Capital markets veteran joins company to fuel next phase of rapid growth
HOUSTON, Aug. 5, 2026 -- Utility Global ("Utility"), a global company enabling the economic industrial decarbonization of heavy industries, today announced the appointment of Robert Lane as Chief Financial Officer. Lane joins Utility at a defining time as the company pivots into its commercialization phase.
Lane has a proven record of scaling organizations and guiding companies through rapid commercial growth. He brings more than three decades of financial leadership across energy, industrial and growth-stage companies, most recently as CFO of Quva Pharma, where he led finance, accounting, IT and treasury functions through a period of process modernization and liquidity improvement. Previously, as Executive Vice President and CFO of Sunnova Energy International, he helped lead the company's Initial Public Offering (IPO) and closed more than $10 billion in tax equity, debt and equity financing to fund its growth. At Spark Energy, Lane helped lead the company through several acquisitions and integrations, simplified the corporate structure, and led creative and innovative financing strategies. At Emerge Energy Services, he guided the company through its IPO and capital expansion while significantly lowering the cost of debt. Across his career, Lane has led dozens of capital markets transactions collectively worth tens of billions of dollars and has a proven track record of building the financial infrastructure to support fast-growing companies to help them scale.
"Robert has built his career taking companies from early-stage growth to full-scale commercial operations, which is exactly what Utility needs right now," said Utility Global Chief Executive Officer Parker Meeks, "His financial leadership and experience guiding organizations through periods of growth gives us the right partner to expand the commercial deployment of our proprietary H2Gen® technology and enable our customers to advance their decarbonization goals while extending the economic value of their existing assets."
Utility's proprietary H2Gen® technology enables the production of low-carbon hydrogen by using industrial off-gases or biogas to convert water into hydrogen without electricity, while simultaneously producing a concentrated carbon dioxide stream with up to 98% purity. As Utility advances multiple commercial projects and expands its footprint across North America, Asia and Europe, Lane will lead the finance function through this next stage of growth.
"Utility is at the stage where proven technology achieves rapid commercial growth, which is the environment where I have spent my career," Lane said. "H2Gen offers hard-to-abate industries a genuinely practical path to economic decarbonization, and I am looking forward to building the financial foundation that enables Utility to scale that technology quickly and efficiently."
Utility Global is a portfolio company of Ara Partners, a global private equity and infrastructure firm decarbonizing the industrial economy.
About Utility Global
Utility delivers practical solutions that enable economic industrial decarbonization across hard-to-abate sectors including steel, mobility, refining, chemicals, and upstream oil & gas. The company's patented and proprietary H2Gen® technology harnesses energy from industrial off gases and biogases to produce application-specific, high-purity hydrogen with low-to-negative carbon intensity on-site from water, without electricity, using a proprietary electrochemical process.
H2Gen also produces a high-concentration carbon dioxide stream, significantly reducing the cost and complexity of carbon capture. Modular, scalable, and operationally flexible, H2Gen systems integrate seamlessly into existing industrial assets with a record-small footprint, enabling practical and economical decarbonization.
Utility is a portfolio company of Ara Partners, a global private equity and infrastructure firm that is decarbonizing the industrial economy.
For more information on Utility's solutions and services, visit www.utilityglobal.com
About Ara Partners
Founded in 2017, Ara Partners is a global private markets firm focused on decarbonizing the industrial economy. The firm invests in the middle market across three strategies: Private Equity, Infrastructure, and Energy. The firm scales commercially demonstrated decarbonization solutions, supports the businesses and infrastructure that enable their adoption, and reduces emissions at the source across the conventional energy value chain. Ara's model combines investing, market and policy expertise, project execution and operational optimization, and rigorous carbon accounting to reduce emissions economically and unlock growth at an industrial scale. The firm operates from Houston, Boston, Dublin and Washington D.C., and, as of March 31, 2026, had approximately $8.2 billion in assets under management.
For more information about Ara Partners, please visit www.arapartners.com.
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