Year in Review - Letter by Avatar CEO & Co-Founder, Kevin Krausert

Avatar at One Year Old: An Unstoppable Movement   

From the desk of Kevin Krausert, CEO & Co-Founder, Avatar Innovations

Shortly before Christmas last year, some of the most senior executives and board members of Canada’s top energy, financial and academic institutions met for a fateful afternoon in the Calgary Petroleum Club.

Each of us had just spent several months on the front lines managing a fundamentally disrupted energy market. The indicators and metrics of the challenge in front of us were immense: an absence of risk capital, an exodus of institutional capital, stubbornly difficult processes bringing new carbon tech to market and a disengaged workforce questioning the future of our industry.

But we gathered there that fateful day because we shared a common purpose: we chose hope over fear, unity over discord.

How could we empower the leaders of tomorrow to build the future they want to live in? How could we de-risk new carbon tech to bring to market? How could we ensure the oil and gas industry is a meaningful and powerful partner in the planet’s climate ambitions?

A vision and a plan, nothing short of audacious, was born.

The fulcrum of this vision – Avatar Innovations Inc. - has become, in twelve short months, not just an engine for real energy transition value creation, but an unstoppable movement of which I am just beginning to understand its full implications for global transformation.

And 600 applications, 270 participants, 44 breakthrough carbon tech solutions, 17 companies, 4 countries and a partnership with the Elon Musk Foundation’s $100M Carbon Removal XPRIZE later, Avatar is ready to enter 2022 full of steam, ready to deliver and driven by the most capable and dynamic team of energy leaders Canada has ever assembled.

To those who say the future of oil and gas is in doubt, let this be their answer. To those who say the oil and gas sector is not a meaningful and powerful partner in the energy transition, let this be their answer.

Now we stand ready to launch Avatar 2022 with registrations open for the next cohort. Privileged to have the support of the same global energy majors who believed in the dream of Avatar that fateful day a year ago. Now joined by many new partners – not the least of which is Boeing’s new venture capital joint venture, AEI HorizonX - singularly focused on delivering this year new value and industry needed and validated technologies, solutions and leaders.

Accomplishments like this past year don’t happen very often. They were only possible because of the incredible community that has made Avatar possible – the hundreds of emerging leaders who committed themselves to this vision the past year.

They exemplified the secret of Avatar: Greatness is never a given. It must be earned.

The Avatar journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things, who have carried us up this long, rugged road towards success and turned this audacious vision called Avatar into reality.

The time for standing pat or protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions has well passed.

For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the world and the energy transition calls for action, bold and swift. New technologies are needed. New opportunities are ready. Avatar has never been more ready to deliver.

While there are certainly some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that the system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what Avatar has already accomplished; what empowered men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them - that the stale political arguments of energy that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.

The question we ask today is not whether the energy transition is moving too fast or too slow, but whether it works - whether it empowers the leaders of tomorrow, whether it lowers emissions enough to reach a net-zero 2050, whether it creates value.

This is Avatar 2022.

What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of everyone in the energy industry - that we have duties to ourselves, to each other, and to the world. Duties that we cannot grudgingly accept, but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to an incredible task.

The world depends on us. Now it’s up to us. The table is set.

There is a new energy future. We’re building it. Hold onto your seats. This is Avatar 2022.