Summit Notebook

from Ask...:

Where oil prices will be in June 2012?

Wars and revolutions across the Middle East and North Africa and the Japanese earthquake and tsunami have sent oil and gas prices soaring with economists worrying over the impact of escalating energy costs on global growth. Last week, for the first time in a decade, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries failed to reach an agreement to boost the output as Saudi Arabia did not convince the others that world's economy will need more fuel.

From June 13 to June 15, Reuters Global Energy and Climate Summit 2011 will feature more than 60 global decision-makers in the energy and climate businesses to discuss the challenges facing the 21st century. This is your chance to give us your forecast on whether oil prices are more likely to got back to their peak of $147 per barrel hit on 2008, or below the current range of around $120.

from Environment Forum:

Could “putting the cow inside the plant” make a new biofuel?

The Next Big Thing in biofuel might involve genetically engineered plants that digest themselves, making it cheaper to turn them into fuel. That's one of the new ideas that Arun Majumdar finds fascinating. As the head of the U.S. Energy Department's ARPA-E -- the path-breaking agency that aims come up with efficient, green energy solutions -- Majumdar said this concept is one of a few dozen that are in the development stage now.

Majumdar let his enthusiasm show as he described this project at the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit on Thursday. He was talking about a project in its early stages at Massachusetts-based Agrivida.

"If you look at biofuels, cellulosic biofuels  ...  you take agricultural waste, you separate out ... the cellulose, then you throw a bunch of enzymes at them. And these enzymes are there in the cow's gut, or termites, that break down this long chain polymer, this cellulose, into small bits and pieces called sugar molecules. And then you take those sugar molecules and feed them into another bug and then you produce gasoline," he said.

The costly part of this process, Majumdar said, is growing these enzymes in a bio-reactor instead of in a cow.

"What this company's doing is a very interesting idea. They take the gene sequences that produce enzymes and put them in the plant itself, so when the plant grows, it produces the enzymes free of cost." But isn't there a risk that the plants wouldn't grow, since they would carry enzymes that would make the plants self-digesting? One possible solution is what this start-up company is trying: make the enzymes inactive, and activate them later by changing temperature, humidity or acidity.

"It's supposed to chew itself from the inside," Majumdar said, with evident delight. "And I call this 'putting the cow inside the plant.' It's an amazing idea. Now I don't know whether it's going to work, but if it does, you essentially eliminated the cost of those enzymes, which is the really expensive part, and you create a more competitive pathway for biofuels than what is traditionally being done."

For more from the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit, click here.

Will Bjorn Lomborg be compared to Al Gore?

Bjorn Lomborg (left) worries that people will conclude he’s becoming like Al Gore (right).

At first sight, that sounds unthinkable.

Lomborg, a Danish statistician who wrote the book “The Skeptical Environmentalist”, argues that the world should develop cheap new green technologies before taking radical steps to fight global warming (…echoes of the policies of former U.S. President George W. Bush).

By contrast, former U.S. Vice President Gore won a share of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize after describing climate change as a “planetary emergency”.

But Lomborg  makes a joking comparison with Al Gore in an interview with the Reuters Global Climate and Environment Summit to illustrate how he reckons debate is often polarised between people who fear global warming means the planet is doomed and others who dismiss it all as a hoax.

Lomborg wants the world to invest $100 billion a year in research and development of new green technologies to help make renewable energies competitive with fossil fuels. The problem is, he says, that some people conclude he’s suddenly embracing Gore-style action to confront climate change.

He says people usually denounce him as a denier of climate change because he says the issue is not a top priority. On the other hand, he said: ”if you say as I do that we should spend $100 billion on this technology, people say: ‘Oh, he’s saying we must spend money, he must be Al Gore’.”

Economic security or environmental destruction?

The Oil Sands, the world’s second-largest proven reserves after Saudi Arabia, hold out the promise of energy security for the United States and economic security for Canada. But environmentalists fear the destructive, energy intensive process of extracting the oil will carry direct consequences for the planet. Despite the doubts, new oil sands projects are again springing up after the financial crisis halted development. How will oil companies balance the quest for more oil with environmental concerns? Mar. 22-23 we’ll put those questions to the oil companies, environmental groups and government officals at the first Reuters Canadian Oil Sands Summit in Calgary.

How Leo DiCaprio started a car company

Henrik Fisker, the storied car designer who has shaped Aston Martins, Fords and BMWs, told the Reuters Autos Summit this week that he now wants a starring role in the green revolution.

But he also wants to make the world safe for sports cars for generations to come.

“Being a car enthusiast and loving cars, to be quite honest, I could not imagine a life without a beautiful, fast sports car,” Fisker said. “I needed to do something to make sure that I could drive one of those nice cars, my children could drive one of those beautiful, fast cars.”

So what was Fisker’s inspiration? What was the epiphany when he realized that the world was ready for the upcoming Fisker Karma, a $90,000 plug-in hybrid with 50 miles of all-electric fun?

Leonardo DiCaprio…in a Prius.

“A couple of years ago it started, by people who were maybe a little ahead of their time. You saw some movie starts like Leonardo DiCaprio buying a Prius.

“He could have bought any car in the world, and I remember seeing that on television and thinking to myself, you know, when you’ve got a guy who could buy any Ferrari or Rolls Royce and he’s buying a Prius, you know something is changing dramatically.”

from Environment Forum:

A Nightmare on Auto Street: Big boxes

When it comes to competition in the auto business, it's the unknown that keeps the top U.S. Honda executive, John Mendel, up at night.

Mendel, speaking to the Reuters Auto Summit in Detroit, said he is always concerned about the conventional competitors. But what he is really afraid of is a company that "changes the game."

"What keeps me up regarding new competition is someone significantly changing the game," Mendel said.

People mention an autoseller taking up dealers dropped by General Motors, Chrysler or Saturn.

"What if they didn't have a dealer network," Mendel said. "What if they used big-box retailers and contracted with Jiffy Lube to have your car fixed?

"That could be a really new metric, which suddenly changes the whole cost structure for distribution significantly," said the Honda executive.

That has been tried before, by Sears, in the 1950s, but was killed by the complex state franchise laws that protect dealership networks.

Upstarts!

The U.S. government has pumped more than $100 billion into Detroit over the past year to keep automakers General Motors and Chrysler alive. But some of the sector’s remaining capitalists are having a hard time stomaching a $25 billion Department of Energy loan program intended to spark new developments in electric cars. 

Start-ups Fisker Automotive and Tesla Motors have won about $1 billion in combined funding, while longtime players Ford and Nissan have received substantially larger loans from Washington to work on vehicle electrification — a technology the White House and many in the industry hope will reduce the United States’ dependence on imported oil and lower emissions of carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas. 

Funneling federal money to new entrants to the automaking world does not sit right with Tim Leuliette, chief executive of parts supplier Dura Automotive. 

“If there’s a real market for electric vehicles, the OEMs will do it,” Leuliette said, using industry jargon for automakers. “We don’t need to have people who have never built a car in their life take $1 billion of our tax money and say ‘I can do it too.’” 

Government funding muddles market signals, Leuliette argued at the Reuters Autos Summit in Detroit.

“When government writes a check, it says the smart money investors are hesitant to fund it,” Leuliette said. “When markets say it’s now wise enough … there’s more than enough money.” 

For his part, the founder of Fisker Automotive — which aims to build plug-in hybrid cars at a former GM plant in Wilmington, Delaware — said government funding is a logical way to kick start a technology that private U.S. companies have been slow to focus on. 

60-hour work weeks, all in the name of climate change

Some politicians may be accused of dragging their heels when it comes to dealing with climate change, but you can’t say members of the United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism’s executive board aren’t clocking in the hours.

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), an emissions trading scheme under the Kyoto Protocol worth $33 billion last year according to the World Bank, allows companies and countries to outsource their greenhouse gas reduction efforts by investing in clean energy projects in emerging countries like China and India, where making emissions cuts costs less.

Projects are submitted to the CDM for registration and a staff of over 100 examine and scrutinize each one to ensure environmental integrity.

The whole scheme is supervised by a 20-member executive board, chaired by Lex de Jonge of the Netherlands’ environment ministry.

“The members are all employed by governments and assigned to the board. They don’t get a salary from the UN but they receive a daily subsistence allowance to pay for meals, hotel and travel costs,” de Jonge said at the Reuters Climate and Alternative Energy Summit.

“As chair of the board, I spend 75% of my time on CDM issues and 25% on domestic issues relating to my actual job,” he added.

The CDM’s executive board holds some 7 to 8 week-long meetings a year, up from 5 meetings in 2005, the year international emissions trading really began to take shape.

Enviro-boxer Britain needs to spend more on climate cure

Scientists may face an uphill battle in trying to warn the world about the looming perils of global warming, but one of Britain’s top academics wouldn’t trade places with the politicians tasked with negotiating a new global treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

“Although the science (of climate change) is difficult and still uncertain, it’s a doddle compared to the politics,” said Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, Britain’s science academy.

Thousands of international delegates will convene at UN climate talks in Copenhagen in December. All early indications suggest those talks, seen as critical to agreeing a successor to the Kyoto Protocol after it expires in 2012, will be anything but a cake walk.

That said, Rees thinks UK policymakers have done a good job so far.

“We must give (the UK) government credit for its leadership in this area, going back to the Gleneagles G8 summit in 2005 when climate change was pushed up the agenda,” Rees said at the Reuters Climate and Alternative Energy Summit this week.

“The UK punches above its weight in the debate on climate change even though we only produce 2% of the world’s emissions,” said Rees, likening Britain to some sort of environmental boxer.

Rees thinks that because the UK has the high-tech know-how, it should strive to provide more than 2% of the solution to the climate problem by upping investment technologies to help replace fossil fuel burning.

Google’s Green Energy Czar on investing in renewables

Bill Weihl, Google’s Green Energy Czar, sat down at Reuters’ Global Climate and Energy Summit in San Francisco and talked about Google’s solar thermal project, infrastructure costs and where he sees the energy mix heading in 20 years.

Here he chats about emerging clean tech hubs and what the United States should do about investing in renewables.

(Editing/video by Courtney Hoffman)