Host: Jason Jacobs
Guest: Anna Scott | Chief Science Officer & Co-Founder | Project Canary
Category: ☁️ Carbon Reduction | ESG Data
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[4:55] “Project Canary is an ESG data analytics company that helps emitting industries get to net zero using measurements. We have two signature products, one of which is our sensors that we put on facilities and we measure emissions in real time. And I think we're best known for our measurements of methane, because we do them continuously. So we've insisted that we need 24/7 ontinuous monitoring, particularly in what's called the upstream oil and gas sector.”
[5:23] “We have this other product, which is an environmental assessment, that we take a really rigorous look at the engineering of facilities […] to understand how well somebody did constructing their energy facilities. And what people have really started using that for is to actually differentiate the natural gas commodity, not only on the basis of chemicals, which is a standard way to differentiate commodities, but on the basis of environmental attributes. And that's something that we've seen take off. But all in all, we think about ourselves as a data company that provides really robust and rigorous measurements that the economy needs to get to get us moving towards net zero.”
[25:07] “Our largest customer segment is upstream oil and gas companies. […] As part of producing fuels, it turns out that a fair amount of emissions gets lost essentially, gets released into the air, whether through negligence, whether through equipment design […]. It causes a pretty big environmental problem. And so, we made a sensor that could measure that and could do it from the facility level. Whereas at the time, it was pretty common for people to walk by a site once a year to be in compliance with regulations […]. But we said we think it's going to be necessary to monitor these 24/7.”
[26:16] “If you talk to somebody who operates an oil and gas company, or even some other verticals now, like the agriculture or the waste industry, people are identifying methane emissions as their number one strategic issue that they want to choose to focus on. And that was certainly not true a couple of years ago.”
[38:40] “We're seeing this need for rigorous ESG data that's backed up by actual measurements, not estimates, to be a need in lots of other verticals. Some of those verticals have emission profiles that look a lot like oil and gas, for example landfills or agriculture. But we're also thinking about things like carbon sequestration, we're also thinking about anywhere where folks are trying to get to net zero and need numbers to do so. And we think that's a pretty large swath of opportunities that do not just involve energy.”
[51:42] “The reason that people measured methane emissions historically has been because of regulations. We essentially offer voluntary compliance. […] I think a lot of the policy is moving and evolving in really interesting ways. But we certainly do see it moving faster […] on the economic side. So the SEC type rules, I think, are more likely to go through and with fewer comments than the EPA rules, which I view to […] be a pretty lengthy process. And everyone suggests to me that there's going to be several lawsuits involved as well.”
Rating: ⚡⚡⚡
🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify | Google (Original Title: "Startup Series: Project Canary")
🕰️ 56 min | 🗓️ 04/07/2022
✅ Time saved: 54 min
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