Erik Belz

Engine No. 1

Head of Private Equity

Erik leads the firm’s private equity business and is a member of Engine No. 1’s investment committee. He has over 15 years of investing experience across the broad natural resources sector. Before joining Engine No. 1, Erik was a managing director at Blackstone where he led the natural resources focus within Blackstone private equity’s energy transition and climate solutions strategy. Before Blackstone, Erik worked at First Reserve, one of the original sector specialist private equity funds investing in the natural resources industry. He also helped launch Blue Water Energy, an international natural resources private equity firm based in London. Previously, Erik worked at Lehman Brothers in the natural resources M&A group based in New York. Erik began his career working with the Central Intelligence Agency. Erik received an AB in Economics and Government, cum laude, from Harvard College.

Sessions With Erik Belz

Wednesday, 8 March

  • 07:15am - 08:20am (CST) / 08/mar/2023 01:15 pm - 08/mar/2023 02:20 pm

    The Role of Private Capital in Funding the Energy Transition
    Finance & Investment/Trading & Risk Management/ESG
    While public market funds run by institutional investors have been shifting allocations toward cleantech companies, they are often hamstrung by a limited universe of pure-play cleantech equities and index-tracking methodologies that limit their ability to take longer-duration bets. The real action for energy transition investors to date has been in private equity, where funds can take duration risk and have overcome liquidity limitations by successfully raising historically large funds. The pace of private equity dealmaking, which slowed in early 2022, has accelerated sharply again for cleantech since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States. How much of the pent-up private equity capital remains to be run through, and how will the even larger universe of public market investors gain access to these growing markets?