Cynthia (CJ) Warner is President and Chief Executive Officer for Renewable Energy Group, Inc. (REG) and is a member of the board of directors.
For more than 35 years, Ms. Warner has held executive positions in the energy sector in operations, business development, strategy, environment, health, and safety. Prior to REG, Ms. Warner was Executive Vice President, Operations for Andeavor.
She oversaw Andeavor’s refining, logistics, and environment, health, safety and security groups. Ms. Warner was also Andeavor’s Executive Vice President, Strategy and Business Development, where she led the company’s strategic growth initiatives.
She joined the company in 2019, bringing more than 30 years of experience in energy, oil refining and marketing, and related technology development.
Ms. Warner recently was named a Fortune 2020 Businessperson of the Year.
She also is a member of the board of directors for IDEX Corporation and a member of the board of directors for Sempra Energy. She is a member of the National Petroleum Council as well as the Board of Visitors of the Vanderbilt University School of Engineering.
In this 3,180 word interview, exclusively in the Wall Street Transcript, Ms. Warner explains how she is managing the “Bernie’s Mittens” of the ESG stocks:
“You’re seeing a lot of heightened interest in the investment community in ESG — environmental, social and governance — types of investments.
And REG sits right at the heart of ESG. That’s what we’re really all about. And because we’re on a growth trajectory and because the demand for our product and the focus on what it is that we do is increasing, there’s a really nice confluence between investor desire for finding better ESG investments and coming to companies like REG. And we feel we have a good solution for them.”
The Bernie’s Mittens of stocks has some serious science backing its development:
“We take waste products of biological oils, either used cooking oil, like the types of oils that would be produced from Burger King or Kentucky Fried Chicken.
We also take fats, oils, and tallows from renderers. We do take some refined vegetable oil as well, and then a waste product from the ethanol production process called distillers corn oil; it’s inedible corn oil.
All of those materials can be converted through transesterification to produce biodiesel, or through hydrodeoxygenation to produce renewable diesel.
Both of those processes produce a high-quality diesel fuel that can be used in any diesel engine and it’s much lower carbon than petroleum diesel. In fact, using biodiesel reduces carbon by over 86% versus using ULSD, ultra-low sulfur diesel, or petroleum diesel.
So it’s a very nice way to reduce carbon and reduce waste at the same time and close the carbon cycle. We’ve been doing this for over 20 years and continuously improve the technology.
And we’re very excited about the prospects for the future because the technology is still quite young. And we know that we still have improvements that we are going to continuously make over the future.
…We took the concept of biodiesel and transesterification and extended that to hydrodeoxygenation, so we also produce renewable diesel, which is also a very good product.
It is not oxygenated, whereas the transesterification does produce a methyl ester, which is an oxygenated molecule. They both have very good qualities.
And in fact, blending them together produces REG Ultra Clean Diesel, which is one of our fastest-growing products that we sell on the market.”
The market for Renewable Energy Group, as a “Bernie’s Mittens ESG Stock”, is growing rapidly:
“The United States does have a renewable fuel standard, which is kind of a cornerstone of incentivizing the growing development of renewable fuels for on-road transportation.
California took that and really accelerated it by putting in place a low carbon fuel standard with a goal of significant decarbonization by 2030. And each year, they ratchet up the requirement for carbon reduction.
So that’s been a very interesting market for us, and for that market, our material is very attractive, because it’s, as I mentioned, one of the most readily available ways to decarbonize today without having to make big investments. That makes California a very interesting market for us.
Oregon, in turn, also has a low carbon fuel standard. They started a little bit later than California. They haven’t been ratcheting up the carbon intensity reduction quite as rapidly as California, but they’re coming on quickly. So that’s also a very interesting market.
Canada’s British Columbia also has a low carbon fuel standard and is very similar to Oregon and California. All of those markets are very interesting for us.
Moving over to Europe, the European Union has the RED II, which is also focusing very much on decarbonization and the use of cleaner feedstocks.
And so they’re very interested, for example, in converting used cooking oil to biodiesel as we do, and then the Nordics have a very strong pull on decarbonization. So all of those markets are good focus target markets for us — they are the pioneers in what we can see is happening because now Canada is talking about a low carbon fuel standard as early as 2022.
Many, many municipalities have now stated their desire and their targets for decarbonization. And it feels like we’re at an inflection point where from multiple perspectives, there’s a desire to decarbonize and therefore, either soft targets or even hard targets being put in place to enable that to happen from a real standpoint as opposed to just a dream or a vision.”
Renewable Energy Group is the Bernie’s Mittens for ESG investing:
“You’re seeing a lot of heightened interest in the investment community in ESG — environmental, social and governance — types of investments. And REG sits right at the heart of ESG.
That’s what we’re really all about.
And because we’re on a growth trajectory and because the demand for our product and the focus on what it is that we do is increasing, there’s a really nice confluence between investor desire for finding better ESG investments and coming to companies like REG. And we feel we have a good solution for them…
There are some big names out there that have been quite clear about their not just recommendations but mandates for investing more into the ESG space and, in some cases, de-investing from heavy carbon industries.
You have names like BlackRock, State Street, UBS, which have all been very, very clear that this is a direction that they expect to take. And again, we’re very happy to be one of the solutions for what they’re searching for.”
Get the complete 3,180 word interview with Cynthia Warner, President and CEO of the Renewable Energy Group (NASDAQ:REGI), the Bernie’s Mittens of ESG Stocks, exclusively in the Wall Street Transcript.
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