My Top 10 Energy Related Stories of 2009

Here are my choices for the Top 10 energy related stories of 2009. Previously I listed how I voted in Platt’s Top 10 poll, but my list is a bit different from theirs. I have a couple of stories here that they didn’t list, and I combined some topics. And don’t get too hung up on the relative rankings. You can make arguments that some stories should be higher than others, but I gave less consideration to whether 6 should be ahead of 7 (for example) than just making sure the important stories were listed.

1. Volatility in the oil markets

My top choice for this year is the same as my top choice from last year. While not as dramatic as last year’s action when oil prices ran from $100 to $147 and then collapsed back to $30, oil prices still more than doubled from where they began 2009. That happened without the benefit of an economic recovery, so I continue to wonder how long it will take to come out of recession when oil prices are at recession-inducing levels. Further, coming out of recession will spur demand, which will keep upward pressure on oil prices. That’s why I say we may be in The Long Recession.

2. The year of natural gas

This could have easily been my top story, because there were so many natural gas-related stories this year. There were stories of shale gas in such abundance that it would make peak oil irrelevant, stories of shale gas skeptics, and stories of big companies making major investments into converting their fleets to natural gas.

Whether the abundance ultimately pans out, the appearance of abundance is certainly helping to keep a lid on natural gas prices. By failing to keep up with rising oil prices, an unprecedented oil price/natural gas price ratio developed. If you look at prices on the NYMEX in the years ahead, the markets are anticipating that this ratio will continue to be high. And as I write this, you can pick up a natural gas contract in 2019 for under $5/MMBtu.

3. U.S. demand for oil continues to decline

As crude oil prices skyrocketed in 2008, demand for crude oil and petroleum products fell from 20.7 million barrels per day in 2007 to 19.5 million bpd in 2008 (Source: EIA). Through September 2009, year-to-date demand is averaging 18.6 million bpd – the lowest level since 1997. Globally, demand was on a downward trend as well, but at a less dramatic pace partially due to demand growth in both China and India.

4. Shifting fortunes for refiners

The Jamnagar Refinery Complex in India became the biggest in the world, China brought several new refineries online, and several U.S. refiners shut down facilities. This is a trend that I expect to continue as refining moves closer to the source of the crude oil and to cheap labor. This does not bode well for a U.S. refining industry with a capacity to refine 17.7 million barrels per day when total North American production is only 10.5 million bpd (crude plus condensate).

5. China

China was everywhere in 2009. They were making deals to develop oil fields in Iraq, signing contracts with Hugo Chavez, and they got into a bidding war with ExxonMobil in Ghana. My own opinion is that China will be the single-biggest driver of oil prices over at least the next 5-10 years.

6. U.S. oil companies losing access to reserves

As China increases their global presence in the oil markets, one casualty has been U.S. access to reserves. Shut out of Iraq during the recent oil field auctions there, U.S. oil companies continue to lose ground against the major national oil companies. But no worries. Many of my friends e-mailed to tell me that the Bakken has enough crude to fuel the U.S. for the next 41 years…

7. EU slaps tariffs on U.S. biodiesel

With the aid of generous government subsidies, U.S. biodiesel producers had been able to put their product into the EU for cheaper than local producers could make it. The EU put the brakes on this practice by imposing five-year tariffs on U.S. biodiesel – a big blow to U.S. biodiesel producers.

8. Big Oil buys Big Ethanol

I find it amusing when people suggest that the ethanol industry is a threat to the oil industry. I don’t think those people appreciate the difference in the scale of the two industries.

As I have argued many times before, the oil industry could easily buy up all of the assets of ethanol producers if they thought the business outlook for ethanol was good. It would make sense that the first to take an interest would be the pure refiners, because they are the ones with the most to lose from ethanol mandates. They already have to buy their feedstock (oil), so if they make ethanol they just buy a different feedstock, corn, and they get to sell a mandated product.

In February, Valero became the first major refiner to buy up assets of an ethanol company; bankrupt ethanol producer Verasun. Following the Valero purchase, Sunoco picked up the assets of another bankrupt ethanol company. If ExxonMobil ever decides to get involved, they could buy out the entire industry.

9. The climate wars heat up

There were several big climate-related stories in the news this year, so I decided to lump them all into a single category. First was the EPA decision to declare CO2 a pollutant that endangers public health, opening the door for regulation of CO2 for the first time in the U.S.

Then came Climategate, which gave the skeptics even more reason to be skeptical. A number of people have suggested to me that this story will just fade away, but I don’t think so. This is one that the skeptics can rally around for years to come. The number of Americans who believe that humans are causing climate change was already on the decline, and the injection of Climategate into the issue will make it that much harder to get any meaningful legislation passed.

Closing out the year was the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. All I can say is that I expected a circus, and we got a circus. It just goes to show the difficulty of getting countries to agree on issues when the stakes are high and the issues complex. Just wait until they try to get together to figure out a plan for peak oil mitigation.

10. Exxon buys XTO for $41 billion

In a move that signaled ExxonMobil’s expectation that the future for shale gas is promising, XOM shelled out $41 billion for shale gas specialist XTO. The deal means XOM is picking up XTO’s proved reserves for around $3 per thousand cubic feet, which is less than half of what ConocoPhillips paid for the reserves of Burlington Resources in 2005.

Honorable Mention

There were a number of stories that I considered putting in my Top 10, and some of these stories will likely end up on other Top 10 lists. A few of the stories that almost made the final cut:

The IEA puts a date on peak oil production

The statement they made was that barring any major new discoveries “the output of conventional oil will peak in 2020 if oil demand grows on a business-as-usual basis.”

AltaRock Energy Shuts Down

Turns out that deep geothermal, which the Obama administration had hoped “could be quickly tapped as a clean and almost limitless energy source” – triggers earthquakes. Who knew? I thought these were interesting comments from the story: “Some of these startup companies got out in front and convinced some venture capitalists that they were very close to commercial deployment” and “What we’ve discovered is that it’s harder to make those improvements than some people believed.” I am still waiting to see a bonafide success story from some of these VCs.

The biggest energy bill in history was passed

In total, $80 billion in the stimulus bill earmarked for energy was a big story, but I don’t know how much of that money was actually utilized.

The Pickens Plan derails

The website is still there, but the hype of 2008 turned into a big disappointment in 2009 after oil prices failed to remain high enough to make the project economical. Pickens lost about 2/3rds of his net worth as oil prices unwound, he took a beating in the press, and he announced in July that we would probably abandon the plan.

So what did I miss? And what are early predictions for 2010’s top stories? I think China’s moves are going to continue to make waves, there will be more delays (and excuses) from those attempting to produce fuel from algae and cellulose, and there will be little relief from oil prices.

Let the Data Do the Talking

Although not always successful, my goal is to let data drive my conclusions. Still, we all sometimes find ourselves in debates that are based more on passion and conviction than on data. But if the data are ignored because the conviction is strong, it may be dogma driving the conclusions.

Passionate debates are fine, but passionate debates that ignore data have no business in a scientific discussion. Further, such arguments frequently degenerate because one or both sides is not listening to the other.

During such emotional debates, I have been accused of being a shill for oil and gas, or of being a shill for biomass. In fact, in the debate I will discuss here, I was called both in the same thread! I am pro-biomass. I am anti-biomass. I love the environment. I want to destroy the environment. I am a Conservative. I am a Liberal.

The thing is, my world is not a black and white place. In the right hands, a screwdriver is a handy tool. In the hands of an enraged person, it can be a weapon. Same tool, vastly different outcomes, depending on how it is used.

Biomass is also a tool in which the outcome depends on lots of different factors. And even then the answers to the questions don’t always lead to the same conclusions for everyone.

Here is what I mean by that. People die in car crashes every year. So one reaction to that is “If you don’t want to die in a car crash, then don’t ride in a car.” That is true. That is one response.

But one must then consider the impact of that response:

“How would this impact your mobility?”

“Would you still travel places, and if so, how?”

“Is there a bike path that you could utilize, or would you give up your automobile only to risk your life cycling next to a busy highway?”

In other words, what secondary conclusions result based on the response to the initial question? But another approach is to reexamine the initial question:

“Why do people die in car crashes?”

The answer may be that most people die in car crashes due to very specific issues that can be mitigated. That is not to say that this will eliminate your risk of dieing in a car crash. But if I determine that 63% of the people who die in car crashes were not wearing seat belts, then I can always wear a seat belt and improve my odds of surviving a car crash.

This is the approach I try to take with science issues. Frequently the answers to questions are not definitive, and instead depend on any number of conditions. And in the end there will still be disagreement. Some people may feel that a 1% risk is acceptable, but that may be 100 times too high for the next person on the very same issue.

When someone is letting their emotions drive the argument, I try to get them to confront the data. If the answer is “It won’t fit”, then I either want to see that it doesn’t fit, or I want to measure it. This was the approach that I attempted to take with Joshua Frank, the author of – Burn a Tree to Save the Planet? The Crazy Logic Behind Biomass.

Following my recent critique – Biomass is Not Crazy Logic – Frank dropped by and left a number of comments. Not everyone wades through the comments, and the comments are really not designed for prolonged exchanges. Further, these essays are often picked up and reposted without the comments. So I thought it might be worthwhile to extract some of the comments here. (The complete responses can be found following my initial essay).

Frank’s argument can be distilled down to this: Citing Professor Tim Searchinger, Frank argues that burning biomass creates a net addition of carbon to the atmosphere. Burning biomass creates the danger that we will cut our forests down and inefficiently turn them into energy. Burning biomass creates emissions. Therefore, the burning of biomass is crazy, and it must be stopped.

My response can be distilled down pretty easily. I actually agree with Searchinger that there are lots of factors that have to be evaluated in the biomass/bioenergy equation. Searchinger’s point is to show that the improperly used screwdriver can be a weapon. Frank then extrapolates that position to: A screwdriver is a weapon, and therefore we must stop the spread of screwdrivers.

Frank cites Searchinger, but Frank’s extrapolations are subjective and qualitative. Numbers are missing from Frank’s analysis. Conclusions are sweeping and rigid. He argues that there is only one way to do biomass: The wrong way.

In the real world, the burning of biomass can present the risks Mr. Frank cites. But where Mr. Frank goes wrong is that he believes that it must present those risks. That logic does not follow. Responsible management of biomass resources can have the opposite impact of what Mr. Frank suggests.

In the back and forth that ensued, Frank seems to be unaware that the issues he raises are known issues; that while he is bemoaning them as a reason to surrender, some are out there working on solving them.

A perfect example of this was his frequent argument that “burning biomass creates particulate emissions.”

JF: “Burning woody biomass produces PM25, the most deadly form of particulate matter. This is a serious public health threat. Even if you believe that biomass is carbon neutral, you cannot skate around this important, well-documented fact.”

Regarding this issue that Frank kept trying to educate me on, here are some excerpts from a book chapter that I recently completed on Bioenergy and Biofuels from Woody Biomass:

RR: The majority of the wood used for cooking is done over an open stove. This is an inefficient process, leading to excessive consumption of wood. Open cook stoves also result in particulate emissions. Excessive pollution from wood cooking has been identified as a risk factor in acute lower respiratory infection, the chief cause of death in children in developing countries (Smith 2000).

So I am well aware of the particulate emission issue with biomass burning. But here was the next paragraph, in which I discussed mitigation of the particulates problem:

RR: Modern biomass stoves have been developed that are much more efficient with respect to wood utilization. These stoves can mitigate some of the problems associated with cooking over an open fire. By operating more efficiently, the money spent for fuel, and/or the time spent collecting fuel is diminished, as less fuel is required. Because combustion is more efficient, the air pollution associated with open fires is also diminished. Due to the multiple advantages of moving to modern biomass stoves, a number of programs have emerged with the intent of disseminating these stoves to the developing world (Barnes 1994).

In another section, I wrote:

RR: As with wood for cooking, one disadvantage from using wood for heating is the high level of particulate emissions. Open fireplaces also suffer efficiency losses from heat exiting the chimney. The development of community advanced combustion systems (AWC) has the potential for allowing increased usage of wood for heating, because of increased efficiency and lower particulate emissions.

So Frank is aware of a problem, but is unaware that this sort of problem can be mitigated if the framework is in effect to mitigate it. This problem has a solution, albeit many have not adopted the solutions. Frank only sees a problem.

The biggest hang-up, though, was probably around energy balances. There was quite a bit of “it takes a lot of energy to cut trees down and haul them out of the forest.” Again, there were never any numbers associated with these kinds of comments (except for the ones I provided). I guess if you use phrases like “diesel-powered” a lot, you can infer that the energy balance is bad without ever having to crunch the numbers.

As I told Mr. Franks, the various energy inputs in the logistical chain of taking a tree from the forest and getting it to a processing facility – or the energy inputs in the conversion process itself – are available and are used in life cycle assessments regularly. “A lot of energy” for me has numbers associated with the claim. So instead of arguing about “a lot of energy used to harvest and transport” and that no biomass process can overcome that, why not attempt to quantify that?

Back to the chapter I just completed, I wrote a section called “Net Energy Considerations.” Here is an excerpt from that section:

RR: When calculating the energy that one could extract from a resource, it is important to consider the energy inputs into the process, as well as the types of energy inputs.

In that section, I spent a bit of time explaining that the net energy of a process can easily be negative, and those processes are not sustainable. I concluded that section with:

RR: Consideration of energy inputs also highlights one of the shortcomings of biomass relative to petroleum: The energy density for biomass is much lower; less than half the energy density of oil. This is due to the fibrous nature of biomass, and the fact that the moisture content tends to be high. This has implications for recoverability of wood resources. In general, the lower the energy density of the feedstock, the closer it needs to be to the processing facility due to the energy required for transport. Economical technologies that can efficiently increase the energy density of biomass in the field are needed. Some are currently under development and will be discussed in this chapter.

So yes, I am aware of the relationship that energy inputs have on the sustainability of the system.

At one point Frank did actually use some numbers to show that it takes longer to grow a tree than it does to burn a tree:

JF: “A large tree that took 20 years to go (GE trees would be less) may burn in 17 seconds (after chopped to fine pieces).”

This must be a key concept for him, because he actually pointed it out three different times. At one point he referred to this as a fundamental fact. This leads him to the conclusion:

JF: “Trees will be burned at a far quicker rate than it takes to replace them.”

As a rebuttal to his “fundamental fact,” I point out that the tomato it took 60 days to grow is eaten in 5 minutes. Therefore, tomatoes are eaten at a far quicker rate than it takes to replace them and the eating of tomatoes must be stopped before they are wiped out?

Frank made a number of other unsupported arguments such as:

JF: “Biomass in the US means deforestation in our national forests. Period.”

JF: “Almost 99% of biomass to electricity plants in the US are also burning coal or trash. That’s a huge problem.”

JF: “If we are going to promote biomass as a renewable, we are looking at large scale deforestation.”

JF: “Trees simply do NOT make for good sources of biomass for electricity. Woody debris is not a dense energy source like coal (I’m not suggesting coal is the alternative). That’s why, as you know, power plants are using other fuels with biomass to produce energy.”

JF: “There is no such thing as good forest management when profit is involved.”

It’s like arguing that red is the best color. Put some numbers to it and let’s measure it. Are 99% of biomass to electricity plants really burning coal or trash? What is the source of that claim? Or is that simply hyperbole over coal plants that have started to supplement with biomass?

I kept wondering if he ever gave any thought to what would happen if we abandoned the use of biomass for fuel. I can tell you what would happen: In the U.S., the future would be coal until we run out of coal. (To be perfectly honest, that’s probably the case anyway). That is reality. Sure, there’s nuclear, but something tells me that this wouldn’t be his preferred outcome. In developing countries, it would eliminate the particulate emissions problem because huge numbers of people wouldn’t have any fuel for cooking.

At one point Frank brought up the threat of genetically modified organisms (GMO). I pointed out that while my company doesn’t use genetically modified trees, I am not personally opposed to genetic engineering in principle. Nature has been genetically modifying organisms since the beginning of time, and everything we eat has been genetically modified. Every mutation (even those that aren’t expressed) is a naturally-occurring experiment in genetic engineering. This was his response:

JF: If you are not opposed to GE (and no, cross-breeding and hybridized plants are not genetically engineered, stick to engineering because your biology stinks) then I can’t help you. GE is new to the cycle of evolution.

That line of argumentation is certainly a tangent, but countless people are alive today as a result of genetic engineering. Incidentally, I appreciate his concern, but it isn’t my biology that stinks. I wrote that nature has been doing genetic modifications forever. That is a fact. Frank was the one who translated that as “cross-breeding and hybridized plants.” He may want to look into genetic mutations, because cross-breeding and hybridization aren’t the only things that have changed the genetics of our food.

Ultimately when I continued to challenge his replies, it went the way emotional-arguments often go. Because I failed to yield to his subjective arguments, he concluded that I couldn’t be motivated by the science. So he threw out a couple of ad homs -

JF: You get paid to do it. Makes much more sense why you will not address the real dangers of biomass production.; You are motivated by factors other than hard science. Biomass = paycheck. I get it.

- and then left. In light of what he actually wrote, I found the phrase “hard science” especially ironic. Maybe I misunderstood and he was simply complaining that the science is hard?

For the record, I don’t get paid to promote biomass. I don’t get paid to write at all. I write because I like to, and I am focused on biomass because I think it is going to have to play an important role in our energy future. It can’t be the sole solution – and I have argued the point many times that it can only replace a small fraction of our fossil fuel usage – but every analysis I have ever done suggests that it must be a part of the solution.

At the end of the day, I try to be practical. I frequently hear people suggest that what really needs to happen is to reduce the global population by 95%. My eyes just glaze over. Those are the sorts of things that are not going to happen by politics or decree. It is navel-gazing to sit around and argue about “solutions” like this. Better to focus on solutions in the context of what is likely to actually take place once the politics have been factored in.

This is how I view biomass. Frank can spend his time dogmatically arguing that it must necessarily be a disaster. But what is likely? It is more likely (in fact, it is certain) that we are going to continue down this path. Therefore, I think a much more productive use of time is to ask “How do we do it right?”

References

Barnes DF, Openshaw K, Smith KR, van der Plas R. (1994). What Makes People Cook with Improved Biomass Stoves? A Comparative International Review of Stove Programs. Washington, DC. The World Bank.

Smith, K., Samet, J., Romieu, I., and Bruce, N. (2000). Indoor air pollution in developing countries and acute lower respiratory infections in children In: Thorax. June; 55(6): 518–532.

German Robot Pigs

“What I need for this project”, I explained to my young son, “is an army of German robot pigs.” His eyes went wide. “And I know just where to get them…”

I have a project on my desk right now to look at avenues of disposal for sewage sludge in a specific location. There are lots of things you can do with sewage sludge, but it is obviously dependent on a number of factors. There are places where farmers spread it on their fields, there are places where it is incinerated, and there are places that it is land-filled. And there are other options beyond that.

In order to utilize sludge for energy, the water content is obviously critical. Too much water, and any energy you create from the sludge is lost due to the need to dry the sludge. So what I really needed in this specific case was a method of drying that could help generate net energy from the project.

Obviously you could just spread the sludge out in a sunny location, but there are many problems with that. One good rainstorm can ruin a week’s worth of drying and create a brown river to the nearest waterway. Further, as the outside layers dry, the drying slows down unless the sludge is constantly mixed.

I thought that this particular situation could benefit from a solar dryer. I am familiar with solar kilns and solar ovens, so why not a solar sludge dryer? I envisioned a system like a greenhouse that allows the sludge to dry, but also ventilates and removes the moisture. Several of the functions would need to be automated if this has any hope of being economical.

So I thought “Hmm, I wonder if anyone has invented such a system.” Since about 98% of anything that I ever think of has already been invented, I Googled it. Turns out that there are lots of solar sludge dryers to choose from, but one in particular caught my eye. Enter the German robot pig:

German robot pig the star of sludge drying plants

A group of young, up-and-coming German scientists in the late 1990s founded a company that today is the world leader in solar sludge drying. The star of the environmentally friendly drying process is an unusual pig that works all day without food or complaint.

What would a machine look like if it lived in the mud? Well, probably like a pig. Some 12 years ago, Tilo Conrad, together with two of his fellow students from the University of Hohenheim, built the first electrical pig, pioneering a device that is now being used as a solution to waste disposal problems throughout the world.

The stainless steel pigs, which in a sense resemble big beetles, are an important part of a larger solar drying process was patented by Thermo-System GmbH, a company Conrad founded in 1997 in Filderstadt.

Today, nearly 200 mechanical pigs do what normal pigs do: wallow in and shuffle through the mud — only these pigs do it to reduce sewer sludge disposal costs and protect the environment. Conventional drying processes use non-renewable energy, but Thermo-System’s process harvests solar power to dry the mud. It spreads the wet sewage sludge into sheds that are similar to greenhouses and puts the pigs to work.

In the sheds, the sludge absorbs heat from the solar rays and an innovative ventilation system keeps the air inside the shed warm and dry. The electrical pig, which is a fully automated robot complete with stainless steel mixing tools, tills and aerates the microbiologically active sludge, thereby accelerating the drying process. The whole system is fully automatic, uses very little energy and can be easily maintained.

Alas, another invention that someone thought of 10 years before I did. But this system really has many of the characteristics that I am looking for. Whether the economics pan out is still entirely unclear. The company does have an impressive project portfolio, though, having already built over 100 sludge-drying plants worldwide.

But one doesn’t get a chance to work with an army of German robot pigs every day, so I will continue to investigate and maybe this works out. Besides, that sounds so much more interesting than “I am working on sewage sludge.”

American Freedom from Oil: A Bipartisan Pipedream

The following guest essay is by Kevin Kane. Kevin is a market analyst, economist, Asia political affairs strategist, and Korean language linguist living in Seoul, South Korea.

American Freedom from Oil: A Bipartisan Pipedream

By Kevin Kane

During election campaigns, presidential candidates, policy leaders, and pundits pander to both American fears and desires when they demand that the U.S. should pursue “energy independence” by eliminating oil imports. This has been a rallying cry of every President since the 1970s when American domestic production began a steady decline that continues through today.

Is energy independence a realistic policy, or as we are a part of one globally integrated economy, do we need a more relevant global energy strategy that captures the inherent economic and financial vulnerabilities associated with our age of irreversible interdependence?

Perhaps we need to look outside our domestic tunnel vision and broaden our perspectives on energy security. Seeing the bigger globalization picture will require leaders, starting with President Obama, to refocus the world’s perspective on energy from the zero-sum national to positive-sum international level. Essentially, the world needs a global energy strategy.

Global Energy Security

If leaders are serious about energy independence, they will ask the more appropriate energy question, “How can we create global energy security?”

When asking this more relevant question, we can derive many proposals, beginning, but not limited to, the following three general approaches:

(1) First, recognizing that global economic integration creates mutual energy insecurity, President Obama could propose addressing the topic through the G20, and call for the creation of a global energy security committee tasked to draft a global energy strategy proposal.

(2) Second, this global energy strategy should focus on building cooperation, creating transparency, eliminating barriers to foreign energy investment, eliminating energy trade-related tariffs, advancing liberalization, coordinating R&D, facilitating technology sharing, and managing mutual energy insecurity.

(3) Third and finally, we have to cease “framing” energy security as a national goal, and rephrase our terminology to reflect our mutual international energy insecurity.

Our Oil Interdependence

American leaders, and the proposals of many environmental, renewable energy, and oil company lobbyists, individually or collectively, are incapable of “freeing the U.S. from foreign oil.” While the U.S. may benefit from reducing oil imports and increasing investments in offshore drilling, energy efficiency, and oil substitute technology, we must recognize that these efforts do nothing to free the American economy from oil’s transnational social, economic, and financial linkages.

If one globalization-connected country’s economy were to experience a supply shortage or an industry-crippling price shock, seemingly distant and unrelated, but economically integrated, countries will feel the effects of these shocks in their own trade and financial sectors. Thus, in an era of globalization, nations connected to the global economy are mutually vulnerable to the effects of oil price and supply shocks regardless of their independent national energy strategies.

Consider how America’s subprime mortgage crisis rippled through seemingly unrelated economies across the entire globe, from South Korea to Russia. We should expect the same economic-linkages to spread the effects of an oil supply or price shock to seemingly energy-independent economies.

American policy leaders need to recognize that eliminating oil imports will not create energy independence.

Leader of the Energy World

As the tip of the globalization spear, American leaders need to think much bigger about how the U.S. will achieve energy security in a world where one nation’s energy insecurity is another seemingly unrelated nation’s economic vulnerability. American leaders have to recognize that the U.S. is only as energy secure as the world’s least energy-secure globalization-connected economy, which includes nearly every developed and developing country in the world. Americans pride themselves on being the leaders of the free world. Perhaps it is about time to lead the world towards universal energy security.

Biography

Kevin Kane is a market analyst, economist, Asia political affairs strategist, and Korean language linguist living in Seoul, South Korea. Kevin holds a BA in political science from Georgia State University and a Master of International Studies with a concentration in international trade and economics from Seoul National University.

Kevin has seven years of military experience serving in Asia and the U.S. as a leader in project management and government affairs, two years of intensive academic study in energy economics and the oil and gas industry, and three years of cumulative internship, fellowship, and consultant experience working alongside Asia policy strategists and fortune 100 business advisors. More details can be found in his resume here.

Keep Your Eye on DME

Di-methyl-ether (DME) is a fuel that I have been talking about since at least 2006. I have blogged about it, and I have classified it in several of my presentations as a “Sustainable Contender” (including in a slide at last year’s ASPO conference). I want to use this post to explore DME in a little more detail, and explain why I think you should keep an eye on it as an attractive renewable replacement for diesel.

DME is a pretty simple compound. Methane, the least complex hydrocarbon, has the chemical formula CH4. That is one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms. When methane is burned – which is to say reacted with oxygen – it produces carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H20).

DME can be thought of as a couple of methane molecules with an oxygen separating them. It looks like this: CH3 – O – CH3. This is an ether; in fact the simplest ether (characterized by the oxygen separating two hydrocarbon groups). Note that each methane (methyl) group is missing one hydrogen, which allows it to form the bond with oxygen. But when DME is burned, you still end up with carbon dioxide and water.

DME is produced from methanol, the simplest (and cheapest) alcohol. The current price for methanol as listed by Methanex is $1.10/gal, compared to a national average rack price of $2.26/gallon for ethanol and a national average spot price of $1.83/gallon for gasoline.

Methanol works fine as a transportation fuel, but has some disadvantages. While methanol is cheaper to produce than ethanol, the energy content per gallon is even lower than for ethanol (and methanol is more toxic). Ethanol has about 2/3rds of the energy content of gasoline, but methanol contains only half the energy content of gasoline. As a transportation fuel, this is a disadvantage (but not a knockout) because it limits the range of your car.

As a fuel, DME can be used in either a gasoline or a diesel engine. That makes the potential market huge. DME is a gas at room temperature, but compresses to a liquid under mild pressures. It is currently used as a propellant in many consumer products, and is classified as non-toxic and non-carcinogenic. (Granted that if you stand around in a room filled with nothing but DME, you will die due to oxygen deprivation. The same is also true of nitrogen, which makes up 79% of our atmosphere).

DME is completely miscible with LPG, and can be used as a supplement/replacement in either transportation or heating applications. When combusted, DME burns very cleanly. There are no associated sulfur or particulate emissions (even in a diesel engine).

DME can be produced from biomass, coal, natural gas, or essentially any source of carbon. Unlike many ‘next generation’ biofuels, production from biomass is a straightforward route and not especially complex. You gasify biomass to produce syngas, react syngas to produce methanol, and then dehydrate the methanol. Each of these steps takes place every day at large scale at chemical companies around the world.

There are some specific disadvantages from DME, but this is true for just about any fuel. First, the fact that it is a gas at room temperature means that if there is a leak, it can form an explosive mixture in the air. The same is true for natural gas or LPG. Second, the energy density of the fuel is lower than for gasoline or diesel. The volumetric energy density lies between that of ethanol and methanol.

So why aren’t we using it in North America? Like many other fuels, it is a chicken and egg problem. We don’t have the infrastructure in place in the U.S. Some vehicle modifications would be required to accommodate it as well. But these are not insurmountable problems, as the continuing roll-out of E85 vehicles and service stations has shown.

The Chinese have embraced DME for years, and are increasing their DME capacity. This allows them to convert their coal into something much more desirable for them – transportation fuel.

The Swedes are also at the forefront of rolling out DME. The Swedish company Chemrec has been converting pulp mills into biorefineries that produce DME. Volvo has announced that they are conducting studies on the performance of DME in 14 of their heavy trucks over the next two years. (Here is another story on that at Green Car Congress).

In North America, I know several people or groups who have expressed interest in, or are dabbling with DME. My expectation has been that at some point there will be an entry into the market here, but it will be slow due to the aforementioned lack of infrastructure. What prompted me to write this essay was I spotted a story yesterday about a Canadian company that is going to give it a shot:

Dimethyl ether: The unknown fuel that’s gaining fame

A clean fuel that’s already gaining traction in Asia could be getting a toehold in Canada, just in time to help northwest B.C.’s hard-hit forest industry. Dimethyl ether, or DME, is almost unknown in North America but may soon get a big boost here from new tough emission standards coming to the U.S.

DME is a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide that can be produced from biomass, natural gas or coal. It is now used as a propellant in aerosol spray cans because it is non-toxic and breaks down. But DME also has the potential to replace diesel fuel because it produces 95 per cent fewer greenhouse gases, no soot, low levels of nitrogen oxide and no sulphur dioxide.

Calgary-based GV Energy is proposing to build a biorefinery to produce DME in Terrace, B.C.

While some of those details are slightly inaccurate, the article is a good read on how DME can fit into the fuel mix and add jobs in an area with the right resource base. Especially interesting to me is to view the comments from readers. I find it amazing at times the emotional attachment some people have to trees. I can understand opposition to the conversion of forest to pasture or agricultural land. I can understand the opposition to clear-cutting and not replanting. But it seems that to some people, cutting down a tree is just wrong. Period. This coming from people who are living in houses made from wood.

If we use managed forestry to produce DME, then that has the potential to be an improvement over the status quo. Like anything else, there is a right way and a wrong way. But just because a wrong way exists doesn’t mean that you don’t try at all. We (my company) are not going stop trying to responsibly manage and use forest assets just because some aren’t doing so. We will just continue to do things in the most sustainable way we can, and hope that the proper incentives are in place to make sure others do so as well.

But I digress a bit. To learn more about DME, see this presentation put together by Europe’s BioDME project. Note especially the slide that shows the land usage efficiency of DME relative to competing fuels.

The market for DME is bound to continue growing due to its versatility as a fuel and because it can be produced relatively easily from a wide variety of starting materials. The question is whether North America will continue to watch that growth occur in Europe and China.

Update: I have received a note that another BC company is also working on DME: Blue Fuel Energy.

Platts Survey of Top Energy Stories of 2009

As I compile my year end list of the biggest energy stories of the year, I have just gotten an e-mail from Platts that is very helpful. As they have done in previous years, they have a survey up so readers can rank the top stories:

Platts wants to know: the biggest oil stories of ‘09

They will publish the results shortly after Christmas. Scanning the list and comparing to my rough draft of the Top 10, I see one story that isn’t currently on my list that I missed: The Valero Foray into Ethanol. Other than that, all of the stories that I have tentatively in my Top 10 are on their list except for two (and I bet people who take the survey will suggest both of them).

I will post my list prior to Christmas, and hope that we don’t see another big year end story like the XOM acquisition of XTO. That is a Top 10 story that came in right at the end of the year. Here is how I ranked the stories Platts had listed, but this was off the top of my head and very subjective. I may decide later on that #3 should really be #8, or that something that didn’t make the list should really be on there. My Top 10 will be a bit different because I have combined some topics that they treated separately.

1. Prices (basis WTI) comes roaring back to the $80 level after almost hitting $30
2. Full-year decline in demand heads toward biggest drop since 1981
3. Natural gas-crude spread in US blows out to unprecedented levels
4. Refinery woes: Valero shuts Delaware City , Sunoco shuts Eagle Point, Repsol shuts Cartegena, Japan cutbacks underway (RR: related to Reliance news)
5. Valero makes big foray into ethanol with multiple ethanol plant purchases; Sunoco follows on smaller scale
6. EU slaps duties on US sales of biodiesel into Europe
7. OPEC holds to its 24.845 million b/d ceiling all year
8. US EPA rules greenhouses gases are a threat to public health, plans on using authority to regulate them
9. ExxonMobil gets into bidding war with Chinese, others over Ghana stake (RR: more for what it signals for the future).
10. Exxon buys XTO for $41 billion

Biomass Is Not Crazy Logic

I saw a story about a week ago that I flagged to comment on when I got caught up. I suppose I am caught up enough now to do so. The story is:

Burn a Tree to Save the Planet? The Crazy Logic Behind Biomass

The author is listed as Joshua Frank, described as an environmental journalist and the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush. Frank has previously written an article critical of Oregon’s usage of electricity derived from coal, and in the current essay he turns his attention to biomass.

The article is confusing from the start:

It might seem crazy that anyone would even consider the incineration of wood and its byproducts to be a green substitute for toxic fuels such as coal. Yet that’s exactly what is happening all over the country, and it has many environmentalists scratching their heads in disbelief.

I find those comments baffling. Why would it seem crazy to believe that burning biomass – which utilizes CO2 when it is growing and helps sequester carbon in the soil through the root systems, leaves, and slash – would be greener than burning a fossil fuel like coal that has a long list of potentially undesirable environmental impacts? Do you know what happens to waste biomass that isn’t utilized? It decomposes and ends up as the same CO2 it would end up as if you burned it.

While it is true that emissions controls on coal-fired power plants are much improved in recent years, it is also true that burning coal has resulted in acid rain and increased levels of mercury in our waterways. Burning coal also increases the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. To suggest that burning trees isn’t greener than burning coal is one of the most ludicrous things I have ever heard. From the tone of the article, it sounds as if the author believes that forestry and the harvesting of trees is by definition bad.

Now it is true that if you cut down an old growth forest and inefficiently turn it into a liquid fuel, that isn’t environmentally responsible. I could certainly envision any number of schemes to make the burning of biomass come out with a higher environmental impact than from burning coal. If I cut down a chunk of the Amazon, displace the people and the wildlife living there, ship the wood halfway around the world, and combust it in an old, inefficient boiler – then yes, the environmental impact of that would be higher than from burning Powder River coal. But such exceptions aren’t the norm. This article, however, paints with a very broad, one-sided brush and acts as if all usage of biomass is by definition bad:

NASA’s James Hansen says that the burning of coal is the single largest contributor to anthropogenic global warming, so any alternative fuel source must decrease the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) released into the atmosphere if we are to put the breaks on climate change. Biomass, despite its label as a renewable energy source, does not solve the problem because burning trees actually emits a large amount of CO2.

That is another very odd comment. Burning coal releases ancient CO2 that was sequestered away. Burning biomass releases recently recycled CO2. That’s why it is renewable. If the author is concerned about CO2 emissions – and he clearly is – then coal and biomass are night and day. And while they acknowledge in their next paragraph that this is what “proponents counter with”, Frank quickly tries to shoot that one down:

An article in Science released last October attempted to debunk the myth that biomass is a good alternative to traditional coal and oil burning. The study, authored by climate scientists, claimed that when an existing forest is chopped and cleared to produce fuel, the ability of those harvested trees to absorb CO2 is eliminated entirely while the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere actually increases.

This entire article seems bent on the notion that the biomass we utilize will come from old growth forest that is slashed, burned, and left fallow. The people interviewed for the article must envision a scenario like turning the Amazon into biofuels – and this is the future they must foresee for biomass to come up with these sorts of conclusions. Such a notion isn’t remotely indicative of the future of biomass. Biomass will be grown for purpose (as I explained in Don’t Weep for the Trees), and it can definitely be grown responsibly and sustainably.

“The game is up,” stated biomass skeptic Ellen Moyer, a principal of green engineering firm Greenvironment, after the release of the report. “The problem has been identified, and the clarion call for course correction has rung out around the world. The days of biomass burning … are numbered and pending legislation needs to be corrected before perverse incentives to burn our forests are enshrined in law.”

You will have to show me the laws that incentivize the burning of our forests. If you mean laws that incentivize the usage of biomass for energy – well that isn’t the same as burning our forests. You first grow the forest, and while that is taking place everything you are complaining about when you burn it is running in reverse. Oh, there can be particulate emissions from improper burning, but it is also true that proper forest management can result in improved soil and increased carbon sequestration in the soil.

Another problem with biomass is that it is typically mixed with substances like coal to produce energy. In Nevada, for example, NV Energy is set to use a mix of coal and wood at its Reid Gardner coal-fired power plant. As a result, the company hopes to qualify for the state’s renewable energy credits.

The first problem is that this isn’t true. That is not how biomass is typically used. It can only be blended with coal in small amounts due to differences in chemical and physical properties, and it requires a substantial investment in the coal plant to allow such mixing. There is a technology called torrefaction that has the potential to allow much greater mixing, as it converts biomass into something like bio-coal. But torrefaction is still mostly at a pre-commercialization stage.

If a coal-fired power plant receiving energy credits isn’t mind boggling enough,…

Why is that mind-boggling? You just wrote that they were going to use wood to displace coal. Why wouldn’t they qualify for the same energy credit anyone else gets for using biomass? Or do you prefer that they simply continue to use 100% coal?

“They are burning more than trees because wood is simply not a good energy source,” said Jeff Gibbs, who resides in Michigan and is fighting the state’s six operating biomass plants. “Look, wood produces 50 percent more CO2 than coal, for the same amount of energy output. We have to stop this before more plants begin to pop up.”

I am sorry, but that’s another ludicrous statement. I would really love to see the analysis that provided that figure.

Not only is biomass not a good source of power, claims a 2007 paper presented at the European Aerosol Conference, it’s also not a healthy alternative to coal. The paper claimed that particulate matter (particles, such as dust, dirt, soot or smoke) was actually higher for a 7 megawatt wood gasification plant than it was for a large coal-fired power station.

There’s that broad brush again. While it is true that wood gasification plants can have lots of particulate emissions, that is not an inherent quality. You can put the same pollution controls on them that you can on coal plants. So once again a bad starting assumption leads to a sweeping, but false conclusion.

In summary, this was a very one-sided view that presented the worst extremes as more or less the status quo for biomass utilization. It is true that you can do things a right way or a wrong way. Water is healthy and I need it to live, but if I drink too much it can kill me. Taking a page from this article, I suppose I should avoid water from now on, as it has the potential to kill me.

For those quoted in the article, I hope they don’t freeze to death in the dark as the biomass they are so opposed to rots and releases its CO2 anyway. As I tell people sometimes, if you are opposed to everything, then prepare to be happy with the status quo.

Osmotic Power

Did you ever wonder why the skin on your hands sometimes shrivels when you have them in water for too long? The underlying reason is called osmosis (a simple explanation in more detail below), and the same driving force is now being utilized as a power source.

Occasionally I encounter an energy story that catches me by surprise because it is so far under the radar. This morning I got one of those from a friend who e-mailed and referred me to this story:

The world’s first osmotic power plant opened!

My immediate reaction was skepticism that you could really make osmotic power work as a viable energy source. But first a bit of background before readers’ eyes glaze over at the usage of unfamiliar terminology. Students of chemistry or biology will have encountered the concept of osmosis, and most people have heard of reverse osmosis for the production of fresh water from saline or otherwise contaminated water.

In a simplified nutshell, water that is separated from a salt solution by a semi-permeable membrane (like a cell wall) will have a potential to migrate across into the salt solution – creating a pressure difference on the two sides of the membrane. (Lots of systems can create an osmotic pressure, but for illustration let’s focus on salt water and fresh water).

Osmosis is a very important concept in biology, as it is the mechanism by which water moves in and out of cells. A blood cell, for instance, will lose water and shrink if it encounters an outside environment that is more saline (saltier) than the internal environment. Water moves through plants by this process as well.

But to illustrate what is going on in the press release above, let’s talk about reverse osmosis. In reverse osmosis, a pressure is applied to the high salt concentration side to force fresh water back across the membrane – leaving the salt behind. The applied pressure must be greater than the osmotic pressure, or the fresh water will migrate to the saline side.

Now imagine that system in reverse. There is a saline solution on one side of the membrane, and it is allowed to build pressure from the migration of the fresh water across the membrane into the salt water. The build up of pressure – in this case osmotic pressure – could in theory be utilized for energy.

Imagine the way a dam works. Water pressure forces the water through a turbine, which generates electricity if it is coupled to a generator. If the osmotic pressure is likewise allowed to relieve through a turbine, then yes, in fact it could be used to produce electricity. Such a system would indeed produce osmotic power.

However, until this morning’s e-mail I had never heard of anyone actually building a system to do this. And I am skeptical that anyone can actually produce cost-effective electricity this way, because to generate a substantial pressure is going to require a lot of membrane surface area. A little bit of digging shows that the system above has a power output of only 4 kilowatts.

To put that into perspective, there are numerous power plants with outputs greater than 1,000 megawatts – which is 250,000 times the size of this osmotic power demonstration unit. So while this is perhaps newsworthy due to the novelty, they must prove that they can economically scale-up, and that is always a big hurdle.

One thing I wondered about as I read this article is whether it might not be more cost-effective to put in pipelines of fresh water to regions that are doing reverse osmosis of salt water. The idea being instead of using the fresh water in one location for osmosis and the salt water in the other for reverse osmosis, bypass the osmosis all together (reverse osmosis is very energy intensive).

Update: A reader just sent a link that says that IBM is looking into this as well: Energy From Sea Water? Consider IBM Intrigued

Footnote: I Googled the term “osmotic power” to see if that term had ever been used in this blog. My expectation was that it hadn’t, but I see that a reader linked to a story on this a couple of weeks ago in the comments following the story on OTEC (which I should be updating soon).

The DOE Funding Recipients

I am so far behind on the things that I have been intending to write. It is hard to believe that it has already been over a week since the most recent US DOE biorefinery grants were announced. I have been meaning to list them and comment, but I have finally decided just to list them without too much comment. Let’s just say that some of these names have been around for a while and have issued a lot of press releases, but they haven’t produced any biofuel.

The reason for keeping my comments to a minimum is that I have potential conflicts of one sort or another with several of these companies or projects. Sometimes it is just that I know some of the people involved; in other cases it is more complicated than that. But I don’t want to be accused of possible conflicts of interest by getting into some of the names/technologies that I am surprised to see listed. I know that there were also a number of high profile companies (i.e., they issue a lot of press releases) who did not make the cut.

It is probably worth a future post to check into the six prospective cellulosic ethanol plants funded by the DOE in February 2007 (see the list at the bottom of my post here). As far as I know only one – Broin/POET – has completed a project from those funds that is producing cellulosic ethanol.

Below is the list of recent award recipients, from A(lgenol) to Z(eachem), as compiled by Biofuels Digest (the list/description is verbatim from the DOE announcement, but the original DOE link is offline right now). I embedded links to all of the companies. There were nineteen projects awarded, for a grant total of up to $564 million.

And if you ever wondered how the DOE determines the winners and losers, the New York Times did an interesting story on that a few days ago:

How DOE Dealt With a ‘Tsunami’ of Clean-Tech Applicants

The outpouring of grants — and the preponderance of unsuccessful applicants — has stirred curiosity and some complaints over the DOE rating process.

The review involved a series of screening steps that included technology capability, job creation, likelihood of success, and ability to generate matching funds, DOE says.

Rogers was asked whether DOE would make public the winners’ applications and the review teams’ analysis, to shed more light on the decision-making.

“Our plan is not to make that public. First off, all of the [private-sector] reviewers are doing this as a matter of public service, and we don’t need to draw them into getting interviewed about every application.”

The Winners

Bluefire Ethanol
DOE Grant: $81,134,686
Non-fed funding: $223,227,314

Fulton, MS: This project will construct a facility that produces ethanol fuel from woody biomass, mill residue, and sorted municipal solid waste. The facility will have the capacity to produce 19 million gallons of ethanol per year.

Demonstration Scale

BioEnergy International
DOE Grant: $50,000,000
Non-fed funding: $89,589,188

Lake Providence, LA: This project will biologically produce succinic acid from sorghum. The process being developed displaces petroleum based feedstocks and uses less energy per ton of succinic acid produced than its petroleum counterpart.

Enerkem
DOE Grant: $50,000,000
Non-fed funding: $90,470,217

Pontotoc, MS: This project will be sited at an existing landfill and use feedstocks such as woody biomass and biomass removed from municipal solid waste to produce ethanol and other green chemicals through gasification and catalytic processes.

INEOS New Planet BioEnergy
DOE Grant: $50,000,000
Non-fed funding: $50,000,000

Vero Beach, FL: This project will produce ethanol and electricity from wood and vegetative residues and construction and demolition materials. The facility will combine biomass gasification and fermentation, and will have the capacity to produce 8 million gallons of ethanol and 2 megawatts of electricity per year by the end of 2011.

Sapphire Energy
DOE Grant: $50,000,000
Non-fed funding: $85,064,206

Columbus, NM: This project will cultivate algae in ponds that will ultimately be converted into green fuels, such as jet fuel and diesel, using the Dynamic Fuels refining process.

Pilot and Demonstration Scale FOA – Pilot Scale

Algenol Biofuels
DOE grant: $25,000,000
Other funding: $33,915,478

Freeport, TX: This project will make ethanol directly from carbon dioxide and seawater using algae. The facility will have the capacity to produce 100,000 gallons of fuel grade ethanol per year.

American Process
DOE grant: $17,944,902
Other funding: $10,148,508

Alpena, MI: This project will produce fuel and potassium acetate, a compound with many industrial applications, using processed wood generated by Decorative Panels International, an existing hardboard manufacturing facility in Alpena. The pilot plant will have the capacity to produce up to 890,000 gallons of ethanol and 690,000 gallons of potassium acetate per year starting in 2011.

Amyris Biotechnologies
DOE grant: $25,000,000
Other funding: $10,489,763

Emeryville, CA: This project will produce a diesel substitute through the fermentation of sweet sorghum. The pilot plant will also have the capacity to co-produce lubricants, polymers, and other petro-chemical substitutes.

Archer Daniels Midland
DOE funding: $24,834,592
Other funding: $10,946,609

Decatur, IL: This project will use acid to break down biomass which can be converted to liquid fuels or energy. The ADM facility will produce ethanol and ethyl acrylate, a compound used to make a variety of materials, and will also recover minerals and salts from the biomass that can then be returned to the soil.

Clearfuels Technology
DOE funding: $23,000,000
Other funding: $13,433,926

Commerce City, CO: This project will produce renewable diesel and jet fuel from woody biomass by integrating ClearFuels’ and Rentech’s conversion technologies. The facility will also evaluate the conversion of bagasse and biomass mixtures to fuels.

Elevance Renewable Sciences
DOE funding: $2,500,000
Non-Fed funding: $625,000

Newton IA: This project was selected to complete preliminary engineering design for a future facility producing jet fuel, renewable diesel substitutes, and high value chemicals from plant oils and poultry fat.

Gas Technology Institute
DOE funding: $2,500,000
Non-Fed funding: $625,000

Des Plaines, IL. This project was selected to complete preliminary engineering design for a novel process to produce green gasoline and diesel from woody biomass, agricultural residues, and algae.

Haldor Topsoe
DOE funding: $25,000,000
Non-Fed funding: $9,701,468

Des Plaines, IL. This project will convert wood to green gasoline by fully integrating and optimizing a multi?step gasification process. The pilot plant will have the capacity to process 21 metric tons of feedstock per day.

ICM
DOE funding: $25,000,000
Non-Fed funding: $6,268,136

St. Joseph, MO. This project will modify an existing corn ethanol facility to produce cellulosic ethanol from switchgrass and energy sorghum using biochemical conversion processes.

Logos Technologies
DOE funding: $20,445,849
Non-Fed funding: $5,113,962

Visalia, CA. This project will convert switchgrass and woody biomass into ethanol using a biochemical conversion processes.

Renewable Energy Institute International
DOE funding: $19,980,930

Non-Fed funding: $5,116,072

Toledo, OH. This project will produce high quality green diesel from agriculture and forest residues using advanced pyrolysis and steam reforming. The pilot plant will have the capacity to process 25 dry tons of feedstock per day.

Solazyme
DOE funding: $21,765,738
Non-Fed funding: $3,857,111

Riverside PA. This project will validate the projected economics of a commercial scale biorefinery producing multiple advanced biofuels. This project will produce algae oil that can be converted to oil based fuels.

Honeywell’s UOP
DOE funding: $25,000,000
Non-Fed funding: $6,685,340

Kapolei, HI. This project will integrate existing technology from Ensyn and UOP to produce green gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel from agricultural residue, woody biomass, dedicated energy crops, and algae.

ZeaChem
DOE funding: $25,000,000
Non-Fed funding: $625,000

Boardman, OR: This project will use purpose grown hybrid poplar trees to produce fuel-grade ethanol using hybrid technology. Additional feedstocks such as agricultural residues and energy crops will also be evaluated in the pilot plant.

Copenhagen Suggests Climate Issue Not Going Away

I have mentioned that I think ClimateGate will end up being one of the top stories of 2009. A number of people have commented or e-mailed me and said that the story will soon be forgotten. I don’t think so. I don’t think they realize the energy this gives to those who were skeptical. In my opinion, this will galvanize the opposition and make it much harder to get any legislation passed on climate change. (I am reading through a very comprehensive examination of the raw data and the nature of the temperature adjustments now at Watt’s Up With That?: The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero)

Regardless of whether that view is accurate, I would be remiss if I didn’t have an essay devoted to the Copenhagen Conference. Prior to the Copenhagen conference, the Great Plains Institute, an energy-focused NGO that was going to delegates to Copenhagen, asked if I would be interested in receiving dispatches from their policy analysts about what’s happening in real-time inside the convention hall.

Here is one of those dispatches:

Copenhagen Suggests Climate Issue Not Going Away

Copenhagen, Denmark

Rolf Nordstrom, Wednesday, December 9, 2009

I arrived in Copenhagen on Monday afternoon and am still suffering a little jet lag, but I am awake enough to give you a glimpse of what the climate change conference taking place here these next two weeks looks and feels like, and how you might expect it to impact your life.

First, to give you a sense of scale, I want you to imagine that the vast Mall of America is filled not with shops of every kind, but with hundreds of booths from different organizations, temporary offices for delegates from 192 countries, vast meeting rooms set up with microphones and video screens, cafes, the mother of all cloak rooms, huge banks of computer stations (many with Skype and video capability built in), and the whole place teaming with people.

To get into this global “town hall” meeting, I waited in line with hundreds of others in order to get my picture taken and go through several security check points. Indeed, the elaborate airport-like security system rivals any major airline hub, complete with scanners and sniffing dogs. And all this only hints at the scale of this gathering.

If you don’t follow the climate change issue closely, it may seem like this conference in Copenhagen is coming out of thin air. But the international negotiating process on climate change has been going on for a long time and takes place through a series of meetings, each called a “Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change” (or COP for short). This one, COP15, is my first and by all accounts the very largest of them all, suggesting that concern over the world’s climate has grown dramatically over the past 17 years; and of course the issue of climate change has been studied by scientists for decades prior to that.

High-level ministers and negotiators from all over the world meet every year to review the implementation of the overall Convention, which was signed back in 1992 in New York (including by the U.S.). Its objective is “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”

If you are a climate skeptic, being at this conference would prompt you to ask yourself, “if the science behind climate change is not compelling, then how is it that essentially every major country in the world—and many you’ve never heard of (think Tuvalu or Comoros), is convinced that climate change is a real and urgent challenge? Have their scientists and elected leaders all be hoodwinked?

We tend to be a bit isolated in our thinking in the U.S., but a lack of strong action on climate change has led to demonstrations in some 4,500 locations in 170 countries, and more are taking place here in Copenhagen. An example yesterday featured people convincingly dressed as trees being followed around by a scrum of reporters with cameras and sound booms as the tree people called for a halt to deforestation and the preservation of forests in the push for new forms of energy production.

No matter what happens here, you can expect there to eventually be an international agreement that places legally-binding limits on the emission of greenhouse gases. If I were a business, I would ask myself two questions:

1) Do I think this issue will go away? In other words, can we just wait it out (like a war of attrition) and hope that climate change goes away? If your answer is “yes”, what is the evidence for this view? What leads you to believe that the world will forget about climate change?

2) If the issue is not going away, then what can I do as a business (or an individual for that matter) to position myself to flourish in a carbon-constrained world?

At a minimum, you may want to stay informed. One good way to do that is to follow the proceedings and the U.S. government’s positions here in Copenhagen through this official Web site: http://cop15.state.gov/uscenter/multimedia/index.htm

Rolf Nordstrom is executive director of the Great Plains Institute, a Minnesota-based nonpartisan, nonprofit working with Midwestern States and Canadian provinces to accelerate the transition to a sustainable and prosperous low-carbon economy.