EclecticLip

Late last year, one of the executives asked me to help write a paper on the future of energy.

McKinsey & Company have now published it. 

Other authors in the series include:

• Nobel Laureate and US Energy Secretary Steven Chu (“Time to fix the wiring”)
• Intel co-founder Andy Grove (“An electric plan for energy resilience”)
• peak oil titan Colin Campbell (“The end of the oil age”)

Cooler still, as this unPhotoshopped screengrab shows, we’ve got the top spot in the Energy section!!  (For now.)

Even cooler still, McKinsey had originally intended to circulate the essay collection at the World Economic Forum at Davos.  (Ultimately they published a subset, and ours didn’t make the cut.)  So I came within an editor’s whim of being able to put “…his work has been circulated at the World Economic Forum at Davos…” on my resume!

A long-form version of the essay will be made publicly available soon; I’ll link to that in due course.

Meanwhile, I think I’ll take a few more days off blogging to bask in the quietly ecstatic glow. 

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(click to enlarge)

This is the most encouraging news I’ve seen coming out of Alberta in a good long while. Sadly, the Globe and Mail still has a ridiculous paywall policy for anything more than a week old.  So, in case this is being read after end-Feb, the news is this: the tar sands lobby has splintered!

Like Joe Biden in a Vice-Presidential debate, I’ll repeat that one more time: the tar sands lobby has splintered!  Good to see the dirty-oil campaign has won some success.

This is a classic divide-and-conquer victory: fracturing your opponents and getting them to outflank each other, instead of you.  Wonderful stuff.

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Basically, newer tar sands players using maybe-not-quite-as-lethally-destructive steam-assisted gravity-drainage extraction (SAGD) are trying to separate themselves from traditional tar sands miners.

The process is even more energy intensive than traditional tar sands mining, but it should be possible to extract the bitumen without denuding the boreal forest above.  The process should use less fresh water, and eliminates the need for visible-from-space tailings ponds.

While the only “clean” tar sands are the ones left in the ground, I think SAGD could be marginally less environmentally destructive, on the whole.  Whether a lifecycle analysis confirms this or shows otherwise, it is absolutely refreshing to see the tar sands lobby splintering. 

This New York Times article summarizes why I believe peak oil’s imminence doesn’t mean the end of first-world living-standards as we know it.

It turns out, the US is ridiculously unproductive when it comes to GDP-per-unit-CO2: at 93rd (of 137) it ranks below even Thailand and Mexico!  [corrected from 167 as per comment below]
Ah, but there’s more to that than meets the eye…

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