Name: Ross Faransso
Previous title: Head of business development, KBR
New title: CEO, Nexus PDS
Nexus companies offer a range of products and services related to extracting value from materials traditionally viewed as waste, including a portfolio of anaerobic digestion and landfill gas facilities. Nexus also provides advisory and engineering services to clients on similar projects.
Fresh off raising $50 million in capital, Nexus hired Ross Faransso to lead its project development services arm. As head of Nexus PDS, Faransso will lead the company's advisory, commercial project development, front-end engineering and operational readiness business lines.
Nexus CEO and co-founder Ben Hubbard praised Faransso’s “wealth of institutional energy transition knowledge,” noting it would help Nexus’ growing client base, in a release emailed to Waste Dive.
"Ross brings a unique balance of technical, operations management, and business development experience which is the heartbeat of Nexus PDS,” Hubbard said in a statement.
Faransso has previously worked for engineering, procurement and construction companies in the energy space, as well as ExxonMobil. In his new role, Faransso will assist Nexus as it seeks to take on Fortune 500 clients looking to get into sustainable aviation fuel, renewable natural gas, hydrogen and other clean energy technologies.
"Nexus has had a great past 10 years, [but] one area that they're looking to grow into is the major owner-operators," Faransso said in an interview. "The network I've developed there is going to help open a lot of doors."
Faransso said in recent years, he’s noticed the energy business shift toward pursuing more clean energy and waste-to-value technologies. He said he "wanted to really focus on renewables" in the next phase of his career.
“There's a pressing need that we've got to do something different. We can't just keep doing the traditional [petrochemicals] and refining that are just spewing out CO2 into the environment,” Faransso said. “I wanted to be part of something that made a difference.”
In his new role, Faransso will help expand a company whose client base’s portfolio totals more than $300 billion in energy transition assets. He said he liked the deliberate approach to growth that Nexus has taken since its founding, rather than following the cyclical trends in project development that he saw in his previous roles.
“That really appealed to me, to be able to have that identity that Nexus has,” Faransso said. “Nexus still has that entrepreneurial spirit, they're in that growth mode, they're ambitious, and they're giving me the reins to say, 'How would you do this? What are the market sectors that you see could grow?'”
