Macquarie expands Global Carbon team as it continues to grow its fully integrated environmental products offering

Macquarie Commodities and Global Markets (Macquarie) has announced multiple senior appointments to its Global Carbon team as it continues to expand its activity in international carbon markets.

This expansion will support the provision of integrated carbon offsetting solutions with expertise across the entire offset lifecycle from generation through to retirement.

The hires include Andrew Gaballa, who has joined as Head of Structured Transactions and Sales. Mr Gaballa was previously Structured Products Global Lead, Environmental Products Trading at Shell and VP Emissions and Cross Commodities Asia at Mercuria.

In addition, Jun Song, German Tyeles and Suraj Vanniarachchy have also joined the team. Mr Song worked previously as nature-based solutions (NBS) commercial lead at Shell, Mr Tyeles joins from Vitol where he was a carbon originator and Mr Vanniarachchy from Natural Capital Partners. Mr Vanniarachchy sits currently on Verra’s Forest Carbon Innovations and Blue Carbon working groups.

The new hires will focus on providing clients with greater access to voluntary and compliance carbon offsets, building on the team’s ability to originate, structure and bring capital to carbon removal and reduction projects. This mandate extends across a range of carbon-related projects from nature-based solutions to household devices that also deliver a high social impact, through to carbon capture utilisation and sequestration (CCUS) and other forms of environmental and low-carbon technology.

Erik Petersson, Senior Managing Director in Macquarie’s Commodities and Global Markets Group said: “We are pleased to strengthen the Global Carbon team’s capabilities and support its future ambition by welcoming these highly experienced new joiners. The appointments will allow us to further scale our activities as we look to invest capital in carbon-related projects and support our clients with their decarbonisation pathways.”

Global Carbon builds on Macquarie’s group-wide energy transition activity and is a continuation of the Group’s 15-year involvement in physical and financial environmental products markets around the world. Recently, the team has arranged and structured a number of strategic transactions on behalf of clients including South Korea's SK Energy, supporting the decarbonisation of organisations in hard to abate sectors.

The team is also continuing to build a pipeline of offset generating projects – one of which includes working with C-Quest Capital and partners to develop a sub-Saharan Africa cookstove program that is expected to result in the abatement of approximately 220 million tonnes of carbon over the next 10 years which are jointly marketed by Macquarie and C-Quest Capital. The program will distribute cookstoves to approximately 3.7 million households, providing meaningful social and health improvements in these communities.

These appointments come as markets have witnessed growing demand, with voluntary carbon offset issuances increasing by 85 per cent in 2021 equating to 344 million tonnes of offsets issued across the four major registries¹. This is the result of a growing number of corporates seeking to offset emissions while longer-term structural decarbonisation solutions are being developed².

1. Source BloombergNEF
2. Read more about voluntary offsets here