Back in September, Sinon Vongkusolkit,the 34-year-old scion of one of Thailand’s wealthiest families, was on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange celebrating the milestone listing of BKV, the American natural gas-producing arm of his family’s Bangkok-based company Banpu.

Growing its portfolio to thousands of gas wells under management in Texas and northern Pennsylvania in little under a decade, BKV is key to the Southeast Asian coal giant’s plans to transition to clean energy. “This is just the beginning,” promised Banpu’s sharply dressed young chief executive in an interview with NYSE TV on BKV’s debut day, which raised $270 million, valuing the company at just over $1.5 billion.

Sinon, who took the helm last April, springboarding from his previous role at Banpu’s smart energy solutions unit Banpu Next, has his task cut out: delivering on an ambitious agenda to hit carbon-neutral targets and driving global expansion at the $5.2 billion (revenue) company. Sinon’s goal is to reduce Banpu’s greenhouse gas emissions from its coal-mining operations and thermal power plants by a fifth in the next five years, from nearly 9 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2023. Ultimately, the aim is to hit net zero emissions by 2050. He’s also striving to reduce the share of earnings from coal to under half by 2030 from the current 60%.

“We think that we have a solution,” says Sinon back at Banpu’s Bangkok headquarters overlooking a cluster of high-rise buildings that have proliferated in the capital city. “It’s about balancing the traditional and the new [energy sources]. But the trick is also how do we decarbonize the traditional.”

It won’t be easy, even for a second-gen heir with a $3 billion war chest at his disposal, who was primed from a young age to join the family business. Banpu is among the major coal miners in Southeast Asia, producing some 35 million metric tons of coal in 2023—a lucrative trade for the company, with a gross profit margin hovering around 34%, similar to Indonesia’s coal mining heavyweights.

To complicate matters, volatility in coal prices has squeezed Banpu’s earnings, dragging shares down 20% in the past year. In 2023, net profit plunged 87% to $160 million after peaking at $1.2 billion the previous year as coal and energy prices spiked to exceptionally high levels on geopolitical tensions. And there were no signs of a bounce back in the first nine months of 2024 (the latest period for which results are available): Banpu reported a net profit of $46 million, down 75% from a year earlier, partly due to lower prices for coal and natural gas.

In a catch-22, until the company is able to reduce its coal dependency, analysts expect its performance in the short- to medium-term to continue being dictated by coal-price movement. Banpu started down a carbon-neutral path a decade ago when it stopped investing in new coal mining assets, says Sinon. That significant turn was driven by his father, Chanin, who stepped down as CEO in 2015 and became chairman the following year.

Sinon has chalked out his plan of deploying the $3 billion investment budget from now through 2030. About 60% of funds will be spent on gas, power and a process called carbon capture, utilizationand storage (CCUS), which involves separating carbon dioxide from industrial emissions and injecting the gas underground. The remainder is earmarked for Banpu’s renewable energy portfolio—including solar and wind farms spread across Asia-Pacific and the U.S. and lithium-battery production for electric vehicles—in addition to unearthing strategic minerals such as nickel, bauxite and gold, and next-gen mining technologies to reduce costs and environmental impact.

Suppata Srisuk, senior vice president at Bangkok-based Bualuang Securities, sees Banpu’s moves to phase out the fossil fuel in alignment with global trends as a net positive. However, she cautions, the company has yet to prove itself in terms of financial performance. “Since investors are paying attention to figures, the returns must make sense.”

“This is just the beginning,” promised Banpu’s sharply dressed young chief executive.

Sinon is confident that Banpu’s go-green approach is the right one but stresses that it has to be balanced with reliable energy generation and delivery. “Decarbonization is a responsibility to all and it is our commitment to the society,” he says. “[It] cannot be seen as just cost but also revenue and transformation.”

The Vongkusolkit family, whose wealth is listed under Chanin’s older brother Isara in Forbes’ annual ranking of Thailand’s 50 richest, was already a big player in the country’s sugar industry through its Mitr Phol Group before it expanded into mining. In 1983, the Vongkusolkits teamed with longtime business associate, the Auapinyakul family, and founded Banpu to operate a small coal mine in northern Thailand. Sinon’s father Chanin, the youngest of eight siblings, was put in charge of the new venture that was meant to further diversify the family’s holdings, which also include a stake in SET-listed Erawan Group, the owner of nearly 90 hotels in Thailand, the Philippines and Japan.

Chanin grew Banpu into an energy behemoth that today has nearly $13 billion in assets. Besides its gas wells in the U.S., it owns and operates coal mines in Australia, Indonesia, China and Mongolia, and through its subsidiary Banpu Power Public Co. generates and distributes over 4,500 megawatts (MW) of power in Asia-Pacific and the U.S. from its thermal and renewable power plants. In Thailand, Banpu Power owns a 50% stake in a 1,434MW coal-fired power plant at an industrial estate in an eastern province while Banpu Next, taking advantage of Thailand’s incentives-based push into renewables, has interests in solar energy, EV fleet management and battery production.

Passing the baton to Sinon was in the works for a long while. He spent years proving to his family that he was cut out for the top job. “Honestly speaking, initially I didn’t see it coming,” Sinon recalls. But as the oldest son in a Chinese-ethnic family, Sinon came to realize that he would be the one to carry on his father’s legacy. (His siblings—an older sister and younger brother—aren’t involved at Banpu). He left home at age 12 to attend secondary school in England and stayed on to get a bachelor’s degree in business and marketing at Oxford Brookes University and a master’s in finance from Regent’s University London.

During his college breaks, Sinon spent time working at Banpu and got a chance to visit two of the company’s coal mines in Indonesia—that got him fired up about the family business. “It’s when you go down to the mines,” Sinon says. “If you haven’t gone down to a coal mine, that’s something you have to do in your life, because the scale is so big. It’s like a city of mining.” He was fascinated with how hundreds of massive mining machines worked in sync and it made him realize the magnitude of the challenge to improve mining efficiency.

“It’s about balancing the traditional and the new [energy sources]. But the trick is also how do we decarbonize the traditional.”

Sinon returned to Bangkok after graduating in 2014 and joined Banpu’s corporate finance department as an analyst. His boss was chief financial officer Somruedee Chaimongkol, who went on to succeed Sinon’s father as CEO the following year. “She taught me a lot,” he says. “In terms of mentoring, it’s like you’re getting thrown into the water and then you’ve got to try to swim yourself,” Sinon recalls. “I think that’s how I ended up absorbing all of this knowledge, experience and expertise quickly.”

By 2020, he was in Banpu’s project management office, entrusted with the “greener and smarter” initiative that his father was getting off the ground. There, Sinon led various M&A deals to focus the company on clean energy and renewables, which segued into him taking the reins of Banpu Next in 2022. Over the next two years, he led a fresh wave of investments, including $22 million to acquire a 40% stake in SVOLT Energy Technology (Thailand), a maker and distributor of lithium-ion batteries. He spent another $70 million for a majority stake in a second lithium-ion battery maker, Singapore-based Durapower, to supply the region’s growing market of electric cars, buses, trucks and motorcycles.

Through Banpu Next, the company has assembled 902MW of renewable energy capacity from its portfolio of solar and wind farms, as well as its solar rooftop and floating solar businesses across Asia-Pacific and the U.S., with a target of expanding to 1,600MW this year. Upcoming new ventures will be concentrated in countries where Banpu already has a presence, Sinon says, adding that Indonesia, China and the U.S. account for about 80% of Banpu’s $1.5 billion annual Ebitda.

But it’s the U.S. that holds the most promise amid surging energy demand. BKV began as a joint venture in 2015 between Banpu and Denver-based Kalnin Ventures as a vehicle for oil and gas investments, with Banpu taking full ownership in 2020. Its upstream operations span the Barnett Shale natural gas field in Texas and the Marcellus Shale in northeastern Pennsylvania, boasting a combined net production of 793 million cubic feet of natural gas equivalent a day in the first nine months of 2024. “It was a combination of great vision and timing, team ambition and opportunities,” says Sinon, that saw his dad build Banpu’s gas portfolio in the U.S., which currently accounts for around 20% of the company’s pretax earnings.

In line with Banpu’s net-zero agenda, BKV in late 2023 launched the first of two planned CCUS projects in Texas, dubbed Barnett Zero, that today has a sequestration rate of 200,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent a year (enough to offset the emissions of 40,000 cars daily, according to the company). It aims to boost its CCUS capacity to 16 million tons by 2030 by developing additional projects across the U.S. with Houston-based Verde CO2. With CCUS operations in place, BKV can sell a higher-priced carbon-neutral product called carbon-sequestered gas that can be bundled with carbon credits for “industrial customers who want to turn green,” says Sinon.

Still, Sinon acknowledges Banpu’s CCUS plans rely on U.S. government support that stems from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which is partly aimed at lowering household energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions. It’s yet to be seen how President Donald Trump reshapes America’s energy policies and how that would impact the market. “Commercial viability is still dependent on government subsidies and supportive policies. Without financial backing, the high costs associated with development and implementing CCUS projects pose barriers to widespread adoption,” says Udomkiat Bunworasate, partner and country head of consulting firm Roland Berger Thailand.

BKV posted a net loss of $85.4 million in the first nine months of 2024, compared with net income of $79.4 million a year earlier, attributed to a drop in commodity prices and production volumes as well as unrealized losses on derivatives. Meanwhile, capex fell 60% over the same period to $57.3 million, which included $7.7 million for CCUS development, compared with a $44.4 million investment the previous year.

Banpu’s chief exec remains upbeat, saying it’s possible to make gas cleaner and make money at the same time. “Carbon capture is critical to support the gas industry,” he notes. “We believe BKV has much more room to grow.” To scale up, Banpu will rely mainly on cash flow, but with a debt-to-equity ratio under 0.9 comfortably below its debt covenant ceiling of 1.75, it has scope to borrow or consider an equity partnership for larger deals.

Since BKV’s IPO, shares have surged by more than a third to over $25 a share. The U.S listing, says Bualuang Securities’ Suppata, will provide access to bigger funding resources. “It will make Banpu more appealing on the radar screens of investors and, perhaps, attract potential partners.”

For now, Sinon says, coal remains an affordable source of energy that keeps electricity tariffs in check and helps developing countries like Thailand maintain their competitiveness. To that end, he wants to make Banpu’s existing mining operations more streamlined and says AI is one solution. With an average distance of 100 kilometers between coal mine and port, “there’s a lot of value we can do on efficiency, on cost reduction, on decarbonization,” says Sinon, noting its Indonesian mining subsidiary Indo Tambangraya Megah has added EV hauling trucks to its fleet.

For Sinon, while coal remains “an unsung hero, it does not mean that we have to use it forever. We have to make the world greener. That takes time and it needs a smooth transition.”