Where is the world going? In previous posts I talked about dispatchable energy production or in simple terms localized off grid energy production. I also talked about investing where the world is going as opposed to fighting change.
Through a contact I had an interesting discussion with a Senior Executive with the company Waste Management (WM). This company is a very large recycling company and operates landfills throughout the US and in Ontario and Quebec.
Over the next 3 years they plan to spend about a billion dollars in the capture of biogas from their landfills. The amount of renewable natural gas they will collect will power their whole fleet of trucks which will be fueled by natural gas or electric batteries fueled by electricity generated from the RNG. This means that their fuel costs for their primary recycling business is essentially zero.
In addition they expect to be able to produce enough localized electricity from this RNG to provide electricity to more than a million homes near their landfills across the US or about 1% of all homes in the US making it a large electricity utility all using free fuel from its landfills to produce the electricity.
in addition, they already have about 60MW of electricity capacity from solar and wind at adandoned landfills.
By 2026 their income from RNG will be greater than their whole recycling business!!
While what they are doing may not have a big impact on oil demand, it does relate directly to my points regarding putting your money into areas of growth as opposed to areas with headwinds such as oil production. I am not recommending people here necessarily buy WM stock but only using it as an example of where the world is going and that successful investing requires a broad perspective as opposed to a myopic one.