Riverstone Credit Opportunities Income (RCOI ) has completed its conversion into a lender to clean energy projects but with its shares stuck on an 18% discount ahead of a shareholder exit opportunity next May, there’s a question over how long the $97m (£76m) investment company can contribute to decarbonising the world.

Half-year results today showed that with the exception of a few small equity positions received from previous loans to hydrocarbon companies, almost 95% of the investment trust’s assets are in 10 green or sustainability-linked loans.

One of its bigger loans is to Harland & Wolf, the UK-listed maritime engineer which borrowed up to $70m to fund its wind turbine business with the interest rate it pays linked to an apprenticeship programme to expand recruitment in local communities.

In the six months to 30 June, the dollar-denominated closed-end fund run by Riverstone Investment Group in New York saw net asset value (NAV) per share dip a cent to $1.07. Including five cents per share of income from two quarterly and one special dividend lifted the total investment return to 4.1%.

The ordinary dividends of four cents were covered by earnings per share, supporting a 9% yield with the shares up 2.6% today at 89 cents.

Although the shares have drifted below their $1 launch price in May 2019, the total underlying portfolio return has been 37.8% since flotation, with investors receiving 27.6 cents in dividends.

Fund managers Jamie Brodsky and Chris Abbate kept the trust fully invested using spare cash to buy short-term, high-yielding loans to two Texan companies: Hoover Circular Solutions. a provider of sustainable packaging and fleet management to the chemical and refining sectors; and Seawolf Water Resources, a water infrastructure company.

In June, a loan to Streamline Innovation to remove hydrogen sulphide from natural gas was fully repaid having generated an 18.5% internal rate of return or 1.23 times invested capital.

Stifel analyst Sachin Saggar said the results were ‘solid’. Referring to the recent loan problems at BioPharma Credit (BPCR ) and GCP Asset Backed Income (GABI ), he noted it was the ‘one fund that appears to have a relatively clean portfolio with no material concerns, an all-in yield to maturity in excess of 10% and a portfolio fully backed by floating rate loans’.

With a further 20% capital return to come in the event of a wind-down pushing the shares to asset value, Saggar retained a ‘positive’ rating’.

Reuben Jeffery III, the trust’s chair, said the board and managers were ‘working assiduously’ to reduce the discount ahead of the opportunity for investors to withdraw all their money at NAV. The company has previously said that if shareholders take more than half their capital, leaving RCOI with less than $50m, it will wind up and liquidate.