July 1st, 2009
Can we find a clean, planet-friendly fuel to power our cars? Electric cars will take a decade, at least, to have a majorimpact on climate change, while corn ethanol has a slew of well-documented problems. Investors and the government are increasingly focused on so-called next-generation biofuels, which turn sustainable feedstocks (not food-stocks) into transportation fuels.
Dozens and perhaps hundreds of companies are frantically searching for the perfect biofuel. One is Qteros, a Massachusetts-based startup, spun off from Umass-Amherst, that has discovered and refined a microbe called the Q Microbe that turns biomass—switchgrass, wood chips, grass, corn stover or even municipal liquid waste—into ethanol. Qteros’s CEO is Dr. William Frey, former global director of biofuels at Dupont, who recently told a reporter that the company is “basically trying to become the Microsoft of energy.
Since Qteros was formed in 2006, the company has raised about $30 million from venture capital firms, big companies, individuals and, yes, taxpayers like you. The investors include Battery Ventures, BP, Camros Capital, Long River Ventures, the Quantum Group of Funds (advised by George Soros), Valero and Venrock. The U.S. government has given Qteros a $2 million grant towards construction of a pilot plant, and the company wants more, specifically, another $18 million from the U.S. Department of Energy. The DOE says it will provide nearly $800 million from the stimulus package for biofuels research and development, inviting companies to submit proposals to compete for the money.
I met with Qteros executive vice president Jef Sharp and business-development chief Jon Gorhan last week in Washington. They told me that company traces its beginnings to 1996 when Tom Warnick, a lab assistant to a University of Massachusetts microbiologist named Susan Leschine, took a walk near a reservoir in western Massachusetts (below), brought a batch of mud back to her lab and isolated a microscopic organism that has since been recognized as a “novel life form.” It’s a nice origin story: Informational technology companies (HP, Apple) often start in a garage, so why can’t a clean tech company get its start in the mud?
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Battery Ventures, biofuels, Camros Capital, ethanol, Jef Sharp, Long River Ventures, Qteros, Quantum Group, Valero, Venrock
Posted in Climate Change, Economics, Energy, Environment, Politics, Sustainability
1 Comment »
June 29th, 2009
In the energy and climate change debate, environmentalists are for the most part united in their feelings about coal (very bad), gasoline (avoid “gas guzzlers”), nuclear energy (scary), hydropower (small is better than big), wind (good unless you worry about birds), solar thermal (nifty) and rooftop solar PV (even niftier). But what about natural gas, which is the source of more of our energy than coal, nuclear or all the renewable sources combined?
“We’re the Rodney Dangerfield of fuels,” says Roger Cooper, executive vice president of policy and planning at the American Gas Association. Meaning that gas gets no respect, nor all that much attention. (The DOE logo, below, includes an oil derrick, wind turbine, hydro and the nuclear symbol, but nothing about gas.
I went to see Cooper and Christopher McGill of the AGA last week because of the news that the domestic supply of natural gas is increasing. A group called the Potential Gas Committee, which is based at the Colorado School of Mines, has just reported that the U.S. has about a 100 year supply of natural gas, assuming we continued to consume it at today’s rates. “That’s the largest future supply ever reported,” McGill said. Just a decade ago, the same group project that the U.S. had a 60 to 65 year supply. The increase is, essentially, a result of new (and controversial) drilling technologies that make it easier to recover the gas from saturated shale rocks that, it turns out, exist all over the country–the Applachachians, Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma and in the Rocky Mountains. “You’re talking about a huge volume of saturated rock that has the potential to be exploited,” McGill said. This New York Times story explains the significance of the new estimates.
My question for the gas association was a simple one: What does the discovery of vast new reserves of natural gas, which is, after all, a fossil fuel, mean when it comes to climate change? A simple question, but the answer is anything but.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: American Gas Association, Christopher McGill, Roger Cooper
Posted in Climate Change, Energy, Environment, Sustainability
1 Comment »
June 28th, 2009
I learned two things last week about Sunil Paul, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist with a passion for clean tech. One is that he thinks big. The other is that he is very well-connected in Washington.
Paul came to D.C. to release a report called the Gigaton Throwdown that, in his words, “redefines what’s possible for clean energy by 2020.” It’s roadmap that demonstrates how we can scale up clean energy to have a major impact in the next decade. Joining him at a news conference to unveil its findings were an all-star group from the Obama administration—green jobs czar Van Jones (checki him out on video, below), White House science advisor John Holdren and assistant secretaries of energy David Sandalow and Cathy Zoi, key players in Steven Chu’s brain trust at DOE.
Paul’s timing was excellent. He released the Gigaton Throwdown the day before the House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, the most important energy and environmental legislation of our era. While Waxman-Markey is far from perfect, it’s a step towards the ultimate goal: a top-to-bottom transformation of the global economy into one that is sustainable and just. Paul gets this as not many business people do.
Working with scientists, entrepreneurs and investors, Paul put together a team to see what it would take to reach “gigaton scale” for nine technologies—biofuels, building efficiency, concentrated solar power (i.e. solar thermal), construction materials, geothermal, nuclear, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, solar photovoltaics and wind. As the report explains:
To attain gigaton scale, a single technology must reduce annual emissions of carbon dioxide and equivalent greenhouse gases (CO2e) by at least 1 billion metric tons — a gigaton — by 2020. For an electricity generation technology, this is equivalent to an installed capacity of 205 gigawatts (GW) of carbon-free energy (at 100% capacity) in 2020.
The report found that eight of the nine technologies–the exception was plug-in hybrids–could feasibly reach gigaton scale in a bit more than a decade. Paul’s report is significant, in part, because it reflects the thinking of a many in a hurry–other studies, particularly the very good McKinsey study on how to avoid climate disaster, look out 20 or 40 years.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Climate Change, Economics, Energy, Environment, Politics, Sustainability
No Comments »
June 26th, 2009
There are two places on the Internet where you can find out how the $787-billion stimulus package is being spent. One is run by the government. The other by a west coast tech company. Care to guess which does a better job?
Yes, it’s recovery.org, which despite its dot-org suffix, is run by a company called Onvia (Nasdaq: ONVI) based in Seattle, which is tracking thousands of stimulus projects at the state, county and local level, from building a transit center in Washtenaw, Michigan, to decommissioning nuclear facilities in South Carolina.
Then there’s recovery.gov, the federal site that “offers little beyond news releases, general breakdowns of spending, and acronym-laden spreadsheets and timelines,” as The Washington Post put it. But don’t worry, the government is on the case. An office set up to oversee the stimulus (with a budget of $84 million) has about 30 employees, plus outside contractors, working to revamp the site, the newspaper said. “We have four and a half years to turn this thing into its final product,” Earl Devaney, the former inspector general now in charge of oversight, told The Post. No, I’m not making this up.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Economics, Energy, Environment, Media, Politics, Transparency
No Comments »
June 25th, 2009
“If the employees are well taken care of, they’ll take care of the customer and the customer will come back,” says Bill Marriott, the CEO of Marriott International. “That’s basically the core value of the company.”
Some things never change at Marriott. The company’s core values were shaped by its founder J.W. Marriott, Bill Marriott’s father, who opened a root-beer stand in Washington back in 1927 that grew into the hotel giant (3,000 branded hotels, $12.9 billion in revenues last year).
But the company has to constantly adapt—to the economic slump, to new technologies, to the changing tastes of travelers. Before long, Marriott could well get the first non-family CEO in its history, a soft-spoken Midwesterner named Arne Sorenson. (He’s next to Bill Marriott, below.)
My profile of the company, called Marriott Gets A Wake-Up Call, appears in the current issue of FORTUNE, part of a series of stories I’m doing for the magazine on FORTUNE 500 companies. It was a pleasure. For starters, I didn’t have to get on a plane; the company’s headquarters are about two miles from my house in Bethesda, Md. More important, I’ve long admired the company’s worker-friendly culture, its ethic of service and its commitment to voluntarism. Marriott is also leading the travel industry when it comes to envirommental issues.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Arne Sorenson, Bill Marriott, Marriott International
Posted in Business Ethics, Leadership, Sustainability, Workplace
3 Comments »
