Cementing a Career in Decarbonization with Becky Gallagher, Yale School of the Environment/School of Management '16

In Brief

Clean energy careers exist across countless sectors, industries, and topics.

De-risking an innovative technology is as much about communication as it is about finance.

There is an adjustment period to settle into the different approaches within a large company versus a small startup.

At the Yale Clean Energy Conference, we had the opportunity to interview Becky Gallagher, Head of Project Development and Strategic Sourcing at Sublime. The conversation focused on career pathways in the energy sector and showcased Sublime's innovative breakthrough process for producing low-carbon cement. This article is written from a lightly edited conversation.

What was your background before coming to Sublime? What do you currently do there?

Before graduate school, I was focusing on public policy ballot initiatives, newsletters, and political work. When I got to Yale, I really wanted to change gears and try the private sector. The functional role that I pursued through Yale and internships was really in finance, and in particular, project finance. I TAed for several very challenging courses and they were hugely beneficial. I made “the ask” to TA these classes, and that is one of the themes I’ve learned as well in my career. Even if you're not tapped to do something, if you can advocate for yourself you should go for it.

So far, I’ve lived in project-level finance where you're obsessed with the engineering inputs of the project itself and some of the sales inputs around the offtake price. What's the yield? What's the CapEx? Wait, why is this line item different from what it was in the last project? That's what I enjoy about financial models.

The energy landscape is a big place. How did you decide what to do in the energy sector after graduation?

As my career unfolded, I got to choose a little bit more; for example, sales, market development, or market-making in offshore wind right before coming to Sublime. But over time, offshore wind faltered, and the focus shifted more toward procurement, cost savings, execution excellence, and operational excellence, etc. Not really my area. I'm your business development person. What I loved was always project development and seeing projects from the get-go, whether that was market-making in the early days or just working with customers and getting to FID (final investment decision).

What has surprised you about entering a new sector that you didn't expect?

At first, it was a confidence hit. By the time I was ending at Avangrid, I had a lot of contacts and knowledge in energy. However, when I attended a cement conference somewhat early on at Sublime, I had no idea what was happening on the panel. For large, established project developers, you can't go in there and tell them how to do it. You're just one cog in the development machine. But at Sublime, I get to sort of create it in my own image and leverage the learnings I’ve gained over time.

What has it been like trying to de-risk the perception of Sublime as a new venture?

You go from sidewalks to skyscrapers, as we say at Sublime. I think we feel a very high burden of safety. I mean, how many Series A companies do you know that have a full-time safety manager?

You can't take the "move fast and break things" approach, although sometimes you have different messages for different folks or different personas that you embody. For example, when you're talking to ready mix operators, you're emphasizing the testing that you've done, inviting them to your pilot, and letting them see how clean and how safe it is. It's just about what aspect of the story you're emphasizing.

What are you excited about in policy right now, and what would you hope to see?

I think procurement standards are critical for us because the federal government has a very high procurement rate of cement. The federal government is walking the walk with the Office of Clean Energy Demonstration’s (OCED) grant for $87 million (Sublime is a recipient).

But they need to continue walking the walk to drive significant deployment of this technology at scale for example through resource-specific procurements.

What do you think would be key to making cement more widely talked about?

It took a long time for people to appreciate the fact that kilowatt hours didn't just “show up” – they came from somewhere, like a coal plant, or a solar field. And you could have a preference on that. Retail products like EVs and rooftop solar brought that into the mainstream. But we don't really have that yet for cement. It's out of sight, out of mind. But again, we did it with energy, so we should be able to do it with building materials.