'This will help us get out of recession'

May 5 2009 By Christopher Knox, The Journal

With the North East becoming a hub for low-carbon businesses, Christopher Knox met up with a man helping to create a wider and lasting green economy in the region, managing director of business support organisation Renew, John Barton.

IT'S hard not to feel a little intimidated in the presence of John Barton, not because he is by any means a daunting figure, rather that his CV is so impressive.

Sitting down for coffee on one of Newcastle’s sunnier days it becomes apparent after only five minutes how respected he has become in the low-carbon economy world.

Although modestly describing himself as a salesman for most his life, it is clear that he has been much more, having helped French energy efficiency outfit Elyo increase its turnover from £2.5m to £45m in four years and heading a team to buy BP’s energy reduction operations.

What strikes you right away is his can-do attitude, which has helped him to rise through the process industry at a stellar pace, and one of the reasons why he will "never" go into politics.

Last year saw him become director of Renew, which was set up by The Centre for Process Innovation on Teesside as an energy and environmental technology sector project.

Like Mr Barton himself, Renew’s approach is characterised by action as it provides a vital link in a chain that takes renewable energy and recycling technologies from development to the marketplace.

As well as securing funding for prospective projects through development agency One North East, the project provides extensive market research for budding enterprises looking to enter the region’s low-carbon economy, even going as far as helping to line up a chain of suppliers and customers on their behalf.

Mr Barton has always been interested in science and technology, having grown up in the shadow of the Wilton industrial site on Teesside, which in turn inspired him to take a degree in chemical engineering at Salford University between 1969 and 1973.

Although he later developed a passion for environmental issues, he would be the first to admit that this didn’t always inform his career choices.

In his first job for British Steel at Redcar he was in charge of the stopwatch at a time when the company was pushing its workers to increase their speed and productivity.

He said: "It’s fair to say that I didn’t enjoy my one year with British Steel very much. The nature of my role meant that I certainly didn’t make any friends. No, there certainly wasn’t many quick pints after work."

The chemical engineer went on to become process technologies engineer at the UK base of American agriculture biotech group Monsanto in Seal Sands, where he stayed 11 years.

"Monsanto provided me with a lot of experience and set me up for a long career in the process industry in many ways", he said. "Again my role included finding ways to reduce energy output to save on costs, which was certainly the direction I was coming from during the early stages of my career.

"Issues surrounding climate change just weren’t on the agenda at that point, so energy reduction was all about preserving the bottom line.

"As much as I enjoyed my time at Monsanto, I have to say that it started to become a very closeted and intense environment, which started to give me itchy feet."

He would get the chance to escape this environment in 1985 when he was offered the role of sales engineer at new contract energy management firm Emstar.

Mr Barton, who worked around the country from a site in Darlington, said: "In order to get ahead of their competitors during a boom time, many businesses were becoming more and more conscious of the amount of energy they were using.

"This meant that a number of businesses were set up that could send external people into companies and teach them how to reduce their energy costs. Although it meant travelling around a lot, it was liberating and very exciting to be out of the factory environment.

Emstar was funded by Shell, which gave Mr Barton a huge sense of freedom. He said: "We were a completely new type of business with no precedents to fall back on. In the very early stages we had all this money, but we didn’t know what we were doing."

However, the pressure would be turned up considerably when the business was merged with Associated Heat Services (AHS) in 1992, when Mr Barton found himself in charge of £80m to £90m of contracts.

AHS was set up by the National Coal Board in 1966 as one of the founding companies of the UK’s outsourcing energy management market and provided management of boiler houses at factories up and down the country.

"The effect of the merger was huge and saw us turned into a massive entity overnight," Mr Barton said. "However, the extra responsibility was something I welcomed and it was from here that I began to rise quite quickly through the ranks.

"It was strange at first to be working with coal, which was starting to develop its reputation as a ‘dirty’ source of fuel. However, as the oil price was pretty high at the time and the North East had all of these coal reserves, it was certainly in the mix."

It was in 2001 as a sales director for the now renamed Dalkia Utilities Services that he was approached by French competitor Elyo to be its managing director in the UK, with one of his first assignments being the small matter of heading a bid to buy the energy efficiency arm of BP.

Mr Barton’s can-do attitude helped steer the successful bid, with the £27m purchase of BP Energy adding about 330 staff to Elyo’s workforce of 70.

He would go on to help Elyo UK (part of the Suez group) to achieve a £50m turnover and become one of the major players in the energy and utilities outsourcing market, taking responsibility for contracts at more than 70 sites in the UK for customers such as Nestlé, Rolls-Royce, Kellogg’s and Jaguar.

Although the merger proved successful and helped Mr Barton get his name known in the energy and process industry markets, it led to a few cultural issues among its combined workforce. He said: "Putting the two workforces together like that certainly proved to be a bit of a culture clash for many of them. We had guys from BP turning up in smart clothes and shiny BMWs to service boilers, which came as some surprise to our clients.

"It soon became clear that each side had hugely different attitudes. Those that came to work in the North East certainly took some time to settle in.

"However, by 2002 the world was waking up to climate change, which definitely helped us to grow the turnover like we did so soon after the merger."

It would be this growing interest in all things environmental that attracted Mr Barton to his next role as key account manager at the Carbon Trust, a Government-funded company set up to help businesses and the public sector cut carbon emissions and exploit the potential of commercial low-carbon technologies.

"It was really the first time that I was coming at energy reduction from a purely environmental angle, rather than my perception being based on cost savings, which was certainly exciting," Mr Barton said. Here he was responsible for building relationships with major clients in the North East with energy bills exceeding £4m a year, among sectors including chemicals, utilities and waste.

However, he was unable to turn down the position of managing director of Renew after it was launched last year, when he returned to Wilton to work from the offices of the CPI, as well as a satellite office at marine renewables research organisation NaREC at Blyth. "I feel I’ve come full circle, though I’m now working on the flip-side of energy conservation by highlighting to firms the environmental implications," he said.

"I really believe that the development of low-carbon technology will help us to get out of this recession, and although this may sound like a Government sound bite, it is nevertheless true.

"The next big thing will be resources management. Companies will soon start to search scrap heaps for those unwanted TVs from years ago, as they will contain precious metals and recyclable materials." Despite such inspired forward thinking, he still won’t be drawn to consider a career in politics, no matter how much you tell him how good he would be at it.

"Politics is definitely not for me. Politics is about discussion, planning and then reviewing, whereas I like doing. In my opinion this is why the low-carbon industry has suffered from a lack of leadership since its inception.

"If I was going to take up such a role, it would be within the business community, not at Westminster."

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