Hal Malone, Sea/Switch Partners
Martime decarbonization expert Harold (Hal) L. Malone III is a Princip 3,25al of Sea/Switch Partners, a strategic platform dedicated to ocean decarbonization, and the founder of White Fir Global, Inc., a strategic adviso7ry firm focused on the maritime, offshore and energy industries.
Mr. Malone is a member of the Index Committee for the Marine Money Decarbonization Index and serves as Executive Manager of Marine Transportation Partners LLC.
Prior to founding White Fir, Mr. Malone served as the Head of Transportation at Invesco Private Markets, a private investing division of Invesco Ltd., overseeing a more than $2 billion maritime investment portfolio.
Before joining Invesco, Hal Malone served as the Chief Strategic Officer of the Navig8 Group, a fully integrated provider of shipping management services, and spent over 18 years in investment banking, most recently as a Managing Director in the maritime group at Jefferies LLC.
Mr. Malone previously served as a director of Diamond S Shipping Inc., a NYSE-listed crude and product tanker shipping company, and Navigator Holdings Ltd., a NYSE-listed LPG shipping company, and Chairman of Nautical Bulk Holdings Ltd, a drybulk and product tanker shipping company.
In this 3,257 word interview, exclusively in the Wall Street Transcript, Hal Malone details the objectives of maritime decarbonization.
“The global maritime industry generates an estimate of somewhere between 2.5% and 3% of all global carbon emissions.
To put that in context, if that were a country it would be roughly the same emissions footprint of Germany. It is also equal to the carbon footprint of all of the passenger cars in the United States, so it is a very sizable contributor to global carbon emissions.
It is also deemed to be a hard-to-abate sector along with the industries such as the airline industry or aircraft, cement, steel manufacturing, and so on. These are significant contributors to carbon emissions and ones that will require new technologies and new solutions that don’t exist today.
In comparison, the power generation industry has solutions, such as solar or wind or even nuclear, that are zero emissions, but there are no large-scale carbon-free solutions for the global maritime industry.
So it is a big, big problem that is important to all of us. It is also one that is at its earliest stage of technological evolution. That is why we chose to create the Marine Money Decarbonization Index. We really highlighted the companies that have a range of technologies and services to help address this problem.
We then had the opportunity to partner with ETFMG to make the MMDI investable by ordinary investors.”
Marine decarbonization expert Hal Malone lists the specifics that lead to an investable security for ocean cleaning stocks:
“One thing I’ll just point out here is the diverse use cases for a ship — so whether it’s traveling over a regulfar route, or how far it’s traveling, or what cargo it is transporting.
For ferries and short sea shipping, say around Europe or say between the United States and Hawaii, or the United States in the Caribbean, you have a set fleet that’s traveling back and forth, so solutions such as batteries or fuel cells can be very efficient.
But when you look at things like large container ships moving from Asia to the West Coast of the U.S. or vessels carrying grain from South America to Asia over voyages that last weeks, if not months, you’re going to need a potentially different solution.
This brings us into the second category, and that is green fuel production and related infrastructure. There are a number of initiatives to look at other potential fuels, as opposed to hydrocarbon-based fuels, such as ammonia, methanol, or liquid hydrogen itself.
There are a number of companies that are developing fueling solutions and the infrastructure that will be needed to ultimately deliver these to the maritime industry.
The industry will need distribution and storage systems and you would need essentially the gas station equivalent for ships that are capable of actually delivering the fuel to the ultimate vessels. That would be a second large category.
The third large category would be what we call on-board systems and technologies such as trip optimization technologies.
There are also a lot of on-board carbon capture and storage technologies that are super interesting.
A company with a technology that’s actually available today is called Kongsberg Gruppen (OTCMKTS:NSKFF), and it has developed a hull-cleaning robot.
It is a relatively simple solution that can have a meaningful impact of, say, 5% to 10% of the fuel consumption of the ship just by keeping its hull clean.”
Maritime decarbonization is an issue that drives the highly experienced Hal Malone:
“Until recently, I ran the maritime investment portfolio within Invesco’s private capital business, and we had about $2 billion of capital there that we were stewarding. I also sat on the board of two public NYSE-listed companies in the sector and so from that realized how topical marine decarbonization was…
Shipping faces a substantial decarbonization challenge that matters to all of us.
We have helped create what we believe is a unique way for investors to participate in what we think is going to be a rapidly growing investment in solving this challenge.
We are offering investors exposure to unique non-U.S.-based companies that they may not be familiar with or might not otherwise come across…We have a core tier, which is fixed at 20 names and that has an 80% weighting in the index…
Ultimately, our mission is to help address challenges that we all share as a planet, which is how to decarbonize everything that we consume and everything that we use in our daily lives.
Ninety percent of all of those things move by ship at some point and so it is something that is part of all our daily lives.”
Read the entire 3,257 word interview, exclusively in the Wall Street Transcript, to get the full detail from Hal Malone on the prospects and investing opportunities in maritime decarbonization that will clean our oceans.
Harold (Hal) L. Malone III
Principal
Sea/Switch Partners
www.seaswitch.com
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