What Survived the Clean Tech Collapse

What We Need to Grow, Episode 028: Follow the Bouncing Ball. A Founder Talk conversation with Ben Klepacki, P.Eng., Co-founder, President and CEO of WestGen Technologies. Cleaned for readability; the words are the speakers' own.

Caleb Pedosiuk: Okay, Ben. WestGen Tech. You come from an engineering background, and from what I understand you spent years designing well pad sites for other people, and you saw a gap in the market for some of what you've done to help reduce methane emissions. You've got a pretty unique product that deals with solar and gas. You're dealing with a market right now that has an increased amount of attention in it, people looking at methane, the carbon markets. But at the same time I've seen some of your content where you've been on trade missions, so you're in other countries like Jakarta. You seem to have your finger on the pulse of what's going on with the war in Iran and oil prices. So what seems like you started with this engineering perspective, solving a very specific problem on the ground, very tangible, now has this global reach. If you could share a little bit about your company and what you're doing right now, that would be awesome.

Ben Klepacki: Thanks, Caleb. I really appreciate it. I'll kick off with the vision behind WestGen, and something I've always been passionate about, which is responsible energy development and energy security.

I kicked off my career, and I think a lot of people do this, you come out of university and you're like, hey man, I'm going to save the world. And quickly, so I started my career in alternative energy, and quickly became a little bit disillusioned with that as I started to look at lifecycle carbon footprint and what some of the realities of the technology were at the time. So I ended up moving over into oil and gas. And I realized there was this incredible gap in efficiency in how we were developing our resources, a lot of room for improvement.

The original challenge was that a lot of oil and gas sites are quite remote, and getting reliable access to grid power out there was a huge challenge. So we were looking at generators, and the problem is what we call the power generation gap. If you need a couple of hundred kilowatts, if you need a megawatt, there's a whole bunch of industrial grade technologies out there that could handle that. And conversely, if you only need a couple hundred watts, that exists. But if you needed reliable and efficient power generation in the one to a hundred, one to two hundred kilowatt range, there weren't a lot of technologies out there. And there was this really good opportunity to combine the experience on the renewables side and the oil and gas and power generation side to build a hybrid power generation package and get reliable but efficient power generation out to these remote sites.

What that allowed them to do was run either electric actuation or air compressors, and eliminate a lot of the venting that was being done by using gas produced on site to run the pneumatics and control the site. So it's been an exciting journey, and as an engineer, efficiency is always a key driver. You're able to make the whole system more efficient. It checks the economics box, it checks the environment box, it checks the reliability box, and just makes the whole system better.

Caleb: One of the things I thought was really interesting, and caught my attention specifically on your LinkedIn, is how you've had this commentary on things that are happening in the Middle East, and you're seeing the dots connected between these decisions, where an announcement gets made and the markets respond. You're seeing this almost butterfly effect where a conversation is had or an announcement gets made, you see prices reeling, you see markets responding, and you're tracking metrics like the number of rigs that are active this year versus last year. So without being an expert at all in this space, I see your mind looking at this global scene, and then you're seeing projects on the ground with your clients that are greenlighting or sitting with reservation. Is that an accurate description of what the everyday pulse is like, trying to navigate with your customers?

Ben: It's an interesting time for sure. My belief, and maybe this is a pessimistic view on humanity, is that when people have additional resources, they're given the ability to focus on the nice to haves. And what that nice to have has been over the last five years, the last decade, is the clean tech, green tech side of things, this push away from fossil fuels. And then the second those resources get pulled away and we have energy scarcity, or scarcity in anything, right? You have food, you give it away. You have extra money, you donate it. You have extra food, you give it away to the food bank. The second your food is gone, you want to keep that food for yourself. And that's where we run into the problem right now of energy security.

My belief has always been that for humanity to continue to progress, if we want to solve the challenges we have around world hunger and safety and things like that, the most important thing that we need is energy security. Everybody needs energy to be able to survive, to live and to grow. But at the same time, and we were talking about kids off show before this, I have two young daughters. We want to leave the world a better place for our children. So we need energy security, and we need to develop our energy resources in a more efficient and more responsible fashion, so we leave the world a survivable place.

I think what we're seeing now is a bit of that tension between energy scarcity. And I'm making some conjectures here, but I think the administration in the United States has been trying to develop a secure energy future for the US, and that has led to some of the conflict that we've had. And then in the short term you see energy scarcity through the Strait of Hormuz start to impact markets around the world. You don't have the flow of oil, and then all of a sudden the green tech thing goes away. That's where you see people doing everything they can to get energy. It drives a lot of the choices that we're seeing now.

That's where I think you can follow the bouncing ball and say, hey, what needs to be done to establish a secure path to energy in the future? Now, the interesting aside is that when you pull out fossil fuels and reliable access to fossil fuels, this focus on emissions reduction in fossil fuels itself gets pulled away. But you still need energy. And ironically, I think you're actually going to see a surge in solar, in wind and hydro, because you need to develop that secure energy source, and that's something people can do without access to fossil fuels. So I just try and follow that bouncing ball that says, hey, if this action happens here, what's that going to do to the people who need energy downstream?

Caleb: With the carbon markets, thinking about that bouncing ball, certain targets are set, certain goals are created, new companies are formed, new initiatives. Hey, this is our goal, this is our plan, if we get funding, or if things continue, whether it's government incentives or corporations participating. If there's a pause on that, let's say geopolitically things are going on, there's economic impact. Have you seen a lot of these clean tech companies start to taper off? Is it sort of like the water source has been cut off and now a lot of these are drying up, whereas maybe they were picking up steam before and they just aren't surviving this oscillating wave away from where things were?

Ben: I would say yes. A lot of the clean tech companies, both valuation in the markets and the ability to do business, it's been a bloodbath, frankly. And I don't think it's a terrible thing. Let me elaborate here for a second, because in my own beliefs I think there's a space for fossil fuels in the future. I think we need an all of the above energy supply, but we need to do that in a more efficient way. We need renewables there. So I consider myself definitely more towards the progressive side of energy, embracing clean tech, green tech. WestGen started as a clean tech company.

And at the end of the day, if we come back to this concept of energy scarcity, things need to make economic sense, otherwise people won't pay money. People only, once again in my view, only donate or are generous when they have access. So you need to be able to provide that access.

The government, I think, plays a very important role in the development of new technology, and renewables has been a really good example. I lived down in Texas for a couple of years, and people look at Texas as the oil and gas place. It's not actually commonly known that they are the leader in renewables, the leader in wind, certainly in the United States as well. And that shows what a free market can do when it's given that opportunity. The government, in my opinion, plays an incredible role in providing some incentives to develop that innovation. No technology is going to start out cost competitive. You need to provide incentives, the additional dollars per kilowatt hour, or funding to get companies off the ground. That's a really good way to do it. And then the free market will come in and adopt those technologies and they'll become more efficient until they make economic sense.

Where that starts to bite you is if you're pushing people too fast or too hard through legislation. And I think what we saw with clean tech was this huge push towards emissions reduction, emissions elimination, that didn't pay attention to some of the economics. It was just this blanket push, so anything and everything got picked up.

What we're seeing now, the pendulum has definitely swung back past balance in my opinion, the other way. But these clean tech companies that weren't able to become economic, that weren't able to develop solutions that genuinely made business sense, they've died out. And what's left are the companies that have the ability to actually just make sense. They tend to be the companies that make everything more efficient. And that's not a bad thing. It's a little bit of an evolution cycle for clean tech. We're going to come out of this and these clean tech companies aren't just clean tech any more, they're genuine technology companies that make a system more efficient. They're going to become resilient. And when the pendulum swings back, you're going to have this opportunity for more innovation and more technologies to enter.

Caleb: Natural selection, it sounds like. In that process, almost like an ecosystem, you've got a wetter season, you've got a drier season. What is going to endure? You'll find the plants that are resilient in both. Was it something called the northern energy corridor? And you also mentioned the importance of government. Does this corridor potentially open up some level of capability for the Canadian economy in relation to the US, or independent of the US? Is this something that is of real consequence right now in the big picture?

Ben: I'll take that question two ways, and stand on a soapbox for a minute here. First off, my answer is absolutely yes. Energy security, which has been a topic of our conversation so far, is incredibly important. Canada is a have country. We are a very blessed country from a resource standpoint. And there's absolutely no reason that we should have the dependence we do on others, US or otherwise.

Purely from an economic standpoint it makes incredible sense for Canada. There's a gentleman named Peter Tertzakian. He was with the ARC Energy Research Institute for a while, he's gone off and started his own thing. He did an economic analysis of what a pipeline would add to the Canadian economy if it was in the ground this year. Any numbers I give are going to be, I can't remember them at all, so I'm completely making these up. But the impact was absolutely incredible. It was completely eating away at not just our deficit but at our debt. We could pay back billions, tens of billions, just from one pipeline. And that doesn't even mention the energy security side of things, the ability for Canada to take care of itself.

But I actually want to take a step further. We've been talking about clean tech. About four months ago the east coast of Canada took in its first shipment of LNG from Australia, and I got a little bit frustrated by that. I love Australia, we're trying to expand into Australia, so nothing against them. We have so much gas in Canada. There's no reason we shouldn't be using our own gas.

And one of the big challenges to the energy corridor has been the environmental side, which, as someone who believes we should literally do everything we can to save the environment, I'm going to hop on the pipeline train for a minute here. I did a carbon analysis of shipping LNG from Australia up to the east coast of Canada versus a pipeline. And here's the shamelessly self-promoting side of things, I apologize, it's all posted on LinkedIn. I did a little white paper on it. I have all of the calculations if people want to back check the work. It's all referenced to the studies. The engineer in me was extremely conservative. It was two to three shipments of LNG that would be the equivalent of the whole lifecycle carbon footprint of installing that pipeline.

And this is gas, so you're not worried about spills or things like that. You boil off your fuel. Your liquefaction energy that goes into it is about a third of the gas itself, plus then you have to boil it off on the other side. It's incredibly energy intensive.

So not only are we shooting ourselves in the foot from an energy security standpoint and the ability to stand on our own two feet, but from an environmental standpoint we have this NIMBY, not in my backyard. If the emissions happen on someone else's land or sea, it's not Canada's emissions. But we have to take a global perspective. Any environmentalist that says don't build the energy corridor pipeline because pipelines are bad, you are literally, people aren't going to turn off their furnace in Nova Scotia. That's not going to happen. Nobody's going to go, well you know what, I'm going to freeze my house this year. The energy is going to get burnt. You're not convincing them to change to solar hybrid systems or something like that.

So if you're going to use the energy, we can't be shipping this from Australia at orders of magnitude more carbon footprint than using our own gas, because you're not going to eliminate the molecule being used. I'm one hundred percent for doing everything we can to eliminate those molecules being used, but you're not convincing Fred in his house, or on his fishing boat, to not go out and fish in the morning using diesel. So do you want to ship that diesel from across the world, or do you want to use what we have here? And the reality is the pipeline is the safest, lowest carbon footprint path to put that in. Sorry for the rant. I'll get off the box now.

Caleb: I'm tracking with you, and I don't think it's a soapbox. To me it's all very level headed thinking. In fact, coming from someone whose first words out of his mouth were, hey, in school here's the path, desires to change the world, make the world a better place. And you come back to it now years later, you've got daughters, you still want to do that, but your eyes seem to have more context and perspective.

My dad worked with the Ministry of Natural Resources for his career, and we grew up just loving the natural resources of Canada. It genuinely is a wonder, it's a treasure. But I think it's interesting, one of the things to me is looking at government and realizing a lot of people's paths, their career, or some are elected in, and how many things are compartmentalized. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt and genuinely believe, red, blue, green, whatever, that people are genuinely wanting to make the best decisions for themselves and those that they care about. Maybe for some that circle is larger, maybe for some it's shorter, I don't know, I can't speak for them. But I've wondered if the compartmentalizing of some things is part of the challenge. And actually in the context we're moving into with more integrations, tools, automations, the ability to process information and have intelligent layers that humans can make decisions with, I'm kind of hopeful maybe some of this will adjust quicker in the future.

I think a lot of people's decisions that move different things along are siloed out or compartmentalized. Some are looking and saying, hey, this will move the needle for GDP, let's green light it. Others are looking and not necessarily seeing that big picture. So I feel like creating awareness to a point where other people have that information, and then hopefully we'll be using more advanced intelligence and tools, we can recognize and balance out some of these extreme oscillations.

Ben: Caleb, I think that would be wonderful, and I one hundred percent agree. I think the challenge is education. You're always going to have your five percent or whatever of extremism on both sides that isn't going to listen.

We've spent some time with populist governments, that's my opinion, and the challenge is with social media and the way information is distributed these days. I think our government is doing everything they can to keep the people happy, and we have a lot of misinformation. I actually think it's the government's job to really focus on fact, particularly in the information environment we have now, where it's so easy to create false information out there, and on education. If you have an educated populace that understands what's going on and understands the truth, then they tend to make the right decisions.

The challenge right now is that a lot of the government has lost the trust of the people, a lot of news organizations have lost the trust of the people, and people don't know where to go. If we could prioritize coming back to facts and working on education and having open conversations, because that's not a commonly known piece of information. I think if you present that whole story to people, then the average person is a very rational and reasonable person. They're able to look and say, hey, wow, I didn't know that, you're right, these are the things we do need, we do need pipelines, we do need energy security.

If you showed someone in Quebec or Ontario who's traditionally been against oil and gas and pipelines, and you say, hey, do you or do you not want to heat your house over the winter? Oh, you do. Okay, fantastic, we're all on the same page there. Here's the energy footprint of one thing, here's the energy footprint of a second, here's the energy footprint of a third. What do you want? The lowest energy, lowest carbon option. Okay, that's what this is. If you can provide all that information on a level playing ground, I think people make those rational decisions. And that's what I'm trying to do.

Caleb: Something that comes to mind as you were saying that is associations. You're talking about information, but information, if it exists in one pocket of the internet or one area and doesn't make its way to other people's feeds, because so much of what is calibrated now is an echo chamber for attention based on interests, really kind of hacking attention. I don't mean that in a judgmental way, I just mean that it's been optimized the way that it was intended to be optimized, and it's really good at it.

But associations are one thing I've been thinking about recently. In an association you'll have, let's say, home builders. Out of all of the things contending for their time, in this sliver of time in their work week, they recognize the importance of understanding what's going on, being able to have some form of voice with government at a municipal, at a provincial, even at a national level. And I wonder about disseminating some of that information like you spoke about in a format they can understand. Hey, this is what this looks like, this is what's going on right now, these are decisions that are on the table or being considered, this is what this would look like for home builders in Ontario or in Quebec. But in other associations too, or for teachers, hey, here's some interesting things maybe for your students or for the teachers to know about what's going on with energy in 2026, with what China is doing, with what Canada is doing. Not in a judgmental way, but here's more information. Here's how Canada is producing its energy, here's how China is producing energy.

If there was a way to disseminate it across, let's say two dozen categories that are hubs of where there are people, networks of nonprofits or churches or something, where you could have information that comes down and shows, hey, these are things that countries are struggling with in this scenario, this is how they're dealing with it, Canada could be in a position to be helping in these ways with surplus. That might be able to contextualize it in a way that they would almost want to share it with their groups, and then those groups collectively would sort of wake up to the angle of the elephant that they're able to sense, and we collectively maybe would have a stronger picture.

Ben: I think that would be phenomenal. I think the CBC is an interesting thing as well. It's a government funded entity, so in my mind it shouldn't be held to the same forces that pull private news. You're going to get a bias because that's the way the money flows. We could learn a lot from the BBC. And if we could get the CBC back to a place where we weren't sharing as much opinion, but we were sharing more of both sides of all the stories, where there wasn't an agenda. And to your comment of a place to disseminate information, just facts, your ten or twelve columns or whatever, and here are facts from both sides of the story. That would be a wonderful use of taxpayer dollars in my mind, and we might be able to gain back the trust of a lot of people.

Caleb: These trade missions, I think I saw something you posted. Was it Jakarta you were in? Are these trade missions connected with government initiatives, or are these private?

Ben: With government initiatives. The Canadian government has done, I will give them a huge pat on the back for the efforts to diversify Canada's trading partners outside of just the United States, with some of the security around that becoming a question in the last couple of years. We've seen them do an incredible job reaching out to both Commonwealth countries and countries beyond that, and having bilateral trade missions going. So taking groups of companies that are similar, we were a clean tech trade mission, and we actually started in Australia, then went up to Indonesia, to Jakarta, after. You're exchanging information as companies and dealing with both industry partners and the government over there, to show what the countries can do. I think that's a phenomenal thing for Canada's economy and something our government has done really well.

Caleb: So as more companies, whether it's in mining or compliance or defence or other initiatives, are looking for options that WestGen provides a solution for, how are you working to ensure that you're showing up as that option? Are most of those conversations happening through association based discussions, conferences? Are they finding you through LinkedIn? Where is some of that happening?

Ben: One of the challenges I've found, and we talked about dissemination of information, is that clients now are so fatigued, through LinkedIn, through conferences. You go to a conference and it's a thousand salespeople and one client, and they're running out the door because they're chased by a hundred people. I probably get fifteen to twenty LinkedIn messages a day. So I think there's a huge level of fatigue there.

What we really try and do to get in front of these people is just take it back to the people side of things. We've been very lucky that we've been around long enough that the vast majority of our clients, and I'm putting words in their mouth here, I think are very, very happy with the product. And you can leverage that to say, hey, do you have anyone that you think would be interested in what we're doing, and just kind of expand networks. It's amazing how quickly you can get from Canada to Australia. Shell, for example, being a company that we work with that works on both sides of the border, you get introductions there, and then you're in Shell and they know a bunch of mining companies. We try and do the people thing, which is a little backwards from the direction the world's going, but I've found it's been very effective for us.

Caleb: I've mentioned the term, but an oscillating wave, you see it in music, you see it in nature, you see it in economies. It has been so helpful for me to look and see that with trends. But I really see that aspect of there's a real desire for people to want to connect. I think back to the dot-com boom, old enough to remember, you log on and there's people, AOL and other things like that with dial up.

Ben: ICQ, where everyone was on ICQ.

Caleb: Yeah, I remember that back in the day. Where people loved the idea, so everyone's running to this side of things to say, I want to digitally connect, there's a chat room, there's a digital way to connect. And I think you see, certainly with Gen Z or maybe even Gen Alpha, this other form of things where so many of them are saying they have seen the disconnect of almost these virtual cubicles that people live in, where subconsciously they just pull back into that window and exist in front of it. So many of them have seen that and have moved in another direction. But that in person connection, at times people joke about sitting on an airplane and the person next to you wants to talk, whether people like that or not. I've found some remarkable connections. You were mentioning Indonesia, but in the Philippines I sat next to a gentleman who was heading up AI compliance and integration. One of his past clients was the largest oil and gas company out of the Philippines in that area, and we had a fascinating conversation talking about different integrations, things he's learning. It's so neat to meet people real time and have these conversations as the technology is shifting. There's almost a craving for it, to have those connections, and yet sometimes you have to filter through this defensive wall that I think a lot of us have up digitally, for incoming messages and whatnot.

Ben: Yeah, one hundred percent.

Caleb: I have one other question for you, and it's what I typically ask everybody at the end. If you had to put your finger on one thing right now that you feel like you need most for WestGen to grow, what would that be? For some people it's, hey, we're raising the next round and so we need investment. For some it's, hey, if we just had a really influential person try what it is that we have, that would unlock exposure for us. If there was one thing you could think of, what would it be?

Ben: Defence. There's an incredible opportunity for dual use technology. Dual use is with defence and commercial or industrial grade. And we learned recently that one of the single biggest risks for NATO forces around the globe is fuel supply for generation. It is a routine, scheduled shipment down a given path. It's incredibly easy for enemies to target. And you have to fill the generator every eight hours, twelve hours, whatever it is.

There's an incredible opportunity for us. Our technology cuts fuel usage by typically 50 to 70 percent, and right there you're cutting the number of convoys by 50 percent or more. The challenge is we compete with the General Dynamics, the GEs of the world, to try and get in there. So I wouldn't call us a startup company by any means any more, but we're nowhere near that scale. If we could get that opportunity to be given serious consideration up with those players and demonstrate our technology, I think, we've got 750 units now deployed everywhere from minus 60 Celsius temperatures in the Arctic Circle down to the deserts of Texas. That could be a huge opportunity for WestGen. And I think it could be a huge opportunity from a safety standpoint, throw the emissions aside, for people's lives, across our armed forces.

Caleb: Awesome. Well, Ben, thank you so much. I'm going to put your LinkedIn here and your company will be linked here as well. But really appreciate the time and you sharing. Thank you.

Ben: Caleb, thank you so much, my friend.