The Wharton Current

The Current welcomes Sophie Lu, Principal, Carbon Management (Scope 3) at BHP, one of the world's biggest mining companies. Sophie breaks down for us how a major company like BHP thinks about emissions management across their value chain. She shares insights on the future of steel decarbonization. And she tells us why cutting emissions isn't just about moonshot technologies -- it's also about change management, building coalitions within corporates and across value chains that can push forward the cuts we need.

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In this episode of the Wharton Current, host Ellie McDonald sits down with Derek Warnick, the co-founder and CFO of Electric Hydrogen. Join us as we talk about the booming hydrogen space in the United States, Electric Hydrogen's unique business model, and the implications of the Inflation Reduction Act on climatetech.

"High temperature superconductors have been proposed as a holy grail for transmission for at least three decades," says VEIR CTO Tim Heidel. In this episode, Edmund Downie and Adriel Barrett-Johnson sit down with Tim to discuss VEIR, a startup developing a new generation of transmission lines that promise to carry up to 5x as much power as their conventional counterparts. We talk about the grid's desperate need for transmission expansion, VEIR's technology and business goals, and Tim's experience in cleantech innovation over the past decade at the Department of Energy and Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

How to approach the energy transition when 65% of your national budget comes from oil profits? In this episode, host Adriel Barrett-Johnson sits down with Adam Sieminski, the outgoing President of KAPSARC, the advisory body to the Saudi authorities on energy and climate. Saudi authorities on energy and climate. They discuss the role of a thinktank in advising policy makers on climate, how the energy transition is discussed within the Kingdom, and the challenges for Saudi Arabia in setting goals toward net zero carbon emissions.

The technology of battery recycling hasn't changed in a century - until now. In this episode, host Adriel Barrett-Johnson sits down with Megan O'Connor, Founder and CEO of Nth Cycle, a battery recycling and metals processing company. They discuss the battery materials supply chain, the need for critical mineral processing capacity in the US, and the innovation in electro-extraction for battery recycling that Megan developed during her PhD, which is now the foundation of Nth Cycle.

Last year the IEA put out a report that said that if we actually start tracking toward net zero by 2050, we will need 42x the lithium that we currently produce annually. Battery recycling will be one of the pillars of meeting that intense demand and enabling us to sustainably and ethically source the critical minerals needed to power the energy transition.

On this episode of the Wharton Current, host Adriel Barrett-Johnson sits down with Wilson Ma of Li Cycle, a leading battery recycling company in North America. They discuss the role of battery recycling in the energy transition and the significance of Li Cycle's updates to some of the traditional processes.

https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions/mineral-requirements-for-clean-energy-transitions

Weaning ourselves off of carbon for energy purposes is front and center in climate work. Less discussed but arguably equally important to decarbonization is the move away from petroleum-based materials to produce the goods we consume.

On this episode of the Wharton Current, host Adriel Barrett-Johnson sits down with Wharton grad Rich Riley, CEO of Origin Materials, a carbon negative materials company. They discuss the importance of carbon negative materials in decarbonization, what it takes for a materials company to be carbon negative, how Origin Materials is scaling, and Rich's experience as CEO.

Despite contributing approximately 5.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions today, little progress has been made in decarbonizing cement production.

In this episode, co-hosts Ellie McDonald and Thomas Obermeier sit down with Cody Finke, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Brimstone, which is seeking to introduce carbon-negative cement to the market.

We discuss Cody's path to finding the most relevant problem to tackle that could have a meaningful impact at scale, how that led him to founding Brimstone in 2019 with Hugo Leandri, the existing cement and concrete ecosystem that appears uninterested in pursuing decarbonization, and why he is confident that a lower-cost solution, not CCS, is the only feasible pathway for the industry.

On this episode, co-hosts Nick Van Hollen and Thomas Obermeier sit down with Meghan O’Sullivan, the Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs and the Director of the Geopolitics of Energy Project at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

They discuss how the geopolitics of energy will evolve during the transition to cleaner energy sources, focusing on the distinction between the long-term geopolitical implications of a net-zero world and the short-term perils that will arrive in the next few decades.

Within this framework, they also examine the counterintuitive forces sustaining petrostates, the growing importance of clean energy supply chains, and energy’s central role in the ongoing war in Ukraine.

[Updated for clarity on June 1, 2022]

On this episode of The Wharton Current, host Ellie McDonald sits down with Luke Mairo, the co-founder and COO of Voltpost. Join us as we talk about trends in the electric vehicle space, Voltpost's business model, and what policy initiatives are set to catalyze EV infrastructure build out.

To learn more about Voltpost, visit their website at https://www.voltpost.com/ or check out their LinkedIn page.