Energy Tech Startups

0:00 Transform your startup journey with the energy tech nexus. Connect with fellow founders, access critical resources, and be part of a community shaping the future of energy and carbon tech. Your

0:10 path to building a Thunderlizard starts here. Learn more at energytechnexascom. Our vision is the energy

0:17 trilamum. 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,

0:28 make an oil Like you drill your resource, it comes out of the ground, you know it's gonna cost. Welcome back to Clean Techies, the number one podcast for climate tech, entrepreneurs, and

0:35 investors. I'm Silas Mayner, and today I will be your host. Today we've got a much more freewheeling conversation than normal, and we've got two incredible guests, Nada Ahmed and Jason Etier,

0:44 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

0:54 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 Greentown

1:04 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 good work on carbon capture space,

1:14 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

1:25 nuclear could possibly get a jumpstart during this administration to get it moving, get the rails built, and get it kind of give some momentum there. Number three, will carbon capture just survive,

1:35 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

1:45 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 if you are in Houston or going to be in Houston

1:55 for the hydrogen Forum on February twelfth and thirteenth come meet us there I with energy techniques as we are actually going to be doing a happy hour and live podcast and now I've said it it's out

2:05 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 twelfth sometime in the afternoon and evening and that the live recording

2:15 and then followed by the happy hour like I said it's going to be probably largely focused on hydrogen given the hydrogen form a town by taught you novices can be a lot of great Cleantech people there

2:24 in general so we will see you in Houston and I'm looking forward to this very much both Samuel and I should be there so All right, let's get into the show.

2:36 All right, boom, we're live, how are you guys doing? Good, how are you? I am finest frog hair, as I like to say, or as my dad likes to say, and I've parroted that. Have you guys heard that

2:45 one before? No, like where does that reference come from? I have no idea, probably just that frog hair is so fine, you never knew that frog's had hair, you can't see it. I really don't know the

2:55 origin of it, but dads like to have lots of dad lines, right? Yeah, it's like one of those dad jokes, yeah. Exactly, I'm working on that now I just had my first recently, so I have to practice

3:05 my dad jokes, get them all, get them all. Yeah, I can't. Way to go. Yeah, thank you guys. Well, I guess give us a little bit of an introduction to yourself. I think probably a lot of people

3:14 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 at TA, one of the founding partners here at Energy Tech Nexus. I've been

3:23 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, move to Boston, I met a bunch of

3:32 awesome entrepreneurs. start Greentown Labs with about five others. And it was like a roller coaster journey of just kind of experiencing the heyday of climate. And it was very interesting because

3:44 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 climate tech. No one wants to invest in it.

3:53 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

4:03 it in a different way. And along the way, I helped launch Greentown, 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 not

4:15 introduce yourself. Yeah. So my name is again, Nada Ahmed. And I am a founding partner together with Jason of Energy Technics. And my background's more been in corporate. I graduated with a

4:27 master's degree from Rice University and started working with carbon-captain storage technology. And this was like around the year 2010, where it was, there was a lot happening within that space.

4:39 It was, Europe was gonna deploy like 10 projects, they had funding for them. And so I was working for Norwegian company, I ended up going to Norway with them and working on CCS globally worldwide.

4:51 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

5:02 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

5:15 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 not only their employees, but the public that

5:27 they have a conscience and wanna 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

5:39 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.

5:50 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

6:01 called the energy tech startups. And around that time Jason was also exiting Greentown Labs and we decided that Houston's so big and there's so much going on. There's enough capital, there's enough

6:12 industry here that there's space for more ecosystem builders. And that's what we are as energy techs and exes. We're a startup hub for companies working on the energy transition and really want to

6:24 help cultivate this ecosystem here And, you know, inspired by what some of the other cities have done, if you look at. you know, Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, and seeing how incubators

6:38 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

6:50 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. Like it's not the same way it probably used

7:00 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, you know,

7:09 renewables versus not. And I know when we first, 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

7:18 generally. Right? So I'm kind of, I'm really excited to see what you guys are doing here. So tell us a little bit more about the what, what does it look like to be part of Energy Technics? Like,

7:26 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,

7:35 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

7:45 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

7:55 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

8:05 law firm that you can trust to be your partner through it all. From incorporation to exit, they've got you covered. Go to goodwinlawcom and tell them clean tech he's setting you to get exclusive

8:14 access to startup resources. All right, back to the show. Yeah, happy to jump into that. So as a hub, we're a member supported organization. We ask members to pay fees. We have, I think, 101

8:26 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.

8:38 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

8:48 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 kind of networking. And so we start

8:59 membership out at65 a month today It's going to go up to75 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

9:10 we have is if a founder comes in and says, look, Jason, I'm short on cash. I'm raising money. We'll do it deferral until they need help or until they can come back and pay back. So we're trying

9:20 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 indirect mentorship with members. But like with any kind of financial model,

9:29 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

9:38 direct services. Really, the tech nexus today, energy tech nexus today is funded by grants and by engaging with corporate partners. We have a handful of corporate partners that we are going to

9:49 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, we get to build those important connections between the

10:01 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

10:15 partners insight into what's coming. And so part of that is providing services that we share, all the startups we engage in, all the startups we look at. But then also, we bring them together for

10:25 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

10:37 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

10:47 add to that. I think what we often talk about as our vision is the energy trilamum. So it's really solving for security, affordability, and sustainability. And we've just actually going to

10:58 publish this week our impact report, and we really talk about there We lay out what are our key pillars on which we work on our mission. And our mission is building thunderlizards. That's what we

11:11 call our companies. They're not unicorns at thunderlizards. 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

11:21 to focus on and take advantage of being in Houston, which has a lot of industrial infrastructure. So we focus on innovation infrastructure be focused on the pilot projects. and really giving

11:33 startups the opportunity to to do their first pilots and their second pilots here in Houston so that's one of the first things that we we did last year during our grand opening was to a pilot thon and

11:45 that's something that is going to become a yearly event for us we have a pilot location in the Midlands or where we have testing infrastructure and our startups can go and start testing today their

11:56 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

12:06 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 that people who have made their businesses within

12:16 not only on the gas industry but other you know chemicals industries and how do you unlock that capital how do you cultivate and the investor network because we're not used to investing in startups

12:28 the way you are in some of the other startup cities Leadership is really important for us. We really, we call ourselves to be founder focused. So that's our third pillar is how do we make sure that

12:39 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

12:51 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

13:01 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, some of her founding members. We have these

13:11 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

13:24 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 have reached a threshold

13:35 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 want to make sure that the

13:47 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, so just

13:59 to mention Julianna Garayes, who is also one of the launch partners of Greentown Labs here in Houston is also our founding partner. So we make sure that, you know, we not only have this HEDA

14:09 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

14:20 our expertise and make sure that women have a voice in the energy transition. Yeah, that's really awesome I mean it sounds like you guys are really just like cutting through all of the the difficult

14:31 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

14:39 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. So I really love this, this focus, and I'm a big

14:49 fan of community and ecosystem. So you know, I'm all here for it. But you mentioned something I'd like to touch on a little bit, which is you said that they're aside from just the energy side of

14:56 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

15:05 well? Yeah, I'll take that. I think you can decide to kind of define things very thinly or very broadly. And the reality is energy touches so much of our lives. It's really kind of that lever of

15:17 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.

15:28 Water is one of those things where you look at the cost of doing anything. thing with water and you realize it's really an energy story because it's all about how much does a kilowatt cost to get

15:35 accessible water. So I think with data centers, like you look at where data centers are, where crypto is, they put crypto where energy is cheap. And so it's such a tightly coupled economics that

15:46 we say, look, 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

15:56 does CCUS have to do with energy? And 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

16:06 product, it's the results of burning fossil fuels. So, you can't have one without the other, you can't even, it's hard to talk about hydrogen without talking about CCUS. And so to kind of come

16:16 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 company that does polymer

16:25 compositions today and will engage with both founders, as well as strategics who are looking for that next generation of material. We found historically some of the best kind of innovators or

16:36 investors in technology, where are 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

16:46 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

16:59 in many ways, getting product market fit is less ambiguous when you have these kind of advanced material plays. And so it reduces kind of that market risk when you know what you're supposed to build.

17:10 Yeah, because there's a clear objective of what to work towards. Yeah, that's it. That's really interesting. I always, I guess, do you guys have any thoughts on this? One thing I've always

17:18 hoped that we would see is companies build juggernauts that will Yeah, at least challenge the incumbents, right? 'Cause it oftentimes feels like in climate. people are building with the intention

17:28 to be acquired, kind of at the worst case scenario. I mean, obviously that's not the only intention, but it oftentimes feels difficult to say, okay, how are we gonna build a new green chemical

17:37 company versus just building something really innovative and getting acquired by BSF, right? Like, do you see that being a possibility? Like, what we see new juggernauts created? Yeah, so our

17:48 preferred term is thunder lizard, so that's what we call them. Yeah, and I think that there's a couple of realities. Like, this much thing is a small energy business And if you're small, you get

17:57 acquired. And really the only way to get scale is to build something that delivers massive amounts of products. Like when we're talking about sustainable aviation fuel, you just aren't impactful if

18:09 you're just building a very small percentage of the market. If you wanna have impact, you have to go big, or you have to get acquired. And I think within energy tech, there's a couple of points

18:19 where you have to just stop, make that decision. Do I wanna sell the technology and the IP I put together, Or do I want to go big? The reality is the market multiples for going public are far

18:30 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

18:41 gotta go for what drives the most return to investors and that typically means hitting public markets. You don't get some company valuations, but it's still better than an acquisition. Personally,

18:52 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 dollar

19:01 valuation band where you're selling essentially for IP. If you're selling for 40 million dollars, you really haven't had enough money to build a factory or if it's really that matters. And so I

19:10 think that's why you see this goal for going large. The reality is 90 of energy businesses get acquired before they, as their exit. So I think there's a little bit of reality versus kind of what

19:23 you need to deliver for your investors I don't know not if you have a different - perspective. No, I think you nailed it pretty well. Very good. Well, I appreciate that perspective. I really

19:31 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. Yeah, well that way. I think the reality is like with any

19:39 energy revolution, you know, you do have a new technology that comes out and it's classic disruption. And if they don't get purchased early, they end up dominating. And it's really hard for an

19:52 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,

20:02 so easy to make money, make an 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

20:12 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 rather

20:22 drill more shale. Like it just makes financial sense. 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

20:34 way they're used to. And 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 kind

20:43 of pull these projects together, they'll just be by themselves. They'll have aggregated all that assets, they'll be the experts. And I wouldn't be surprised if you got Kinder Morgan here running

20:52 pipelines, who's the Kinder 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

21:01 IOCs, right? You have the shells and the BP's, 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,

21:09 you know, they've been around for more than 100 years. So, and I think going, going forward in the future, it's not going to be completely disrupt them then. disrupting them, and more also

21:20 looking at like medium-sized companies that are still going to be pretty substantial, going to have a big impact as you re-diversify the energy mix to, you know, have more geothermal, to have

21:30 other types of alternative energies, but there's still be a role to play. You know, a good example of a company who's been able to transform successfully is the Danish oil company, ERSTED, and

21:41 just looking at how, you know, we'll see what happens now with the new administration and some of the changes that they've put on offshore drilling. And I know their stock was done 17 since that

21:51 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

22:02 seen it happen because it is very, very hard. And you really have to have that commitment from the top. Yeah. Yeah, certainly. I think that's probably the best case scenario, right? If people

22:12 can transition and do what Orsted did, that can actually have the most impact on fighting this. this whole issue, but this is a good segue. So let's talk about the new administration. I guess,

22:21 you know, broad thoughts, what are you guys thinking about 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

22:30 about here, maybe there's, you know, crazy things that happen 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

22:39 gas and drilling is going to be the core thing and even some crazy things happening with the interconnection side of things. But what are you guys' thoughts on what the next four years brings for, I

22:47 guess, the clean energy movement in general? Yeah, Nadia, you have good thoughts on the, I guess, the drilling activity this morning. Yeah, no, I think, yeah, I mean, depending on when

22:56 you're listening to this, but I think we kind of know the direction and the new administration's going to take. So, yeah, we know they have put a pause on the

23:08 IRR, IRA, the 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 they can actually take the funding away,

23:19 especially for projects that have been promised funding. So we don't, there's a big uncertainty. We don't know what's gonna happen, but this uncertainty is not good for projects, especially clean

23:29 energy projects, who already are challenged when it comes to, you know, getting investors on board, getting infrastructure funding, because they're often first-of-a-kind type of projects. So, I

23:41 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 base load,

23:53 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

24:04 really ignoring that. So, this would be the time for us to start seeing if we can actually make progress on nuclear. I mean, four years is still a very short period of time for us to even build a

24:14 nuclear power plant. But one of the other things that he's also done is, you know, accelerate some of the permitting and approvals for these projects. So we might see some of these projects come

24:24 in faster. In terms of drilling, I think what we were talking about earlier, Jason, is that it's really, you know, just because the government comes in and says, you know, drill more, doesn't

24:33 mean oil and gas companies are going to drill more because 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

24:44 time I checked the price of oil is right now around like 76 dollars 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

24:56 66 dollars, 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

25:05 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

25:13 try to lower energy costs for consumers.

25:23 but if your energy market is completely based on the price of oil and gas, you're gonna have these boom and busts with the price, with, you know, field price going through them. And I just wonder,

25:24 like, how can you 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 energy. And I don't know how to

25:33 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

25:45 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

25:56 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 an exporter of oil. And why are we exporting it?

26:05 'Cause other people will pay more for it than we will. I mean, that's as simple as that than the S is a transport cost. It probably costs5 a barrel to get it down. to the port, and then you've

26:14 got a process and you've got to ship it, maybe that's five to10 to get to another location. But that kind of tells you that there's an oversupply because we're sending it elsewhere. If we really

26:23 wanted to, oh my gosh, I'll be so painful. If we 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

26:33 shifted the power of who sets price. It's no longer a OPEC, which is effectively a market cartel. Its individual company is looking at the forecast and saying, Okay, we can turn these oil wells

26:43 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

26:54 index the amount of drilling based on supply. And I think we learned this. And there was a lot of supply variation in the 2016 and 2018 cycles because we were just learning how much shale can swing

27:06 the market. And it's kind of stabilized because I think a lot of the smart people who do financial planning, look at this and said we don't want to over-build because it all. It'll hurt us in the

27:14 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

27:25 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

27:36 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

27:45 want to make a billion dollar bet and then see the price of oil drop. There's a much higher preference for these small, I think fracking and drilling a small well now is still under10 million. So

27:56 much easier to kind 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

28:08 of force the supply to change, especially when the free market, if the people making these decisions know when to pull back on their own drilling to kind of maintain a healthy income for for the

28:19 company and for their shareholders to be honest and 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 that's one of the the beauties of the

28:29 kind of open market we have in the U S Yeah and then if you look at you talked about them price of gas for individual consumers rate price of gas right now is not expensive it's I think three dollars

28:42 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 dunno know incrementally how much producing more oil is going to decrease

28:55 the cost per gallon to the consumer but you know I think some people was also written about there's a lot of auto new regulation that's going to expand LNG export to terminals and that's going to

29:08 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 okay, drill more, but then also

29:18 export more LNG and how that is actually going to play out in terms of price. We don't really know. Are you ready to lead the decarbonization charge? Energy Technexes is your platform for growth,

29:31 offering unique resources and expertise for energy and carbon tech founders. Join us at energytechnexescom

29:38 and start building your thunderlisset. 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,

29:49 it's possible to do it in a very clean way compared to what a lot of other countries do. Is that something you guys have much knowledge on, whether or not they're capturing the carbon or the methane

29:58 that comes up comes from that? I'm not super well educated. I think if you think about where they're a resource-rich country that have a lot of oil and they haven't actually started fracking, you

30:06 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, by comparison to

30:15 other countries, has a lot of regulation. And so I think we've got to clean the water. We only have so much flaring. We're allowed to do. I think the parts of the world where they don't care if

30:25 you flare. Maybe they want to, but it's just not a cost that the country can support. And you've got to remember the reason we flare is it's safety. You burn off these explosive gases that could

30:36 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

30:48 kind of remove these other heavy hydrocarbons, which are so 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

30:58 they want to make sure you don't flare too much. I would say Texas is its own animal, so won't get into that in too much But in general, the US. is a high regulatory environment. And I think

31:08 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

31:18 a lot of flowback water. 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

31:27 ratios can be 10 to one. I could see countries where maybe that with the water regulations aren't as strong 'cause we have very strong wastewater requirements here in the US. Yeah, I don't know how

31:36 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

31:46 that off that waste flare and then turning into energy on site too, to my Bitcoin or to do compute for kind of non-urgent like data center needs. So I'd be curious, especially if you look at the

31:56 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

32:05 there. So again, it's a little bit of speculation definitely beyond my understanding of what's going on

32:09 there. But I think the broader question I have, and I believe a lot of people have right now, and I would love your thoughts on, is how do climate tech companies position themselves in this new

32:20 administration? 'Cause we have this kind of really large, a lot of momentum to be towards American dynamism, right? And energy abundance. So how does a climate tech company who for four years has

32:29 been like seeing all the, the climate, you know, words and buzzwords, how do they position themselves? You wanna take a first stab Nada? Yeah, I think that's a question. We're asking ourselves

32:39 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

32:48 purpose driven. They're deeply care about what they're, 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

32:59 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

33:10 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.

33:21 But good businesses, their business model doesn't depend on subsidies, right? So you want to make sure that you're gonna be able to make profit without subsidies So in a way, this is also a good

33:33 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

33:44 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. I think the

33:53 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

34:03 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 doubt it's going to be

34:12 challenging for companies depending on their lifecycle. It depends on where they are. I think folks who are at the beginning of their journey or thinking about the beginning of their journey,

34:19 they're hoping to start the next generation wind turbine company that sucks. It'll be hard because I think that's clearly off the table for some programs at the federal level. And it means you got

34:27 to go find the funding source. And maybe that means calling all your friends in New York and seeing who needs a wind turbine. 'Cause I sort of still gonna be here, right? Like there's still gonna

34:36 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 'cause they aren't necessarily gonna get the funding

34:45 they need. We also gotta remember the biggest, I think it's the second or third biggest market. You know, Europe still has a very strong commitment to the Paris climate agreement. Technically,

34:54 you know, a lot of the brick 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

35:02 going to develop technology here. ERCOT 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,

35:11 can go out there, you are subject to the market. So as a first of a kind, like maybe you don't pick as much money, but a lot of times you prove things here in the US, you prove it and used it,

35:22 you figure out very quickly where your target market is 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

35:33 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. So it'll be too expensive. It'll be too hard. I

35:42 had another thought, but it seems like you have another question. Well, I was going to say that that sounds really similar to what eight Rivers said when they came on the bus that there are some

35:49 some technologies that they they really make sense. Like they make sense sort of, but then they really make sense in certain areas of the world where I was like, if you can kind of put on a global

35:59 hat and say, okay, you know, can we developed this project in South Korea because they have this particular need for. you know, shipping fuels or whatever, right? I don't know the nuances of

36:06 the South Korean market, but I remember him saying something about that. So that is a good perspective I hadn't thought about. I guess one thing I'm, I don't know, maybe I'm way too optimistic or

36:16 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

36:27 that there needs to be a lot of people to stand up and say, Hey, listen, if you genuinely care about having energy abundance, we need to, let's focus on the permitting things. Like the things

36:38 that we can all agree on, we need energy broadly. So let's scale back the permitting requirements and fix the interconnection queue issue, right? Like let's fix that stuff. Let's just say, why

36:46 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

36:55 thing, we'll do our renewables thing. And I really hope that the kind of clean energy people willing to step up together and say, hey, listen, we'll help you achieve your objectives of lowering

37:05 the cost of energy. And by doing that, we can actually power 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

37:14 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

37:26 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

37:35 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

37:44 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

37:51 thoughts there. Yeah, so there's something really interesting if you kind of think about history, and you think about like all the old industrial centers, they kind of have a couple things in And

37:59 sometimes they're like on a trade route, like obviously New York is like a good export terminal, but you would make a lot of stuff near rivers because there was cheap power, right? It was just

38:09 like, here's my hydro dam and it's like once I build it, it's super cheap. And the most interesting thing about the renewables and wind and solar is you kind of decoupled like where you can get

38:21 cheap energy from like the specific like geography, like you don't longer have to be a longer river. And you do kind of need to get the latitude and maybe got to be in the right wind zone But you've

38:31 just kind of opened up so much of the US. now for where you can like make stuff. 'Cause this is a really good point, right? And it's, I think it's a little hard to see like from 10, 000 feet and

38:44 so 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,

38:52 which is why there wasn't a lot of wealth built up there. But now it's kind of creative freedom and the ability to kind of build new skill sets locally to make American again. because you're not

39:03 constrained. And so to go back to your earlier question of, like, how do we sell these kind of renewable projects, the reality is you can kind of plant down the solar site anywhere. You can build

39:13 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 run a pipeline there. So if there's no infrastructure, there's

39:22 no pipeline and we know how people feel about building pipelines in their backyard, it isn't always the best solution. And this is where a diversified energy mix is your ally and you know what an

39:31 energy project needs and needs an off-taker. And so I think the creativity of the developers is going to have to go up, but there's this really good story around like we got to support, if we're

39:42 going to support making things in America again, if 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

39:51 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

40:01 Sloan Management You don't build it faster than what you predict 'cause you'll lose money and you don't build under. And so they have one rate they wanna make stuff at. And that opens up the door

40:12 'cause you don't have enough supply of power generation equipment. Yeah, I just add to this to try and make sure people get what you're saying there is that there are places like in the Midwest that

40:21 may not have access to a standard kind of traditional energy source which because of renewables or if we work to build better transmission, could actually have low cost of energy because if anybody

40:30 who's not familiar producing and manufacturing something, usually the biggest cost is electricity. So if you can get low electricity costs, you could focus on building it there. So we are opening

40:40 an opportunity if they want to. I think there was at one point enough there's still plenty on doing this, like trying to move some of the government agencies around the country so that there's more

40:49 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

40:58 local representative or to some, it doesn't even have to be your local. kind of Republican senator who really wants to create jobs in their area. And you can try to come up with a partnership where

41:07 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, you know, soft banks

41:13 trying to build or whatever. Right. And that could be an interesting way to get straight to the top of the, of the pile and realize that this is going to benefit Americans. And I think if you make

41:22 a strong case that'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

41:31 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

41:40 revealed. Nada, did you have anything to add? Yeah, I know. 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

41:46 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, you know, make it

41:56 easier, easier, more common sense, not just force. one technology, you know, for the sake of it. One question I have on this idea of just like having diverse energy, and we talked a little bit

42:09 about nuclear earlier, is 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

42:22 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

42:33 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.

42:41 Any thoughts on what could be done to get that on the rails and really trucking? Yeah, I wish I was more of an expert on nuclear. So here's my kind of my concern, especially something like

42:52 nuclear's, a lot of regulations written in blood, right? And I think everyone loves and hates OSHA requirements, There's a reason why we have these safety requirements. There's a reason we are a

43:02 hard hat when you're on a construction site. And I am 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

43:11 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 just got furloughed and

43:23 wasn't even a nuclear project. It was just like cooling vents off of a gas turbine 'cause people just don't want it in their city center And I think that's the concern, right? You don't want to

43:31 pull back so much regulation that it becomes an accident. Not as like you have a - No, and I was going to say, nuclear has probably the highest amount of - it's like the most regulated industry,

43:40 right? And it needs to be and it should continue being. Because nuclear, like when I work with CCS, public perception is a big deal in the US. No one wants something in their backyard. And

43:52 nuclear has the same problem. I think more than anything else, it's a public perception So, I would say, you know, look at countries who've done it well and are doing it well. You know, look at

44:00 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

44:11 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

44:20 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.

44:33 And I think even if we haven't had more projects go online, I think the research on a nuclear has been ongoing. The technology has advanced quite a bit. And also, you can recycle a lot of the

44:44 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, you know, that to

44:56 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

45:06 happen in red states, and that's where we can actually take advantage of this administration to actually drive this agenda. Yeah, I think the public perception issue is really big one because

45:17 nobody has updated their thinking on what's going on. They think about Chernobyl and Through Mile Island, and that's all they think about, right? And in Japan, so it's like, if you can go and

45:27 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 that's interesting.

45:35 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

45:44 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

45:51 that's why I find interesting because even people in these like like more conservative places are actually - totally open to it. Because I think most people are not too worried about the issues. And

46:00 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

46:09 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, oh, we're going to build this factory here or

46:17 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

46:27 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, used to seeing this new nuclear technology would be great. Any other

46:35 thoughts on that on nuclear in general? No, I think overall, just like the point of taking advantage of what we've been served, right, with the new administration. And that means there are

46:44 pro-nuclear and the 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

46:54 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

47:04 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

47:14 in the clean tech ecosystem going forward? And especially I'm kind of curious how this will perhaps benefit the carbon capture space? Yeah, I'm gonna let Nada take this 'cause she's our carbon

47:25 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

47:39 emissions and just have something to work on on the side. So, and that could be true. I don't know, yeah, I don't have any opinions on that, but CCS is a technology that does help us deal with

47:50 our emissions for some of these, These omissions that we are not able to abate in some of the industries like steel making cement making industries so so I do see that CCS is going to continue

48:03 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

48:15 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

48:27 chevron announcing new natural gas power plants too 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

48:37 centers are being used for the likes of microsoft and meta and they don't know they have set goals for themselves the net zero goals I don't know how they're going to change now we're going to find

48:48 out over the course of the year but they want to show their users that they are using clean energy to service these data centers. So I think CC is going to continue to be on the rise. That's kind of

49:01 my view because it goes in line with a lot of the pros fossil fuel agenda. Interesting. And I think the other thing is energy companies have huge asset bases that they like plan around for like 10

49:15 to 20 years. You think about like a company that's developing the Permian oil field. They went off and bought a bunch of acreage and they said look we're gonna have a drilling plant and that that

49:25 will run through 2035. And the same thing when they buy up leases up in offshore and the same thing when they're they're looking at other developments. It's just a long development cycle. And so I

49:37 think that same mindset just permeates a lot of the decision making. There's a 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

49:44 10-year life or more that kind of pay back for the business and that there's strategic alignment. And so generally, that energy companies are making 10-year plans. And guess what? The

49:54 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

50:03 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

50:15 learned on Friday during one of our determined to lead sessions that was hosted by Gabrielle from McKinsey was that European companies get when they set up US operations, they still have to report

50:25 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

50:34 companies that are based here in the US that are European domicile still very much care about kind of their scope one and scope two emissions and carbon capture and storage is an essential part of how

50:46 that gets managed. Yeah, and I would add that. I think, I mean, This is you know in my view from what I've seen I think there's a generally generational shift happening right a lot of more

50:57 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 is the generational

51:08 shift is already happening and and 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

51:25 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

51:37 I do think being a talent that that's a pretty underrated piece though nobody wants to work in a really dirty like a dirty company like they want to work with the companies that are you know winning

51:47 on the sustainability kind of scoring things, right? So there's a lot of people who even basic jobs, right? They don't want to do these things unless they're clean, so that's interesting. Are

51:56 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

52:06 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

52:16 or so ago and they said, look, we're gonna come out with a strategic plan. We're really sitting at the end of Q2, but we're kind of waiting to see how some things shake out. And I think it's a

52:25 little bit of a 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

52:35 go, but they're gonna shift that investment strategy based on a lot of input. And these companies, they're run with a lot of consensus, and so they're gonna be taking input, everything from

52:45 strategic relations all the way up. True kind of what their customers want at want to see and I could I could easily see some companies saying they're going to delay their strategic output even till

52:56 the third quarter because they are waiting for more information I dunno not as if you have a different perspective I think you're right I mean these companies operate on forty five year stretch

53:05 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

53:19 know if you look at the likes of exxon Mobil 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

53:30 an administration change so so I don't think it's going to have like a huge impact for for these big oil and gas companies the European ones are going to continue to work on projects that they have to

53:41 like report back on report back to you know their and their countries through the E U Also, just the general public, which is a lot more engaged in this topic and carry a lot more about carbon

53:54 footprint. Yeah. Yeah. That goes into the point of the big corporates, right, like Amazon, like they self-report on the European requirements, so they're still going to have an interest in

54:03 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

54:14 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

54:23 get to that strategic investment, usually you're getting that around Series A Series B, so you're raising like10 to20 million, and so kind of

54:30 the bar for like what you need to have is a little different. And usually at that phase, you need some sort of off-take, and you need kind of a first of a kind project kind of understood, doesn't

54:40 mean it needs to be funded. And so what does that mean? three partners kind of in this. You got to have the technology provider, which is the startup. You'd have to have the buyer or the off the

54:49 person Who's Who's who's taking the off take the power or sustainable alternative fuel or what have you and you need the APC that's the person who's going to build a project sometimes the APC is two

54:60 firms who got engineering and procurement and construction and and you need them to be all it like it's one thing to get kind of letter support like hey we'll help you out if you raise the money but

55:09 it's another thing if you're actually working together and you have real commercial paper in front of each other and you're ready your shovel ready and and ideally you know when you're out raising

55:18 money you're raising money for the project to do that first of kind to that deployment you don't want to be out there saying hey we think it's going to cost as much as we think it's going to be there

55:27 you want to have kind of a package where you can you get the money and you can hire the you know the people within two months and start building and at the outs you know the outside of the milestones

55:36 you achieve there is saying look we did the first of the kind we showed these certain KP eyes now we're ready for scale up we want to kind of build that the next thing that's that's in a perfect world

55:46 not everyone can Kinda navigate because sometimes you just have what you have when you go to market. But that's really what it takes to get the strategics in. And even at the seed stage, usually

55:55 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

56:06 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

56:16 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

56:27 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

56:37 why Houston, why is it gonna be the center of the energy transition? And like this like very, I'm gonna say bizarre skill set the energy industry has, is picking out how to do these massive -

56:47 projects with multiple players and with regulation and stakeholders and they like tend to deliver them on time and on budget and without and they even like put financial risk controls around it and we

56:58 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 next generation energy projects. This is what you got to do and that skill set

57:08 is people in Houston as people who have worked on traditional energy projects and and built the teams and put these parties together and made it real and you think about any any oil field project be

57:20 it in a small independent one or one with a super major kind of has all these components and for some of these pros working in the industry this is just like muscle memory for them and and so just our

57:30 this is our like shameless promotion of Houston feeling to do a big project you got to you got to build a project team in Houston because it's kind of what you need if you're going to have impact if

57:39 you want to become a billion dollar business you want to become a thunder lizard you need those skills that are here. And so we. We hope the entrepreneurs who are really thinking about going big,

57:49 find talent here in Houston. Yeah, I think that's probably a really good place to end down. I think if I were to summarize what I've witnessed from running this podcast or doing this podcast for

57:58 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.

58:09 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

58:19 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

58:27 developer in the future, but they have to, if they're coming at it initially with a new technology, they have to develop projects to prove that the technology works, so that they can then get the

58:37 guarantees in place and then just sell the technology technology through other partners in the future. you better learn your project development shops, right? Yep, yep. Very good. Well, I mean,

58:47 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

58:54 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 gonna be hosting something there. So stay tuned for that, anybody listening.

59:02 But yeah, this is a pleasure to have you guys both on. Thank you.