Fortis mulls carbon fund refocus
13 January, 2010
Fortis Bank Netherlands is considering changing the focus of its planned carbon fund, Carbon Finance has learned.
Last September, the bank’s global head of energy and commodities Seb Walhain said that he was preparing a €1 billion ($1.5 billion) carbon fund, to invest in emissions reduction projects that would generate carbon credits post-2012. But with so much uncertainty over the likely size and shape of the carbon market from 2013, Walhain said the fund may shift its focus to clean energy.
“We don’t know what credits people will need post-2012,” he explained. “The big business is generating credits for post-2012 ... but I don’t know where.”
World leaders failed forge a new legally-binding climate change agreement at UN talks in Copenhagen last month, while the EU is yet to finalise its offset credit rules for Phase III of its emissions trading scheme, which runs from 2013-20 and which is thus far the only confirmed source of demand for international carbon credits post-2012.
Walhain said that a clean energy fund is less reliant on a market-based price signal and more on government subsidies. He added that Fortis has already started looking at this refocus, and the fund may be launched at the end of this quarter.
The bank is talking to potential investors, chiefly Dutch pension funds, Walhain said, but he declined to specify which ones.
The carbon fund was intended to use a mix of outside investment and Fortis’ own cash.
Fortis Bank was one of the first investment banks to enter the carbon market, but it lost its portfolio to France’s BNP Paribas, which bought the bank’s Belgian assets when the bank was broken up and part-nationalised following the global financial crisis, while the Dutch arm retained the carbon team.
