Student Information:

John Abbett

Environmental Studies Policy concentration in Administrative Science

jfabbett@colby.edu

Location: London, England

Organization: The carbon emissions sales and trading desk as part of Barclays Capital Environmental Markets

Barclays Capital is the investment banking arm of Barclays Bank Plc. Barclays has been a leader in environmental markets since 2004 and is the largest liquidly provider to governments, utilities, industrials, and carbon project developers having traded over 3.5 billion tonnes. The environmental markets team also has expertise in structured products and primary CDM origination.

Internship Description:

January 4- January 29, 2010

My internship, for purposes of description, can be broken up into four parts one for each week. The first week was primarily focused on getting myself up to speed on market theory and acynomns. This consisted of reading selected internal and published documents usually between 300-400 pages a day with verbal and written competency tests.

The second week my task was to present a presentation to the London team on US proposed climate legislation, Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer, and how it compared to the EU ETS as well as an in-depth analysis of the proposed US carbon price forecasts. I looked specifically into the EPA’s and CBO’s price forecasts for each bill. For the first two weeks, I directly reported to Jan-Willem Martens, Associate Director of Emission Sales and member of the UN Methodologies Panel for CDM projects. This week I met with Kathryn Mintoft, Associate Director of Sustainability at Barclays. Barclays is carbon neutral and Kathryn went over the process of selecting offsets and key issues to come along with the selection process. This was directly relatable to my thesis work on carbon offsets at Colby.

The third and fourth week I reported to Harshika Patel, Head of Emission Sales, and worked closely with Chen Long of the Emission Sales team. During the third week, I was immersed in commercial side of carbon trading and had the opportunity to go to the Czech Republic with Chen Long for five client meetings. I learned the structured products Barclays offers as well as briefed Chen Long on the companies that we visited.

The fourth week my task was to help with follow ups from the client meeting and to develop PowerPoint slides of structured products that Barclays offers that could use for new client pitches. I also had to give a mock client presentation to Chen Long to demonstrate my understanding of the commercial side of carbon sales and trading. This forth week also consisted of a series of meeting and interviews with top management including Jonathan Whitehead, Co-head of Commodities, Roger Jones, Co-head of Commodities, and Benoit de Vitry, Head of Global Markets.

Reflection:

I learned an extraordinary amount about the EU ETS and current US policy. I learned the commercial products that are under cap-and-trade systems. From the meetings in the Czech Republic and conversing with the CEOs, I now better understand the practical implications of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme on their various businesses.