Latest news with #Barnard
News.com.au
a day ago
- Automotive
- News.com.au
'Barnard is the best on the Formula E grid' Sam Bird lauds his McLaren teammate
"Barnard is the best on the Formula E grid" Sam Bird lauds his McLaren teammate
Business Insider
2 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Platinum Asset Management Ltd (PIJ) was upgraded to a Hold Rating at Bell Potter
Bell Potter analyst Marcus Barnard upgraded Platinum Asset Management Ltd (PIJ – Research Report) to a Hold today and set a price target of A$0.49. The company's shares closed last Monday at €0.27. Confident Investing Starts Here: Easily unpack a company's performance with TipRanks' new KPI Data for smart investment decisions Receive undervalued, market resilient stocks right to your inbox with TipRanks' Smart Value Newsletter Barnard covers the Financial sector, focusing on stocks such as Platinum Asset Management Ltd, Challenger , and Perpetual Limited. According to TipRanks, Barnard has an average return of 2.1% and a 55.56% success rate on recommended stocks. Platinum Asset Management Ltd has an analyst consensus of Strong Sell, with a price target consensus of €0.30.
National Observer
5 days ago
- Business
- National Observer
Could Canada's carbon capture ambitions catch a chill from Iceland's struggling Mammoth project?
Iceland and Canada lie over 4,500 kilometres apart on a world map, yet news that a pioneering carbon removal project near Reykjavik is falling well short of expectations a year after its launch has hit home with some North American sector skeptics closely watching the climate technology's progress. Switzerland's Climeworks, which has raised US $800 million, opened the world's largest operational direct air capture (DAC) plant, known as Mammoth, to global fanfare in May last year. But the facility, which uses what look like walls of giant fans to capture CO 2 directly from the air and then pumps it deep underground, has not measured up to expectations. The pilot project pulled just 105 tonnes of CO 2 from the air in its first 12 months of operation, a fraction of its projected annual capacity of 36,000 tonnes, according to a report by Iceland's Heimildin newspaper last month. 'That is less than the annual emissions of a dozen long-haul trucks,' said Michael Barnard, a prominent clean energy technology analyst and self-styled debunker of greenwashing technologies. Climeworks has not responded to the news report or to requests for comment from Canada's National Observer. But the slow start at Mammoth has sparked discussion in clean energy circles over the wisdom of investing hundreds of millions of dollars in similar CO 2 removal projects in Canada. 'We don't need a billion-dollar vacuum cleaner for the sky,' Barnard said in a LinkedIn post. 'We need heat pumps, EVs, and clean electricity. DAC might serve as niche cleanup after 2050 — maybe.' Canada was already betting on direct air capture before the Iceland setback. The Trudeau government supported DAC development through tax credits covering 60 per cent of construction costs, a $10 million commitment to carbon removal service purchases, and a draft federal offset protocol allowing DAC companies to generate tradeable carbon credits. These incentives and guaranteed demand aim to lure private investment in DAC and potentially boost the Liberals' faltering pledge to reach net-zero emissions in Canada by 2050. Following his April election, Prime Minister Mark Carney said Canada could be a leader in carbon capture and storage as part of a controversial effort to decarbonize oil and gas, including extending tax credits and setting carbon dioxide removal targets. Canada is taking the opposite approach to the United States, where Trump administration budget cuts could eliminate up to US $1 billion in Department of Energy (DOE) funding for two direct air capture demonstration projects in Texas and Louisiana. Nevertheless, DAC is gathering pace elsewhere, with roughly 150 companies working on projects around the world. Eight companies are located in Canada, including Montreal-based start-up Deep Sky's Alpha project — a first-of-its-kind solar-powered DAC technology hub in Alberta partly backed by Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Catalyst fund. Deep Sky Alpha, on track to bring the first of as many as 14 different DAC plant concepts online this summer, is expected to cost over $110 million over the next decade. Whether any will make the leap to commercialization remains a question mark, said Phil De Luna, Deep Sky's chief carbon scientist and head of engineering. 'In the current geopolitical climate, with the US Trump administration cutting DOE funding for key DAC projects, there are understandably some concerns about development of the technology,' he told Canada's National Observer. 'But this only makes the industry more focused — and the scrutiny being shown [to projects like Mammoth] is overall a healthy thing and helps all of us in learning as we go in developing DAC technologies.' Trials of a 'first of a kind' technology Where industry observers like Barnard see an expensive technology failing to live up to its hype, De Luna remains optimistic. He said only a 'subsection' of the Mammoth plant was fully commissioned, and despite the low carbon capture rate, the results show the technology works, he said. 'I think the marketing [by Climeworks on its Iceland project] and the attention generated has been a little premature,' said De Luna, who toured the facility during a recent holiday in Iceland. 'This is first-of-a-kind technology, and it's tremendously positive that we know the technology is working,' he said. Jorden Dye, director of the Carbon Dioxide Removal Centre, a Calgary-based think-tank, said the poor results from Iceland were 'nothing more than a bump in the road' and direct air capture could be a viable technology for climate mitigation in the years to come. 'If we are not developing DAC now — working through the prototypes, getting it deployed at ever-larger scale, commercializing it — then we won't have it ready when we need it by mid-century,' he said. Barnard, a former IBM troubleshooter who now consults on energy transition technologies for industrial conglomerates, said DAC 'does work and will work better' as it is developed, but it would not be economically scalable by 2050, if ever. 'DAC is economically non-viable. It's a dead technology walking,' he said. The current uses for captured CO 2 — such as injecting carbon dioxide into aging oil and gas reservoirs to boost pressure and production, as well as into concrete, plastics or biofuels — account for a very small percentage of the 35-45 billion tonnes of CO 2 added to the atmosphere each year, he said. 'So the 'U' in CCUS [carbon capture, utilization and storage], for instance, will never become material," Barnard said. If captured CO 2 isn't being used, he said it only makes sense to build DAC plants where it's possible to store large volumes in geological structures like depleted fossil fuel reservoirs or rock formations deep underground. 'Carbon capture, if it can be made to pencil out at all, only does so in a very limited number of places,' Barnard said. To make sense from a climate and economic point of view, any new carbon removal technology would need to capture around 100 million tonnes annually, according to Barnard's calculations. Achieving this scale would require hundreds of kilometres of so-called 'extractor walls' made of porous materials to absorb CO 2. Nature-based alternatives — from reforesting denuded lands and planting tree farms, to restoring waterways and wetlands — are a better investment, Barnard said, as well as stepping up the electrification of industries and transportation. Canada "well positioned" Despite the economic and technological hurdles, proponents point to DAC's key role in Canada's carbon management strategy to reduce the country's greenhouse gas emissions by 40 to 45 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. 'Canada is incredibly well-positioned to lead in advancing this technology — which will take time to develop, but which we are definitely going to need due to climate change,' Dye said. "Carbon capture, if it can be made to pencil out at all, only does so in a very limited number of places. Canada has two advantages for DAC projects. First, 80 per cent of the country's electricity comes from renewable sources, primarily hydroelectric power that provides the clean, affordable energy that carbon removal plants need. Second, Canada's underground geology can store about 678 gigatonnes of CO 2 — nearly equal to the country's entire emissions in 2023 and more than twice Canada's objective of carbon removal by 2050, according to Carbon Removal Canada. The industry lobby group projects that a full-scale DAC industry could create 300,000 jobs and add $143 billion to Canada's GDP by 2050. 'DAC needs the intersection of renewable power and geologic storage and there are very few places on the planet that have these in the abundance we do here in Canada,' De Luna said. The global DAC market could exceed US $1 trillion by 2050, according to projections from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and McKinsey & Company. Still, the disappointing news from Mammoth could affect investor perceptions of direct air capture projects, said Na'im Merchant, Carbon Removal Canada's CEO. 'There are well over 100 companies around the world that are doing 'something new and difficult for the first time' to develop these technologies,' he told Canada's National Observer. 'Some might outperform expectations, some might underperform, but we haven't yet made the kind of investment needed to help commercialize these technologies to let up now," he said. "I do worry public perception of a project like Mammoth could affect investor perception [of the viability of DAC]." Multiple pilot projects could help to identify scalable technologies worthy of the major investment needed to build carbon removal plants that can benefit from economies of scale, he said. Barnard disagrees. While Wright's Law — which says the cost of manufactured items gets cheaper for every doubling of units produced — explains a 90 per cent plunge in solar panel prices in the past decade, DAC will not see such cost reductions, he said. 'Solar got cheap because [the industry] had billions of units, huge consumer markets, and steep learning curves and [photovoltaic panels] were relatively simple objects to make,' he said. DAC involves industrial-scale infrastructure moving huge volumes of air through kilometres of fan walls. 'Only thousands of units will be manufactured per type of DAC and most of the components are already bog-standard and cost-optimized,' he said. "Creating the right policy environment, so investors feel DAC is sufficiently derisked must ultimately be more important than early results from a first-of-its-kind carbon removal technology like Climeworks" The technology faces other challenges. 'It takes energy to separate dilute CO 2 from air and then separate the CO 2 from whatever captured it — lots of it. There's no magic breakthrough coming,' Barnard said. DAC's development is also a policy puzzle. "Creating the right policy environment, so investors feel DAC is sufficiently derisked must ultimately be more important than early results from a first-of-its-kind carbon removal technology like Climeworks," Merchant said. He sees the US policy retreat as Canada's opportunity to accelerate the development of demonstration-scale plants capturing hundreds of thousands of tonnes annually. Environment and Climate Change Canada spokesperson Samantha Bayard said in an emailed statement that Ottawa was 'still consulting' on the draft offset protocol for using direct air capture that qualifies for federal offset and pricing systems, as well as clean electricity regulations. The federal government supported DAC because it was 'recognized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the International Energy Agency that there is no credible path to net-zero emissions without [these] carbon management technologies," she said. Canadian 'DAC Olympics' Deep Sky Alpha, being built in Innisfail, AB, will play a central role in growing small-scale pilots to mid-size demonstrators. Start-ups such as ReCarbn, Carbyon, Carbon Atlantis, and Skyrenu are already queuing up for construction and commissioning. 'We see Alpha as the DAC Olympics,' De Luna said, adding the project will help identify what technologies work best for Canada's climate and inform investor decisions on whether to invest the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to scale up the technology. Other Canadian projects are moving ahead as well, including a maiden DAC plant in Fermont, northern Quebec, developed by Ottawa-based TerraFixing and partner Tugliq Énergie, a green energy supplier in Montreal. 'This project will take full advantage of Quebec's clean hydroelectricity and huge wind power resource, so it will point the way toward developing more renewables in the province as well as proving our technology on the way to commercialization,' TerraFixing CEO, Vida Gabriel, told Canada's National Observer. The Fermont project, expected to go online later this year, comprises a pair of TerraFixing DAC units powered by wind and backed up by hydro. Each unit aims to capture up to 1,000 tonnes of CO 2 per year. Industrial-scale demand needed The federal government's carbon removal strategy envisions deploying a range of technologies that will spur the development of a 'world class, multi-billion-dollar carbon management sector.' While it concedes that DAC is 'less mature' than CCUS, it believes direct air capture holds 'significant' potential for current climate action plans. Ottawa's carbon removal procurement plans are an important first step, Merchant said, but federal purchases need to increase tenfold now and another tenfold after 2030, given that industrial demand for carbon credits will drive DAC growth. 'We need to create the demand for DAC across government, the corporate sector, from heavy-emitting industry — we won't get to gigatonne-scale [carbon removal] plants without it,' he said. Corporate early adopters are already emerging. Shopify, an online marketplace platform, last year founded a group called Frontier alongside Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, and McKinsey Sustainability, with plans to spend US $925 million on carbon removal. Separately, RBC and Microsoft have signed deals with Deep Sky to buy DAC carbon credits over the next 10 years. Climate change won't wait, however. DAC proponents argue technologies must be developed now to be ready to capture and store legacy emissions in the decades ahead, regardless of how quickly the world decarbonizes. 'We have to factor in 'pipeline warming,'' De Luna said, adding that even if all emissions ceased immediately, global warming would persist for decades and require removing at least a decade's worth of CO 2 already in the atmosphere. 'The criticism of DAC — it's too energy intensive, too costly, too hard to scale up — overlooks this," he said. "Clean energy, yes, it is absolutely what we should do, but there are still emissions to be dealt with and DAC will be a big part of the solution there.' Carbon cost disincentive One issue is that Canadian companies are reluctant to pay the price of carbon credits. The federal carbon levy, launched at $20 per tonne in 2019, rises $15 annually and is expected to reach $170 per tonne by 2030. But De Luna believes 'over time this willingness to pay will change' as carbon removal gets cheaper and companies face intensifying pressure to decarbonize. Today, the cost of pulling CO 2 from the atmosphere is around US $1,000/tonne — what Climeworks has paid to capture emissions at its Mammoth facility. The Swiss company has said its Generation 3 technology aimed to reduce costs to US $250-350/tonne of CO 2 captured, and achieve a total cost of US $400-600/tonne removed by 2030. Deep Sky sees a route over the next three to five years to reduce their costs to $400/tonne and then 'in the 2030s' closer to $200/tonne. 'We are never going to get the cost down to as low a level as we need if we don't start building now,' said De Luna. 'We are never going to get the cost down to as low a level as we need if we don't start building now." 'We are already seeing precipitous cost reductions between the technologies we are piloting at Alpha and the next-generation technologies that we are evaluating for our next projects there," he added. Barnard argues climate action investments by governments and industry should be directed solely at clean energy — solar power, battery technologies and electric vehicles. 'If we electrify as fast as we might, we will not have anywhere near the demand for technologies like DAC,' he said. 'DAC is not going to help us in Canada or on this planet with our 2050 emissions reduction targets. Renewables, led by solar and batteries, will.' 'Co-opted' by Big Oil? Without wider public support, Merchant warned, DAC risked becoming a 'fig leaf' that allows fossil fuel companies to continue business as usual. US oil giant Occidental is an example of this concern. Its Stratos facility in Texas will be the world's largest DAC plant, capturing 500,000 tonnes of CO2 yearly and, according to the company, help preserve its core oil and gas business. 'This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it's going to be very much needed,' Occidental CEO Vicki Hollub told a Houston oil and gas conference in 2023. Investor sentiment for DAC is also highly dynamic, with feverish interest in the technology in the early 2020s giving way to greater investor wariness. That could shift again. 'The carbon removal investor 'gold rush' we saw a few years ago is over. This is a time of stress for the sector,' Gabriel said. 'Canada can seize the opportunity to rapidly advance DAC and move past this phase.' DAC proponents want to reframe the conversation about climate change and the role that carbon removal technologies can play in reducing emissions along with other mitigation efforts. As the climate crisis deepens, 'we will realize we didn't do enough to develop carbon removal technologies so that we have the tools we need to help ourselves," Merchant said. De Luna said he hoped 'ingenuity and innovation' would get the energy transition back on track and DAC could be part of the climate action solution. "With climate change, things are going to get worse before they get better. But will we be able to make things better with DAC and other carbon removal technologies? Yes, absolutely.'
The Citizen
6 days ago
- The Citizen
Help find Hennie: Family offers monetary reward for information
POLOKWANE – A reward of R5 000 is being offered to anyone with reliable information that can lead to the whereabouts of Hendrick 'Hennie' van Zyl (32). Van Zyl left his home in Polokwane on June 7 and was en route to the Greenery Shopping Centre at the time of his disappearance. Read more: Polokwane police search for missing man Hendrick van Zyl This is according to his cousin, Chris Barnard, who told the Polokwane Review-Observer that the family hopes the monetary reward will increase the chances of his cousin being found, as he has been missing for seven days now. At around 13:00 on June 7, van Zyl informed his grandparents that he would walk to the shopping center and return in about 30 minutes but never made it home. This prompted the family to file a missing person's docket three days later at the Polokwane Police Station. Van Zyl left home dressed in a green check shirt, a brownish jacket, blue jeans and black sneakers, the family representative confirmed. Barnard said Van Zyl started working as a fleet manager for a popular vehicle tracking company this June and has also worked for a Johannesburg-based medical facility. 'He is a kind soul but he needs his family, as his aunt, my mother, passed away three months ago, which has had an impact on him very much like the rest of the family,' Barnard said. Polokwane Community-Policing Forum chairperson Rudolph Phaswana said photos of Van Zyl were posted across many local community social media platforms with no results. Those with information are requested to contact the investigating officer Sgt Mokgadi Molope on 082 728 9831, the Crime Stop number on 08600 10111 or via the MySAPSApp. At Caxton, we employ humans to generate daily fresh news, not AI intervention. Happy reading!
Indianapolis Star
13-06-2025
- Business
- Indianapolis Star
Enlivex Therapeutics and Foremost Clean Energy Interviews to Air on the RedChip Small Stocks, Big Money(TM) Show on Bloomberg TV
ORLANDO, FL / ACCESS Newswire RedChip Companies will air interviews with Enlivex Therapeutics (NASDAQ:ENLV) and Foremost Clean Energy (Nasdaq:FMST) on the RedChip Small Stocks, Big Money™ show, a sponsored program on Bloomberg TV this Saturday, June 14, at 7 p.m. Eastern Time (ET). Bloomberg TV is available in an estimated 73 million homes across the U.S. Access the interviews in their entirety at: In an exclusive interview, Oren Hershkovitz, CEO of Enlivex Therapeutics, appears on the RedChip Small Stocks Big Money™ show on Bloomberg TV to provide a corporate update. Enlivex is pioneering macrophage reprogramming immunotherapy with its Allocetra™ platform, a universal, off-the-shelf cell therapy designed to reprogram macrophages into their homeostatic state. This innovative approach aims to address critical medical challenges, including debilitating diseases like osteoarthritis. In 2024, the company achieved a significant milestone with the initiation of a multi-country, randomize, double -blind, placebo-controlled Phase I/II trial evaluating Allocetra™ in up to 160 patients with moderate to severe knee osteoarthritis. With promising data from the open-label Phase 1 stage of the trial the company had completed the enrollment of 134 patients for the Phase 2 stage and expecting knee osteoarthritis key data by August 2025, potentially paving the way for future therapeutic breakthroughs. Jason Barnard, President and CEO of Foremost Clean Energy, appears on the RedChip Small Stocks Big Money™ show on Bloomberg TV to share the company's strategic vision for advancing uranium exploration in the world-renowned Athabasca Basin. Barnard details Foremost's expansive portfolio of 10 uranium properties spanning over 330,000 acres, including high-priority drill targets at Hatchet Lake and Murphy Lake South, where recent assays confirm strong mineralization and discovery potential. He also discusses the company's transformational partnership with Denison Mines, which brings technical, financial, and strategic backing from a C$2.9 billion uranium leader with a 19.13% equity stake in Foremost. With nuclear energy gaining momentum as a critical clean power source – and global pledges to triple capacity by 2050 – Foremost is uniquely positioned to benefit from structural supply deficits and surging demand. Barnard highlights the company's fully funded 2025 exploration program, robust institutional backing, and dual exposure to uranium and lithium as key drivers of long-term shareholder value. ENLV and FMST are clients of RedChip Companies. Please read our full disclosure at About Enlivex Therapeutics Enlivex is a clinical stage macrophage reprogramming immunotherapy company developing Allocetra™, a universal, off-the-shelf cell therapy designed to reprogram macrophages into their homeostatic state. Resetting non-homeostatic macrophages into their homeostatic state is critical for immune system rebalancing and resolution of life-threatening conditions. For more information, visit About Foremost Clean Energy Foremost Clean Energy Ltd. (NASDAQ:FMST)(CSE:FAT)(WKN:A3DCC8) is a rapidly growing North American uranium and lithium exploration company. The Company holds an option to earn up to a 70% interest in 10 prospective uranium properties (with the exception of the Hatchet Lake, where Foremost is able to earn up to 51%), spanning over 330,000 acres in the prolific, uranium-rich Athabasca Basin region of northern Saskatchewan. As the demand for carbon-free energy continues to accelerate, domestically mined uranium and lithium are poised for dynamic growth, playing an important role in the future of clean energy. Foremost's uranium projects are at different stages of exploration, from grassroots to those with significant historical exploration and drill-ready targets. The Company's mission is to make significant discoveries alongside and in collaboration with Denison through systematic and disciplined exploration programs. Foremost also has a portfolio of lithium projects at varying stages of development, which are located across 55,000+ acres in Manitoba and Quebec. For further information, please visit the Company's website at About RedChip Companies RedChip Companies, an Inc. 5000 company, is an international investor relations, media, and research firm focused on microcap and small-cap companies. For 33 years, RedChip has delivered concrete, measurable results for its clients. Our newsletter, Small Stocks, Big Money™, is delivered online weekly to 60,000 investors. RedChip has developed the most comprehensive service platform in the industry for microcap and small-cap companies. These services include the following: a worldwide distribution network for its stock research; retail and institutional roadshows in major U.S. cities; outbound marketing to stock brokers, RIAs, institutions, and family offices; a digital media investor relations platform that has generated millions of unique investor views; investor webinars and group calls; a television show, Small Stocks, Big Money™, which airs weekly on Bloomberg US; TV commercials in local and national markets; corporate and product videos; website design; and traditional investor relation services, which include press release writing, development of investor presentations, quarterly conference call script writing, strategic consulting, capital raising, and more. RedChip also offers RedChat™, a proprietary AI-powered chatbot that analyzes SEC filings and corporate disclosures for all Nasdaq and NYSE-listed companies, giving investors instant, on-demand insights. To learn more about RedChip's products and services, please visit: 'Discovering Tomorrow's Blue Chips Today'™ Follow RedChip on LinkedIn: Follow RedChip on Facebook: Follow RedChip on Instagram: Follow RedChip on Twitter: Follow RedChip on YouTube: Follow RedChip on Rumble: Subscribe to our Mailing List: Contact: Dave Gentry RedChip Companies Inc. 1-407-644-4256 info@ SOURCE: RedChip Companies, Inc. View the original press release on ACCESS Newswire
