Building a modern legacy of corporate and social responsibility

QUESTIONS + ANSWERS

Businesswoman, philanthropist, educator, and entertainer Revani “Rani” Puranik discusses the convergence of sustainability and work ethos as part of the Energy Transition. Photo courtesy of ranipuranik.com

With a mind for business and a passion for people, one woman leads the legacy her family trailblazed in corporate social responsibility.

Revani “Rani” Puranik, named successor for the CEO of Worldwide Oilfield Machine (“WOM”) and current Chair of the Puranik Foundation, continues the institutions her parents created with the same emphasis on mindfulness, sustainability, and opportunity for all.

In addition to extending the reach of WOM’s 3,000+ employees across 10 countries–and counting–Puranik shapes future leaders and innovators of energy through The Energy Project, a program launched in 2020 by the foundation to support young minds tackling environmental challenges for sustainable development across five sectors: Alternative Power Generation, Sustainable Consumption, Waste Management, Urban Design, and Water Sustainability.

In her upcoming book, Seven Letters to My Daughters, scheduled for release on May 24^th, Puranik shares lessons in love, leadership, and legacy carved out of distinct seven-year periods of her life. And if inspiring the next generation and writing a book weren’t enough, Puranik has her eyes set on building a more holistic charter school in collaboration with Baylor College of Medicine.

With just a moment to spare before she launches a new initiative, Puranik met with EnergyCapitalHTX to discuss what Energy Transition looks like from her perspective.

EnergyCapitalHTX: You’ve had an interesting career, with one foot in something very altruistic, and the other in energy–which has a reputation for being… not so altruistic, let’s say. How did you get here?

Rani Puranik: First, I'll tell you that none of it, none of it, was planned.

The 1st 17 years of my life, I lived in Houston. I went to Lamar high school thinking I was going to be an engineer. But I was on a robust and dedicated journey singing and dancing, too. I was always very active and engaged in my heritage that way.

I went to India after I graduated from high school and stayed in my parents’ vacation home, which was next to a poverty-stricken area. All I thought was, “hey, how can I help?”

And that “how can I help?“ has always turned into larger projects than I ever imagined. Before long, I was running an after-school dance program for 60 kids. But it was more than dance. These girls needed a safe space to express themselves.

EC: How did you end up back in Houston?

RP: Well, life happens. I came to Houston on a one-way ticket with $200 in my pocket. My dad was still living here in Houston, running Worldwide Machine, so I volunteered in his company to keep busy.

Finally, in 2012, I realized I’m never going to be an engineer; I graduated from Rice with an MBA in finance in 2014. And then I just dedicated my entire life to WOM, my two girls, and the Puranik Foundation my mother started when I was in India.

EC: On one hand, you're encouraging innovation around building a sustainable environment with Puranik Foundation. And with WOM, you provide offshore equipment, services, and expertise. Do you see those concepts blending as part of the energy transition?

RP: One of the core principles of WOM is “stay curious.” We have something called the Idea Factory; sometimes we get ideas that are related to sustainability and alternative energies. The people that come up with these solutions and methods are deeply involved from start to finish as part of our research and development team.

We’ve currently got a patent on a frac valve that is so much healthier for the environment. There’s no disposal of grease, there’s much less use of water and chemicals injected because of the way our frac valve operates, and the pressures and temperatures it can sustain and withhold.

We’re also looking at design, revisiting processes and asking, “how can we make this more efficient?” How can we reduce not just the emissions, but the use of oils and liquids and fuels with process improvements and enhancements for the equipment that we're manufacturing?

EC: And for the foundation?

RP: What's important for me is to understand what energy is, why it's needed, and how we can tap into it from all sources.

If younger minds can think of things like some of the students in this year’s cohort of The Energy Project– things like using human movement to not just capture, but transform, energy–we're headed in the right direction.

EC: The energy transition is increasingly branded as a transition in mindset more than anything. Mindfulness is a core tenet of your foundation, is it a part of the nine core principles of WOM you mentioned?

RP: Absolutely. I've been called an empathetic leader because I listen. And I say the first part of listening is receiving. When you receive information, you're empowering yourself with knowledge and information being shared by someone else for you. And then you can offer a direction, a guide, or just a helping hand.

There's definitely a shift going on where people not just want to be heard, but there are leaders and organizations who understand the value and the importance of it. We can't do things on our own.

EC: You emphasize collaboration and human connectivity often, which are vital components of the sustainability economy. Can you elaborate on how your organizations embody these concepts?

RP: I made up the “earn to return” philosophy because I saw it in my own parents and I said, I've been given very valuable resources and I've been given a talent to connect people. And if together, that can create something beautiful to really enhance the abundance of resources and create stable pathways for people in their livelihoods, then that's my purpose and that's what I'm going to do.

And in the process, yeah, we make great sales, great profits. But then the profits have to be returned back to our local communities and our people and our kids so that they end up having stable livelihoods for their future. For me, that was always the driving force, and it still is.

But I'll tell you again, none of it was planned. None.

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Houston American Energy shares details on Baytown recycling facility, new innovation center

coming soon

Houston American Energy Corp. (NYSE: HUSA) plans to break ground on its new advanced recycling facility in the Cedar Port Industrial Park in Q4, the company shared in an announcement this week.

The company acquired a 25-acre, $8.5 million site for development in July from TGS Cedar Port Partners, which handles approximately 5 billion pounds of plastic resin annually. HUSA also plans to build the Abundia Innovation Center on the site.

HUSA named Houston-based Corvus Construction Company the design and construction partner on both projects.

“The site at Cedar Port is in the largest master-planned rail and barge served industrial park in the United States with direct access to the Houston Ship Channel and the Port of Houston,” Ed Gillespie, CEO of HUSA, said in a news release. “It provides robust logistical advantages for the transportation of both feedstock and our low-carbon drop-in fuels and chemical products. Critically, the region has a deep pool of engineering and operations talent. HUSA looks forward to working with local communities and adding economic growth in the Gulf Coast region.”

The new advanced recycling facility will convert plastic waste into pyrolysis oil and will serve as a hub for a five-year development plan designed to scale production capacity.

The facility will be built around New York-based Abundia Global Impact Group LLC’s technologies and proprietary pyrolysis process, which converts plastic and certified biomass waste into high-quality renewable fuels.

HUSA acquired AGIG this summer. At the time, the combined company shared that it planned to serve a multi-billion-dollar global demand for renewable fuels, Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) and recycled chemical feedstocks.

The Abundia Innovation Center is planned to serve as a state-of-the-art research and development facility for the renewable energy sector, aiding in the commercial and technical validation of new technologies. HUSA previously announced that Nexus PMG, also based in Houston, will provide strategic support and guidance in the development of the innovation hub.

According to HUSA, the recycling facility and innovation center will “create the foundation for HUSA’s long-term vision to be a leader in the low-carbon fuels sector by driving collaborative innovation.”

UH researchers make breakthrough in cutting carbon capture costs

Carbon breakthrough

A team of researchers at the University of Houston has made two breakthroughs in addressing climate change and potentially reducing the cost of capturing harmful emissions from power plants.

Led by Professor Mim Rahimi at UH’s Cullen College of Engineering, the team released two significant publications that made significant strides relating to carbon capture processes. The first, published in Nature Communications, introduced a membraneless electrochemical process that cuts energy requirements and costs for amine-based carbon dioxide capture during the acid gas sweetening process. Another, featured on the cover of ES&T Engineering, demonstrated a vanadium redox flow system capable of both capturing carbon and storing renewable energy.

“These publications reflect our group’s commitment to fundamental electrochemical innovation and real-world applicability,” Rahimi said in a news release. “From membraneless systems to scalable flow systems, we’re charting pathways to decarbonize hard-to-abate sectors and support the transition to a low-carbon economy.”

According to the researchers, the “A Membraneless Electrochemically Mediated Amine Regeneration for Carbon Capture” research paper marked the beginning of the team’s first focus. The research examined the replacement of costly ion-exchange membranes with gas diffusion electrodes. They found that the membranes were the most expensive part of the system, and they were also a major cause of performance issues and high maintenance costs.

The researchers achieved more than 90 percent CO2 removal (nearly 50 percent more than traditional approaches) by engineering the gas diffusion electrodes. According to PhD student and co-author of the paper Ahmad Hassan, the capture costs approximately $70 per metric ton of CO2, which is competitive with other innovative scrubbing techniques.

“By removing the membrane and the associated hardware, we’ve streamlined the EMAR workflow and dramatically cut energy use,” Hassan said in the news release. “This opens the door to retrofitting existing industrial exhaust systems with a compact, low-cost carbon capture module.”

The second breakthrough, published by PhD student Mohsen Afshari, displayed a reversible flow battery architecture that absorbs CO2 during charging and releases it upon discharge. The results suggested that the technology could potentially provide carbon removal and grid balancing when used with intermittent renewables, such as solar or wind power.

“Integrating carbon capture directly into a redox flow battery lets us tackle two challenges in one device,” Afshari said in the release. “Our front-cover feature highlights its potential to smooth out renewable generation while sequestering CO2.”

As electric bills rise, evidence mounts that data centers share blame

Data Talk

Amid rising electric bills, states are under pressure to insulate regular household and business ratepayers from the costs of feeding Big Tech's energy-hungry data centers.

It's not clear that any state has a solution and the actual effect of data centers on electricity bills is difficult to pin down. Some critics question whether states have the spine to take a hard line against tech behemoths like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta.

But more than a dozen states have begun taking steps as data centers drive a rapid build-out of power plants and transmission lines.

That has meant pressuring the nation's biggest power grid operator to clamp down on price increases, studying the effect of data centers on electricity bills or pushing data center owners to pay a larger share of local transmission costs.

Rising power bills are “something legislators have been hearing a lot about. It’s something we’ve been hearing a lot about. More people are speaking out at the public utility commission in the past year than I’ve ever seen before,” said Charlotte Shuff of the Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board, a consumer advocacy group. “There’s a massive outcry.”

Not the typical electric customer

Some data centers could require more electricity than cities the size of Pittsburgh, Cleveland or New Orleans, and make huge factories look tiny by comparison. That's pushing policymakers to rethink a system that, historically, has spread transmission costs among classes of consumers that are proportional to electricity use.

“A lot of this infrastructure, billions of dollars of it, is being built just for a few customers and a few facilities and these happen to be the wealthiest companies in the world,” said Ari Peskoe, who directs the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard University. “I think some of the fundamental assumptions behind all this just kind of breaks down.”

A fix, Peskoe said, is a “can of worms" that pits ratepayer classes against one another.

Some officials downplay the role of data centers in pushing up electric bills.

Tricia Pridemore, who sits on Georgia’s Public Service Commission and is president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, pointed to an already tightened electricity supply and increasing costs for power lines, utility poles, transformers and generators as utilities replace aging equipment or harden it against extreme weather.

The data centers needed to accommodate the artificial intelligence boom are still in the regulatory planning stages, Pridemore said, and the Data Center Coalition, which represents Big Tech firms and data center developers, has said its members are committed to paying their fair share.

But growing evidence suggests that the electricity bills of some Americans are rising to subsidize the massive energy needs of Big Tech as the U.S. competes in a race against China for artificial intelligence superiority.

Data and analytics firm Wood Mackenzie published a report in recent weeks that suggested 20 proposed or effective specialized rates for data centers in 16 states it studied aren’t nearly enough to cover the cost of a new natural gas power plant.

In other words, unless utilities negotiate higher specialized rates, other ratepayer classes — residential, commercial and industrial — are likely paying for data center power needs.

Meanwhile, Monitoring Analytics, the independent market watchdog for the mid-Atlantic grid, produced research in June showing that 70% — or $9.3 billion — of last year's increased electricity cost was the result of data center demand.

States are responding

Last year, five governors led by Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro began pushing back against power prices set by the mid-Atlantic grid operator, PJM Interconnection, after that amount spiked nearly sevenfold. They warned of customers “paying billions more than is necessary.”

PJM has yet to propose ways to guarantee that data centers pay their freight, but Monitoring Analytics is floating the idea that data centers should be required to procure their own power.

In a filing last month, it said that would avoid a "massive wealth transfer” from average people to tech companies.

At least a dozen states are eyeing ways to make data centers pay higher local transmission costs.

In Oregon, a data center hot spot, lawmakers passed legislation in June ordering state utility regulators to develop new — presumably higher — power rates for data centers.

The Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board says there is clear evidence that costs to serve data centers are being spread across all customers — at a time when some electric bills there are up 50% over the past four years and utilities are disconnecting more people than ever.

New Jersey’s governor signed legislation last month commissioning state utility regulators to study whether ratepayers are being hit with “unreasonable rate increases” to connect data centers and to develop a specialized rate to charge data centers.

In some other states, like Texas and Utah, governors and lawmakers are trying to avoid a supply-and-demand crisis that leaves ratepayers on the hook — or in the dark.

Doubts about states protecting ratepayers

In Indiana, state utility regulators approved a settlement between Indiana Michigan Power Co., Amazon, Google, Microsoft and consumer advocates that set parameters for data center payments for service.

Kerwin Olsen, of the Citizens Action Council of Indiana, a consumer advocacy group, signed the settlement and called it a “pretty good deal” that contained more consumer protections than what state lawmakers passed.

But, he said, state law doesn't force large power users like data centers to publicly reveal their electric usage, so pinning down whether they're paying their fair share of transmission costs "will be a challenge.”

In a March report, the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard University questioned the motivation of utilities and regulators to shield ratepayers from footing the cost of electricity for data centers.

Both utilities and states have incentives to attract big customers like data centers, it said.

To do it, utilities — which must get their rates approved by regulators — can offer “special deals to favored customers” like a data center and effectively shift the costs of those discounts to regular ratepayers, the authors wrote. Many state laws can shield disclosure of those rates, they said.

In Pennsylvania, an emerging data center hot spot, the state utility commission is drafting a model rate structure for utilities to consider adopting. An overarching goal is to get data center developers to put their money where their mouth is.

“We’re talking about real transmission upgrades, potentially hundreds of millions of dollars,” commission chairman Stephen DeFrank said. “And that’s what you don’t want the ratepayer to get stuck paying for."

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