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
Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Daniel Woldorff. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.
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.
Transcript
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Tag: Latitude Media Podcast at the Frontier of Climate Technology.
Shayle Kann: I’m Shayle Kann, and this is Catalyst. How far off do you think we are from AI making your job of doing this annually obsolete? When can I say generate me a 200 slide deck with insights on the state of global energy and climate?
Nat Bullard: Well, the first thing that it’s going to be doing is taking my existing deck and using it as reference.
Shayle Kann: Coming up, 200 slides of sweet, sweet data on energy and climate distilled into one glorious conversation, split in two parts.
I’m Shayle Kann. 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 Halian, an AI company, but he’s a longtime analyst focused on energy and climate stuff. 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 ’em.
There’s too much to talk about in one episode. So this is a two-parter. You’re here in 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 of 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 back.
Nat Bullard: It’s always great to be back. How are you?
Shayle Kann: 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. Do you have an emotional reaction to that? Are there slides that I didn’t pick that you’re like, ah, that was my favorite one?
Nat Bullard: It’s honestly such a great bit of sunlight because you are the first person to see it. 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, 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. Sometimes the simple, 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 CSV 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 my master narrative sense, the stuff that I think is the most important.
Shayle Kann: How far off do you think we are from AI making your job of doing this annually? Obsolete. When can I say generate me a 200 slide deck with insights on the state of global energy and climate?
Nat Bullard: 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 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 if what it would do I think is allow an 85% wireframe to be put together very quickly. Let’s say that it wasn’t you or I, but it was an executive adjacent strategy suite at a big company looking at this for the first time, you could probably have the AI composed 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. 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 we able to reference what you and I had done now? It would be interesting. It would say, if I could ask it, 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 upcoming something that would be intriguing to me.
Shayle Kann: Right, 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.
Nat Bullard: 200 slides
Shayle Kann: 200 slides, 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 dunno what the word is for it, wherein it turns out we were creating artificial global cooling in addition to global warming and then we are sort of stopping doing that for other environmental reasons and that’s a problem. But what you have in 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.
Nat Bullard: 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 and little bit of tiny natural stuff. And all those things together get up to 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’s 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. 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 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’ve been doing. You’d be injecting 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.
Shayle Kann: Yeah. So the other thing I thought was interesting, I generically I knew this story about 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 C out of a total warming prior, I guess otherwise warming of 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?
Nat Bullard: 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 seventies, in the seventies 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 oil, combustion of oil as well. But no really striking, I mean down from 35 or so million tons of sulfur dioxide out a year to 10 and very, very quickly relatively speaking
Shayle Kann: That’s remarkable about that chart is 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 dunno, 13 million tons per year down to now 4, 3, 4, something like that. China over a slightly longer period of time from 2010 to 2020 went from 40 to 10. It’s just a much bigger impact,
Nat Bullard: 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 of that are largely well contained to China and to other parts 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 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 and points towards emissions unless you were there in China at the time. And yes, I mean the difference is remarkable. We both began working at a time when 1950s Smogging London stereotypes 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.
Shayle Kann: Yeah, it’s one of these weird things of there’s great reason for all these regulations for doing the scrubbing, for reducing marine emissions of SO two and so on, but it has this weird side effect of more global warming unfortunately and strangely
Nat Bullard: 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 hardening 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.
Shayle Kann: 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 listeners 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.
Nat Bullard: It is kind of crazy. I think the keyword in there is net. I think that a lot of people see the inflows. We still import millions of barrels of oil a 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 in quadrillion BTUs rather than in specific types, in specific types of molecules that’s being measured here. But yes, we now export about as much energy on a trailing 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. 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.
Shayle Kann: How do you dominate more than this?
Nat Bullard: How do you dominate more than this? How much more winning can we have? But to be more pointed about it, but 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 related but not the same thing. And that will be interesting because we are of this very, very large energy producers. We are the only one that is, I would say a fully besides Canada, a fully market economy. The state has no control or say over how much we pump, how much we drill, how much we put on a ship. That’s not entirely true. Obviously there’s plenty, there’s some elements there, but it’s not the same thing as say a Saudi Aramco for instance.
Shayle Kann: 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 1 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 where these oil flows are going to go?
Nat Bullard: Yeah, as of the early part of the 21st century, in fact as of 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 US has been on a downward trajectory and then passed 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 refined products already a couple of years ago. The real question is, the real question is of those remaining 10 million barrels a day of apparent demand that we’re going to have in the future, what is it going towards? 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 petchems and aviation fuel are going to be really main drivers of demand growth. They might actually grow in real absolute terms where the other things are actually shrinking. But yeah, big implications. I mean there’s a lot of apparatus now built around China being the world’s biggest importer of oil.
Shayle Kann: Yeah, that’s interesting. Alright, we’re moving on. I want to talk about ESG for a minute. I don’t want to talk about ESG too much. It’s not a fun conversation these days, but let’s talk about ESGA little bit. Slides 46, 47 50 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 BlackRock of course, and look at how many times he mentions the words sustainability in 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’ve anticipated it being, but it’s still pretty stark. But then I want to contrast that against what’s actually happening with the A UM that the assets under management of ESG funds, which is not the direction I would’ve expected it to go.
Nat Bullard: I think it’s really important we have something that is literally rhetorical. 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 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, count up how many times did 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. Basically climate shows up, sustainability shows up in his letter that was published last year in the spring to the tune of five times total down from 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 an E-S-G-E-T-F and a mutual fund are approaching 5%. They zoomed upwards in 2020 and 2021 and then have grown very slowly since then–
Shayle Kann: But have grown.
Nat Bullard: But not zero.
Shayle Kann: Right?
Nat Bullard: 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. 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 as sort of an UND dimmed 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 and the kind of transformative nature of what ESG is going to be to all things and to all investors.
Shayle Kann: It’ll be interesting to see where that goes. It’s hard for me to imagine the upward trajectory on the share of total ETFs and mutual funds that 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 US-centric view that I have on things and maybe it’s different in other places.
Nat Bullard: So I think important to think about there’s, there’s a bunch of other related trajectories that have gone in the deck, which is number of new funds that have been created,
Shayle Kann: And those are all down.
Nat Bullard: Those are going down. Are those numbers going to soar? Is there a lot of appetite right now for a brand new white 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 give it a larger context anyways, which the iShares clean energy ETF is not exactly blowing the doors off these days. There are a lot of other performance elements that we should understand as relevant to this. 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 US where the politics around it seems to be completely decoupled from the actual investment performance.
Shayle Kann: You’re pretty plugged into 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. 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.
Nat Bullard: So the way that I think about it’s ESG is a set of issues, but it’s not the same thing as a set of drivers. They’re issues to be aware of screens and filters on making institutional investment, which is different than an alpha case reasoned to invest capital in something. ESG says nothing about what you’re actually providing to the market. It doesn’t say that you’re providing an alternative to X or that you’re providing something at lower cost or greater availability than Y. 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 you and I have been through multiple waves of this. This stuff was social, SRI, it was socially responsible investing when we began. 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. You can have a great environmental record of terrible governance and vice versa. So that’s one thing. And then two, 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 certainly the investors that I know who are in your position want nothing to do with this as a label because it complicates matters and it doesn’t necessarily generate any particular alpha for you to be part of that rhetorical construct for thinking about markets.
Shayle Kann: Certainly not now if it ever did.
Nat Bullard: No.
Shayle Kann: Alright, 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 are not the same thing, but they dance with each other often. The first one, slide 71 is near and dear to my heart. 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.
Nat Bullard: 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 2022 thing. But it’s true is that we had, for context here, we had this very significant runup in all kinds of stuff that happened in I would say the early years of the Coronavirus pandemic that led to some really 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 isn’t extraordinary number given the difficulty of the task at hand to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Shayle Kann: Yeah, I’ll tell you firsthand, as an investor in early stage climate companies, the numbers staggering. There’s 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 R in 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 stark to show what is happening in the carbon market, the voluntary carbon market as well, which has gone where,
Nat Bullard: Well, we had another massive runup in issuance. More than 300 million credits were issued in 2021. Also more than 2.1 billion worth of 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’s 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 another sign. These sort of go hand in hand. It’s kind of a surprise that in the year that you have this spike and in 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 way off the boil compared to where they were just a couple of years ago. Again, to some extent probably healthy. If there was no fundamentals driving a market like this, then lying can’t go up forever. You need to settle in towards a healthier state of market. And what I think will be very interesting to see is the interplay between which we’ll get to in a little bit is 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.
Shayle Kann: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think the overwhelming likelihood is that we are 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 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 whoop, see our emissions went up. I dunno if that stays.
Nat Bullard: Yeah, we’ll see. And now 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 completely haywire in terms of their demand for electricity and the need for speed within that. So yeah, we’ll see if that doesn’t work in favor. But then again, to your point, how does that play out? How is that going to manifest in the market on what structure and at what volume is that going to actually take hold?
Shayle Kann: Alright, we’re going to cut it off there. More to come in my conversation with Nat 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 to latitude media.com for links to today’s topics. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures, prelude backs, visionaries, accelerating climate innovation that will reshape the global economy for the betterment of people and planet. Learn more@preludeventures.com. This episode was produced by Daniel Waldorf, mixing by Roy Campanella and Sean Markwan theme song by Sean Marwan. Steven Lacey is our executive editor. I’m Sha Khan and this is Catalyst.
