Mika Anttonen's concern is curious for a man in the oil business. A former energy trader, he now runs his own Helsinki-based firm, called St1 by Noah_Kirsch
A former energy trader, he now runs his own Helsinki-based firm, called St1. The company, which had 2019 revenues of $7.8 billion, refines over a billion gallons of oil each year, operates 1,300 gas stations in Scandinavia and has a 15%-plus share of the diesel fuel market in Norway, Sweden and Finland. “If we weren’t going to [refine and sell oil], somebody else would,” Anttonen says “I have to make sure that our company will stay alive.
To that end, he is funding renewable energy projects that he hopes can compete with carbon fuels at scale, like a 4-mile geothermalin Espoo, Finland, designed to provide 10% of the region’s heat when completed next year. He wants to reforest large swaths of the earth, starting with a pilot involving “fast-growing” trees in Morocco. Most ambitiously, Anttonen plans to capture carbon from the atmosphere and turn it into energy, an idea called “Power-to-X.
The war improved Finland’s standard of living, and by extension its government services, which provided a vital backstop for Anttonen during his childhood. His parents divorced when he was five years old, effectively turning his mother into a single mom. “The money was not there,” he says.At age 19, after serving his mandatory military service, Anttonen enrolled at the Helsinki University of Technology, where he majored in technology and energy studies.
He considered leaving Neste to strike out on his own, but hesitated, worried the idea was infeasible. Energy trading requires a lot of start-up capital; to make money, oil must be bought at huge scale. But at the urging of a friend, in the mid-1990s
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