#233 The Climate Disruptors You Haven’t Heard of (Yet)—Inside Energy Tech Nexus w/ Nada & Jason

In This Episode
We are speaking with Nada Ahmed and Jason Ethier, two of the founding partners at Energy Tech Nexus. Energy Tech Nexus is a Houston-based hub designed to connect EnergyTech startups with the resources they need to grow. This includes access to capital, corporate partners, direct access to pilot opportunities, as well as a community of other founders doing the same thing. 

In this episode, we dive into
**how they're building an innovation powerhouse in the heart of the U.S. energy industry, 
**the evolving role of oil majors in clean tech, 
**and how to navigate the new regulatory landscape of the Trump administration 

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Topics:
(today’s show is all public)
**00:00 Intro to Nada & Jason
**01:51 Building the Energy Tech Nexus Community
**10:16 Funding & Supporting Clean Tech Startups in Houston
**14:30 Innovating in Green Chemicals and Advanced Materials
**20:57 Navigating the New Administration's Energy Policies
**29:46 Flaring and Methane Emissions
**32:05 How to Market Climate Tech Under Trump
**36:37 T36:37 How to Jump Start Nuclear Energy
**46:47 Carbon Capture and the Future Role of Oil Majors

Links:
**Nada Ahmed | Jason Ethier
**Energy Tech Nexus
**Check out the Energy Tech Startups Podcast
**Participate in the CleanTechies Listener Survey: Take Survey.
**Connect with Somil on LinkedIn | Connect with Silas on LinkedIn
**Follow CleanTechies on LinkedIn
**This podcast is NOT investment advice. Do your homework and due diligence before investing in anything discussed on this podcast.

This podcast is NOT investment advice. Do your homework and due diligence before investing in anything discussed on this podcast.

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro to Nada & Jason
• 1:51 Building the Energy Tech Nexus Community
• 10:16 Funding & Supporting Clean Tech Startups in Houston
• 14:30 Innovating in Green Chemicals and Advanced Materials
• 20:57 Navigating the New Administration's Energy Policies
• 29:46 Flaring and Methane Emissions
• 32:05 How to Market Climate Tech Under Trump
• 36:37 How to Jump Start Nuclear Energy
• 46:47 Carbon Capture and the Future Role of Oil Majors

Transcript

CleanTechies (00:00)
Vision is the energy trilemma. So it's really solving for security, affordability and sustainability. The only way to get scale is to build something that delivers massive amounts of products. So easy to make money making oil. You drill your resource, it comes out of the ground, you know it's going to cost. Welcome back to Clean Techies, the number one podcast for climate tech entrepreneurs and investors. I'm Silas Manor and today I will be your host. Today we've got a much more freewheeling conversation than normal. We've got two incredible guests, Nada Ahmed and Jason Ethier.

two of the founding partners at Energy Tech Nexus. If you are not familiar with them, they are building an incredible community in Houston for founders working at the intersection of energy, tech, and innovation broadly. And they've got an incredible coalition of corporates and investors that surround them to support these founders building in this space. Jason was heavily involved in Green Town Labs, including their expansion into Houston. And Nada has an incredible background.

working on a lot of projects around the world and in particular she did some some good work on carbon capture space which you will hear about today. Today our conversation really just covers five core themes. Number one their thoughts on what the Trump administration means for clean tech. Number two how nuclear could possibly get a jumpstart during this administration to get it moving get the rails built and get it kind of get some momentum there. Number three will carbon capture just survive or will it actually thrive during the coming years?

Number four, what will the role of oil and gas majors be in clean tech over the coming years? And number five, what is unique about the Houston ecosystem? As an FYI, none of this conversation is behind the paywall, so you can enjoy the entire discussion. And one heads up we want to offer you is if you are in Houston or going to be in Houston for the hydrogen forum on February 12th and 13th, come meet us there. With Energy Tech Nexus, we are actually going to be doing a happy hour and live podcast. And now I've said it, it's out in the public. We have to make it happen.

We still have a lot of details to iron out. The event itself should be happening on the 12th, sometime in the afternoon and evening. The live recording and then followed by the happy hour, like I said. It's going to be probably largely focused on hydrogen given the hydrogen form in town, but obviously there's going to be a lot of great clean tech people there in general. So we will see you in Houston and I'm looking forward to this very much. Both Somail and I should be there. So, all right, let's get into the show.

All right, boom, we're live. How are you guys doing? Good. How are you? I am fine as frog hair, as I like to say, or as my dad likes to say, and I've parroted that. Have you guys heard that one before? No. Where does that reference come from? I have no idea. Probably just that frog hair is so fine. You never knew that frogs had hair. You can't see it. I really don't know the origin of it, but dads like to have lots of dad lines, right? Yes, like one of those dad jokes. Exactly. I'm working on that now.

I just had my first recently, so I have to practice my dad jokes, them all. Yeah, congratulations. thank you guys. Well, guess, guys, give us a little bit of an introduction to yourself. think, you know, probably a lot of people listening know who you are, but just give us both a little intro to each of you and what you guys are working on. I'm Jason Etier, one of the founding partners here at Energy Tech Nexus. I've been a lifelong entrepreneur working in energy, started out at Duke University working on cars of all things.

and realized I wanted to be in the thick of it. So moved to Boston, met a bunch of awesome entrepreneurs, helped start Green Town Labs with about five others. And it was like a rollercoaster journey of just kind of experiencing the heyday of climate. And it was very interesting because there was no money, zero money in climate. And I remember sitting with an investor and him saying, Jason, love what you're doing. Don't call yourself Climatech. No one wants to invest in it. And here we are, gosh, 12 years later, and guess what? There's a ton of capital.

coming into the space, there's actually policy that was supportive. And I think a lot of people are interested in it in a different way. And along the way, I helped launch Green Town Houston, and now we're doing the Energy Tech Nexus. We'll come back around to what the Energy Tech Nexus is, but I'll let Nada introduce herself. Yeah. So my name is, again, Nada Ahmed, and I am a founding partner together with Jason of Energy Tech Nexus.

And my background's more been in corporate. I graduated with a master's degree from Rice University and started working with carbon capture and storage technology. this was like around the year 2010, where there was a lot happening within that space. Europe was going to deploy like 10 projects. had funding for them. And so I was working for a Norwegian company, ended up going to Norway with them and working on CCS globally.

worldwide. So my career really started off working in clean technologies. Later on, worked with an EPC in the North Sea, looking at how can we transform as being a provider, mostly just for oil and gas projects, to doing more offshore wind, CCS, hydrogen. So over the past decade, I've really seen corporates take that transition from being solely serving oil and gas, but to also looking at how they can diversify their portfolio and take advantage of

not only subsidies that are coming up, but also like real business opportunities and showing to, you not only their employees, but the public that they have a conscience and want to curtail their CO2 footprint. So that's been an interesting journey, but at the same time, I was always really interested in innovation and technology. So even within my corporate roles, I was heading innovation and involved very heavily with the startup community and how to take some of the new technologies.

and ways of working that they had into corporate. So there was a time kind of around COVID where I decided I wanted to work more closely with startups. So when I moved back here to Houston, I started talking to Jason and we started our own podcast called the Energy Tech Startups. And around that time, Jason was also exiting Green Town Labs. we decided that Houston's so big and there's so much going on. There's enough capital, there's enough industry here that there's space for

more ecosystem builders. And that's what we are as Energy Tech's Nexus. We're a startup hub for companies working on the energy transition and really want to help cultivate this ecosystem here. you know, inspired by what some of the other cities have done. If you look at, you know, Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, and seen how incubators have had a big role to play in cultivating that community. We don't call ourselves an incubator.

But you just need that support for startups and also for investors to be able to actually get this technology off the ground and get these projects off the ground. Yeah, I think it's super underrated that you need kind of an ecosystem player nowadays. It's not the same way it probably used to be in Houston, like back in the day when energy was kind of really starting to boom. I'm assuming a lot has changed and now you probably also have maybe some factions around like renewables versus not.

I know when I first interviewed you Jason on the pod that you talked about the fact that Houston prides itself on being at the forefront of energy generally, right? So I'm really excited to see what you guys are doing here. So tell us a little bit more about what does it look like to be part of Energy Tech Nexus? Like how do you guys make money? Like how are you funded, et cetera? You know that feeling when you meet someone who shares your vision for the future? It just clicks like two peas in a pod. Well, that's exactly how we felt when we met Goodwin, who we are proud to have as our sponsor.

Being the first major law firm to set up a climate-specific startup and venture practice makes them exactly the kind of partner we are excited to work with. They realize that there are a plethora of challenges to building climate tech startups, and that's why they have built an entire suite of resources for founders, investors, and entrepreneurs in the space. They even offer several tailored pricing methods. And guess what? It doesn't matter where you are listening to this. Goodwin is a global law firm that you can trust to be your partner through it all, from incorporation to exit.

They've got you covered. Go to GoodwinLaw.com and tell them Cleantech is setting you to get exclusive access to startup resources. All right, back to the show. Yeah, happy to jump into that. as a hub, we're a member-supported organization. We ask members to pay fees. We have, I think, 101 members today who are engaging with us. We actually have about 240 people registered kind of in the ecosystem. And if they can't afford to pay today, we say, great, love to have you in here. Raise money.

you know, raise a grant, but we want to be supportive where we can. But there's a hundred or so that really support our vision and the fees are affordable. Our goal is to create authentic connections between founders, kind of going through the tough journey of growing a business. And sometimes you just can't spend a lot of money on, on kind of networking. And so we start membership out at $65 a month today. It's going to go up to $75 once you get around to changing the website. That's like our standing line, but it's about making engagement easy.

And one of our policies we have is if a founder comes in and says, look, Jason, I'm short on cash, I'm raising money, we'll do a deferral until they need help or until they can come back and pay back. So we're trying to keep it accessible. We do have a higher rate that's at the 275 level, which allows us to do more one-on-one time and direct mentorship with members. But like with any kind of financial model, you have most of your folks at that entry phase. But that doesn't answer your question on how we make money.

So that really just pays for events, that pays for venue, it allows us to provide those direct services. Really the energy nexus today is funded by grants and by engaging with corporate partners. We have a handful of corporate partners that we were going to announce once we hit 10. We are pretty close. So we are building out that partner network today. But that allows us to do two things. One, get to build those important connections between the strategic to have capital to deploy.

and startups and hopefully create business relationships, which we encourage with a lot of our activities. But the other thing we do is give those strategic partners insight into what's coming. And so part of that is providing services where we share all the startups we engage in, all the startups we look at, but then also we bring them together for roundtables, discussions on investment and discussions on the market in a pre-competitive environment.

And that really allows us to help those partners kind of see the future and help them identify what their strategy should be so they can deploy capital efficiently. And ultimately the more capital that we help get deployed, the more we affect our mission. Yeah. And I'll just add to that. think, you know, what we often talk about is our vision is the energy trilemma. So it's really solving for security, affordability and sustainability. And, you know, we've just actually going to publish this week our impact report and we really talked

about there, we lay out, know, what are our key pillars on which we work on our mission? And we call, you know, our mission is building thunder lizards. That's what we call our companies. They're not unicorns, they're thunder lizards, and they're really going to transform and disrupt the industry in some way. And so one of the things that we do and that we really want to focus on and take advantage of being in Houston, which has a lot of industrial infrastructure. So we focus on.

Innovation infrastructure, we focus on the pilot projects and really giving startups the opportunity to do their first pilots and their second pilots here in Houston. So that's one of the first things that we did last year during our grant opening was do a pilot on. And that's something that is going to become an yearly event for us. We have a pilot location in the Midlands where we have testing infrastructure and our startups can go and start testing today their technologies over there.

So one of our second pillars is strategic capital access. So that's really about building an investor community, because you're not going to build a startup community without having the capital flow. That's another advantage of Houston is that you have the capital. You know, we have these big industrials who have the capital. They're people who have made their businesses within not only oil and gas industry, but other chemicals industries. And how do you unlock that capital? How do you cultivate the investor network?

because we're not used to investing in startups the way you are in some of the other startup cities. Leadership is really important for us. We call ourselves to be founder focused. So that's our third pillar is how do we make sure that our founders get the support that they need? So we have what we call a founder circle. We have an in-house coach that works with the founders because as a founder and Jason knows this, it can be a very lonely journey.

And you don't realize a lot of your other startups are going through the same challenges. So we really bring them together to build that community and help them kind of shortcut a lot of the challenges that they're having by talking to each other about it. Then we have the industrial partnership. That's what Jason spoke about is, you know, some of her founding members. have these big corporates here who want to pilot, who want to test new technology. And so we build that relationship. The fifth thing that we do is give global access.

So not only to companies that are in Houston, but we're also a landing pad for companies from abroad, give them access to Houston. We're doing a project today with Canada where some of the companies might've reached a threshold of their clientele in their region, but then Houston's the natural next step for them to access energy clients. And the last one and the most important one is that we wanna make sure that the energy transition is also equitable.

that we include more people within it, and especially women. And that's something that's really important to all three of us who are in the partner team. just to mention Juliana Gureiz, who was also one of the launch partners of Green Town Labs here in Houston, is also a founding partner. So we make sure that we not only have this HEATA program, which is the Houston Equitable Energy Transition Alliance, we also have what we call the Determined to Lead Network here, where we bring women leaders together and make sure

that we share our expertise and make sure that women have a voice in the energy transition. Yeah, that's really awesome. So, I mean, it sounds like you guys are really just like cutting through all of the difficult parts or some of the most difficult parts, I guess you could say, of building, especially probably a hardware climate startup, getting them access to the corporate partners who want to help with the pilots, which is usually like step number one, right? If you're going to validate things for the big scale, you need to start at a small level.

I really love this focus and I'm a big fan of community and ecosystem, so I'm all here for it. But you mentioned something I'd like to touch on little bit, is you said that aside from just the energy side of things, which is pretty obvious, like Houston's energy place, you mentioned the chemical space. Do you see and do you work with a lot of companies trying to innovate in the green chemicals play as well? Yeah, I'll take that. think you can decide to kind of define things very thinly or very broadly. the reality is energy touches so much of our lives.

kind of that, that, that lever of the industrial revolution. And it touches agriculture, it touches advanced materials because a lot of it materials are petrochemicals. Let's be honest, plastics are amazing. And it touches water. Water is one of those things where you look at the cost of doing anything with water and you realize it's really an energy story because it's all about how much does a kilowatt cost to get accessible water. Same thing with data centers. Like you look at where data centers are, where crypto is, they put crypto where energy is cheap. And, and, and so it's such a tightly coupled.

economics that we say, anything where energy has an outsized impact on that business, we are happy to kind of engage within our business. That's why we talk about carbon capture and storage, right? What does CCUS have to do with energy? It's really an energy sink. Most carbon capture, most storage is highly dependent on the underlying cause of energy. And also to be honest, it's derivative of an energy product. It's the results of burning fossil fuels. So you can't have one without the other. It's hard to talk about hydrogen without talking about CCUS.

And so to kind come back to your question, yes, we work with companies working on different types of materials, be it advanced polymers, biopolymers, and we're doing a project with a company that does polymer composition today. And we'll engage with both founders as well as strategic who are looking for that next generation of material. We found historically some of the best kind of innovators or investors in technology were those working on high performance materials. And one of the reasons is it's very clear how to value them.

Like if you have a membrane that has certain performance parameters, you have a plastic that can last at a better temperature range, it's very clear what the market will bear in terms of pricing. You see some of that also in battery technologies. And so in many ways, getting product market fit is less ambiguous when you have these kind of advanced material plays. so it reduces kind of that market risk when you know what you're supposed to build.

Yeah, because there's a clear objective of what to work towards. that's really interesting. I always, guess, do you guys have any thoughts on this? One thing I've always hoped that we would see is companies build juggernauts that will at least challenge the incumbents, right? Because it oftentimes feels like in climate, people are building with the intention to be acquired kind of at the worst case scenario. mean, obviously that's not the only intention, but it oftentimes feels difficult to say, okay, how are we going to build a new green chemical company versus just

building something really innovative and getting acquired by BASF, right? Like, do you see that being a possibility? Like, will we see new juggernauts created? Yeah, so our preferred term is Thunder Lizards. That's what we call them. Yeah. And I think that there's a couple of realities. Like, there's no such thing as a small energy business. if you're small, you get acquired. And really, the only way to get scale is to build something that delivers massive amounts of product. Like, when we're talking about sustainable aviation fuel,

you just aren't impactful if you're just building a very small percentage of the market. If you want to have impact, you have to go big or you have to get acquired. I think within energy tech, there's a couple of points where you have to make that decision. Do I want to sell the technology and the IP I put together or do I want to go big? And the reality is the market multiples for going public are far better than the multiples you get for acquisition.

historically, that was probably before 2022 when the IPO market really froze up. But generally, like if you play the venture capital game, you got to go for what drives the most return to investors. And that typically means hitting public markets. You don't get SaaS company valuations, but it's still better than, an acquisition. Personally, or sorry, if memory serves me correctly, you kind of have to go up to the billion dollar range to even talk about going public. Otherwise you're kind of stuck in the 40 to $200 million valuation band.

where you're selling essentially for IP. If you're selling for $40 million, you really haven't had enough money to build a factory or a facility that matters. And so I think that's why you see this goal for going large. The reality is 90 % of energy businesses get acquired as their exit. So I think there's a little bit of reality versus kind what you need to deliver for your investors. I don't know, Nada, if you have a different perspective. No, I think you nailed it.

Very good. Well, I appreciate that perspective. I really hope that we see some new ones because I hate it. I hate in a hundred years for us to have the exact same companies running the world. I think the reality is like with any energy revolution, you know, you do have a new technology that comes out and it's, it's classic disruption. And if, if they don't get purchased early, they end up dominating and it's, it's really hard for an energy company.

the way they're currently structured to kind of wrap their heads around the financial structure of these newer businesses. And I think we saw this play out with geothermal. You know, it's so easy to make money making oil. Like you drill your resource, it comes out of the ground, you know it's going to cost 70 bucks a barrel. And oh, by the way, my shale well pays for itself in like 15 months. Like, I get it. You look at a geothermal well, and a lot of times you need to get an off take that's like 10 years. And an oil company looks at that and says, no, I'd

I'd rather drill more shale. Like just makes financial sense from a rational perspective for them. And to go off and buy kind of a geothermal asset, it's hard because literally they can't cycle cash the same way they're used to. so fundamentally the way they've engineered their business, I think it's very challenging. I think if we see the rise of a geothermal company that kind of gets it and can kind of pull these projects together, they'll just be by themselves. They'll have aggregated all that assets. They'll...

They'll be the experts. And I wouldn't be surprised if you got Kindra Morgan here running pipelines. Who's the Kindra Morgan for geothermal, right? There's someone who's coming, who's going to be doing that. Yeah. And I think the energy space is more, you know, we think about the big IOCs, right? You have the Shells and the BPs and these are like mega companies and it's hard to think that we're going to be able to disrupt them in the next, you know, decades. I would say, you they've been around for more than a hundred years.

And I think going forward in the future, it's not going to be completely disrupting them and more also looking at like medium-sized companies that are still going to be pretty substantial, going to have a big impact as we diversify the energy mix, to have more geothermal, to have other types of alternative energies, but there's still be a role to play. A good example of a company who's been able to transform successfully is the Danish oil company, Ørsted.

And just looking at how, you know, we'll see what happens now with the new administration, some of the changes that they've put on offshore drilling. And I know their stock was down 17 % since that announcement was made, but they were completely able to transform in a very short period of time. And that's kind of the transformation we're hoping some other companies would make. But we haven't seen it happen because it is very, very hard and you really have to have that commitment from the top.

Yeah, certainly. think that's probably the best case scenario, right? If people can transition and can do like what Ersta did, that can actually have the most impact on fighting this whole issue. But this is a good segue. So let's talk about the new administration. guess, know, broad thoughts. What are you guys thinking about the new... Just for a record, we're recording this a week after Trump's inauguration. So for people to understand what we're talking about here, maybe there's, you know, crazy things that happened between now and this is published. But for now, we've just got a slew of executive orders, basically.

stating very clearly that oil and gas and drilling is going to be the core thing and even some crazy things happening with interconnections side of things. But what are your guys' thoughts on what the next four years brings for, I guess, the clean energy movement in general? Naudi, you some good thoughts on the drilling activity this morning. Yeah. Yeah. No, think, yeah, mean, depending on when your listeners listen to this, but I think we kind of know the direction the new administration is going to take. So yeah, we know they have put a pause on the

IRA, the infrastructure infrastructure bill. It's pending a 90 day review and there's a lot of questions because the government will face a lot of legal challenges and if they can actually take the funding away, especially for projects that have been promised funding. So we don't, there's a big uncertainty. We don't know what's going to happen, but this uncertainty is not good for projects, especially clean energy projects who already

our challenge when it comes to getting investors on board, getting infrastructure funding, because they're often first of a kind type of project. I mean, overall, we know the news is not good, but then there's certain areas that the government is prioritizing. Like geothermal, for example, like hydro. So there's a lot of focus on baseload, which includes obviously natural gas and coal, but also includes hydrogeothermal, nuclear.

And I know there's a lot of pro climate people who've been talking about nuclear and how we've been really ignoring that. So this would be the time for us to start seeing if we can actually make progress on nuclear. I four years is still a very short period of time for us to even build a nuclear power plant. But one of the other things that he's also done is accelerate some of the permitting and approvals for these projects. So we might see some of these projects come in faster. In terms of drilling, I think what we were talking about earlier, Jason, is that

It's really, you just because the government comes in and says, you know, drill more, doesn't mean oil and gas companies are going to drill more. Cause it's really going to be driven by market if they see it as profitable. And it really depends on the price of oil per barrel. I think last time I checked, the price of oil is right now around like $76 a barrel, which is like, okay. But if we suddenly get a lot of oil in the market, the price could fall. And if it falls around $66.

there's not a lot of incentive for people to produce more. That's what I was going to ask is because my understanding of, I don't know, I have a deep understanding of the oil and gas business, but it's usually they're very agile based on the price of oil, which goes to my underlying question with this whole thing. It's like Trump is supposedly saying, Hey, we're going to try to lower energy costs for consumers. But if your energy market is completely based on the price of oil and gas, you're going have these booming busts with the price, right? With, you know, fuel price going through.

And I just wonder like, can he actually achieve this? I don't even, maybe I'm miss speaking, but I thought he said something about like having the cost of the average person's like energy. And I don't know you see how you do that unless you have a really stable kind of type of energy source, like renewables could provide. Yeah. So I think part of the challenge with understanding oil is that there's been a shift in kind of the dynamics of the price of oil. And it used to be that OPEC really had a strong control of kind of oil supply and

That was when the US was a net importer of energy. And guess what? We had the shale revolution, which changed entirely how we pulled oil out of the ground. And now the US is a net exporter of gas. We're a net exporter of oil. And why are we exporting it? Because other people pay more for it than we will. I mean, that's as simple as that. And then the US has a transport cost. It probably costs $5 a barrel to get it down to the port. And then you've got to process it, and you've got to ship it. Maybe that's $5 to $10 to get to another location. But that kind of tells you that there's an oversupply because we're sending it elsewhere.

If really wanted to, my gosh, it would be so painful, if really wanted to reduce the cost of oil, we would shut down exports. That's not going to happen. But I think ultimately the shale dynamic has shifted the power of who sets price. It's no longer OPEC, which is effectively a market cartel. It's individual companies looking at the forecast and saying, okay, we can turn these oil wells on as quickly as next month and start getting them produced. And they have a very rigorous

prediction of how many drilling rigs they want to have, what leases they're going to produce, and they index the amount of drilling based on supply. And I think we learned this, there's a lot of supply variation in the 2016 and 2018 cycles, because we were just learning how much shale can swing the market. And then it's kind of stabilized, because I think a lot of the smart people who do financial planning looked at this and said, we don't want to overbuild, because it'll hurt us in the long run. And they kind of turn on the drilling programs as they need it.

They kind of have a plan for the year, but it really gets locked in with that kind of financial discipline that Houston is known for. What you'll see though is because there's not a long-term demand for stable oil prices or long-term expectation of stable oil prices, you haven't seen offshore drilling pick up. So offshore drilling is where you get these mega billion dollar kind of build outs where there's a lot of, it's expensive. Number one, that's part of the reason you don't want to do it. You don't want to make a billion dollar bet and then see the price of oil drop.

there's a much higher preference for these small, think fracking and drilling a small well now is still under $10 million. So much easier to of modulate on supply when you know there's that kind of ability to kind of control your price and have good certainty. And so what are we going back to? Like it's hard to kind of force the supply to change, especially when the free market, the people making these decisions know when to pull back on their own drilling to kind of maintain

a healthy income for the company and for their shareholders, to be honest. That's kind of their mandate. And we don't have a national oil company here in the US to force it. So that's one of the beauties of the kind of open market we have in the US. Yeah. then if you look at, you talked about the price of gas for individual consumers, right? Price of gas right now is not expensive. It's, think, $3 a gallon. And it's been like that for the past decade.

And adjusted for inflation, it hasn't really increased much. So, you know, I don't know incrementally how much producing more oil is going to decrease the cost per gallon to the consumer. But, you know, I think some people have also written about, there's a lot of also new regulation that's going to expand LNG export terminals, and that's going to drive demand.

and then potentially also drive up costs. So there's some confusing levers out there. We don't know exactly what's going to happen because there's, drill more, but then also export more LNG and how that is actually going to play out in terms of price. We don't really know. One thing I'd be curious if either of you know much about is, I could be completely misinformed by this, but I understand that

when the US does fracking, it's possible to it in a very clean way compared to what a lot of other countries do. that something you guys have much knowledge on, whether or not they're capturing the carbon or the methane that comes from that? I'm not super well educated. If you think about where there are resource-rich countries that have a lot of oil and they haven't actually started fracking, you realize that Europe has banned fracking, so there's not going to be any of that there. That's a high regulation environment, but they also just said not on our turf. The US, in comparison to other countries, has a lot of regulation.

And so I think there are, you we got to clean the water. We only have so much flaring we're allowed to do. I think there are parts of the world where they don't care if you flare. Like maybe they want to, but it's just not a cost that the country can support. And you got to remember the reason we flare is it's safety. You burn off these explosive gases that could have a safety issue. But second, methane is 34 times more impactful from a greenhouse gas emissions perspective than CO2. And so...

We flare the gas, we do something called VOC reduction where you kind of remove these other heavy hydrocarbons which are also impactful. And a lot of states like North Dakota and the Bakken is very strict on how much emissions you have to reduce down because they want to make sure you don't flare too much. I would say Texas is its own animal so I get into that too much. But in general, the US is a high regulatory environment and I think there's concern that other countries just don't have the same discipline or the same knowledge set.

One of the things that's very challenging with a lot of modern unconventional wells is they produce a lot of flow backwater. And sometimes if you look at the numbers, you realize a lot of these wells are actually water wells that just tend to produce a little bit of oil. And sometimes those ratios can be 10 to one. I could see countries where maybe that the water regulations aren't as strong because we have very strong wastewater requirements here in the U.S. Yeah. I don't know how this would exactly play, but I always think about if there are, there was...

This is kind of during the time where Bitcoin was really like being talked about a lot, where people would be like taking that off that waste flare and then turning into energy on site to mine Bitcoin or to do compute for kind of non-urgent data center needs. So I'd be curious, especially if you look at the administration's focus on crypto right now, in general, like kind of pro crypto mentality, if that could be something that could incentivize capturing some of this stuff and stopping it from going there. again, it's a little bit of speculation.

definitely beyond my understanding of what's going on there. But I think the broader question I have, and I believe a lot of people have right now and would love your thoughts on, is how do climate tech companies position themselves in this new administration? Because we have this kind of really large, a lot of momentum to be towards American dynamism and energy abundance. So how does a climate tech company who for four years has been saying all the climate words and buzzwords, how do they position themselves? You want to take a first stab, Nada?

Yeah, I think that's a question we're asking ourselves too. How do we position ourselves? You know, I think for a lot of companies, you know, I talk about a lot of people that we bring on our podcast. They started their companies because they're purpose driven. They're deeply care about what they're doing and the impact of their technologies. And they care about the country and making sure that we play an important role as an energy provider. We are independent in terms of our energy needs.

So I think many of them will continue working on what they believe in, what they're passionate about. If they are able to kind of position themselves a bit differently to take advantage of the new executive orders, new regulations coming in, new funding that might potentially be available, I think many of them will do that. But good businesses, their business model doesn't depend on subsidies, right? So you want to make sure that you're going to be able to make profit without

subsidies. So in a way, this is also a good stress test of whether you had a good business model to begin with. So that would be kind of my take is really reevaluating and looking at your business model. And I think for a lot of them, of course, it's the first of a kind project that's hard. And there we're hoping that we could get more catalytic funding. You know, there's funding available besides the government. think the government is the biggest funder for a lot of these climate projects, thanks to also a lot of what the previous administration did.

But I think there will be, you know, there's still hope and it's, you know, again, it's only four years and things could change pretty drastically. So that's kind of my take. I don't know, Jason, what more do you have to add? Yeah, no, like no doubt it's going to be challenging for companies depending on their life cycle, and depends on where they are. think folks who are at the beginning of their journey or thinking about the beginning of their journey, they're hoping to start the next generation wind turbine company. It sucks. It'll be hard. Cause I think that's clearly off the table for some programs at the federal level. And it means you got to go find the funding source. And maybe that means.

calling all your friends in New York and seeing who needs a wind turbine. Because NYSERDA is still going to be here, right? There's still going to be programs at the state level where a lot of these things are local in their home. And yes, it's more work. So more companies won't make it because they aren't necessarily going to get the funding they need. We also got to remember, I think it's the second or third biggest market. Europe still has a very strong commitment to the Paris Climate Agreement.

Technically, a lot of the BRIC countries are still committed to it. And so there will be demands. It just doesn't necessarily mean you do it at home. What's going to happen at home is we're still going to develop technology here. Iroquois is probably still the best place to test something that's new from an electrical generation perspective, just because it's kind of easy to get permitting, can go out there. You are subject to the women of the market. So as a first of a kind, maybe you don't make as much money. But a lot of times, you prove things here in the US.

You prove it in Houston, you figure out very quickly where your target market's going to be. And if that means deploying initially here and going to somewhere like Western Canada, bringing it to Europe, I think it changes the commercial calculus or the math of where you really need to build the business. And for some companies, they just won't make the transition because it'll be too expensive. It'll be too hard. I had another thought, but it seems like you have another Well, I was going to say that that sounds really similar to...

what Eight Rivers said when they came on the voice that there are some technologies that they really make sense. They make sense sort of, but then they really make sense in certain areas of the world. So it's like if you can kind of put on a global hat and say, okay, can we develop this project in South Korea because they have this particular need for shipping fuels or whatever. I don't know the nuances of the South Korean market, but I remember him saying something about that. So that is a good perspective I hadn't thought about. guess one thing I'm...

I don't know, maybe I'm way too optimistic or just wear too many rose colored glasses, but if the Trump administration wants to stick to what they say they care about, which is like competing with China and energy abundance, I really believe that there needs to be a lot of people to stand up and say, listen, if you genuinely care about having energy abundance, need to, let's focus on permitting things, like the things that we can all agree on. We need energy broadly.

So let's scale back the permitting requirements and fix the interconnection queue issue. Okay, like let's fix that stuff. Let's just say, why are you trying to say that solar wind can't exist? Because there's nothing like that's detrimental to it. So why can't we just have everything all at once, right? So you guys do your oil and gas thing, we'll do our renewables thing. And I really hope that the kind of clean energy people are willing to step up together and say, hey, listen, we'll help you achieve your objectives of lowering the cost of energy. And by doing that, we can actually...

the manufacturing that you want to do to compete with China because we can't, we cannot compete with China if we have energy prices like this, like this. So I hope that we can get to the point where even let's say, you know, Republican related States or Republican side of the aisle is very pro this innovation because this innovation isn't just about climate. It's about efficiency and being able to produce things in a more circular way because the critical minerals piece is something that's really, really important too, right? If we produce things here or if we, bring

materials here, if we can keep them here by having a circular economy, that's also a massive advantage to us, right? Because we consume a lot, so therefore a lot's coming in. If we can keep it here instead of having to ship it off, something like that, I think that's also a really positive thing. I don't know if you have any thoughts there. Yeah. So there's something really interesting if you kind of think about history and you think about all the old industrial centers, they kind have a couple of things in common. Sometimes they're on a trade route. Obviously New York is a good export terminal.

But you could make a lot of stuff near rivers because it was cheap power. It was just like, here's my hydro dam and once I build it, it's super cheap. The most interesting thing about the renewables and wind and solar is you kind of decoupled where you can get cheap energy from the specific geography. You don't longer have to be along a river. You do kind of need to get the latitude and maybe got to be in the right wind zone.

You've just kind of opened up so much of the US now for where you can like make stuff. This is a really good point. I think it's a little hard to see from 10,000 feet until you kind of understand the nuance of it, but anywhere that's been kind of historically energy deprived, which tends to be like historically red states, like they just didn't have industry, which is why there wasn't a lot of wealth built up there. But now it's kind of created freedom and the ability to kind of

build new skill sets locally to make American again because you're not constrained. so to go back to your earlier question of like, do we sell these kind of renewable projects? The reality is you can kind of plant down a solar plant site anywhere. You can build in a wind turbine site anywhere as long as you get the trucks there. You can't always put in a gas turbine because you just got to a pipeline there. So if there's no infrastructure, there's no pipeline and we know how people feel about building pipelines in their backyard. It isn't always the

the best solution. And this is where a diversified energy mix is your ally. And you know, an energy project needs an off taker. And so I think the creativity of the developers is going have to go up. But there's this really good story around like we got to support, we're going to support making things in America again, we're going to go support all these data centers, which is kind of what the news of Stargate is all about. There will be a demand. The reality is, I think that the GE factories where they make these big gas turbines

have a limited capacity and they probably design them for where they expect capacity to be. And if you kind of adhere to the loan management expectations, you don't build faster than what you predict because you'll lose money and you don't build under. And so they have kind of one rate they want to make stuff at. And that opens up the door because you don't have enough supply of power generation equipment. Yeah, I just add to this to try to make sure people get what you're saying there is that there are places like in the Midwest that may not have access to a standard kind of traditional energy source.

which because of renewables or if we were to build better transmission could actually have low cost of energy because if anybody who's not familiar producing manufacturing something, usually the biggest cost is electricity. So if you can get low electricity costs, can, focus on building it there. So we are opening an opportunity if they want to. I think there was at one point, I know if they're still planning on doing this, like trying to remove some of the government agencies around the country so that there's more jobs provided. It's more evenly distributed. If they care about this idea of bringing more jobs back to America,

they could do this. And if you're a really creative founder, maybe you go to your local representative or to some, doesn't even have to be your local. You can just go to some kind of Republican senator who really wants to create jobs in their area. And you can try to come up with a partnership where it's like, we're going to power this thing with renewables if you help us cut the permitting process to get the power here. And then you can build this new factory that SoftBank's trying to build or whatever. And that can be an interesting way to get straight to the top of the pile and realize that this is going to benefit Americans. And I think

If you make a strong case that it's going to benefit Americans with jobs and everything, it's going to be pretty hard for any Republican to argue against that. Yeah. And I think the parallels with data centers are the same. Like data is like maybe you're producing compute or something, but it's a big capex project that's power hungry. And we're going to see parallel paths as those markets kind of get revealed. Nada, did you have anything to add? Yeah, no, I was just going to say, I mean, the point is that the energy demand is going to keep on going up, right? I mean, especially with these data centers, we're going to need more energy and like,

The question is like, do we want to just solely focus on one source of energy or do we want to diversify and make it easier, easier, more common sense, not just force one technology for the sake of it? One question I have on this idea of just like having diverse energy, and we talked a little bit about nuclear earlier, do you, either of you have an idea of what, with the momentum of kind of scaling back permitting and trying to make things go faster,

Do you have an idea of what could be done by the administration if they really wanted to set nuclear on a good trajectory for the next administration? What they would do? Because I think we can all agree that it's very unlikely any new project from start to finish would actually get built during four years, but perhaps a lot of advancement like with permitting and maybe they start building, but commissioning would take a while. Any thoughts on what could be done to get that on the rails and really trucking?

I wish I was more of an expert on nuclear. So here's kind of my concern, especially something like nuclear, is a lot of regulations written in blood, right? And, you know, I think everyone loves and hates OSHA requirements, but there's a reason why we have these safety requirements. There's a reason why you're a hard hat when you're on a construction site. And I'm just not smart enough about what regulation is holding back nuclear, because on the one hand, it's like we want to prevent another three-mile island. We want to make sure these things are safe.

And I expect a lot of people just don't want nuclear in their backyard. I think I heard anecdotally about how one project got furloughed. It wasn't even a nuclear project. It was just like cooling vents off of a gas turbine because people just don't want it in their city center. And I think that's the concern, right? You don't want to pull back so much regulation that it becomes an accident. and I was going to say, mean, nuclear has probably the highest amount of, it's like the most regulated industry, right? And it needs to be and it should continue being because

know, nuclear, like, you when I worked with CCS, like public perception is a big deal in the US. No one wants something in their backyard. And nuclear has the same problem. I think more than anything else, it's a public perception issue. So I would say, you know, look at countries who've done it well and are doing it well. You know, look at France, which has 80 % of its power coming from nuclear and they've been doing it for decades. You know, they have high speed trains that are running on this clean electricity. And so I would just say like build partnerships with these other

countries who are doing it well and understand like how are they able to get them off the ground and you know, yes, don't be lax on when it comes to regulations because we don't want to repeat the disasters of the past. We want to do it in a safe and secure way, but we want to get the train going because it does take a long time. And I think even if we haven't had more projects go online, I think the research

on nuclear has been ongoing. The technology has advanced quite a bit. And also you can recycle a lot of the nuclear waste now. I think France recycles 90 % of their waste. So I think there's a lot of people don't know about nuclear because we don't talk about it. So hopefully bringing that topic into the front of people's mind, discussing it, talking about it, understanding its risks will help with the public perception issue that will help us advance. And a lot of these projects

you know, happen in red states. And that's where we can actually take advantage of this administration to actually drive this agenda. Yeah, I think, I think the public perception issue is really big one because nobody has updated their thinking on what's going on, right? They just, think about Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and that's all they think about, right? And

and in Japan. it's like, if you can go and have, you know, Trump go on boots on the ground and like talk about the new, I don't know, fourth gen nuclear technology, hopefully people could say, Oh, you know, maybe, maybe that's interesting. The reason I'm always so passionate about this is I come from Midwest state and I haven't actually met people who are against nuclear. So I work in renewables and because of it, people are always giving me crap, but I'm always like, they always say, well, you know, nuclear is the way. And I'm like, okay, so you're okay with having it here in our backyard? And they say, absolutely.

So that's why I find it interesting because even people in these like more conservative places are actually totally open to it because I think most people are not too worried about the issues. And if you are really worried, just put it in a slightly more remote area, I'd say, and pipe the energy to the local cities, right? Because you can build transmission. So my hope is that we use the four years, if they really care about this, to get a bunch of projects started. And hopefully there'll be commitments that come along with it. Like, we're going to build this factory here or this battery facility there. And once these two things are tied together,

no matter who's in the next administration, it would be very difficult for them to unwind it because of how upsetting it would be to the local people and to the jobs that are coming there. And I think that just getting the American people used to seeing this new nuclear technology would be great. Any other thoughts on that, on nuclear in general? No, I think overall just like the point of taking advantage of what we have, what we've been served, right, with the new administration. And that means they are pro-nuclear and they're pro-geothermal. Like, okay, so let's get on that train.

And let's advance these projects and advance our research and development within this space as much as we can over the next four years and see where it takes us. So I've got a big question for you though, that I think is really unique that you guys can answer, which is it kind of rolls in with this idea of carbon capture and upcycling generally, but what do you think being in Houston, where all these oil majors are, what do you think the role of oil majors will be? Are just the traditional energy companies in the clean tech ecosystem going forward? And especially I'm kind of curious how

how this will perhaps benefit the carbon capture space. Yeah, I'm going to let Nadia take this because she's our carbon capture expert over here. Yeah, I think some people have this view that CCS is really lobbied by the oil and gas companies so that they can continue producing fossil fuels and release their emissions and just have something to work on the side. And that could be true. I don't know. I don't have any opinions on that.

you know, CCS is a technology that does help us deal with our emissions for some of these, especially these emissions that we're not able to abate in some of the industries like steel making, cement making industries. So, I do see that CCS is going to continue playing a big role. We're not going to back out of it. There's a lot of advancement that's been made, a lot of projects that are going off the ground. And for a lot of the oil and gas companies, it makes sense.

to use a lot of their infrastructure, a lot of their knowledge, their talent within that domain into something that's very adjacent and transient for them. You know, we're seeing the likes of Exxon, Chevron announcing new natural gas power plants for energy needs for data centers. And a big chunk of the innovation that's going to happen there is on the CCS side, because a lot of these data centers are being used for the likes of Microsoft and Meta, and they don't.

You know, they have set goals for themselves, the net zero goals. don't know how they're going to change now. We're going to find out over the course of the year, but you know, they want to show their users that they are using clean energy to service these data centers. So I think CCA is going to continue to be on the rise. That's kind of my view because it goes in line with a lot of the pros fossil fuel agenda. And I think the other thing is.

Energy companies have huge asset bases that they plan around for 10 to 20 years. You think about a company that's developing the Permian oil field, they went off and bought a bunch of acreage and they said, look, we're going to have a drilling plant that will run through 2035. And the same thing when they buy up leases up in offshore and the same thing when they're looking at other developments. It's just a long development cycle. And so I think that same mindset just permeates a lot of the decision-making.

There's reason why they're kind of slow to pick up projects, but it's also because they want to make sure these projects have a 10-year life or more that kind of pay back for the business and that their strategic alignment. And so generally, you know, these energy companies are making 10-year plans. And guess what? The administration is four years. There's still going to be a 10-year plan that's kind of behind this. But equally important, again, going back to Europe, there's a very strong incentive to kind of meet European requirements as the minimum standard. And that kind of permeates a lot of these big energy companies.

that are headquartered or originate from Europe. One of the interesting things I learned on Friday during one of our Determined to Lead sessions that was hosted by Gabriella from McKinstry was that European companies get, when they set up US operations, they still have to report back their carbon footprint and their carbon impact to the regulators. I don't know if there's a penalty attached to it, but they still have to report it. And what does that mean? Well, energy companies that are based here in the US that are European domiciled.

still very much care about their scope one and scope two emissions and carbon capture and storage is an essential part of how that gets managed. Yeah. And I would add that I think, I mean, this is in my view from what I've seen, I think there's a generational shift happening. A lot of more millennials are going to take over leadership. When you talk to Gen Zs, they care about the climate and their carbon footprint. Obviously not everybody, but

I think there is going, the generational shift is already happening. so that drive of people to have cleaner power, to have cleaner air around them, to take care of the nature around them is only going to increase, I think. So I think it's not only, you know, for the companies to make profit, but to also make their companies be an attractive place to work and have that corporate responsibility that they can show to their

their society. do think being in town, that that's a pretty underrated piece though is nobody wants to work in a really dirty, like a dirty company. Like they want to work at the companies that are, you know, winning on those sustainability kind of scoring things. Right. So there's, a lot of people who even, even basic jobs, right. They don't want to do these things unless they're, unless they're clean. So that's interesting. Are there any particular, I guess it's really, really early to see maybe, but are there any particular things that you guys notice your

some of the corporate partners around that they're looking for in terms of requests for startups or anything like that that's shifted yet since Trump has taken office? No, I don't think that it's too soon. Literally, we were talking to one company a month or so ago and they said, look, we're going to come out with a strategic plan. We'll release it at the end of Q2, but we're kind of waiting to see how some things shake out. And I think it's a little bit of coincidence that this year that they're doing a strategic review, but I expect they are kind of reacting.

Kind of in real time in the sense that they kind of knew where they wanted to go, but they're going to shift that investment strategy based on a lot of input. And these companies, you know, they're run with a lot of consensus. And so they're going to be taking input, everything from strategic relations all the way up through kind of what their customers want to see. And I could easily see some companies saying they're going to delay their strategic output even till the third quarter because they're waiting for more information. I don't know if you have different perspective.

I think you're right. mean, these companies operate on a four to five year strategic plan. And obviously they're looking at what the government is doing and what's going to be profitable for them for the next four years. But again, it's too soon for them to change. But also, you know, if you look at the likes of ExxonMobil, Chevron, regardless of what the regime is, they're still going to work on projects that they think are strategically going to be good for them, regardless of

an administration change. I don't think it's going to have like a huge impact for these big oil and gas companies. The European ones are going to continue to work on projects that they have to like report back on, report back to their countries through the EU and also

just the general public, which is a lot more engaged in this topic and care a lot more about carbon footprint. Yeah. Yeah. That goes into the point of the big corporates, Like Amazon, like they still have to report on the European requirements. So they're still going to have an interest in these things as well, right? So maybe the last thing we can wrap up with is what are the most important things that if a company is trying to land a pilot or a corporate investment from a strategic, what are the things that they should be keeping an eye out for? What should they look for? What should they do?

Yeah, I think this is a little invariant of kind of who's president to get to that strategic investment. Usually you're, you're, getting that around series a series B. So you're raising like 10 to $20 million. And so kind of the bar for like what you need to have is a little different. Um, and usually at that phase, you need some sort of offtake and you need kind of a first of a kind project kind of understood. Doesn't mean it needs to be funded. And so what does that mean? You kind of need three, three partners kind of in this, you got to have the technology provider, which is the startup.

You have to have the buyer or the person who's taking the offtake, be it power or sustainable alternative fuel or what have you, and you need the EPC. That's the person who's going to build the project. Sometimes the EPC is two firms because you've got engineering and then procurement and construction, and you need them to be all in. It's one thing to get kind of letter support like, we'll help you out if you raise the money, but it's another thing if you're actually working together and you have real commercial paper in front of each other and you're shovel ready.

And ideally, when you're out raising money, you're raising money for the project to do that first of kind, to do that deployment. You don't want to be out there saying, hey, we think it's going to cost as much and we think it's going to be there. You want to have kind of a package where you can get the money in. You can hire the people within two months and start building. at the outside of the milestones you achieve there is saying, look, we did the first of kind. We showed these certain KPIs. Now we're ready for scale up. We want to kind of build the next thing.

That's in a perfect world. Not everyone can kind of navigate that because sometimes you just have what you have when you go to market. But that's really what it takes to get the strategic in. And even at the seed stage, it's usually too early. Go ahead, Nada. No, I was saying, I think that's a very good point, Jason, in terms of like the startups to not just looking at themselves as a technology provider, but I'm seeing more and more of them calling themselves project developers. So they could be using their own technology or they could be using whatever technology is readily available.

But it's really bringing them together into a project. And that's why we think the importance of being able to really lift off these pilots is more important than being able to prove your technology is that can you build a whole project together, bringing in all these different partners to actually get it off the ground? Yeah. And I think this is kind of like one of the hidden skill sets of Houston. when people ask why Houston, why is it going to the center of the energy transition and like this like very

I'm going say bizarre skill set the energy industry has is figuring out how to do these massive projects with multiple players and with regulation and stakeholders. And they like tend to deliver them on time and on budget and without, even like put financial risk controls around it. And we need to teach kind of the rest of the world how to do that. But importantly, we got to teach kind of the folks working on, on next generation energy projects. This is what you got to do. And that skill set is, is people in Houston, it's people who have worked.

on traditional energy projects and built the teams and put these parties together and made it real. And you think about any oil-filled project, be it a small independent one or one with a super major, kind of has all these components. for some of these pros working in the industry, this is just like a muscle memory for them. so this is our shameless promotion at Houston. If you're really going do a big project, you've got to build a project team in Houston because it's kind what you need.

If you're going to have impact, if you want to become a billion dollar business, if you want to become a Thunder Lizard, you need those skills that are here. And so we hope the entrepreneurs who are really thinking about going big find talent here in Houston. Yeah, I think that's probably a really good place to end on. think it's if I were to summarize what I've witnessed from running this podcast or doing this podcast for past four years now, it's that there's a lot of people who want to make an impact and they oftentimes do not know how the game is played.

right? And they struggle with a lot of these things. Everything is extremely hard. And in part because they didn't look ahead and find who else is doing the things well. And in part because they haven't looked to other industries to see who's doing it well. Or they viewed themselves as a technology provider and they assumed everything else would fall into place rather than a project developer. And sure, maybe they will become a technology developer in the future, but they have to, if they're coming at it initially with the new technology, they have to develop projects to prove that the technology works.

So that they can then get the guarantees in place and then just sell the technology through other partners in the future. So either way, you better learn your project development chops, right? Yep. Very good. Well, I mean, we're a little bit over here. I appreciate you guys taking the time. This has been a really, really pleasure. I'm looking forward to seeing you guys when I come to Houston. I think this should be out before then. So hopefully people come in and come and tune in. We don't have the details, but it looks like we're going to be hosting something there. So stay tuned for that. Anybody listening? But yeah, this is a pleasure to have you guys both on. Thank you. This has been great.

Thank you. Thanks so much.