Gevo is racking up the agreements to produce sustainable fuels, announcing deals with Chevron, Axens, and now ADM since September. Our view on the need for sustainable aviation fuel is that everyone building will likely be capital constrained relative to the potential demand – this is also true for sustainable diesel and gasoline, which is relevant given that the EIA sees the conventional light vehicle stock peaking globally as late as 2038 (this is not inconsistent with other estimates we have seen) see chart below.
A couple of things worth highlighting in today's daily report – the first being Chevron’s move to join the net-zero club – focusing all eyes now on ExxonMobil in particular but also the rest of the US E&P crowd. Chevron will have some major challenges getting to net-zero and will likely face much of the same skepticism that bp, Shell, and TotalEnergies attracted in Europe initially and still face today. The Europeans have placed a lot of their bets on moving into renewable power – for the moment, Chevron is focused on moving to net zero in its own operations, which we read as biofuels and a lot of CCS. Given the acute shortage of international natural gas, it would make the most sense for the independent natural gas E&P companies and the LNG sellers to jump on the same boat. By promising low carbon natural gas and LNG, the industry is much more likely to gain support for the expansion that the world needs to counter some of the EIA assumptions around coal and petroleum product use from 2030 to 2050. Of course, it would be a whole lot easier for the US industry to do this if they had a value on carbon to work with! The chart below looks at one of the core clean-up issues, which is methane leakage. This is a subject we cover extensively in our ESG and Climate service linked here.
We focused on several aspects of carbon in our ESG and Climate report yesterday and we see several headlines today that focus on carbon and storage, whether it is the blue hydrogen project in France or the Chevron interest in CCS. Chevron has some experience with CCS with the Gorgon natural gas project in Australia and while the company has been criticized recently for falling short of its capture goals for the facility – we believe that all learning experiences are valuable, and what happened in Australia likely leaves Chevron better equipped than many to pursue successful projects going forward. The likely disappointment for Chevron will be the lack of investor appreciation that it may get for the initiatives, as the focus will remain on the scale of fossil fuel exposure – see our Sunday Piece from this week. The barrage of announcements from Chevron is likely in response to the investor pressure that the company (and the industry) is under, but as we discussed on Sunday, it may not make a difference – it did not for Shell in the eyes of the Dutch court.
The Engine No1 headline and the Chevron headline are not necessarily the right way to think about the challenges for Chevron and whether or not the challenges are just really beginning for ExxonMobil. The Engine No 1 approach to ExxonMobil was not ESG focused and hit on a larger issue of very poor shareholder returns, with ESG/Climate only one-line item on a list. What Engine No 1 is doing now, is focusing more specifically on climate, and ExxonMobil is likely as large a target as Chevron on this basis. Last week in our Sunday report, we commented on how good the Chevron Gevo deal was for Gevo, but that it did not move the needle for Chevron. Chevron, ExxonMobil, and others are aggressively pursuing renewable fuels, mostly from waste and vegetable oils until the Gevo agreement, and there is another headline today about Chevron pursuing CCS opportunities with Enterprise and the chart below discusses a green hydrogen plan for Chevron. All of these initiatives do not sum to something that investors will take note of for any of these companies yet, and while they might be important building blocks towards a net-zero future, larger tangible investments are probably needed to get any investor buy-in. In the meantime, the activists have a lot of room to work.