Paparazzi Ethnography

• Carbon Dioxide Utilization Workshop taking place today at Haas Business School

Epilogue — we broke up at about 8:30 PM after a fairly long day of activities that I am still a little unclear about, though to most of the technical people in the room, things are rather clear. One thing I can opine, putting my own sociological spin on things, is that Carbon Utilization will be a much more innovative entrepreneurially driven sector than Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS). Capturing and herding carbon for umpteen hundreds of years is  a different kind of activity than utilization, with all its imperatives to make a profit.

4PM: policy break out group: now we are gathered in a different room with a different set of folks, talking openly about the policy issues associated with Carbon Utilization. And we’re talking about (1) the appropriate role of government; (2) the relationship to carbon taxes and credits; (3) education and communication to the public; (4)  What is plan B? (given that we’ve done nothing to deal with carbon over the past 20 years, and we will not seem to be doing anything, what is our alternatives); (5) Transforming CO2 from a cost to a business and technological opportunity; (6) energy security and societal implications (political problems) — as Graciela Chichilnisky stated–and who consulted for the Pentagon– that the U.S. military identifies climate change as a major risk center; (7) energy security; (8) funding by government agencies, potential coordination; (9) energy policy and interrelations.

(1) role for government: well, we’re sort of stuck discussing what the role of government should be… Typically, in energy, government regulates by industry, while in environment, government regulates across industry, so the question of I have is: what is the “object” of CO2 for government… Actually,  so we agreed that the role of govt. should be to explore a menu of ideas for carbon management; (2) education…? government should educate itself of the risks for addressing climate change and the increasing uncertainty in energy security, given the problems in the middle east…

3PM: ah, okay, so I participated in the “electrochemical frontiers” break out group, and I cannot really say that I understood too much, it was quite technical, but as a workshop process, we were supposed to come up with some goals and here they are, for what it is worth: (1) a CO2 Utilization Community should be created (it is fragmented at present) to lobby policy and funding organizations; (2) Add-on contact manufacturing could reduce threshold for adopting of new technology; (3) be complementary to CCS; (4) find research on long-term performance of catalyst including regeneration; (5) novel scale-up technology; (6) improve volumetric efficiency and throughput; (7) develop suitable analytical techniques; (8) develop common economics/performance matrix; (9) create a pipeline of engineers and scientists through outreach.

In the end, we “voted” to select a few to bring to the main conference. And it turned out that creating a Utilization Community got the most votes. So, here, the point was that there were several types of technology for utilization that were competing against each other, and this particular group — which included a few venture capitalists, a few scientists from Chevron and DVN and well, I was in there– felt that it would be a good idea for these folks to identify themselves as a community for government and scholarly funding…

lunch: I am starved! all this conversation over “microfluidic reactor for CO2 conversion”, and utilization via “Direct Heterogeneous Electrochemical Reduction” — which I know nothing about, and can barely identify as English, and even looking at all these slides that have all these graphs, and lines going in crazy directions, and “artificial trees”, and such topics, is stressing my pea-brain, and reinvigorating the corporeal aspects of my body, mainly my tummy — that I am hungry!

Let’s look at what’s available to eat:

lunch buffet

lunch plate

noon: Green Cement’s Brent Constanz from Stanford talking about placing carbon in cement. Good grief, it is possible to put all kinds of wastes in cement– and have it sequestered there forever. You can get about 1600 pounds of CO2 in a yard of concrete. And figuring the whole world is cementing over everything, there’s quite a possibility there for some interesting possibilities. Here’s a pretty good graspable article on his work.

China, China, China. Here it is again. We had it last week in Oslo, and now here in Berkeley. China and India, the fact is, a new cement plant once a week, a new coal fired electricity plant once a week. “No matter how you model it, if we go as hard as possible toward renewable, we’ll get to 49% coal fired electricity in 20 years from 50% now”…. Well, that settles it. StudioPolar is going to start a new project in China.

10:30 AM: Clean Coal! Sequoia Capital’s Hogarth is actually talking about how cheap electricity is to produce from coal in the Powder Basin (Utah), and how it makes sense for carbon sequestration. Good grief, this is such a crazy issue! I have to point out that in Norway last week at the Oslo Energy Forum, there was a practical meltdown over Clean Coal, and how the public relation campaigns has taken the natural out of natural gas. Graciela Chichilnisky opined that if we are serious about moving beyond coal we have to cut the government subsidies which ranges in the billions of dollars.

the future as coal

Notice for example, that in this slide on the left, that coal with carbon capture and sequestion (“Coal w/CCS”) is already depicted as the late-bridge beyond natural gas. Moving toward Clean Coal to displace natural gas. Can you imagine!!

10:00 AM: Much of the discussion over the past hour has been on scaling and economics. Scaling up to manage the huge volumes of CO2, taking it and turning it into something useful, from the lab to industrial scale, and the money that no one’s making on it so far. Uncertainties at the industrial scale surround project permitting, project capital, educating the communities, and so, the speakers are interested in getting these parts of the problem in place, practically before even coming up with the idea itself for making CO2 useful… because “once you get to industrial scale, you need to role these things out immediately” — and, it is often “easier to do this outside the United States”….

Graciela Chichilnisky from Columbia University is speaking right at this minute. She is a famous scientist who represented the United States as author of the IPCC report that garnered a Nobel Prize with Al Gore. What an amazing personal website she has. The “externality of Carbon Dioxide can be redressed through the profit motive” — making money from from externalities. Useful ideas to deal with CO2, rather than put it back in the ground.

Berend Smit, from Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, however, now speaking about how we should realize that we’re dealing with an Enormous amount of material, the CO2 that we produce is in total abundance. By looking at sheer volumes, he suggests underground may be the only way, as far as sheer volumes. Five years ago, no one worked on CO2, but now it’s cool.

Financier Warren Hogarth, another big gun from Sequoia Capital with an impressive website. Looking for companies that have a valuable economic technology today.

9 AM: This morning, I’m attending the UC Berkeley, Haas Business School workshop on carbon dioxide utilization, discussions on how to capture and re-agentize carbon dioxide. Andrew Isaac, who runs a business exchange with Norwegian companies DNV (Det Norske Veritas) and Statoil, is the facilitator. A few of the folks that I met last week in Oslo are here representing the same companies. DNV is sponsoring the event.

I will be updating what is presented here, in not too technical terms, because this is a unique type of workshop and the only one of its kind in the United States so far. As with always, We have our placards, name tags, complimentary breakfast with yogurt and coffee, and of course the power point projector that feeds us information.