Innovation challenge funds five sustainability solutions

To achieve this, the two teams collaborated with a large pool of experts and stakeholders from our businesses and the SHV Energy head office in Hoofddorp, Netherlands, to identify the most impactful areas of focus for this challenge:

• Efficient transportation to find solutions that can help us find ways to reduce our carbon footprint in our delivery and logistics operations.
• Smart and efficient facilities to find solutions that can help us find ways to reduce our energy consumption in our facilities and plants around the world.
• Decision support systems to help our sustainability managers and decision makers better understand data and analytics, helping them to make better and more effective carbon emission reduction decisions.

The challenge was launched and opened for submissions in July 2022. During the submission period over 300 startups were scouted and reached out to, 51 submissions were received, and after a first round of evaluation, 13 startups were shortlisted that were interviewed by a panel of experts from our businesses. From those, 6 startups representing the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United States, France and Portugal were selected as finalists who were invited and attended an afternoon pitch session in the SHV Energy head office in Hoofddorp, Netherlands, to present their solutions to board members and other colleagues of SHV Energy. The session was very well received and after careful evaluations by a selection committee, 3 startups were chosen as winners. They will receive full financial and resource support for a pilot project with one or more of our businesses.

The projects

• Gravity Climate (US): Gravity Climate provides a state-of-art approach in carbon accounting, carbon management and reporting, and decarbonisation pathways for companies.
• Combifuel Swiss AG: Combifuel has built a patented LPG conversion kit for diesel engines, which can enable any diesel-powered engine to run almost completely on LPG (as opposed to blending LPG and diesel commonly available) and reducing emissions as a result.
• M Efficiency (NL): IM Efficiency has created flexible solar panels to be installed on trucks to use photovoltaic energy to reduce fuel consumption of trucks.