Green Gas Giant

Linde's SANJIV LAMBA serves two masters: environmentalists and investors. Neither group has cause to complain.

- William Baldwin

Linde PLC puts the heavy in heavy industry. It furnishes industrial gases to the world's smokestacks: fertilizer plants, steel mills, glassworks, oil refineries. It spews 38 million tons a year of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

This is a repentant sinner. Sanjiv Lamba, who has been running the firm from a Danbury, Connecticut, office for the past two years, reels off the many things Linde is doing to save the environment. He says it's going to get its own operations down to net zero carbon (eventually), and in the meantime, for every pound of greenhouse gas it emits, its products and its know-how enable customers to avoid more than two pounds of their own emissions. He talks about the $2 billion Linde will put into a Beaumont, Texas, hydrogen plant that will stick the resulting CO2 in the ground.

"Hydrogen energy is our future, and Linde is leading the way," declares the company's website. When trucks, buses and ships need hydrogen fuel, Linde will be equipped. It knows how to handle gas under a pressure of 10,000 pounds per square inch.

And when is the world turning green? Well, someday. Not too fast. The words "a question of time" come up when Lamba talks. And the words "sanity check." He's not going to let a climate diversion cause Linde to miss an earnings estimate.

The green energy revolution is having a rough patch. In the past three years the Invesco Wilder Hill Clean Energy fund has lost 72% of its investors' money. Tesla's unit sales have fallen. The big windmill makers (Vestas and spinoffs from GE and Siemens) are either barely profitable or losing money. Wall Street is littered with red-ink hydrogen companies.

In this environment, Linde is something of a freak. It netted $6.2 billion last year on revenue of $33 billion. Whatever Lamba's admiration for Greta Thunberg, it is greater still for his operating margin (27.6% if you exclude merger-related accounting charges).