean, you guys have the data, so you know that right that is never going to happen. And then, like I said, with LNG again, you do the mass. You look at the data to decarbonize an entire fleet by six percent,
Each LG gives you fifteen percent. So you do the mask and you're like, okay, how do I get six percent if I've got a fleet of one hundred ships, fifteen percent, you've got to move forty of those ships onto LNG.
It's huge.
And that's by twenty thirty.
So I think this point around what are we're doing in you know, twenty fifteen net zero is great, but the industry is going to have some real penalties to pay in twenty thirty. And the other bit that I think people aren't realizing is, at least you know, in the in the maritime space, the legislation is not one size fits all. The legislation incentivizes first movers and penalizes
those who are late. So my expectation is that by twenty thirty you'll see real disruption in terms of the haves who have prepared and the have nots who have not. And you know, I think what we do in twenty fifty is kind of it's kind of neither here nor there.
We have to do stuff now.
Yeah, this gets the sort of challenge between decision windows and impact windows and long asset lives in these sector sectors. Chris, what do you think of that kind of same topic around book and credit versus implementing things now, yeah, that's there.
I think it comes back a little bit to sort of Forez, but there isn't one pathway, so I think offsets will play a role. And I've certainly heard the same conversations about the aviation sector. I mean interestingly, as a project we can generate some of those high quality technical credits. But I think Lara's point on lee time
is a really important thing. And we just talk about L and G, but I was involved when do we started twenty twelve twenty thirteen on the shel days of putting LERG into ships, And there's a whole lot of chickens and eggs running around, the eggs not running around, the chickens running.
Around and.
Or what comes first. And as a company, Shell could take that decision. It invested in break bonk facilities and in Rotterdam and a bunker barge, but it had the LNG portfolio to stand behind that and deliver that, and it took a number of years for that to really take off. And if it hadn't been for those first moves, we wouldn't probably be talking about Ellergy in the shipping sector.
So this this sleetime is important. It is important. On the facilities, it is a minimum probably of six years to get project off the ground, possibly longer, and it is and is a challenge for our customers on the shipping side as well to make the decisions. It's a it's a big bit of whether you go down to ammonia ship, do we commit on an energy ship? Is the energy ship method already? What's is the engine technology there,
the bunkering facilities, you're there. So there's a lot of things which actually have to come together to make this work.
So credits may bridge some of this.
It's probably it's not going to be the silver bullet, like anything else is not going to be the silver bullet, but this timeline is important. We are almost too late for twenty thirty now.
Yeah, it sounds like similar similar views to what Laura was saying. For any thoughts on the same topic.
Well, I mean credit only to take you so far. I mean, you've got there's so much fuel to replace, and I know we're just talking about fuels, but let's you know, there's chemicals that need to be replaced as well. So you know, if we're looking at we actually need to make the transition and keep fossil in the ground. That's you know, the key part of the transition. We need to start making stuff. You know, we can't just
make it go away by buying a credit. There's a place for credits and quality offsets, and that's a whole nother discussion. But we actually need fuels, we need chemicals, and we need them to be done in a different way to the way they're done today.
I want to shift yours have been and ask there's a lot of investors in the room, and I want to ask what you're hearing each of you is hearing from investors when you're when you're pitching right now, you spend time in front of investors and you're pitching projects or or raising rounds. What are you hearing and kind of how has that changed over the last few years.
You hinted at the beginning about how it's a world of difference versus five years being five years ago being in a back room somewhere that no one wanted to come to, versus now. But maybe we'll start here, Laura, and then work our way down around what you're hearing from investment.
Yeah.
I mean so, I've often wondered if there was a way to go long emethanol without having to do this job like how would I do it something that's just a bit less hiring. And I think I've sat on the other side most of my life where I've had the checkbook and given it out, And I think the thing that's interesting on the investment side is this. So what Freya said about SAF being the sexy thing, right, that is absolutely where investors' mindsets her up right, And
so I'm sure Chris doing the same. Right, We're all talking a great game on methanol to jet. It's not even a STM certified. It will be, and that's all fine, But the reality is people want to go into the SAFA space and the reason is they look at the headline on the regulation and they say, oh, there's quotas for ethuels in SAF there's real penalties, whereas Marinia you
haven't got actual quotas for ethiels. Most of them, like ninety nine at nine percent, have not actually looked at the marine legislation and done the back calculation, which is that you cannot meet twenty thirty targets where there are punitive penalties, you cannot meet those without a substantive portion of e fields. So this whole thing about SAF having binding quotas. I think it's a bit of a meme, but that's kind of where the investment community is at.
The Second thing, and this, I think is more of a valid point, is investors are saying, unless you've got a revenue line, what kind of a business are you?
And I think there's been a lot of kind of you know, a lot of sort of lack of robust projects in the pipeline that didn't actually have the feedstock or you know, a good cost model, and so that's kind of clouded the whole space and people are shying away and saying, I can't really assess which of these projects is actually good from a sort of project development perspective.
There is no revenue line because the shipping companies aren't signing long term off take and so I'm just going to stay out of space until someone figures it out. And I think the challenge on the off take side is I joke about this with some of my old colleagues who still have, you know, stable jobs at Rio Tinto. One of the jobs I used to have was I was in charge of setting the procurement policy and risk
management for our freight and and our bunker. And I would literally spend all of my days telling people not to take positions no fixed prices. We've got to retain our exposure in line with the market. And the real challenge is the risk exposure for these procurement teams has fundamentally changed and they haven't adapted their procurement strategies to deal with that. And so until we sort of see all of the regulation play into procurement strategies, the investment community won't move.
Chris any thoughts on that. On the same question about investors and how that conversation is changing.
I think, I mean, it does come down to some of the fundamentals. Who's the customer, who's underwriting in the long term contracts, on the revenue SAR, the feedstock, the quality of the project execution, where you sit on the cost curve is really important. And all of these things, by the way, are not mutually exclusive. Of course, the quality of the teams and the capabilities and the experience
of the teams is very important. But the other thing I would add, and it plays into this pathways point, is focus is focus on what you need to deliver. Getting that first project off the ground is really important. You know, you may have growth you know, you need to demonstrate you've got a view on growth, but you don't get that right to growth unless you deliver those first projects and take the time to set those up appropriately. But once you're there and you get some of the
support there, that offers a platform of growth. And I think the other piece that you know, I've seen this because I've sort of also been involved here over the last years and advising some funds on investments, is a focus on your what is the support are you really capturing some of those supports to just get over this sort of critical phase to get those contracts in at the right price points and get the projects off the ground and to get those fundamentals.
There and free. I mean, you've seen this go from the full arc of early days at Landstech to now many years on with a very different stage of the commercial process. Where how have those conversations changed, particularly in the last two or three years.
Well, I mean, I think you know, echo what the others said. You know, making money very important, but how do you know, if we backtrack, how do you make money. You've got to have off takes, You've got to be able to sell it at the right price and what's that dependent on. So just looking at the staff space, that's dependent on unfortunately policy, And I don't mean that you want to have a technology that's dependent on incentives and handouts.
You don't want that.
But you want to be able to sell your product at least, so you want to have a market that is going to help you know, the market environment where you can sell your staff or whatever type of fuel you have. And up until now that hasn't really existed. It's been incredibly unstable because of the sort of tumultuous
time of biofuels excuse me one point zero. And then with SAFF in the UK, which is interestingly one of the more progressive countries in terms of their staff SAFF legislation, you know, investors were waiting to see what would happen with this so called revenue certainty mechanism, you know, in a SAFF mandate. And this has only just been sort of buttoned up in the last couple of months, so
there was this incredible uncertainty. And looking at European legislation, I mean, I've been working on one policy in renewable energy for ten plus years, and what kind of investor
is supposed to you know, be forthcoming. When policy is unstable and there's no clarity and the Commission is still putting out sort of FAQs about the policy frameworks because nobody really understands what it means or it's too vague, and until these things are kind of clear, investors are always going to have a challenge in knowing where to put their money. But luckily, in the saf space, a lot of that has you know, moved forward, but that is still a problem and it all comes down to
how much money you're going to make. I mean it's pretty it's a pretty straightforward answer, but also the other things that what they're looking for.
To on that policy runt. I mean, there's a lot of policy makers in the room. Is there any any of you have some requests you'd like to air to them? Grievances as well, if you'd like speed.
Yeah.
I mean I think policy makers and investors always get a bashing. You know, people complain that the regulation is not clear, the regulation has not been finalized. I mean the regulation will never be finalized by definition, right, I mean regulation evolved.
I actually think the regulator is well done.
Regulators, I think it's done a really good job today at least in Europe. And if the IMO, even on the low end of the targets, if the IMO comes out where people are talking about.
Them coming out, that will be a real win.
So I actually don't think the issue is necessarily policy makers. I think the issue is as fair I said, sometimes people actually have to understand what that policy means, and you know, help sheets and all that stuff, and the regulation is complicated, and I think if I sort of had a, you know, an ask for policymakers, I would say, we all know e fuels is going to be the end state.
I mean, we can talk.
About multi fuel pathways together, that's fine, but you know, really e fuels is the only way, as I've talked about, that you can decarbonize at scale. And so what I think would be incredibly helpful, and we've seen it in Staff as a great case study, is to have specific
parts of the policy that very clearly call out ethuels. Now, we can get to the same place by having absolute emission and reduction targets that don't specify a pathway, but from an investor interpretation point of view, having those really clear signals, it's just night and day in terms of being able to move money into the sector.
So that would be that'd be my ask.
A Decho frays point on time and times not on our side from a transition. But I do keep a degree of optimism here. You know, I think we saw some positive moves, you know, on the IMO when they were meeting two weeks ago here in London. But I keep some optimism. You know, there was a reason you started talking about elergy and hipping. It wasn't actually really decarbonization ten twelve years ago.
It was about emissions.
It was about socks, it was about Knox, and it came because of the emission controller is the echos. And this was IMO legislation which has brought change, whether it's scrub as loads, sulfur fuels, et cetera. So you do see some of this come and when it comes, you get that change and furely you is actually an example of this is as Laras talks about. So I yes, it takes some time, but actually when it comes, it does lead to change. So I do keep some degree
of optimism here. But the things that can support just getting over this first hurdle are also.
Important as well for any other final requests for policymakers, ease, Yes.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. I mean, yes, end state Great, we've got to get there, or else we're totally screwed, and so speed things up.
Let's move forward.
And you know, using a sporting analogy, we don't just need the home runs to win. You need the singles and doubles. So you know, that's what's important on the policy side, to let things sort of move forward.
Okay, I've got one more question. I'm going to ask just to quickly hopefully end on a bit more forward looking note. If you were to sort of look back, we're ten years into the future. What was obvious about clean fuels that isn't obvious now? So any sort of bold prediction you'd like to make there about what we're going to think was obvious but isn't now.
I don't think it's particularly bold, but I will I'll put it out there.
I think.
I think people are underestimate how differentiating this legislation. I'd say this being all of the decarbonization type legislation, is going to be on customers.
And what I mean by that is.
We are entering a world where there are now U risk exposures. It's not just how much do I pay for my energy? And can I get the same energy price as everybody else? It is now, do I have access to that energy that is going to also give me decarbonization? Do I have security of supply on that for more than just six months? And do I have a good visibility on the chain of custoder as to
where that energy has come from? And I think those are all things that are not relevant today but will become such differentiators for whether it's shipping or aviation or anyone else who has a punitive decarbonization target to meet. And I think when we roll forward to twenty thirty, which is for a lot of these sectors, the next kind of step up, we're going to see that play up.
And I think a lot of companies.
Will wake up not having prepared and be completely stung by that, and others will be sitting there basically raking in and actually making you have a lot of money out of decarbonization because they started early for that reason, as opposed to because they tried to do it to be good citizens.
So very differentiated out comes.
Chris quickly over, I think I'm going to keep it simple. I wish we'd started sooner.
YEPA, we underestimated how much hydrogen we needed.
Laura Chris Freya, thank you very much for sharing your expertise with us. I have a feeling this is a topic that we're going to continue to talk about more and more at our summits in the future. So to all of you, please join me in thanking our panelisties.
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