CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — First Elon Musk and now, the Coastal Bend received a visit from another billionaire investor, this time Bill Gates!
The co-founder of Microsoft met with various community and industry leaders innovating the world of next-generation clean energy.
Now, while those meetings were private, 3NEWS was able to get some information on where Gates went and who he met with.
Gates is scheduled to speak Thursday in Houston at one of the biggest energy conferences in the U.S., but before that, he was right here in Corpus Christi and also made a stop in Kingsville.
As for the people in those meetings, it was kept pretty secretive, but Gates himself took to social media to share about his South Texas visit.
One of the wealthiest men in the world was at the Infinium's pilot plant Wednesday.
The $25 million facility is located in the area off I-37 across from Gulf Coast racing and adjacent to Howard Energy Partners.
The company is helping change the game for clean energy fuel for trucks, ships and planes.
"Just an amazing process, they are going to take waste carbon dioxide and water and hydrogen and make an eFUEL," President and CEO of the Corpus Christi Regional Economic Development Corporation Mike Culbertson said. "And eFUEL is one that you can make without carbon, it's regular diesel, put it in your car, put it in the pump."
Culbertson told 3NEWS what the visit from Gates means for our area.
"I think it means we are going in the right direction, not only is he here, down in DAC with Kingsville with the carbon capture, in order to get our carbon footprint down, and where we need to be you are going to be, you are going to need all of these technologies to get through this," he said.
Gates posted to his blog gatesnotes.com that Infinium has, "already signed a deal with Amazon."
The billionaire also detailed that himself along with company 'Breakthrough Energy' has invested more than $130 million into Texas-based projects.
While Culbertson said oil and gas isn't going away, industry leaders are looking to the future.
"I've never seen this amount of projects from one sector, meaning the hydrogen sector ever, and I've been in this office since 2009 and this is impressive," he said.
The investor and philanthropist was also pictured with Kingsville leaders and public figures involved in the DAC project lead by 1PointFive, a subsidiary of Occidental.
As we've reported that project aims to capture carbon directly from the air and store it with a hub to be located on one of the world's largest ranches, the King Ranch.
Gates wrote, "I was an early investor in direct air capture technology, and it's super cool to see it evolve from a concept to real economic opportunity for a local community."
3NEWS reached out to both Infinium as well as 1PointFive for comment about Wednesday's visit from Gates, but have not yet received a statement. Kingsville leaders pictured in the room with Gates have also kept pretty quiet about Wednesday's visit.
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