The Energy Republic June Edition 2022

INDUSTRY NEWS
Mitsubishi Corporation to Invest $100 million in
Climate Technologies
Mitsubishi Corporation (MC) has
officially announced its decision to
invest in Breakthrough Energy
Catalyst (Catalyst), a program dedicated to
a c c e l e r a t i n g i n n o v a t i v e c l i m a t e
technologies. Mitsubishi plans to invest
100 million USD in Catalyst, and in doing so
w i l l b e c o m e t h e f i r s t c o m p a n y
headquartered in Asia to make a
commitment of this scale to the fund.
Catalyst is a first-of-its-kind model that
brings together companies, governments,
and private philanthropy to accelerate the
adoption of critical, next generation
climate technologies. Catalyst is part of
Breakthrough Energy, a network of
initiatives founded by Bill Gates in 2015
dedicated to funding, developing,
commercializing, and scaling the
technologies that will be necessary to avoid
a climate disaster.
By making targeted investments in climate
technologies that have proven their
p o t e n t i a l t h ro u g h re s e a rc h a n d
development, Catalyst aims to speed up
their large-scale commercialization. This
will significantly decrease the price of new
clean products, increase their availability in
the market, and demonstrate how to
f i n a n c e t h e i n f r a s t r u c t u r e o f
decarbonization at scale.
Having unveiled its own roadmap to carbon
neutrality in October 2021, MC has publicly
disclosed both its greenhouse-gas
emissions reduction targets and energytransformation
(EX) investment guidelines.
As a private entity with ownership in
resource, energy and many other
businesses, MC is fully committed to doing
its part in the worldwide push to
decarbonize.
Renewables, hydrogen, ammonia and
methanation are just some of the nextgeneration
energy initiatives that MC is now
examining as future earnings pillars, but MC
also understands the challenges to
achieving a net-zero world. Swift
application of new technologies and
innovations will be crucial to meeting those
challenges.
Catalyst creates a framework in which
Breakthrough Energy and its public and
private sector partners including
g o v e r n m e n t s , c o r p o ra t i o n s , a n d
philanthropic organizations, will work
together to commercialize high-impact
decarbonization technologies through
measures such as equity investment, grant
funding and offtake agreements. These
technologies will underpin a zero-carbon
economy but are currently more expensive
than their existing fossil-fuel emitting
counterparts. The difference between these
costs is what is now referred to as “Green
Premium.”
The current Catalyst focus areas are (1)
C l e a n H y d r o g e n ( a n d r e l a t e d
infrastructure), (2) Long-duration Energy
Storage (LDES), (3) Sustainable Aviation Fuel
(SAF), and (4) Direct Air Capture (DAC). In
future, the Catalyst program and its
partners may expand its focus to include
other hard-to-abate sectors. MC also
considers these technologies vital to its own
EX strategies and net-zero roadmap.
By participating in this program, MC is
demonstrating a commitment to growing
climate technologies and further reducing
our carbon footprint in ways that will not
compromise our quality of life.
At MC we are proud of the wealth of
expertise and networks that we have built
up in Japan and throughout Asia. We remain
dedicated to optimizing those assets so that
we can assist our Catalyst partners in steel,
aviation, finance, energy and other
industries. Together we will work to
enhance the program’s value and help us
transition to a carbon-neutral world.
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