Tom Whitehouse, chairman of London Environmental Investment Forum, explores trends in clean-tech.
Over the years, oil and clean-tech have had a love-hate relationship. When investing in clean-tech took off roughly 10 years ago, it professed to hate oil and promised to banish it from the energy future. After the financial crisis, this flipped to love, as more-mature clean-tech businesses realised they could make money in the oil industry –which showed no signs whatsoever of banishment – by offering operational efficiencies in, for example, energy used in extraction and wastewater treatment.
The…