Commodity Insights LIVE’s Post

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Hello, My name is Raul LeBlanc and I'm here at the Denver conference called Carbon Management Americas, which is a really fascinating conference, our first time to put on this conference and frankly it's going quite well. It's been a really good experience, so let me. Give a couple of observations that that I think may be important. People talk a lot about promises. People talk a lot about pledges. People talk about it. We're getting there. But the world is moving beyond the promising phase. It's moving into the implementation phase. And in the process of doing that, of course, it's discovering that there's a lot of problems and there's a lot of difficulties in making these things real. If you really want to manage carbon. Yeah. And you have to get realistic. You have to start to put up real money. You have to get steel on the ground, and you have to understand things better and better and better. And so we've got this evolution now of moving from here's the thought, here's the idea, here's the vision. Which of course you need, but to now the reality and let's start solving problems and let's start putting boots on the ground and, and dealing with the practicalities of, of managing carbon. And I also thought it is a good theme that managing carbon because it's not necessarily about eliminating carbon overnight. That's not going to happen. But what can happen is companies and, and nonprofits and governments can start to manage carbon. And that's probably the way to think about it. Just managing it. Things cost money, things have value and how do we make those trade-offs? And so that's what I saw a lot of at this conference was people grappling with the realities. And what's interesting to me is you've got people at in very different niches, OK? You have some people who are in incipient markets, really embryonic sort of of industries like hydrogen where people are working very hard on what's the business model, What is that even going to look like, right. All the way through to say traditional oil and gas, who are thinking, how can I do a better job on this? How can I, you know, recreate my industry? How can I renovate? And, and make things better from that carbon management. How could I be a company that's not only involved in, in extracting and delivering energy to the world, but also in charge of putting carbon back in the ground, say in the case of CCS, right? So you've got people in very different niches across this. And that makes it hard, frankly, to have a conference, right? Who do you invite? What do you put on the agenda? And I was very happy for the first conference in particular. That we were able to attract a group of people who are professionals who were able to. Coalesce around an agenda that was robust but also a diversified somewhat. It's very interesting on the first day we had 1/2 day which was just training and we weren't sure how that was going to turn out turns out a lot of people showed up people are hungry for learning more about this and and so that turned out to be a good idea now I myself presented on the second day I was fortunate enough to moderate a panel actually with a number of people and the whole. Focus on that panel was on methane. So methane as you know is very powerful but short lived greenhouse gas. And, umm. If you look at this, about 1/3 of the methane, uh, from the US in recent years has come from oil and gas activities. And that's a little bit of a. Problem because a, you're wasting your resource that you could be selling OK, but it's also devilishly difficult. There are solutions and one of the great things about the discussion that we had was really glad I had a person from a large oil and gas company who's doing really interesting things with AI and detection. I had someone from a satellite provider who is of course looking at satellite data, right. And then I've got someone. Who's on the academic side, who's trying to tell if these things really work? And it turns to a good discussion. And where we got to was that aerial detection of methane or detecting methane remotely. It's a great idea because it allows you to cover large areas of fairly frequently. If your satellites flying around and passes over, you know, West TX or North Dakota or the Middle East every day, you could start to take pictures and really piece together what's happening. And the idea is really that let's fix the problem. OK, Let's try to understand where those leaks are occurring. What are the sources of these things? How persistent are they? What is their rate? What is their duration? And be able to. Fix the problem. And I, I feel good because when I think about the oil and gas industry that I've been involved with, we have gotten to a point where everyone actually is, is taking the problem seriously and people are looking for real solutions. Yeah. And so this was a great panel to talk about the limitations of some of those solutions as well as the strengths, right. And so that's the second big movement within carbon these days within emissions, if you will. First, you have the movement. From promising to action. And now you also have the movement from estimating things to measuring them. And that's a very different kind of environment to be in. And it has its own host of problems. What do I do if measurement A says that the answer is 10 and measurement B says that is 14, right? What's the reality of that situation? If they're part, those are. But those are good problems to have. It means that we are learning more or getting better or, or. Getting a better handle on the problems. And every day that passes, we get a little bit better, right? And we all hope that that things accelerate. So those were some things that I took away from the conference. You know, those are my big themes is the movement toward action and all the hubbub and, and issues and challenges and solutions that that entails. And also I'm looking at this movement from estimation to measurement to better science to getting our, our. Knowledge in place and being able to provide practical solutions. You know, like I said, mine was on the methane side, but then you have also things like carbon markets. The whole second day was devoted to carbon value and monetization. And how do we track that? It's also think about it, you're trying to track and monetize and invisible, odorless and often unmeasured type of. Gas, right, either it's carbon dioxide or it's it's methane or it's into or it's got a whole bunch of these things and how do we track them with reliability? How do we charge the right price for them so that society can make the trade-offs? That's the third theme was. The trade-offs and the politics and the policies and of course we're seeing great ferment in that. And I feel like sometimes, you know, it's tied, it comes in and it goes out, right. But on the other hand, you know, over time it does make progress and we get to find, I think better and better answers. So that's what I'm seeing from the Carbon Management America's conference that S&P put on in Denver and we are excited about where it leads us. We're looking forward to next year and having people talk about more problems and more solutions.