Andrew Forrest has joined a green venture capital fund led by Bill Gates and comprising big-name billionaires focused on emerging greenhouse gas-reducing technologies, the Financial Review reports.
Other investors in Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV) include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Virgin founder Richard Branson, businessman and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and LinkedIn executive chairman Reid Hoffman. Each member of the fund must invest a minimum of $US50 million.
The Forrest family’s private company, Tattarang, reportedly joined the fund after being approached by the Gates team.
Tattarang chief investment officer John Hartman said BEV would invest in companies at the cutting edge of developing technologies needed in the transition to a net-zero economy.
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“We are going to need significant breakthroughs in several key industrial technologies such as green steel, green cement, renewable hydrogen,” he said.
“This is a fund that has some of the best and brightest scientists and impact investors involved to find those companies and help foster them to deliver those technologies.
“Given the nature of the fund and the tech it is seeking to invest in, it is more suited to entrepreneurs and business people able to take that risk than institutions.”
BEV’s initial venture capital fund raised $US1.1 billion from more than 20 billionaires, and kicked off with investments in 46 businesses across agriculture, construction, electricity, manufacturing and transport.
A second fund capped at $US1.5 billion was targeted to support an additional 40-50 climate-technology businesses that “seek to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions by at least half a gigatonne per year”, or about 1 per cent of annual global emissions.
In addition to the BEV funds and under the Gates entity’s wider Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, the capitalists are looking to raise $US7 billion to scale up critical climate technologies, starting with green hydrogen, direct air capture and sustainable aviation fuel.
One of the first businesses backed by BEV was Boston Metals, a developer of green steel-making technology that has also caught the eye of BHP’s venture capital division.
“BHP Ventures was created as part of chief executive Mike Henry’s innovation drive. It is tasked with finding ’emerging companies with game-changing technologies’,” the Financial Review stated.
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“Both BHP Ventures and BEV, as an existing investor, participated in a $US50 million raising by Boston Metals in January aimed at accelerating commercial-scale green steel-making through its molten oxide electrolysis technology.”
Fortescue Metals Group founder, chairman and major shareholder Dr Forrest has committed the iron ore miner to produce green steel from a pilot plant at its operations in Western Australia.
Fortescue has also signed agreements for the development of green energy projects in Australia and overseas, including the giant Grand Inga hydropower project in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The company is poised to make a final investment decision on a 250MW green hydrogen plant at Bell Bay in northern Tasmania expected to cost at least $500 million to develop.
