NAE Clean & Environmental Technology Newsletter – Week Ended 4/16/2021 Greenland Technologies reported preliminary revenue that doubled Y/Y. The unit sales of the Company's transmission boxes also doubled in the Q1, as compared to a year ago, mainly due to continued growth led by the reopening and rebound of the broader economy, along with the Company's successful introduction of new products. Cleveland-Cliffs says it reached a tentative agreement with the United Steelworkers for a new 53-month labor contract covering 300 USW-represented workers at the Mansfield Works in Ohio. The agreement is pending ratification by USW local union memberships. Workers returned to Mansfield Works earlier this year after a bitter three-year lockout in which replacement workers kept the plant running. Beyond Meat announced a significant product distribution expansion within thousands of European retail locations this spring. The new product distribution in Europe includes Sainsbury's nearly doubling its distribution of the Beyond Burger nationwide in the U.K. and the company expanding its product offerings in over 1K new German retail stores through Kaufland, Tegut, Famila and Real. Ingersoll Rand agreed to sell its Specialty Vehicle Technologies segment to the Platinum Equity private equity firm for 1.68B USD. Ingersoll Rand says the sale materially reduces net leverage to less than 1x and provides significant capital flexibility. The company stated that the divestiture achieved a premium valuation for the leader in the golf, commercial, and consumer low-speed vehicle market. Total says it expects first crude exports from the long-delayed Lake Albert project by 2025, after key final agreements needed to develop two oil fields in Uganda and a pipeline to Tanzania were signed. Total and partner CNOOC say they will kickstart construction of a 3.5B USD, 230K bbl/day crude pipeline to the Tanzanian port of Tanga on the Indian Ocean to help ship crude from fields in western Uganda to international markets. Worldwide semiconductor revenue was up 10.4% on the year in 2020, driven by memory, GPUs, and 5G chipsets, according to new Gartner data. Gartner stated: memory, GPU, and 5G chipsets led semiconductor growth, driven by hyperscale, PC, ultramobile, and 5G handset end-market demand, while automotive and industrial electronics suffered due to lower spending or a pause in spending owing to COVID-19. Intel remained the top semiconductor vendor by revenue with a 7.4% Y/Y sales growth due to strength in the core client and server CPU business. Navigator Holdings says it signed a non-binding letter of intent with Naviera Ultranav Limitada to merge Ultragas ApS' fleet and business activities with its own operations, in a deal that would unite two gas shipping companies with a combined fleet of 56 vessels. The companies say the combined entity would have an aggregate net asset value of 1.3B USD, based primarily upon desktop appraisals by maritime brokers. Eos Energy announced booked orders from key customers, including Hecate Energy, Azure Power, and ZGlobal. This is to meet increased demand for energy storage in critical markets such as Texas, California and India. The company’s order backlog has grown to approximately 30M USD, which includes more than 20 orders totaling 107 MWh over the past six months. Berry Petroleum reported upbeat select preliminary results, generated by improving production, lower operating costs, and rising crude oil prices. The company expects total production to be in the range of 27,000 boe/d to 27,200 boe/d, with 23,800 bbl/d to 24,000 bbl/d of oil production, representing a 3% and 2% increase in oil and total production, sequentially. Capital expenditures are seen between 24M USD and 26M USD, primarily for drilling 45 development wells in California. Nvidia unveiled eight new Ampere-based GPUs for artists, designers, and engineers and unveils its next-generation processor for autonomous vehicles. The new RTX GPU products actually bring Nvidia's RTX A5000, A4000, A3000, and A2000 workstation processors to desktops and laptops. The desktop versions of the RTX A5000 and A4000 can power AI graphics and real-time rendering performance up to 2x faster than the previous generation. Nvidia also introduces two Tensor Core data center GPUs (A10, A16), which offer up to 2.5x the virtual workspace performance for designers and up to 2x user density with lower cost of ownership and enhanced virtual desktop experience over the previous generation, respectively. The new Nvidia Drive Atlan is an AI-enabled processor for autonomous vehicles that can deliver more than 1,000 trillion operations per second and targets the 2025 vehicle models from automaker partners. The Drive Atlan system-on-a-chip combines Nvidia's next-gen GPU architecture, new Arm CPU cores, and deep learning and computer vision architectures. The SoC has a BlueField data processing unit that offers data center-grade advanced networking, storage, and security for complex compute and AI workloads. Intel is in talks to manufacture automotive chips to help alleviate the global chip shortage. According to a Reuters interview with CEO Pat Gelsinger, Intel is talking to automotive chipmakers to produce those chips within Intel's factory network with the goal of reaching chip production within six to nine months. Gelsinger was among the semiconductor and automotive executives meeting with the Biden administration to discuss domestic production and the global shortage. Diamondback Energy reported preliminary Q1 production of 307.4K boe/day at an average price of 42.36 USD/boe, including a 4.8% Q/Q increase in oil production to 84.2K bbl/day at 56.94 USD/bbl. The company revised its production guidance for the full year to account for the QEP acquisition, seeing 360K-370K boe/day overall vs. 308K-325K boe/day prior guidance, as well as FY 2021 capital spending of 1.6B-1.75B USD, raised from 1.35B-1.55B USD previously. The company said it continues to see no need to grow oil production into an artificially undersupplied market, and instead plans to generate free cash flow to pay its dividend and pay down debt. New York’s state pension fund said that it plans to sell of 7M USD worth of securities in six Canadian oil sands companies and not make future investments in them including: Imperial Oil, Canadian Natural Resources, Cenovus Energy, MEG Energy, Athabasca Oil, and Husky Energy. State comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said the fund is pulling out of companies that have not shown viable plans to adapt to a low carbon future. TC Energy is reportedly considering wind power investments to electrify its pipelines in the U.S., saying it has requested information from 100 renewable development companies for potential contracts or investment opportunities in wind energy projects that could generate up to 2.5M MWh/year. BP sold a 49% stake in its US transportation and delivery affiliate to investment firm Sixth Street for 700M USD. The sale of the stake in BP Pipelines, which includes pipelines tied to Whiting, the company's largest refinery, will form the basis of a joint venture for future midstream investments. BP’s new Argos semi-submersible floating production platform and the centerpiece of its 9B USD Mad Dog 2 project arrived in the US near Corpus Christi on the Texas Gulf coast after a 16K mile journey from South Korea. As tall as a 27-story building and with a deck the size of a football field, Argos is one of BP's largest oil production platforms and the company's fifth in the Gulf of Mexico and first addition since 2008, before the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in 2010. Continental Resources says February's extreme weather nicked Q1 total production by 6K boe/day, and it now expects oil production for the period to come in at 152K bbl/day with natural gas output averaging 935M cf/day. Continental also forecasts Q2 production of 160K-165K bbl/day of oil and 920M-940M cf/day of natural gas. Continental also says it has cut its net debt to 4.88B USD, reflecting a significant reduction from year-end 2020, and it now expects to reduce total debt to 4B USD or less by year-end 2021. LG Electronics joint venture with Magna International is said to be very near signing contracts with Apple to build electric vehicles. LG Magna e-Powertrain is near signing contracts with Apple to handle initial volume production of Apple EVs, according to a Korea Times report, which cites a source familiar. Once an agreement is reached, LG Electronics and Magna will jointly establish details for the production of the Apple EV, a prototype of which will be teased sometime in early 2024, according to the report. Compass Minerals says Q1 winter weather activity in its North American-served market was less than average, resulting in a slightly below average winter for the full season ended in March, but it sold 4.6M tons of highway deicing salt products in Q1 vs. 3.1M tons in the year-ago quarter. Compass says 11 representative cities in the primary North American highway deicing service area reported 100 snow events during Q1, 8% below the 10-year average but 18% above the prior-year quarter. Chevron and Honeywell announced the start-up of what they say is the world’s first commercial scale ISOALKY process unit that utilizes ionic liquids to produce alkylate used to increase octane in motor fuels. The companies say the technology, first used in Chevron's Salt Lake City refinery, is designed to meet the refining industry's needs for a cost- effective alternative to conventional liquid acid systems that offers process safety advantages.