Thursday Jun 26, 2025

E16: Financing Deep Decarbonisation: Scaling Market-Based Mechanisms for Industrial Transition in the UK & ASEAN

Heavy industry is responsible for some of the most stubborn greenhouse-gas emissions on the planet. Cement alone drives an estimated 7-8 % of global CO₂ output, while bulk chemicals such as ethylene sit at the heart of the world’s largest industrial energy user – the chemicals sector. As governments tighten climate policy and investors demand credible net-zero plans, decarbonising these “hard-to-abate” sectors has become an urgent financial and technological challenge.

In this episode of New Frontiers in Climate Finance, host Harry MacKenzie speaks with two experts who bridge engineering and finance: Dr Gbemi Oluleye, chemical-engineering researcher developing whole-system tools for deep decarbonisation, and Dr Raúl Rosales, Senior Fellow at Imperial’s Centre for Climate Finance & Investment and Co-Director of King’s Net Zero Centre. Together they unpack how market-based mechanisms (carbon markets, offtake contracts, blended-finance structures) can unlock the capital required to scale breakthrough technologies for low-carbon cement and ethylene.

Listeners will learn why traditional project-finance models often stall in heavy industry, which policy signals really move private capital, and how integrated engineering-policy-finance thinking can close the cost gap versus fossil incumbents.

Please find below some of the brilliant talks and research by our two guests.

Raúl:

Raul Rosales Profile | Imperial College London

Enhancing-Market-Infrastructure-and-Integrity-to-Scale-Up-Carbon-Markets-in-ASEAN-Policy-Brief.pdf

The Carbon Credit Price and National Tree Planting Impact of Woodland Carbon Code Admittance to the UK-ETS | Imperial Business School

Global Voluntary Carbon Markets (VCMs) and Market Infrastructure

Financial Accounting for Carbon Finance: A New Standard for a New Paradigm

Gbemi:

ht tps://gbemioluleye.com/research/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360319925015721

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pdLdvWUm0c&pp=ygUNZ2JlbWkgb2x1bGV5ZQ%3D%3D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-wUwx9SO_k&pp=ygUNZ2JlbWkgb2x1bGV5ZQ%3D%3D