Roundtable Discussion; The Future of Mineral Sands. Watch the video here.
In terms of stock selection process, the managers combine macro and fundamental research to identify 'best in class' companies across subsectors.
The process largely begins from a top-down basis, however, with the managers initially focusing on three key themes: oceans and water systems; land, food and forestry; and sustainable cities and buildings.
The fund also targets all seven of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals relating to biodiversity and ecosystem restoration.
"Where we conduct our environmental analysis, we use primary carbon waste and water data, rather than something that has already been interpreted. Then, we look at the environmental footprint," Lees explained.
"Only then, after we have conducted the macro, regulatory and thematic research, will we go bottom up."
Fugmann added: "It is a bit like cycling. If you have the wind on your back, everything feels much easier. If the wind is right in front of you, it is hard work.
"The starting point is to focus on the themes that desperately need solving, then once you have that tailwind, it is all about figuring out which companies offer superior environmental benefits and financial returns over time."
https://www.investmentweek.co.uk/news/4032355/bnp-paribas-launches-ecosystem-restoration-fund
BNP Paribas Asset Management (BNPP AM) has launched an Ecosystem Restoration fund, which invests in companies proactively trying to improve biodiversity and restore oceans, lands and communities to avoid significant economic loss.
The Luxembourg-domiciled SICAV, which will be seeded with an initial €100m, comes almost exactly ten years after the firm launched its Energy Transition fund, which was seeded with the same amount of capital and has already reached €3.1bn in assets under management.
"These products can grow very quickly," co-manager of both funds Ulrik Fugmann told Investment Week.
"Investors really understand the potential returns that one can get by supporting companies that are at the forefront of making urgently-needed changes - in this instance, restoring our ecosystems.
"We are going to see about $22trn of cumulative investment into ecosystems over the next decade."
There were push factors as well as pull factors when it came to deciding to launch the fund, according to co-manager Edward Lees.
"Half of the world's GDP is dependent on natural capital and our consumption of it is taking place 1.7 times as fast as the earth can regenerate it, while global population growth and rising incomes are leading to increased demand, which adds up to an urgent need to restore damaged ecosystems," he pointed out.
Fugmann and Lees, who also oversee BNPP AM's long/short Environmental Absolute Return Thematic Equity (EARTH) fund, will hold between 40 and 60 stocks within the new mandate, which will have been chosen from an investable universe of 1,000 companies across the globe that are focused on aquatic, terrestrial and urban ecosystem restoration.
While the fund is relatively concentrated, the managers will have a keen focus on ensuring the portfolio is diversified by geography, sector and market cap.
"It was important for us to have a spread across market capitalisations, because we feel we can have a really substantial impact as public market investors when we go down the cap spectrum," Fugmann explained.
"We also believe those are areas that can be a phenomenal resource of return for investors, because they become much more a pure play on solving certain issues.
"Approximately 50% of the portfolio is in large caps, while around 30% is in mid caps, and the rest in small caps."
The managers added they adopt a similar focus on geographic diversification, which they said is a differentiator between the BNPP AM Ecosystem Restoration fund and others focused on biodiversity.
"With Ed being from the US, I think there is a natural inclination for him to look a little bit more that way," Fugmann continued.
"For me, being Danish and sitting in an office in London, I tend to look a bit more towards Europe. But we are very interested in opportunities elsewhere - such as Asia - as well."
https://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/951195/today-s-market-view---altus-strategies-gem-diamonds-goldstone-resources-and-more-951195.html
Vanadium - Momentum continues to build in vanadium market, with prices up over 50% year-to-date
Vanadium prices continue to rise with European Ferro-Vanadium prices have risen nearly 53% YTD to $8.25/lb (Asia Metal).
China has turned into an importer of vanadium in recent months reducing the downward pressure caused in European prices last year by Chinese exports
Increasing capacity utilisation in European, US and Chinese steel mills is being seen as construction projects move from excavation and concrete foundations to using more structural steel for above ground construction.
Wobbly skyscrapers as seen in Shenzhen serve to remind the authorities of the importance of build quality and the materials used in construction.
While a certain amount of wobble is tolerable in skyscraper fast build rates and potentially sometimes lax adherence to building regulations in China makes observers wary of the potential for catastrophic collapse.
What about a nice half 2 RNS, confirming a US spin off.
More and more money being ploughed into vrfbs'.
Definitely feels as though things are hotting up (not the batteries).
https://m.cnfeol.com/Article/2251984.aspx
Good lad;
https://www.countrylife.co.uk/nature/feargal-sharkey-from-top-of-the-pops-to-crusading-for-britains-rivers-227659
Feargal Sharkey, one of the most recognisable pop voices of the 1970s and 1980s, talks to Country Life about his life, his passion for fishing, and how campaigning for clean rivers has become an obsession....
As a first step in reducing the country’s emissions, the commission will meet on June 4 to make a recommendation on whether it supports the environment ministry’s proposed greenhouse gas reduction targets, known as nationally determined contributions, for 2025 and 2030.
The proposal, to be submitted ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference to be held in the UK in November, estimates that to implement its targets the country will need to access $4.5-billion a year from multilateral and bilateral sources by 2025, and $8 billion a year by 2030.
A draft proposal released in March that improved on previous greenhouse-gas emission targets has been criticized by several environmental organizations for not being ambitious enough. Under the new targets, maximum emissions will not exceed 510-million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent units in 2025 and 440-million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent units in 2030.
“There is scope for us to do much more to bring in capital, including concessionary type capital for this,” said Moosa, who helped establish two Johannesburg-based private equity funds and Lereko Investments. “There is capital that’s looking for these projects in countries like South Africa, and remember that we are a developing country, we are in Africa, we are disadvantaged etcetera, etcetera.”
https://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/south-african-adviser-urges-shift-to-renewables-to-spur-growth-2021-06-01
Replacing South Africa’s aging and inadequate electricity generation capacity with renewable energy plants is an opportunity to spur economic growth and cut emissions, the effective head of a presidential climate change commission said.
While many countries face the problem of having to idle fossil fuel-fired power stations to meet climate commitments, many of South Africa’s decades-old, coal-fired plants are due to close anyway, said Valli Moosa, deputy chairperson of the Presidential Climate Change Coordinating Commission.
“We are an energy-short country. That’s our opportunity and that hole is only going to be filled by renewables,” he said in an interview at his Johannesburg home on May 28. “There is no shortage of appetite on the part of capital to invest in renewable energy in South Africa.”
Eskom Holdings, South Africa’s State-owned power company and a near monopoly, has subjected the country to intermittent outages for more than a decade, partly because of poor maintenance at its fleet of 15 coal-fired stations. Attempts to have private companies build new coal-fired stations in the country have faltered because of the reluctance of banks to finance them.
Shifting to renewables provides Africa’s most industrialized country with a chance to change its economic fortunes, said Moosa, who served as South Africa’s environment minister between 1999 and 2004. The country is the world’s 12th biggest source of the climate-warming gases.
GROWTH SPURT
The transition is “what’s going to give us the next big spurt of economic growth,” he said. “The commission is starting to look at how we can move the South African economy where it is to a low-emissions economy, because we have to. If we don’t we are not going to get the money to develop any other kind of economy, or businesses are going to become uncompetitive.”
Moosa was appointed to the 22-member commission in December and effectively runs it, as its chairperson is President Cyril Ramaphosa.
The main purpose of the body “is to develop a national consensus on how the South African economy moves from where it is currently to a zero emissions economy by 2050,” said Moosa.
The first big issue the climate commission, which has had two meetings so far, will address is South Africa’s energy challenge, said Moosa. The commission has members from major polluters, Eskom and Sasol, as well as labor unions, non-governmental organisations and the Cabinet.
“It’s going to have to build consensus on how we reduce the carbon footprint of our energy industry and at the same time grow the energy supply and make it more dependable,” he said.
http://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/14362100
A new technology that identifies even low levels of the novel coronavirus in a community by analyzing wastewater will soon be available to municipalities willing to pay for the service, a first in Japan.
Leading drug maker Shionogi & Co., based in Osaka, and Hokkaido University launched a joint study last autumn to develop the technology, which they said can detect the virus, even when only several people are infected, in sewage discharged from tens of thousands of people...
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/3-strong-buy-stocks-from-a-top-analyst-on-wall-street-2021-05-27
Largo Resources
Rare-earth metals are key ingredients of a host of products in today’s technological world. One of these metals, vanadium, is well-known for both its rarity and its application to a host from products. From high-grade steel to high-yield batteries, vanadium has a place in multiple industries. The metal is expensive, with the European price of vanadium pentoxide flakes (a common industrial form of the metal) running at more than US$8 per pound.
Largo Resources, the first stock we're looking at, is both a miner and refiner of vanadium. The company has one mine, the Maracas Menchen mine in Brazil, that produces vanadium, with 2021 production projected to be between 12,000 and 12,500 tons. This ore is processed into a variety of products by Largo, including the company’s VPure and VPure+ lines. These include pure metal in flake or powder form, as well as the industrially useful vanadium pentoxide alloy. Largo will begin production of vanadium trioxide, used in steel and titanium alloying, later this year.
Largo’s revenue and income can vary quarter to quarter and year over year, based on market demand and mine production. In 1Q21, the company saw $4.1 million in net income, compared to $4.3 million one year ago. Per share, this came to 7 cents, compared to 8 cents in the year-ago quarter. At the top line, revenue was $39.8 million, down 4% from 1Q20.
Heiko Ihle, in his note on Largo, comes to a bullish conclusion: “Largo continues to sell products with prices based on different V2O5 and ferrovanadium benchmarks, as demand within all of its key markets remained strong during the quarter. In particular, we highlight that the company experienced sales volume improvements from the steel and chemical industries…. We highlight the company’s strategy on developing new markets for its high-purity products, while simultaneously focusing on expanding sales into the growing vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) market…”
In line with these comments, Ihle rates LGO a Buy along with a $20 price target. Should his thesis play out, a potential upside of ~40% could be in the cards
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4431882-vanadium-miners-news-for-the-month-of-may-2021
Agreed. 5 and a bit million pounds each year in fines since 2017 is nothing compared to the amount of money it would take to deal with it properly, they are quite happy to take the hit. All in each others pockets.
A power failure triggered alarms after pumps used in the treatment of sewage stopped working. The malfunction should have been answered remotely by Thames Water staff, and an engineer sent immediately to the treatment works, which is unmanned at night.
As untreated sewage built up below ground, almost 50 warning alarms were set off over the next 5 hours. Every one was left unchecked.
It was only as dawn broke, several hours after the incident began, that a Thames Water engineer arrived at the sewage treatment works, discovering problems with sewage flow and the power supply.
With many of the pumps out of action, effluent rushed through the sewer network and out above ground, flooding the recreation area.
It took Thames Water 15 hours to report the incident to the Environment Agency, a legal requirement, and another 12 hours – by now, the morning of 9 February – before the company had any sizeable presence at the scene.
An Environment Agency investigator found a thick layer of sewage charting a course across the park and into the Hogsmill River. The water’s fast flow had flushed away any evidence before his arrival.
The Hogsmill, and the almost-continuous green corridor through which it passes, is much-loved by local people as a crucial habitat for fish and wildlife as diverse as bats, water voles and kingfishers. A local community garden is watered from the chalk stream.
Sitting at Aylesbury Crown Court on 26 May, Judge Francis Sheridan fined Thames Water £4 million, ordering them to pay the Environment Agency’s costs of £84,669.
Thames Water pleaded guilty to depositing sewage waste at the recreation ground in February 2016. The court also took into consideration breach of a permit regarding that incident, and discharging into the Hogsmill River in January and October 2018, and an incident in September 2019, when sewage sludge was released from Hogsmill sewage treatment works in error.
The Environment Agency charged Thames Water under sections 33 (1) (a) and 33 (6) of the Environmental Protection Act 1990; and regulations 12 (1) (b), 38 (1) (a) and 38 (2) of the Environmental Permitting (England and Wales) Regulations 2016.
This latest conviction brings the total amount of fines given to Thames Water since 2017 to £28.4 million for 10 cases of water pollution.
Beat you to this one Stu;
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/thames-water-fined-4-million-after-catastrophic-sewage-blunder
Thames Water has been fined £4 million after untreated sewage escaped from sewers below London into a park and a river.
A court heard dozens of high-priority alarms would have told staff about the incident, but were either missed or ignored, leading to pollution of a popular park, woodland and the Hogsmill River, in New Malden.
The sewage treatment works at Surbiton couldn’t handle the amount of sewage produced by Storm Imogen in the winter of 2016.
Sitting at Aylesbury crown court on 26 May, Judge Francis Sheridan noted Thames Water’s new commitment to improving compliance, but said that must be the norm, issuing a warning shot they will be held to this commitment in future cases.
The court was told approximately 79 million litres of sludge escaped across an area of about 6,500 square metres. It took 30 people a day for almost a month to clean-up sludge that was ankle-deep in places.
Gary Waddup, a land and water officer for the Environment Agency in south London, said:
Like similar incidents in the past few years for which they have been prosecuted, better management overall and on the night by Thames Water could have prevented this catastrophic incident.
It wasn’t the first time sewage had escaped from manholes due to problems at the treatment works in Surbiton. Pollution as a result from problems at the site goes back to 2001.
The Environment Agency’s enforcement action over several years and the pressure it has put on water companies has led to £30 billion of investment by the industry in water quality. This incident shows Thames Water and the industry have a lot more to do to protect the environment.
Thames Water’s equipment at Hogsmill struggled under the pressure of forecast extreme weather one night 5 years ago.
Instead of the sewage being treated, pumps failed, allowing raw effluent to back up along the sewer network, bursting out of a manhole to cover an area the size of 3 football pitches.
One of Thames Water’s own engineers described finding an “avalanche of foul waste” spread over Green Lane recreation ground. The sewage travelled with such force across the park and into the river, leaving thick sludge, toilet paper and wet wipes covering the riverbank, grass, shrubs and a wooded area.
Enough toilet paper to fill 2,500 refuse bags was recovered from the scene.
An investigation by the Environment Agency found things began to go wrong at the treatment plant just after midnight on 8 February 2016. The park was closed for a month during the clean-up, although some of the toilet paper swept along by the sewage was still visible in the woods months later.
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/05/27/flow-batteries-keep-the-energy-flowing/
The U.S. Department of Energy has just taken a big step toward America having an emissions-free economy by 2050 by setting aside $20 million for flow battery manufacturability.
Granholm understands that for renewable energy sources like solar and wind to take hold and become more commonly used, developing the right energy storage system is crucial.
As Congresswoman Diana DeGette of the U.S. House of Representatives recently told Energy Storage News:
“The key to unlocking the full potential of solar and wind energy is to store it for use around the clock. Flow battery technology can help us utilize the full potential of these clean-energy resources….”...
https://www.energy-storage.news/blogs/us-solar-storage-projects-that-decarbonise-save-energy-costs-from-ameresco
A few years ago, any project with over half a megawatt of battery storage was rare and significant enough to be immediately worthy of consideration for coverage on Energy-Storage.news. Not long after that, about five or six years ago, there would comfortably be two or maybe three projects a week from around the world that exceeded the megawatt mark and one or two that might exceed 10MW.
Well, unquestionably a new era is upon us, where projects in the tens of megawatts and megawatt-hours are no longer a rarity and the world’s largest operational battery storage systems run into the hundreds of megawatts of power and even exceed the thousand megawatt-hour mark for energy capacity in some cases.
In the US, which has for some time now been the biggest global market for battery storage, we focus increasingly on these large-scale projects, many at utility-scale and front-of-the-meter, and many of them pairing batteries with renewables — more typically solar PV than wind or other generation types. Nowhere is this more true than in California, where many of those largest projects in the world, both standalone energy storage and solar-plus-storage, are located.
But it’s important to remember that the smaller projects are not necessarily lesser projects: often they can provide targeted value to behind-the-meter customers where their economic value can immediately be quantified, not to mention the value of resilience they offer. Here are three interesting new behind-the-meter California projects using solar and storage storage we’ve learned about in the past few days that combine technologies and applications to maximise the benefits of battery storage and solar...
Ameresco helps army training centre to meet net zero objective by 2022...
ENGIE North America saves non-profit group US$65 million with solar, storage and EV chargers...
Invinity wins latest California flow battery project at US Marine Corps Base...
Just got halfway through typing the same thing Stu, lol. When's he coming back lol.
Enter Stony Brook University’s Clean Energy Business Incubator Program, the university’s tech-heavy “incubator without walls.” StorEn, a multiyear CEBIP client, might have gone off the rails during the global health crisis, according to Brovero, if not for the program’s steady hand.
“CEBIP helped us keep up our research work throughout (the pandemic),” he said. “Our access to [Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center] laboratories and facilities continued as before, and we have been able to keep our payroll and cost-structure very tight.”
Bolstered by the SBU programs, StorEn has made significant progress through the teeth of the pandemic, particularly over the last six months. Among other things, Australian project partner Multicom Resources has received a federal government qualification that allows it to access a government fund for projects “with strategic significance for Australia,” Brovero noted.
Meanwhile, the Stony Brook-based company recently closed a sale with the University of Calgary in Canada, where a cutting-edge battery-storage laboratory will put the vanadium-flow tech through its paces.
The University of Calgary battery is slated to be delivered in June, with funding from the Canadian federal government’s Innovation, Science and Economic Development division pending. StorEn is also exploring a possible deal with a Brazilian university, according to Brovero, and may have identified its next international destination: Africa.
After attending 2020’s Power Africa Summit (in Miami) and the virtual Africa Mini-Grids Summit this past February, company officials are convinced that tremendous opportunity awaits on a continent where an estimated 600 million people live without basic electricity services.
“There are a lot of communities in Africa, hundreds of millions of people, that do not have access to an electrical grid,” Brovero noted. “Building a grid is not an option, because they are such remote locations, and sparsely populated – so the electrification of Africa has to be through solar, plus batteries.
“This serves a true social purpose,” he added. “Not only selling batteries, but really contributing to the social and economic development of these communities.”
https://www.innovateli.com/around-the-world-with-storen-riding-a-vanadium-flow/
StorEn Technologies is speeding toward commercialization of its vanadium-flow battery tech, conceived and created by a team of immigrant scientists: CEO Carlo Brovero, CTO Angelo D’Anzi, Senior Engineers Gianluca Piraccini and Maurizio Tappi and advisor Gabriele Colombo are all Italian nationals who pursued their vanadium-flow dreams to America.
A big step in the commercialization process is a big-time demonstration in the Land Down Under. Two years ago, the 2017 startup announced plans for a government-sponsored welcoming ceremony at the Queensland University of Technology, followed by factory-based production of StorEn’s proprietary batteries – but the global coronavirus pandemic threw a monkey in the wrench.
Flash forward two years, and the ceremonious welcome and the full-on production remain on COVID-induced hold. But StorEn’s breakthrough battery – delivered to Queensland University on-schedule and ready in January 2020 – has been doing what it’s built to do, impressing observers in a rigorous shakedown at the Queensborough-based National Battery Testing Centre.
Brovero, who noted the battery “[sat] in a crate at the university for months” due to the pandemic, said the device – which uses vanadium ions in different oxidation states to store chemical potential energy – is now meeting and exceeding expectations in its high-profile trial run, which marks the first vanadium-flow exercise anywhere in Australia.
The testing phase is scheduled to wrap up in the coming weeks. And it’s no accident that it’s happening in Australia, according to Brovero, who noted a fresh Aussie focus on technology exports.
“The whole idea is that Australia is trying to move away from exporting minerals and get into exporting technology with their minerals inside,” the CEO said. “They’re trying to export the value-added products.”
“Value-added” could be StorEn Technologies’ middle name. Batteries leveraging vanadium-flow technology have existed for a while and are used extensively by major industry – but those batteries are too big for smaller industrial uses, and way too big for residential applications.
Intent on introducing the tech to a variety of new markets, Brovero et al are working to incorporate state-of-the-art nanotechnologies and develop prototypes better suited to smaller-load end users, including residential uses.
Their work has continued unabated throughout the pandemic – a bit of serendipity for the four-year-old startup, according to Brovero, who said his company found itself in the right place during this very wrong time.
“We have been lucky, in a way,” he noted. “We’re still working on engineering and development, and we’re not heavy into manufacturing yet.”
From 2016;
https://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/124350/bushveld-minerals-makes-the-move-into-energy-storage-124350.html
Mine developer Bushveld Minerals Limited (LON:BMN) has taken a major step to becoming an energy storage business.
For the owner of vanadium, titanium and iron ore assets in South Africa, has signed an outline deal called a memorandum of understanding with an American firm UniEnergy Technologies (UET).
UET builds energy storage facilities that have at their core a new technology called vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB).
The AIM-listed mine developer, meanwhile, launched its Bushveld Energy subsidiary to “promote the role of vanadium in the growing global energy storage market through application in vanadium redox flow batteries”.
Bushveld chief executive Fortune Mojapelo said: “The memorandum of understanding with UET is a significant step in Bushveld Energy's development, providing a platform for collaboration with a credible technology partner that not only has a strong track record in the technology development of VRFBs but is also a commercial manufacturer of quality VRFB systems.
“This achievement also underscores the opportunity for South Africa to beneficiate its mineral resources further and as a result develop new industrial opportunities. It is just the first step in Bushveld Energy's efforts to promote the role of vanadium in the growing energy storage market through smart partnerships and innovative business models.”
The patchy power infrastructure in Africa means the continent is ripe for an energy storage solution such as VRFB, particularly with the rise of the renewable sector, the Bushveld boss added.