Catalyst with Shayle Kann - 2025 trends: aerosols, oil demand, and carbon removal

Episode Date: January 30, 2025

Out today: Nat Bullard’s 200-page slide deck with data from across the energy transition. Nat is the former chief content officer at BloombergNEF and current co-founder at data insights company Halcyon.  In part one of their two-part conversation, Shayle cherry-picked the most interesting slides and sat down with Nat to unpack them. They cover topics like: Accidental solar geoengineering and the state of aerosols The United States’ record-setting fossil fuels exports Whether Chinese oil demand is peaking Conflicting indicators for the state of ESG investing Whether you can have too many carbon removal startups Recommended resources Catalyst: Putting a halt to geoengineering — by accident Catalyst: 2024 trends: batteries, transferable tax credits, and the cost of capital  Catalyst: 2023 trends: biomass, ESG, batteries and more Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com. Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the public relations and strategic marketing agency of choice for climate and energy leaders. If you're a startup, investor, or global corporation that's looking to tell your climate story, demonstrate your impact, or accelerate your growth, Antenna Group's team of industry insiders is ready to help. Learn more at antennagroup.com.

You listen to this podcast for incisive coverage of the tech, business, and market forces shaping clean energy and climate tech. You can get them in your inbox, too. Latitude Media's flagship newsletter, The Latitude, offers B2B analysis, commentary, and curated news from across the industry. It's the perfect compliment to this show. Subscribe to receive the Latitude daily or weekly in your inbox or get our AI Energy Nexus newsletter on Wednesdays. Go to Latitudemedia.com slash newsletter to subscribe today. I'm Shail Kahn, Podcasts at the Frontier of Climate Technology. I'm Shail Khan, and this is Catalyst. How far off do you think we are from AI making your job of doing this annually obsolete? Like, when can I say generate me a 200-slide deck with insights on the state of global energy and climate?

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I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, and host of a brand new podcast, Critical Capital. Each episode, I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building the clean economy. Tune in as we unpack how progress is actually made. Listen to Critical Capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Catalyst is supported by Fish Tank PR, an award-winning PR firm focused on climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability. Fish Tank is known for generating prominent and effective media coverage for the brands they work with. If you want a PR partner that's thoughtful, shoots straight, and gets results, you'll like Fish Tank PR.

To learn more about Fish Tank's approach, visit Fish Tank, PR.com. That's F-I-S-C-H-Fish-Tankpr.com. I'm Shale Khan. I invest in revolutionary climate technologies at energy impact partners. Welcome. All right. Well, this is the third annual edition of this conversation that I had with Nat Bullard. Nat is a friend of mine. Nat is the co-founder at the company called Halcyon, an AI company, but he's a longtime analyst focused on energy and climate stuff. He, a few years ago, started producing this annual slide deck that's looking at trends in decarbonization and climate and energy in general, and he's got all sorts of interesting data in there. And so our tradition

now is that he sends me the deck ahead of time. It's 200 slides this year. And I cherry pick the things that I think are most interesting. And we talk about them. There's too much to talk about in one episode. So this is a two-parter. You're hearing the first part here. We're going to release the second part next week. Between the two parts, we talked about all sorts of things. Aerosol emissions and the impact that they've had on climate change. We talk about battery performance and hot weather and cold weather. We talk a lot about AI and energy. We talk about deep seek, which is obviously topical this week if you are listening when we release this thing. We talk about, of course, solar and wind and trends there. We talk about carbon markets and carbon removal, all the things

that you want to hear about, but with, I think, some interesting lenses that you don't typically hear. Anyway, with no further ado, here's the first part of my conversation with Nat. Nat, welcome Welcome back. Shale, always great to be back. How are you? I'm good. I'm very excited for this conversation. As always, with these ones, I have a question for you. So every year, as is now tradition, I go through your deck and I pick my favorite slides, and then I tell you which ones are my favorite slides for us to talk through on this podcast together. Do you have like an emotional reaction to that? Are there like slides that I didn't pick that you're like, ah, that's my favorite one? It's honestly such a great bit of sunlight because you are the first person to see it. You know, you're the first person to see this narrative that's been baking for months, and I've got a narrative in my head, and I'm very curious to see what parts resonate with you first. Like, what do you as an informed observer, and actually informed actor, too, find very interesting? It's always funny to me which ones strike people.

Like sometimes the simple, like, sometimes it's a simple slide that was absolutely mountains of work to do. Other times it's a really complicated slide that was just a CISD. DSV download that I put into something. There are some things that I was hoping you would find more interesting, mostly because they took me an awful lot of time to put together. But I also do really appreciate what you've got here, because I think it maps a lot to kind of my master narrative sense, the stuff that I think is the most important. How far off do you think we are from AI making your job of doing this annually obsolete?

like when can I say generate me a 200 slide deck with insights on the state of global energy and climate? Well, the first thing that it's going to be doing is taking my existing deck and using it as reference. So perplexity would be looking for that. It would also be trying to find probably a PDF file, which I don't distribute. So it may not actually be able to pull it and it might be going for references that reference it, you know, as opposed to the deck itself. I will say that AI tools make a lot of the instrumentation of doing work like this much, much better. But I don't know that it would yet be replacing the full story.

And what it would do, I think, is allow like an 85% wireframe to be put together very quickly. Like, let's say that it wasn't you or I, but it was an executive, an adjacent strategy suite at a big company looking at this for the first time, you could probably have the AI compose like a wireframe of things you should be asking about, but then you're going to need to go in and do the rest of your own work yourself. Like would it create a story with nuance? Would it create a story that references back to things that had already been said somewhere else? Would it be able to reference what you and I had done?

That would be interesting, it would say, if I could ask it, And let's listen back to every podcast on deep decarbonization that Shale has done in the last five years. And let's put those together as themes and riff on that for an upcoming, an upcoming something that would be intriguing to me. Right, right. All right. Well, enough preamble. Let's get into it. As usual, I have read with great interest the entirety of your, how many? 200 slides. 200 slides. 200 slides. Okay. And I've picked my favorites, and I've grouped them a little bit together into things that I find interesting together with each other. So I'm going to reference slide numbers, and we're just going to dive right in. Let's start with some climate stuff. Talking about

aerosols. So we have talked a little bit before on this podcast about this phenomenon that is interesting, unfortunate. I don't know what the word is for it, wherein it turns out we were creating artificial global cooling in addition to global warming, and then we're sort of stopping doing that for other environmental reasons, and that's a problem. But what you having the deck is, I had not seen the numbers that ascribe a certain amount of warming or cooling, whichever the case may be, to that and where it comes from. So, yeah, talk me through the aerosol story. Absolutely. So this is slide 20, and we can both thank Zeke Housefather for posting this just this month on one of his pieces for the climate brink. And it's really important because

what he does is a kind of waterfall chart of all of the different things that compose today's forcing functions of global warming. CO2, other greenhouse gases, methane, other anthropogenic causes, a little bit of tiny natural stuff. And all those things together get up to like one point,

almost like 1.9 degrees C. And then the aerosols that we've been pumping into the atmosphere for 175 years reduce the warming effect by 0.57 degrees C, which is obviously massive, like an obviously massive significant thing. And those aerosols are very roughly sulfur dioxide. That stuff that was the result of coal combustion in land power plants. And also, in particular these days for us, it is marine particulates. So from burning bunker fuel, in particular, it's most acute in the places

where you have a lot of shipping. Let's think of the North Atlantic, for instance. And so, basically, what we've done is we've turned off this cooling function, right? These aerosols don't have any warming effect. They have a cooling effect. And when you turn off the cooling effect, what you get de facto is more warming. And in particular, you get it over these places where the sun had been sort of occluded by high altitude particulates. So, I mean, Basically, if you read any paper on geoengineering and sort of veil-making, to use Oliver Morton's word for it, what you would be doing is exactly what we'd been doing. You'd be ejecting sulfur dioxide into the high atmosphere that reduces the amount of sunlight that hits the Earth's surface.

And now we're not doing that anymore. Yeah. So the other thing I thought was interesting, because I sort of, generically, I knew this story about, you know, marine emissions regulation and the fact that we had started doing less of that, I had not realized, first of all, exactly how much of a radiative forcing reduction that had caused. As you said, more than half a degree C, out of a total warming prior, I guess,

otherwise warming of like 1.9 something. That's a lot. But the other thing I didn't realize is that we had already been emitting a lot less sulfur dioxide outside the marine industry thanks to China, I guess, getting off of coal to some extent?

What's causing that? It's not getting off of coal, but simply scrubbing. simply doing the kind of things that we had done in North America in the 70s, in the 70s and in the 1980s. And so it's really striking, given the scale of China's emissions, not just from a power sector, but also from other uses of coal, like industrial uses of coal in particular, and also, you know, combustion of oil as well. But no, really striking. I mean, down from like 35 or so million tons of sulfur dioxide a year. to like 10, you know, and very, very quickly, relatively speaking.

That's what's remarkable about that chart, because you do side by side the marine impact, which is what we've been talking about for the past couple of years and the China impact. And the marine impact is going from just eyeballing it, like a peak of, I don't know, 13 million tons per year down to now four, three, four, something like that. China, over a slightly longer period of time from like 2010 to 2020 went from 40 to 10. there's just a much bigger impact. A much bigger impact. And one that I think, interestingly, is probably not remarked upon as much as it should be because the local impacts of that are largely contained to China.

The local air quality impacts are that are largely contained to China and to other parts of the sort of the North Pacific region where that would be most felt. And the marine thing is most felt in shipping channels and in port cities. So you would feel that most in, say, Port of Newark and Rotterdam, you know, for instance. And so there is this element that you're like, oh, you might notice the improvement from marine shipping if you're in the United States or in Europe. But you would not necessarily notice China's impact on emissions, points towards emissions, unless you were there in China at the time. And yes, I mean, the difference is remarkable. Like, we both began working at a time when 1950s smogging London stereotype certainly applied. to the big cities in northern China. And to a degree, it's not really the case anymore. There are still

issues of air pollution and things like that, but not nearly what it was, even 15 years ago. So it's really quite striking. Yeah, it's one of these weird things of like, there's great reason for all these regulations for doing the scrubbing, for reducing marine emissions of SO2 and so on, but it has this weird side effect of more global warming, unfortunately. And strangely, not unknown. This was not mysterious. What I would love to be able to do, go back in time and sit in on the IMO, International Maritime Organization, discussions about limiting sulfur dioxide emissions,

and say, have you thought about the impact that this is going to have on a climate level, not on an air pollution or an air quality level? Because this is hardly unknown stuff if you're an atmospheric scientist. It's not like some big mystery that this was going to happen. I just feel like it was outside frames of reference for people talking. The geoengineering people don't talk to the IMO and vice versa. Let's put it that way. Virtual power plants are becoming a reliable way for utilities to manage capacity.

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All right, so let's move on and talk about energy flows, global energy. flows. I mean, we're in a time when we have a new president in the United States, and that president is very focused on energy dominance, as he says. So let's start with a reminder of just how energy dominant we already are in the United States, talking about how big a net exporter of energy we've become. I think people on this, listen to this podcast probably know that we are a net exporter, but the degree to which we're a net exporter is actually kind of crazy. It is kind of crazy. I think the key word in there is net. I think. The key word in there is net. I think that a lot of people see the inflows. We still import millions of barrels of oil

day for structural oil market and refining capability reasons. But we export a lot more, in particular with the form of LNG, and that's primary energy. So that's like in quadrillion BTOs, rather than in specific types of molecules that are being measured here. But yes, we now export about as much energy on a trainly 12-month basis as we imported in the early 1980s. That's pretty extraordinary. We are in the United States the world's biggest oil producer. We are by far the world's biggest gas producer. We're the world's biggest natural gas exporter via LNG.

We get increasing amounts of our electricity supply from zero carbon domestic sources, wind, solar, but also nuclear. And the upshot is that we now export and we export a lot. It does make, to be honest, it makes the phrase energy dominance, something of a curiosity to me. I don't understand what you need more than this to be considered dominant. How do you dominate more than this? How do you dominate more than this? How much more winning can we have? But to be more pointed about it, the real thought on dominance in this context is what functions of the state could either make us export a lot,

more or could make us produce a lot more domestically, which, you know, related, but not the same thing. And that will be interesting because we are, we are of these, of this very, very large energy producers, we are the only one that is, I would say, like a fully, besides Canada, like a fully market economy. Like, the state has no control or say over how much we pump, how much we drill, how much we put on a ship. Not, that's not entirely true. Obviously, there's plenty, there are some elements there, but it's not the same thing. as, say, a Saudi Ramco, for instance. Well, let's talk about the other side of this coin, though, which is China.

There's two interesting charts here in slide 33, 34. One, which points out that as of very recently, China has become the world's largest importer of oil specifically, which is interesting, maybe not counterintuitive, but interesting nonetheless. But the other, to put in contrast to that, which points out that China may have reached peak oil demand in, I don't know, the past couple of years.

So what does that tell us about, like, where these oil flows are going to go? Yeah, I mean, as of the early, as of the early part of the 21st century, in fact, as of like 2007, Japan was still a bigger oil importer than China, if we can believe it, right? China has in quick succession blown past Japan and the United States, especially because the U.S. have been on a downward trajectory, and then past the EU in terms of oil imports. And it imports like more than 13 million barrels a day as of 2023. But imports is not the same thing as demand in China. Obviously, they're correlated, but they're not precisely the same thing.

And in terms of apparent demand, which is what the statistic is called, and it's basically looking at refinery runs in China, it looks like it's peaked at some point in 2023. And the new data that was published as of yesterday morning shows that actually statistically the big refiners were down less than 1%, but they were down year on year in terms of their total refinery throughput. So yeah, entirely possible that China demand has peaked for a bunch of reasons. Some of it is industrial, a lot of it is transport related, and it's not just light duty vehicles too. It's increasingly heavy duty vehicles. But I think they've seen peaks in some of their refineries. products already a couple of years ago. You know, the real question is, the real question is like

of those, you know, remaining 10 million barrels a day of apparent demand that we're going to have in the future, what is it going towards? You know, is it going towards road fuels that are then exported? Is it going towards petrochemicals? Is it going towards aviation fuel? Certainly the expectation from the oil think tanks in the oil industry in China is that pet chems and aviation fuel are going to be really main drivers of demand growth. Like they might actually grow in real absolute terms where the other things are actually shrinking. But yeah, big implications.

I mean, like, you know, there's a lot of apparatus now built around China being the world's biggest importer of oil. Yeah, that's interesting. All right, we're moving on. I want to talk about ESG for a minute. I don't want to talk about ESG too much because it's not a fun conversation these days. But let's talk about ESG a little bit.

Slides 46, 4750, I think are pretty interesting on this. I'll contrast two things. One, which you've done in years past, but I like that you do it, which is you do a word count of Larry Fink's annual letter, Larry Fink from Black Rock, of course, and look at how many times he mentions the words, sustainability and climate in the letter. So I want you to tell me what that trend line has looked like. And that is the trend line I would have anticipated it being, but it's still pretty stark. But then I want to contrast that against what's actually happening with the AUM, the Assets Center Management of ESG funds, which is not. the direction I would have expected it to go. I think it's really important because we have something that is midderumly rhetorical.

It's, you know, it's what the rhetoric and the frame of discussion is in the public eye from the founder of and the operator of the world's biggest asset manager. And, you know, every year he writes these letters. They've changed format and shape a little bit. He used to do one that was for CEOs and then one that was for investors. now there's just one universal letter, and it's much, much bigger. But yeah, I would just go through there and count up how many times that you talk about sustainability and climate.

And in 2020, it was a combined like 45 times almost. In 2021, he mentioned not only sustainability and climate, but he mentioned ESG quite a bit. And that trend is now just almost vanished. Like basically, climate shows up, sustainability shows up in his letter that was published last year in the spring to the tune of like five times total, down from like, you know, more than 40.

So the rhetoric of this is being, I think, sort of let out. The air on that rhetoric is being let out. However, the assets under management globally that fall into like an ESG, ETF and a mutual fund, are, you know, approaching 5%. They zoomed upwards in 2020 and 2021, had then have grown very slowly since then. But have grown.

zero. Right. Yeah, grown. The numbers have not gone away. And I think this is a really important element of this is that there are institutional investors in other parts of the world. You know, there are people in the rest of the world that invest. They're not just people in Texas and California that shape kind of our understanding

of what investing might be. And in particular, there's a lot of investors in Europe who still have an, and as sort of an undimmed appetite for this kind of investing. And who have a lot more sort of structural, EU-related reasons to be invested in these sectors. So, yeah, it's not shrinking. It's just not growing. And it's definitely not as, let's say, feverish in terms of the rhetoric around it,

the kind of transformative nature of what ESG is going to be to, you know, to all things and to all investors. It'll be interesting to see where that goes, you know. It's just, it's hard for me to imagine the upward trajectory on the share of total ETFs and mutual funds that are ascribed to ESG. it's hard for me to imagine it continues to go up over the next few years. But I don't know, maybe that's a U.S.-centric view that I have on things. And, like, maybe it's different in other places.

So, right. I think important to think about, like, there's a bunch of other related trajectories that have got in the deck, which is like a number of new funds that have been created. Right, and those are all down. You know, are those going to, like, are those numbers going to soar? You know, is there a lot of appetite right now for a brand-new, white and white and label ESG fund, not particularly. Is there an appetite for that within institutional investing around some of the bigger funds? Yes. But yeah, it has to live in a larger context anyways.

So, you know, the, you know, the I-Share's Clean Energy ETF is not exactly blowing the doors off these days. You know, there are a lot of other performance elements that we should understand as relevant to this. You know, again, a lot of this stuff gets divorced of actually being thought of in an investment context, but these are investments. If they're not performing well, people might have less interest in putting money into them. So there is that element of this that I think gets lost, in particular here in the U.S., where the politics around it seems to be completely decoupled from the actual investment performance. You're pretty plugged into, like, financial market, ESG-type world.

I'm curious your perspective on this. It feels to me like if you're a climate person, as I am, as you are, you're best served by trying to sever climate off of ESG. Like, ESG is in all sorts of trouble for a variety of reasons, and it's this broader umbrella concept that climate was sometimes shoved under. But if you isolate climate, it's not to say everybody's going to love it, but it feels like it has more staying power. So the way I think about it is like ESG is a set of issues, but it's not the same thing as a set of drivers. You know, there are issues to be aware of screens and filters on making

institutional investment, which is different than a, you know, an alpha case reasoned to invest capital in something. You know, ESG says nothing about what you're actually providing to the market. It doesn't say that you're providing, you're providing an alternative to X, you know, or that you're providing something at lower cost or greater availability than why. And so I do think that it's been a pairing or a coupling that sort of makes rhetorical sense, but does not necessarily make strategic or even practical sense in any case. And also, like, you and I have been through multiple waves of this. This stuff was social, you know, SRI.

It was socially responsible investing when we began. You know, there have been lots of different ways to do this. And I think that ESG is sort of an unwieldy concept in many ways to begin with. Like, you can have a great environmental record and terrible governance and vice versa. And then, so that's one thing. And then, too, how that actually would drive investment behavior at the sharp end for, say, energy impact partners portfolio companies is, I think, would never have been entirely clear even in the best of times. But it's certainly, like, the investors that I know who are in your position want nothing to do with this as a label, because it just complicates matters. And it doesn't necessarily generate any particular alpha for you to be part of that rhetorical construct for thinking about markets.

Certainly not now, if it ever did. No. All right, moving on from ESG. Let's go to slide 71 and 73. I want to talk about carbon removal and carbon credits, which I know we're not the same thing, but they dance with each other often. The first one, slide 71, is near and dear to my heart because I point this out all the time. It's just the sheer number of startups that there are trying to do various forms of carbon dioxide removal.

Show me those numbers. Well, first of all, can I step back? and put it in the context of remember what this section is called these slides come from a section called it's a 2021 thing right brutal partially called sometimes a 22 thing but it's true is that we had we had a as for context here we had this very very significant run up in all kinds of stuff that happened in i would say the early years of the coronavirus pandemic that net to some really uh outsized outsized outcomes in certain elements of what's going on in climate. One of them being the number of startups that are being founded around carbon dioxide removal. There are about

500 of them, and there were almost 80 of them in 2021 that were founded. This is an extraordinary number given the difficulty of the task at hand to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Yeah, I'll tell you firsthand as an investor in early stage climate companies, the number is staggering. There are so many different companies doing CDR. And part of the reason for that is because there's so many different ways to do CDR, right? There's all the different nature-based stuff. There's direct air capture. There's ocean stuff.

There's biomass stuff. There's mineralization, all sorts of things. It's great if you want there to be a lot of CDR in the world. I think it's great if you want there to be a lot of CDR on the world. It's actually maybe gone past that point where now there's so many that there's going to be a shakeout. Investors have a hard time differentiating amongst different companies and picking winners. It's just something's got to give there. And in fact, one of the things that may drive something giving is slide 73, which is looking at issuance of voluntary carbon credits.

Now, again, not all CDR credits. Let's be clear. I understand the nuance there. But nonetheless, it is dark to show what is happening in the carbon market. the voluntary carbon market as well, which has gone where? Well, we had another massive run-up in issuance. More than 300 million credits were issued in 2021. Also more than $2.1 billion with the market transactions in 2021.

And those have both come down significantly. Issuance last year was call it about $150 million. Retirements, we actually don't know yet, the sort of value of those retirements in the market. That data is not there yet. Retirements themselves are sort of ticking along, like they're still going, which is a good thing. That's a function of that part of the market, the buying part of the market, not just the selling or the creating, is working cleanly. But it's just, you know, it's another sign thing like this, these sort of go hand in hand.

It's kind of a surprise that in the same, the year that you have this spike and then the peak in CDR startups, you've also got the same. energy going into people issuing new carbon credits and the value that's being transacted around them. And they're both just like way off, way off the boil compared to where they were, just just a couple of years ago. Again, to some extent probably healthy, you know, like if there was no fundamentals driving a market like this, then, you know, line can't go up forever. You need to settle in towards a healthier, a healthier state of market. And what? What I think will be very interesting to see is the interplay between, which we'll get to in a little bit, is like, materially new sources of electricity demand that need to go fast and need to be built with high power quality right now and how that plays into what used to be a corporate PPA market and now might be playing into, say, a carbon dioxide removal market in order to make some kind of neutrality. Yeah, I think that's right.

Like, I think the overwhelming likelihood is that we're in for a bit of a reckoning in that market. And that market, I mean both the general voluntary carbon market and more specifically the CDR market. Not to say everything fails, but there's just there's an oversupply of startups for sure. And the buyer pool has not expanded as much as you would like it to have in order to see the up into the right trajectory on the demand side. And something's got to give there. the silver lining maybe is what you're describing, which is that the big buyers have been the tech companies. Historically, the tech companies are about to go build a lot more natural gas,

probably, or buy a lot more power from natural gas in the next few years because of AI. And so to the extent that they're serious about this, you'd imagine it actually amps up their CDR procurement. But we'll see. I don't think have great evidence of that yet. So far, they're saying, we're going to keep doing what we're doing. we're going to keep buying CDR and whoopsie, our emissions went up. I don't know if that stays.

Yeah, we'll see. I mean, like, and now, you know, the sort of not exactly sneaky, but the companies that have had a net zero target for their emissions have seen their emissions trend reversing and going up for the last couple of years, even before things have gone, you know, completely haywire in terms of their demand for electricity and the need for speed within that. So yeah, we'll see if we'll see if that doesn't work in favor. But then again, to your point, how does that play out?

Like how is that going to manifest in the market on what structure and at what volume is that going to actually take hold? All right, we're going to cut it off there. More to come in my conversation with that next week. Nat Bullard is a co-founder at Halcyon and the former chief content officer at Bloomberg, New Energy Finance. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over Latitude Media.com for

links to today's topics. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures. Pralood Beck's visionary is accelerating climate innovation that will reshape the global economy for the betterment of people and planet. Learn more at Pralud Ventures.com. This episode was produced by Daniel Waldorf, mixing by Roy Campan and Sean Marquan, theme song by Sean Marquan. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. I'm Shail Khan, and this is Catalyst.