What happens when clean energy starts to outgrow fossil fuels at scale? Is it right to call China an electrostate? And how long will we be reliant on hydrocarbons?
This week on Cleaning Up, host Michael Liebreich sits down with Lord Browne of Madingley — former CEO of BP and one of the earliest voices inside Big Oil to publicly call for emissions reductions from fossil fuels.
Recorded in front of a live audience in London, the discussion explores how geopolitics, energy security, AI, and rising global anxiety are reshaping the path to decarbonisation. Lord Browne reflects on launching BP’s original “Beyond Petroleum” strategy, his current work investing billions through BeyondNetZero, and why the future of climate action will be driven as much by adaptation, resilience, and people as by technology itself.
From the rise of China as an electrification juggernaut and the US as an AI-powered energy giant, to the tipping point where clean energy demand could finally outpace fossil fuels, this episode offers rare insight from someone who has shaped — and challenged — the global energy system from the inside.
Leadership Circle:
Cleaning Up is supported by the Leadership Circle, and its founding members: Actis, Alcazar Energy, Davidson Kempner, EcoPragma Capital, EDP, Eurelectric, the Gilardini Foundation, KKR, National Grid, Octopus Energy, Quadrature Climate Foundation, SDCL and Wärtsilä. For more information on the Leadership Circle, please visit https://www.cleaningup.live.
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Michael Liebreich
A good friend of yours, or good colleague acquaintance, I'm not sure: Dan Yergin, he wrote this piece called The Troubled Transition, saying all of the stuff that we're doing, it's additive. We can do a bit of wind and a bit of solar sprinkled on top, but the core and the fundament of the energy system is and always, essentially, what he's saying is, always will be fossil. Is he right?
Lord John Browne
No, because otherwise, then we would see far greater growth in the consumption of fossil fuels than we actually see at the moment. And so it's not right. I mean, it's a way of looking at it, and it's a headline grabbing way of looking at it, but I'm not sure it's actually statistically true or actually sends the right message? I don't think that's right. We are generating different sources of far cleaner and totally clean energy, and I would expect that that will grow.
ML
Hello, I'm Michael Liebreich, and this is Cleaning Up. My guest today, back on the show for a second time, is a giant of the Clean Energy Transition, Lord Browne of Madingley. In fact, you could say it was Lord Browne who fired the starting gun on serious efforts to transform the global energy system. In 1997, as CEO of BP, he delivered a seminal lecture at Stanford University in which he shocked the rest of the oil and gas industry by admitting the need to reduce fossil fuel emissions. He then famously re-branded British Petroleum as Beyond Petroleum, and led the first of the company's two big pushes to diversify into clean energy, efforts that are now being very publicly scaled back. He is now managing director at private equity investor General Atlantic, where he co-founded and chairs a growth equity fund called BeyondNetZero. In 2024, General Atlantic acquired Actis, and it's also an investor in SDCL, both members of our Leadership Circle. Lord Browne is also co-chair of the Prime Minister's Council on Science and Technology. This episode was recorded in front of a live audience during our Leadership Circle’s end of year events in London. Please welcome Lord Browne to Cleaning Up.
ML
John, thank you very much for joining us here today on Cleaning Up.
LJB
It's a great pleasure, great pleasure to be back
ML
Back, indeed. So this is your second appearance. The first time you came on the show, it was the depths of covid. It was in 2021 and we were getting ready for COP26. Everything was net zero. There were all these pledges for net zero. It was all very exciting. Before we do ‘how are we doing today?’, we should update the audience, some of whom will have seen that episode, on your roles and your activities. What are you doing at the moment? And we'll get into ‘where is the world’?
LJB
Well, in some ways, I've been doing the same thing since 1966, which is to be in the energy business, and everything related to the energy business, and I regard the whole activity as one great, big activity. I don't differentiate between different forms of energy. I differentiate about what their impact is on the environment. And I've been, since the mid the mid 90s, I've been very focused on the impact of energy sources on the environment. And so today, since I last saw you, as it were, on this program, I set up a fund called BeyondNetZero to invest in companies that we defined at the time as those which made really good private equity returns but reduced greenhouse gasses faster than identified by science based targets (SBTs). And so legitimately we could call ourselves BeyondNetZero, because if you're faster than SBTs, you're beyond net zero.
ML
And the difference between when we spoke back in 2021 is that you've now got some of those investments. Because you had just started, you maybe had one?
LJB
We’re pretty well done. I mean, not quite done, but $3.5 billion dollars has almost been invested. And it's sort of working according to the recipe outlined at the start, which is quite good.
ML
And I'm looking, I'm just eyeballing the list is sort of 15 investments, any you want to give a shout out to at this point to the proceedings?
LJB
Well that’s like saying, you know, here's my favorite children. They're all great. You know, I have to say that they're all very different, but they actually are about important things to do with efficiency, the circular economy and decarbonisation. And they're very much related to the way energy is used, not so much how energy is created.
ML
Now, what I would ask is, as we go through and we have our chat, if you can think of particulars where they illustrate a point that you're making, because that gives it a little bit of richness, then please bring bring in, although I know you'd want to kind of mention all 15 of them at some point in the conversation. You won't be able to do that, I suspect, but it would be good to hear about some of the things that you've been doing in the detail. But if we move on to the world, right, we are not in the same world as we were in in 2021. The world has changed very, very dramatically. How do you characterize that? How do you sum that up?
LJB
Well, I'm not of the school that we're on the brink of war, although I know that some of my friends would say we probably are. I think we're probably several steps away. We've always been several steps away from it. But security has become a very big deal in the minds of everybody, not just for energy, but particularly for energy. But the security of borders, people, property, intellectual property and speech. So security is a very big issue. The second one is the advent of autarky, as opposed to geopolitical togetherness, so everyone's out for themselves, at least in blocks, I would say. And we have, as a result of that, two gigantic superpowers who know how powerful they are, and say how powerful they are, and remind people who aren't members of the United States or China that most other people don't have the relevance that they used to. And that sort of sets everyone back a bit, and we have to rethink who we are. And thirdly, energy has been up and down. The mix of energy. I like to think that energy always mixes and then remixes. So we're on a sort of remix 20. You know, we're remixing again, the use of hydrocarbons, the use of non-hydrocarbon energies. It carries on, and that's a very big deal. And finally, if I may say, I think just about everybody I meet in the world, in some ways, is more anxious than they used to be. And that, I think, changes the way in which people think, and they're a little bit on edge, and they want to get things done a bit too quickly, without necessarily enough reflection to get the right answer right.
ML
We're going to dive into quite a few of those. You've got security number one, insecurity number four, the big blocks, and then the energy mixing and remixing. Now I could almost say sort of. ‘Now that's what I call energy 2025’ or 2026 as we're about to go into the new year. And the changes there, this business of blocks, what exactly is going on there? Because when I started my career, in terms of geopolitics, there was Europe and America, where there was a sort of NATO block. Japan was kind of an appendage to that. We used to call that the West. And then there was the Soviet Union. China was not a big commercial player when I started my career, so you had the geopolitical competition between the West and the Soviet Union. And now it very much looks like it’s China versus the US, and everybody else we're now… I don't know, I think you used the phrase most of the world, or the rest of the world.
LJB
Most of the world.
ML
Is that a permanent and forever shift, do you think?
LJB
I don't think anything's permanent and forever, and I think there will definitely be changes, because in the end, I think most people recognize that. To have cooperation such as frictionless free trade would be a very clear example of that is very, very good for the world as a whole, and brings people out of poverty, and does all these very important things for human beings. So I think things keep developing right now, I would say. People are looking after themselves. There's the question of security going back into different blocks. So there's a premium for having control of your own energy, as well as control of your own… you know, fill in the gap. So it's a big change, I agree. When I was growing up, I was taught how to hide underneath my desk as the nuclear bombs were to be dropped. So, you know, there's this very, very different situation now, and we all realize that. You know, everyone was prosecuting ‘Reds under the bed’, as their key to remind people that they had to do well to defeat the Soviet Union at every possible point.
ML
If we translate that into the energy world, on Cleaning Up quite a lot of the time, we talk about sort of the electrostate, which is China, and the petrostate in the US. Do you think that is an appropriate… Do you see that as an appropriate description of what's happening? Driving this mixing? we've got the US pushing away from electrification and renewables and China pushing towards it. Is that just too simplistic or not?
LJB
I think it's a very good way of talking to people in elevators, but I don't think it's quite a good description of what's really going on.
ML
I love the idea of people listening to Cleaning Up in an elevator, although I’m not sure they’d have the time.
LJB
They might need it to get stuck.
ML
If it gets stuck, they might have a chance of getting through an episode, but you think that's too simplistic?
LJB
I do because, for example, you can see it evidently today in the United States. They are indeed listening to the President talk about ‘drill, baby drill.’ That won't have a huge amount of impact, probably, given that this is not a state company running hydrocarbons. It's a multiple of private interests who all have shareholders, and they need to service them. But equally, it's also developing electricity, not least for data centers, not least, actually, for the way in which houses are built and cars are powered. So I think it's also changing its mix. Quite where it lands up, who knows. In China, I think you know, as the world's largest consumer of coal, it is not quite right to say that they are an electrostate. I mean, they are using a lot of it to generate electricity, of course, but they're still hydrocarbon based.
ML
Very much so, more than 50% of China's electricity is still coal based. So it's not declaring it a kind of a clean, electrified state. But if you look at the growth in the economy in China, the areas that are growing, it is all around electrification of transport, and it is all around solar and wind. Those are the growth areas. Without those, the Chinese economy is really very almost stagnant.
LJB
I agree. And the consumers of electricity in the United States are propping up the stock market, namely AI.
ML
So you've got one tent pole over in China, which is electrification, and clean energy, clean electricity. And in the US, the tent pole is absolutely AI
LJB
Which is electricity.
ML
Which is electricity. And I could sort of throw the curve ball and say, and is it a bubble?
LJB
We'll know when it bursts.
ML
Not ‘if’ it bursts. I'm going to take that as an answer. But within your 15 favorite children are any of them particularly pushing AI or exposed to AI?
LJB
So one of the most interesting, more interesting investments we have is in a company called Technosylva. And Technosylva’s speciality is to try and pre-empt the impact of wildfires, in particular, on electric utilities. And it does this with a combination of assessments of the environment, in which overhead cables and transformers exist — so ground conditions, trees, you name it — as well as mapping all the details of the infrastructure and then meteorological forecasts. And it's able, because it keeps learning, it's a learning mechanism to detect when things might spark and instruct the utilities to shut down parts of the system. I think it's really a very exciting thing, and they are expanding into floods and into earthquakes. So this is exactly what we need to do. It's the first level of adaptation for climate change. So if you can say, well, we are where we are, we can't quickly adapt everything we do, but what we can do is try and reduce the actual risk to humans and to property by forecasting reasonably accurately what we can do to stop fires, stop floods happening. And there's quite a lot of interesting work actually here. I'm trying to figure out whether we can do something with it on natural flood prevention, you know, understanding where the flood plains are, what you do about it. How do you make sure drainage is there? A lot of things that probably the Dutch would have understood many years ago, but we seem to have forgotten.
ML
Which is an interesting question, because, of course, both fires and floods, climate is only one of the drivers. Proliferating assets in vulnerable places, building houses on floodplains, is another. So we kind of need to do those things anyway. We don't have to just do it for climate.
LJB
But it's been enhanced, I would say, really pushed along in some areas with climate change.
ML
Former, I don't think colleague, but somebody from the oil and gas industry, Chris Wright, now Secretary of Energy in the US, would either disagree or completely disregard that last statement of yours and say it's all nonsense. Energy, the only thing that matters is abundance. Any small changes due to climate change are irrelevant and dwarfed by the benefits of energy, and that's where we should be putting all of our resources and time. And you and I have essentially wasted the last how many years?
LJB
Well, the good news is that there's room for more than one opinion. And so Chris and I both worked for Carlyle/Riverstone, and for many years together. And so I respect his intelligence and his opinions, but I disagree with them. And so it's very clear that climate change is not a hoax. It is not a hoax, and it is having an impact on what we see. We don't understand the full depth of the impact, but we're pretty clear that we are forcing change that is going faster than it would do naturally, and that's having an impact on human beings. So I don't agree, and therefore I think we need to do things to make sure we either stop it or we understand how to handle it if it's happening. So, you know, a debate of whether or not the objective function is the number of degrees centigrade we heat up the world in 2100 is actually quite difficult for people to identify with. I mean, it's a very long way away, and it doesn't seem like a very big… the difference between 1.5°C and 3°C is 1.5°C. And people say, ‘Well, that's the fluctuation of the daily temperature in London, even within a month, so does it make a difference?’ And the answer is, yes, it does. But we therefore need to think about how we take real precautions, to say, if we can't handle what's happening, can we at least adapt ourselves to take care of it?
ML
And we need to do both. Now I'm going to find myself in a slightly odd position of defending Chris Wright, or as you've just dubbed him, Chris Wrong, because I think he accepts that it is happening. I think that his position is not that it's a hoax. So his boss says it's a hoax. Actually, a con job is what President Trump called it. A hoax as well. But I think what I've seen Chris Wright, Chris Wrong, is that it's manageable, that the wealth created is much more important. And he draws on William Nordhaus’ research, and says, ‘well, the Nobel Prize winner in climate economics, Bill Nordhaus, says that 3°C or 3.5°C by the end of the century, is optimum.’ And presumably more heating thereafter. So he's accepting it exists, and there may even be a little bit of damage, but the benefits of just charging ahead with fossil fuels vastly outweigh it.
LJB
So I think you need to do everything in some ways, in the right order. So it's very clear, it's been very clear to me for a long time that hydrocarbons cannot be replaced very quickly, and it's undesirable to replace them very quickly, because we don't have the sufficient variety of technologies to find things that will replace them. And so it's a matter of fact that they're going to be around for a long time. And you know, whether it's 70% or 68% or 75% of the energy mix, depending on whether it's useful energy, final energy, this, that, and the other, which this gentleman here is an expert on, it's nonetheless a lot, and it's moving very slowly indeed. So we need to do things recognizing that. And actually what we are doing, I think, is fairly sensible. We're regenerating, we're doing a remix again, so we're using a variety of energies to take care of the growth and more and more, and that's great. And what we should be doing is exactly that we should be deploying the things we have that are commercial, that don't ruin people when you deploy them. And that changes the mix and allows us to say, we'll now mix the outcome that we see.
ML
So another good friend of yours, or good colleague, acquaintance, I'm not sure? Dan Yergin, actually a mentor and a friend of mine,
LJB
And who was at Cambridge with me.
ML
Was at Cambridge with you. I still don't know whether I should call him a colleague or a friend, but somebody you know very, very well, as do I. He wrote a piece earlier this year which kind of encapsulated a lot of the pushback to the change since the Glasgow COP26 days, when everybody was excited about 1.5°C and net zero 2050 globally, and so on. But he wrote this piece called ‘The Troubled Transition’, saying all of the stuff that we're doing, it's additive. We can do a bit of wind and a bit of solar sprinkled on top, but the core and the fundament of the energy system is and — essentially, what he's saying is — always will be fossil. Is he right?
LJB
No, because otherwise, then we would see far greater growth in the consumption of fossil fuels than we actually see at the moment. And so it's not right. I mean, it's a way of looking at it, and it's a headline grabbing way of looking at it, but I'm not sure it's actually statistically true or actually sends the right message. I don't think that's right. We are generating different sources of far cleaner and totally clean energy. And I would expect that that will grow, not just with what we have seen today, but we know much more. You know, geothermal has lots of mileage in it, for example. And actually, if we can get a grip on project management in the right way, so does some of nuclear, and I'm cautious in how I phrase that, because I think wild, wild projections of nuclear probably will end up in financial disaster.
ML
So you were very kind, because you called me a gentleman, which is very kind. But also you said that I was the expert on the difference between final and useful, and so on and so on, because I wrote this piece called ‘The Pragmatic Climate Reset,’ where I tried to look at what happens if the clean stuff, all of the above clean, just outgrows the growth in energy demand, and I keyed it not to try to move away from fossil, but just say, ‘We want energy demand to grow in the world.’ I want more people to have air conditioning or MRI scanners in the Global South, or lighting or whatever. And if that grows, but clean energy, the clean things grow faster, actually mathematically, and it's kind of obvious, when you think about it, the little thing that grows fast eventually overtakes the big thing.
LJB
I think it was what I was trying to say, but you said it much more elegantly. And you can see it, if I brag about another one of our companies called Sun King, you see a little company there growing. It's now got 10 million customers and is growing. And it reminds me very much of the early days of oil products when, you know, people did measure the number of customers they had at gas stations, filling stations. It was a really, really good thing. You know, another half million came into the fold because they could buy a car. People forget that we were automobile poor. So here is a company that installs distributed solar —
ML
These are rooftops in Sub-Saharan Africa?
LJB
Rooftops, quite big systems. So you can do things like charge a scooter, as well as having a phone and lights and things like that. And it's priced to be intramarginal to kerosene or diesel. So it's actually substituting out petroleum products, and it's creating a different lifestyle, and people love it, and they actually pay for it. And many people think, how can you possibly make money in Sub-Saharan Africa? You can, if 97% of your customers pay you on time, which is what they do.
ML
Cleaning Up is supported by its Leadership Circle. The members are Actis, Alcazar Energy, Arup, Cygnum Capital, Davidson Kempner, EcoPragma Capital, EDP, Eurelectric, the Gilardini Foundation, KKR, National Grid, Octopus Energy, Quadrature Climate Foundation, SDCL and Wärtsilä. For more information on the Leadership Circle, please visit cleaningup.live. If you're enjoying this episode, please hit like, leave a comment, and also recommend it to friends, family, colleagues and absolutely everyone. To browse the archive of over 200 past episodes, and also to subscribe to our free newsletter, visit cleaningup.live.
ML
So if you scroll my little calculation forwards, or you grow Sun King, or some combination. In fact, those are the same thing. And you grow a million points of light, Sun King multiplied by many in the world, not just in Sub-Saharan Africa, not just rooftops. But if you scroll forwards with clean energy, continuing to outgrow demand in energy, then fossil fuel goes ex-growth. Not just coal, but oil next, and then gas. What happens within that industry? How will that industry respond? Play that out, because we've never seen it before. So we need to game it in our minds and think about, ‘how does that industry respond?’
LJB
Well, of course, they're all diminishing resources. Wasting resources have a habit of changing their market position, because the cost of development, cost of exploitation, tends to rise over time. Most people do the easiest things first, and they get more and more expensive, and then they cross over with alternatives which substitute them. And I think that's roughly what you can see. The alternatives have come down enormously, wind and solar. And correctly priced— and this, I think, is an issue in many countries where policy is not keeping up with the pricing and the actual real cost of alternatives, but where that is reflected, they clearly are now beginning to chew into what would otherwise have been provided by petroleum products. Now, there are other factors involved globally. There are 700 million people without energy at all. That's quite important. So they're going to find whatever they can get. And actually, what's really quite interesting in many parts of the world, is conventional energy, creating electricity using turbines, it's very difficult to get them, very difficult indeed. And so the faster way of doing it is with wind and solar. And mostly solar. So I think that there's all sorts of changes on the margin here. The big picture… I mean, the numbers are so big. They're so big. And you know, people say, ‘Well we're going to get growth of 1.5% in total energy.’ And they say, ‘that's not a lot.’ It's huge. And then if the investment in conventional energy comes down a little bit, that will begin to change the relativities even more, and that's about cost and return. Because a lot of this is, quite a bit of it, the margin is certainly in the hands of companies that have shareholders as opposed to state owners. And they will have to make decisions on cash flow.
ML
It sounds like you're quite optimistic that there is a tipping point, that we're on the cusp of the tipping point. Because if you're saying that the fossil stuff gets more expensive, and we've seen it with oil, with more and more produced water and having to go further and further offshore and so on. We haven't yet seen it with unconventional gas, it has to be said. But you seem to be saying that it's going to happen there as well. But you did mention that policymakers haven't communicated them to the market properly. So is there a tipping point that you think we're over, or are we still waiting for the policymakers? Or is it a bit of both?
LJB
It's a bit of both. I mean, you can't buck nature. In the end, it's going to get more difficult. And since, for example, since oil prices are set externally, as it were, it all just squeezes the margin to the point where people shut down. I mean, that's for oil production. Gas, it depends on just how much exposure and how much risk people want to take on intercontinental gas, so LNG in particular, and how much they want to take to get those developments underway. And you know, you can see that's getting a little bit more difficult.
ML
But we're also seeing a lot of it being done. And we've got… you know, the Vaca Muerta in Argentina five years ago, it couldn't work. Now that is clearly a major play. But we've also seen LNG developments in Australia, the Gulf, and so there seems to be quite a lot of LNG. Is there a point where there's so much LNG that people can rely on it, and actually that derails the tipping point for some period for gas?
LJB
It's quite possible. I think gas will be anyway, and it logically should be, the last hydrocarbon in existence, as it were. There's a lot of it around, it is the most natural, stable molecule. And we've known where the gas is for a very long time. And I look at all these maps and the news about discoveries, and I say, ;yes, but we kind of knew it was there anyway.’ There's nothing that new about where the resource is. It's about exploiting it at commercial levels, and that requires great care, a lot to do with the policy. You know, what taxes, what incentives, and how strongly people trust the provider of the supply and therefore the cost of capital.
ML
If you were still, or found yourself miraculously again, running an oil and gas major, what would you do with the analysis that you've just provided? What would you be doing?
LJB
Well, obviously, I'd be running the company. Whether I can do that or not, remains to be seen.
ML
Whether investors would let you, you mean?
LJB
Well, certainly I'm way beyond qualifiable
ML
Yeah but in my imagined world, you're still the Sun King, you're still running BP. What would you do on Monday morning in that location?
LJB
The most important thing is to recognize that you are in the oil and gas business, and you need to prosecute it in a way which is responsible. So it means you, first of all, invest in the things that give you the highest returns. And you try to keep the returns up. Very important, do it safely, and do it with a clear eye on the population and for your own emissions, notably methane, keep them down to zero and do that. I think there's plenty of new technology that can be used, both to get projects better and actually to upgrade oil and probably make it into much more of a super fuel, rather than conventional refined product, and to do it more cheaply, with less heat and less pressure. So lots of things I think I could and would do, but I'd use the same formula: sort of exploit and roll out what you know works today, do research for something for the future.
ML
Would you unleash the third big attempt to diversify into clean energy? Because you very famously sort of unleashed that first wave, the BP Alternative Energy wave. But then there was another wave more recently, which is now being very publicly wound back. So is it ‘well, we've learned now, and we got to just stick to the knitting and do it well and responsibly,’ or is it another attempt to look at the horizon and become clean?
LJB
So I think you need to be fairly careful, because you're paid as an oil and gas company to be an oil and gas company. And if you diversify, then you better understand exactly what risks are. So in phase one of BP we did things which were really good for oil and gas, things like pricing carbon, bottling up methane. And then we did an experiment on renewable energy, and that was literally an experiment. And the important thing is, I think most investors will allow you to do experiments — it's called a broader R&D portfolio — insofar as your base business is doing well. If your base business is a little wobbly, most people come in and say to get your eye back on what you should be doing and get rid of all that stuff in the extended R&D portfolio.
ML
I love the way you call it extended R&D because those are the years when you and I, when I met you first. And you were very kind because you sort of plucked me out of obscurity as an analyst and data provider. But your extended R&D was about $8 billion of investment on those renewables
LJB
Over 10 years.
ML
Sight, right. Still, for me, in my world, that's a big number.
LJB
No, it's not. And besides, it wasn't actually all on renewables. It was on the other stuff as well.
ML
Yes, there was biofuels at that time. I agree, absolutely. So that's what you might do in that world. But if I look at your portfolio, and you've said it, a lot of it is on the demand side. So you're not in, how can I put it, just generating green electrons. There's companies, there's Sun King and so on, but you don't have a major power project, renewable power project developer. You don't have bio gas, by the looks of things. So you haven't said, ‘it's molecules, but it needs to be clean molecules, let's go do biogas.’
LJB
So I think as far as BeyondNetZero is concerned, the same rubric applies to a fund as it does to a company. This is a fund with a very specific mandate, and it's sticking to its mandate, which is to produce returns and reduce greenhouse gasses faster than SBTs. And please make sure you stick to that knitting and do not do things that require vast capex. Don't do that. So that's what we have said, and we're sticking to that. So even in wind, for example, we're only in wind services. We're not actually generating electrons with wind. In Sun King, it's solar, but it's the user of solar. We're not making panels and things like that. We're just creating the means for distributed solar activity. The rest is things like recycling. The circular economy is a way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions enormously, enormously, and actually has plenty of other good things associated with it. So we take tires and make them into basketball court flooring, and have great steel. This is called Ecore, terrific. And we recycle waste in Road Runner, using very clever sorting techniques using visual AI. So lots of interesting different ways of doing things. But I come back to it, I have in my family office a very different approach, which is very reasonably high risk, early stage. And I'm very excited about things like new materials, things like metallic organic frameworks, which are materials, you can have a big block, and it will sit here and absorb vast amounts of CO2. Just sit here and absorb CO2, and then you can go and boil it off and store it, for example. And I think I want to go back to something that BP tried a long time ago, which I still think is valid, but it's very different now, is: can you find enzymes that will chew away at wood or waste and make fuels which are very clean? Or actually chew away at oil and refine it in a very different way to make what I think would now be regarded as a super fuel. So if you didn't have AI for science and something called ‘lab in the loop’ nowadays, you'd have to find enzymes one by one. Now you can do it in a very different way.
ML
I'm reminded of the trip, you were very kind, you put me onto the advisory board of Accenture. They had an energy advisory board. And we went down to the Oak Ridge National Lab. We talked about this in the previous episode, and they were willow trees.
LJB
It was willow trees.
ML
I think you remember Willow. I remember poplar, but it was trees.
LJB
They were very bendy.
ML
Yes, they were extremely bendy, but what was extraordinary, I remember, was that some of these trees would produce three times the ethanol, you know we call it second generation ethanol. Back then, some of the trees would produce three times as much as others, and they hadn't even sequenced the gene back then. It was about 2009 or 10. And I just remember thinking they are miles from turning this into a proper industry. But this is all different now, isn't it?
LJB
It probably cost $300 a gallon, didn't it, a sort of huge… So this is very, very different. Not to go to areas that I don't fully understand, but I think that our understanding of chemistry has come on leaps and bounds, leaps and bounds. It's all about the energy maps of how substances are made. That's understanding how we can actually generate different learning modes to discover these enzymes. And what's more, how we can experiment with them very quickly to find out whether they're good or bad. So I think this is an area which is ripe for breakthrough, and it can be used. The important thing here is we're not going to replace all the infrastructure of the world overnight. That's the other problem with an energy transition. You have to transition the infrastructure. But imagine if you had different energy you can put in the same infrastructure, then it's marvelous.
ML
Those things you're talking about at the confluence of where AI can help as a kind of a horizontal, as the tool. But it's also where bio and genetics, and you've also got your involvement in the Crick Institute. You're trading your knowledge there. Seven years, I think you've been involved now in the Crick. The Crick is the big institute of genetic research in the UK.
LJB
Yes. I mean, I mean, I think all of these things come together. It's a very hackneyed phrase, but it's so true in science and engineering, the most interesting things happen in the cracks between different specialties, and it's that which really generates the exciting advances for the future.
ML
One of the things that we see going on, and particularly in Europe… We talked about the US, let's call it petro-state plus, because you pointed out that they are still doing the electrification, and China, which is electro-state minus, because they're still doing the fossil. But in Europe, at some level, we're kind of working on the right things, but there is a huge problem of energy and particularly electricity costs in Europe, which looks like a showstopper because of the economics, but also a showstopper because of what that does to the politics. I’ve got to turn it into a question, so I've got to say, what should Europe do?
LJB
So I think that I'd want to rip the problem apart. There’s a big question of national security. The big question of national security is who pays for it? Who pays for national security? Now, clearly, governments don't go out and privatize the army, they pay for it. But actually there are some fundamental things where the government probably should pay and it should come out of general taxation rather than specific product taxation. And I think we need a debate on that. I think it's a way policy needs to be rethought, it seems to me. Secondly, there has to be a level playing field, a genuine level playing field between all forms of energy. And it depends, and it's very difficult to define a level playing field, because some it is capex heavy, some is capex light. And governments love helping people through with capex, but actually we need to sweep some of that away. So I would like to see how you rip this thing apart on security, jobs, environment, and therefore what the government is doing.
ML
And when you say security, you mean energy security.
LJB
Energy security.
ML
Because the government also is responsible for security, hard security, but so that would be, what, where you're going with those is sort of structure of the energy markets. So, I've been doing quite a lot of work on electrification as a theme, instead of when I started, as you know, I did lots on renewables, and then it was on batteries, and it was on cars. But actually the theme of electrification, and so I've had what I think is an ‘Aha moment.’ I would love to hear what you think of it, which is that there is this assumption that the more we electrify, the higher the cost of electricity. And I think that's a priori wrong, because a big chunk of electricity is now the grid, distribution grid, transmission grid, and the batteries and all the stuff you need to keep it balanced and working, the high voltage DC cables between countries and so on. And of course, when you electrify, you get more volume, which means the denominator goes up. So I think that if I had to choose between electrification and, for instance, Clean Power 2030, in this country, or these very accelerated renewables targets in Europe, I think I would prioritize electrification and maybe soft pedal, be more pragmatic, to use my favorite word on the speed of rolling out of the clean stuff. Does that resonate?
LJB
Well, I try to do both actually. I mean, first of all, I think that Europe, the wider Europe, I mean, including the UK, obviously has an electricity infrastructure that is quite old, and it probably goes in the wrong direction as well, very often, and it has control rooms that really look like they're in a second world war ship. They're not really what you'd expect today, with almost nobody there, and some very much more advanced control systems. So I think a lot of it requires updating, and that cost needs to be applied rateably, right across something. But it shouldn't be all against electricity, the user of electricity, because it is, again, for the nation's interest. And there is a lot of that stuff that has to happen. So I would sort of get on and try and figure out how to update that — something's going to collapse anyway. And I would also look for sources, and I would need, anyway, a better grid for some of the sources I'm going to have which are renewable, and indeed, some of which would be, dare I say, successful SMRs, nuclear.
ML
The SMR thing's an interesting one, because I'm in favor. I have a nuclear engineering background. I also just did the maths on how many of them you need to catch up with wind and solar. And it is, unfortunately, thousands and thousands globally, to have a real climate impact. It is literally tens of thousands, and I just can't see it.
LJB
So if I may, I think we have to be very careful about searching for single point solutions. We're going to have a little bit of this, a little bit of that, which is natural, because I would argue, you could do with tens of thousands of facilities, you could do some very sophisticated carbon capture and storage, not using geological reservoirs, but using what nature intended, which is the oceans primarily. I mean, the ocean is the biggest sink, and if you could speed it up, then that's actually the way to go.
ML
We had Helen Czerski, professor Helen Czerski, magnificent knowledge of it. She's an oceanographer. Great episode. And I think she'd be listening to this going, ‘Oh, acidification or unintended consequences.’
LJB
I think that that obviously has to be looked at. But actually, that doesn't work like that.
ML
I want to finish. You gave a lecture at the Royal Academy of Engineering, and you set four priorities. So this is your rapid fire round where we get to finish by asking you your four priorities. And don't worry, I'll prompt you if you forget one of them. But if you could finish, because it was a sort of roadmap for, if we just click up a level, big picture, what should we prioritize?
LJB
I think we've talked about some of them. We've talked about deploying what we know works today, but really deploying it, not just sort of holding back and saying bits of it. As long as it's commercial, deploy it. Secondly, researching and developing new things for the future. We have not got to the end of innovation in this area. We're at the foothills of it. Thirdly, I think working on adaptation, resilience, you know, because we're not going to solve all the problems. We've got to work on that. And then the fourth point we've not talked about, which is about people. I mean, first of all, none of this will work without having A-grade people involved with getting this done, and they've got to be trained and looked after and enhanced the whole time by experience. And secondly, we need to do things that are acceptable to communities and people that actually encourage them to believe that something good is happening to them, rather than being berated like school children by saying, ‘You can't do that because it's bad for the environment.’ Or, ‘the cost of electricity is high because it just is, and I don't really want to tell you why.’ But I think we've got to combine much more the way in which we think about how we deploy these things with people. Get the right incentives in front of them, get the right behaviors from them, and that, I think, will work, and it clearly does work in areas where you provide something which is useful to human beings.
ML
Thank you very much. Lord Browne, John, it's been an enormous pleasure, as always talking to you. Thank you very much for joining us here today.
LJB
It's a pleasure.
ML
So that was John Brown Lord Browne of Madingley, former CEO of Beyond Petroleum, author of Beyond Business, now chair of BeyondNetZero. As always, I'd like to thank our producer, Oscar Boyd; video editor Jamie Oliver; the team behind Cleaning Up, including our new Head of Operations, Kendall Smith; the Leadership Circle who make all of this possible. And you, the audience for spending a little time here with us today. Please join us at this time next week for another episode of Cleaning Up.
ML
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