Internships

Benjamin Finch ’23

Major

Electrical Engineering

Project Title

Natural Capital Assessment in the Energy Sector

Presentation Link

View Benjamin's Presentation

I interned with BP working on Net Zero Teesside, a proposed carbon capture and storage project in North East England. I conducted a pilot natural capital assessment (NCA) — a monetary valuation of all the environmental impacts of a given development — for the project and contribued to an NCA methodology for evaluating new projects. I researched a number of available NCA methodologies and tested some of them on Net Zero Teesside. I produced a 40-page paper describing my findings and created a presentation to introduce NCA to the wider BP Global Concept Development community. I learned from my internship the importance of working as efficiently as possible and working in iterations when creating something like a new NCA methodology. As there are countless ways to conduct an NCA, it is very easy to get lost pursuing impractical methods or other dead ends. I averted much of that risk by creating the simplest working methodology first then looking for ways to improve it. Overall, this internship was a great experience that reaffirmed my interest in the transition to net-zero energy.