Energy Finance Lab
INTEGRATING FINANCIAL INSIGHT INTO DECISION-MAKING AND ADVANCING IDEAS TO FOSTER MORE CAPITAL INVESTMENT INTO THE ENERGY TRANSITION
INTEGRATING FINANCIAL INSIGHT INTO DECISION-MAKING AND ADVANCING IDEAS TO FOSTER MORE CAPITAL INVESTMENT INTO THE ENERGY TRANSITION
Energy Finance Lab
Reference Corner
Restoring energy resilience and security while decarbonizing the global economy are generational challenges that will cost Trillions of dollars. Public capital can realistically provide only a very small portion. Instead, the public sector needs to create vibrant enabling environments for private investment; there is also ample room for the private sector to act on its own.
The Energy Finance Lab’s mission is to support the initiatives of the Payne Institute, with a guiding principle to foster market-based solutions to unlock private investment. Among other recent research, the EFL is exploring government interventions for critical mineral development, systems to track and financialize carbon footprint and fugitive methane emissions, and the use of carbon markets to fund climate mitigation activities such as plugging oil & gas wells and carbon capture & storage. The Lab also provides explainers across commodity, carbon and energy markets for the benefit of policy makers and other stakeholders.
The Energy Finance Lab Collaborates with these Payne Inititatives
Accelerated Methane Reduction
Low Carbon Energy Technologies
Critical Minerals
Native American Mining and Energy Sovereignty
Supply Chain Transparency
RESEARCH
Tokenizing EAC’s for LNG 11/11/2025
Tokenizing EAC’s for LNG
Payne Institute Energy Finance Lab Director Brad Handler on a podcast discussing systems developing to track and trade environmental attributes like methane. Topics include the emerging demand for reliable Carbon Intensity (CI), the standards for reporting that CI, and how tokenizing environmental attributes can make them useful for commodity traders and the financial community. November 11, 2025.
How the Voluntary Carbon Market Can Fund Orphan Well Remediation 11/7/2025
How the Voluntary Carbon Market Can Fund Orphan Well Remediation
Payne Institute Energy Finance Lab Director Brad Handler writes about how there are an estimated 1 million wells in the U.S., most drilled in a pre-regulatory era, that are orphaned and have either never been plugged or not to current standards that also emit collectively a lot of methane. States are left to plug and handle any necessary remediation. Born out of this burden is the idea to use the Voluntary Carbon Markets, or VCM, to raise funds to plug these wells. November 7, 2025.
Rare Earths Are Hot. Not All of the Government’s New Buys Will Thrive. 11/5/2025
Rare Earths Are Hot. Not All of the Government’s New Buys Will Thrive.
Payne Institute Energy Finance Lab Director Brad Handler, Student Researcher Andrew Bauman, Faculty Fellow Ian Lange, and Morgan Bazilian write about how the Trump administration struck more deals this week with domestic rare earths companies with a $1.4 billion stake in Vulcan Elements and its supply partner, ReElement Technologies. November 5, 2025.
Media tip sheet: Economics of critical minerals 9/9/2025
Media tip sheet: Economics of critical minerals
Payne Institute Director Morgan Bazilian, Faculty Fellows Ian Lange and Rod Eggert, and Energy Finance Lab Director Brad Handler are featured in this article that offers a variety of expert viewpoints who can assist the media in better understanding the financial forces at work in critical minerals. September 9, 2025.
Best Methods for Abandoning an Idle Oil Well and the Longevity of Wellbore Cement 8/21/2025
Best Methods for Abandoning an Idle Oil Well and the Longevity of Wellbore Cement
Payne Institute Faculty Fellow Jim Crompton, Student Researcher Vandan Bhalala, and Energy Finance Lab Program Director Brad Handler write about how plugging and abandoning an idle oil well is a critical process in oil and gas operations during the later stages of the life of a wellbore, environmental, safety and economic perspectives. They look at the best methods for abandoning an idle oil well, as well as the durability and longevity of cement barrier used in wellbores against leakage of methane gas. August 21, 2025.
MP Materials Corporation-Department of Defense Partnership 7/30/25
MP Materials Corporation-Department of Defense Partnership
Payne Institute Energy Finance Lab Director Brad Handler along with PhD candidate Sangita Gayatri Kannan and Payne Institute Faculty Fellow Ian Lange write about how earlier this month, MP Materials Corp. (MP), the U.S.’s only producing rare-earth mining company, announced a partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). July 30, 2025.
Carbon Markets 7/27/25
Carbon Markets
The Payne Institute Energy Finance Lab Director Brad Handler contributes to this podcast on what the cost is of going green. Actually no one really knows for sure and it depends on the scope of the transition. July 27, 2025.
Takeaways from the Payne Institute’s London Critical Minerals Symposium 7/17/2025
Takeaways from the Payne Institute’s London Critical Minerals Symposium
The Payne Institute for Public Policy hosted its inaugural London Critical Minerals Symposium at the Anglo American headquarters in June. We convened over 70 stakeholders from government, industry, academia, and finance. With clean energy, digital infrastructure, and defense all driving demand growth for mineral inputs, the event provided a timely platform for candid dialogue on investment, regulation, and supply chains, with an emphasis on spurring investment growth in resource-rich developing economies. July 17, 2025.
Tokenizing the Environmental Attributes of Liquefied Natural Gas 7/9/2025
Tokenizing the Environmental Attributes of Liquefied Natural Gas
Payne Institute Energy Finance Lab Director Brad Handler and student researcher Mark McCurdy write about how efforts to combat emissions of global warming/greenhouse gases are spawning the development of systems to track, record and share the carbon footprint and other environmental attributes of various operations. Methane emissions from the natural gas industry. July 9, 2025.
Payne Introduces a Critical Mineral Markets Primer 6/17/2025
Payne Introduces a Critical Mineral Markets Primer
Payne Institute Affiliated Partner Rebecca Jackson and Energy Finance Lab Program Director Brad Handler write about how as the urgency for the US and OECD to develop critical minerals supply chains grows, we believe that a fundamental underpinning for that effort will be understanding and expanding market mechanisms that convene buyers and sellers and support mineral price discovery. To that end, we introduce a Critical Minerals Markets Primer detailing the nature of critical minerals transactions and how such transactions may evolve given technology and market growth. June 17, 2025.
Leadership
