John O'Brien is an English businessman and an expert advisor to governments, industry, financiers and the cleantech sector. Based in New York, O'Brien is a managing director in Deloitte's Climate & Sustainability practice. [1] In this role he leads the firm's Energy Transition and Decarbonisation work.
O'Brien has engineering degrees from Oxford and Trinity College Dublin, plus an MBA from the University of Adelaide. [2]
O'Brien previously led Deloitte's work on climate in Australia. [3] Before that, he was the managing director of Australian CleanTech, which acted as the Australian representative for the Global CleanTech Cluster Association. He was also a non-executive director of Novarise Ltd, an ASX listed company which recycles polypropylene waste in China. [4] [5] O'Brien entered the Australian energy sector in the 1990s and worked for Origin Energy for nine years. [6] He had previously worked in the Middle East, the United Kingdom and Canada, where he held various roles in the oil and gas industries and engineering consultancy. [4] O'Brien lectured in leadership and entrepreneurship at the University of Adelaide and was a member of the Premier’s Climate Change Council in South Australia. [7] He has been a member of the board of several CleanTech companies involved in wind farm development, biosensors and plastic recycling. He has served on the board of Renewables SA and as a member of the Clean Technology Innovation Program Committee at Innovation Australia.
O'Brien is the author and editor of the book Opportunities Beyond Carbon - Looking Forward to a Sustainable World, which was published in 2009 by Melbourne University Press. [8] He has since published two further books, Visions 2100: Stories from Your Future in 2015 and Stories from 2030: Disruption-Acceleration-Transformation in 2021, [9] on the topic of effectively communicating environmental challenges through positive storytelling. Since 2012, O'Brien has written frequently about the cleantech sector for the website, Renew Economy. [10]
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