As the world trained its eyes on Copenhagen last Friday to learn the location of the 2016 Olympic Games, I sat in a bar in Washington with an old friend.

We were waiting for the results of a different contest altogether.

The race we were interested in has far larger economic ramifications than the Olympics and every bit of the games’ intense competitive spirit.

While billions of eyes around the world watched televisions to learn the location of the 2016 games, only a handful of other people in the world even knew about the other race, the one I was watching. After all, only a few organizations could muster the resources to compete. The buy in was at least a million dollars, and raising cash the easy part.

The hard part was assembling a world-class team. Not of athletes, but of world-class scientists and engineers. Each competitor would need a team of the sort of visionary geniuses who can conceive and create The Next Big Thing.

What was this contest?

Believe it or not, the United States federal government has quietly begun a race to develop an obscure technology, one only a few industry insiders even know exists.

Experts agree that this technology, properly developed, could reverse global warning. 

As you can imagine, the implications are immense for industry.

They’re immense for the world’s stock markets.

Some say the implications of this technology are critical for the survival of the planet itself. 

Which makes me a little surprised that no one’s writing about it. You saw the papers the next day and since, right? You watched the news on TV. Have you seen a word about the government’s competition to carbon capture and sequestration technology?

Did I mention Unlce Sam is offering a prize?

$1,400,000,000.00.

That’s $1.4 billion U.S. dollars.

I’m not making that up. The U.S. Department of Energy announced Friday that it had selected twelve competitors for the prize. It awarded twelve teams a total of $21.6 million in taxpayer funds to get the competition going. The competitors put up $22.5 million of their own cash.

The results of the first wave of competition finally popped into my in-box late Friday afternoon.

My buddy — a veteran campaign apparatchik — scanned the results.

I waited.

“You called it,” he said. “They’re ninth on the list.” He paused. “Ninth out of 12.”

He gave me an appraising look, the type of look that only comes after years of friendship. Then he asked me the question I’d been waiting for.

“How’d you know? Inside job?”

I shook my head. “Just a little research.”

Earlier this summer, I had written about carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS, a virtually unknown technology that industrial giants were looking at as a means to stem their output of carbon dioxide.

The idea is very simple: Grab emissions before they’re emitted and pump them into the ground instead of into the air.

Sounds simple, right?

It is. But it’s also revolutionary. It’s a 180-degree shift from the way most industrial companies design their plants, mines and factories. And such a sea change is exactly what it will take to reverse the effects of carbon dioxide on our atmospehere.

(So while your congressman is busy debating the so-called “cap-and-trade” system that even its supporters agree will have no global effect, the nation’s bureaucrats are incentivizing the nation’s businesses to come up with a real, workable solution that will reduce emissions while still allowing the economy to grow rather than force it to shrink.) 

Now, because of my interest in petroleum — where CCS got its start — I’ve been studying this emerging field of research for years.  Earlier this summer, I recommended shares of the company that has the most promising CCS technology. It found a way to use CCS technology at coal-fired power plants, the world’s leading emitter of carbon dioxide.

The idea is so stunningly simple that, after you hear about it, you wonder why no one else has ever thought of it.

But no one else has. And the company I recommended owns more than 200 patents related to the technology — a technology that power producers the world over are going to be clamoring for. 

That’s who was ninth on the list. The company I recommended. Their application to compete in the government’s $1.4 billon race was one of 12 that Uncle Sam approved. They have the team in place. They have the money. And they have the technology that’s literally going to change the world.

Now, my friend really didn’t believe me when I told him I picked one of the 12 winners in the first round of Uncle Sam’s contest after careful research. He is, after all, a veteran campaign staffer, a professional skeptic. And, admittedly, what I was telling him then and what I am telling you about now sounds more like the plot to the next James Bond film than it sounds like something that would come from the Department of Energy, of all places.

But it’s real. I published my research on CCS in June. Very few have written about it since, and none have shown investors how to make money off it, as I did at the beginning of the summer, and as I do each month in every issue of Government -Driven Investing.

Many Happy Returns –

Andy Obermueller
Government-Driven Investing

P.S. If you’re still not convinced, then you might as well read the original article. Subscribers to my premium Government-Driven Investing newsletter have unlimited access to its archives, including the June issue, where I reveal the name of the company that owns this world-changing technology — the company that could win the government’s $1.4 billion CCS prize!  Click here to subscribe.