In March 2011 I was invited to Oklahoma State University to deliver two talks on the future of energy for the School of International Studies Global Briefings Series and at an awards ceremony for the campus Institute for Sustainable Environments.  During my visit I was asked to speak with Rob McClendon Host of Oklahoma Horizons show:

Part One: Garry Golden – Energy Futurist

Things I forgot to mention:
Biofuels should be clarified as investing in’next generation’ (non-food) sources such as algae, bacteria that leverage carbon and hydrocarbons from non-food biomass (waste; byproducts; switchgrass, et al).   The US DOE has set clear limits on food-based biofuel production and within the industry there is clear direction to move to next generation (non-food) feedstocks.  Corn and soy are NOT the future of biofuels!  Also – it was a long day at OSU with multiple talks– and I completely misrepresented electrofuels which are based on non-photosynthetic energy conversion.

Part Two: Energy Futurist Garry Golden (Continued)

Notes:
My ’15 years’ (comment shoud have been 1990s, not 1990); Also, I mentioned distributed power generation via fuel cells because Oklahoma has an existing manufacturing base in polymers that could be extended into fuel cells as solid state polymer-based energy conversion.

The World Economic Forum (sponsor of the annual Davos gathering) has released a short set of scenarios highlighting broad implications around plausible outcomes for the ’Future of Future of Mining and Metals in 2030‘. WEF’s scenarios demonstrate the value of foresight and futures thinking for public and private sector leaders interested in exploring uncertainties about global change (and they cause flashbacks to my graduate school days).  The three scenarios were developed based on their ‘relevance, divergence and capacity to challenge thinking‘:

• Scenario One: Green Trade Alliance
• Scenario Two: Rebased Globalism
• Scenario Three: Resource Security

Why are scenarios for mining and materials resources important in the Digital & Knowledge Age?
If you were only to believe the evangelist voices of the ‘digital age’, you might mistakenly believe that de-materialization was the only overwhelming force of change in the world today.  But the truth is more sobering!   ’Things still matter‘ and our ability to master molecules and overcome the geopolitical challenges associated with mineral markets is critical for positive social and economic change for all nations.

Resources such as iron ore used to make steel, bauxite for aluminum, and precious metals used in electronics and appliances are incredibly important to the world economy and self-interest of national economies.   And while nanoscale materials design and bioindustrial assembly of hydrocarbon compounds are likely to help us overcome many resource constraints (e.g. broader substitutability options), there are significant challenges ahead for the mining and metals sectors as economic growth continues to expand the world’s global middle class.

Direct link Youtube

Learn more…

Related resources:

• Oil Drum has collected presentations on mineral and metals resources
• Nate Hagens, An umbrella view of resource depletion and human behaviour, PDF 148 slides, 8.7 MB

My posts: WEC Future of Global Finance Scenarios

http://bit.ly/9EAFyd

Creating a Culture of Little Brother Surveillance or Systems Thinking?

Forecast & Outlook:  The principles of ‘situational awareness’ based on perception, comprehensive and projection might soon support a wide range of applications that reach far beyond military operations and crisis response.   It is a user and outcomes-centric systems approach that could integrate anticipated advances in mobility, ‘smart’ infrastructure, learning systems, policy-making and business intelligence.

Situational Awareness systems might have what it takes to create demand for integrating a wide range of emerging disruptive technologies that include: low cost sensors, IT architecture (network/virtualization), video, robotic vision, gaming, 3D/geospatial modeling, physical and virtual augmentation, autonomous systems, simulation software, location based service, social web lifestreams (by activity/sentiment), and expert software learning systems.  Yes, this is a grab bag of buzzwords (forgive me!) but Situational Awareness (‘dashboard’) platforms will require significant integration to make it useful for users in a networked world.

Managing Expectations & Changing Assumptions:
From Pilots to Drivers to Politicians to Businesses to Learners
Situational awareness will certainly raise red flags of ‘Big & Little Brother‘ by professional and part time conspiracy theorists, but as it becomes more understood and applied by individuals, I believe it will cultivate our capacity for increased awareness, mindfulness, and focus in an age of information distraction.  It will force learners to expand their collection of inputs, selectively identify their filters used in synthesizing and sense-making.  And help to mainstream systems thinking and the imperative of understanding structure, relationships and feedback loops in a globally interdependent world.

Yes, this is my wishful thinking!!  But we are in fact seeing a mainstream cultural transition between the ‘anonymous web‘ (Nobody knows I’m a dog!) and a more ‘social web‘ (‘Most people know I’m a dog)!   Why shouldn’t web users continue to evolve alongside the web as it enters its next phase of being embedded inside the physical world?

To become as mainstream as today’s ‘social web‘ behavior and expectations, situational awareness (SA) systems will have to stretch beyond historical and current day applications that lead to potential confusion that it might be just a code word for advanced ‘surveillance’.  And I am certain that more accessible concepts like ‘dashboards’ will emerge to properly frame and engage mainstream world!

Situational awareness is most commonly divided into three stages of awareness and behavior that allow us to see wider, deeper and further:

• Level 1 – perception of elements, relationships and structure in a given environment
• Level 2 – comprehension of the real-time situation
• Level 3 – projection and anticipation of possible outcomes into the future

The historical SA paradigm of perception, comprehension and projection is most familiar to military pilots (“lose sight, lose fight“) engaged in training and combat based situations.  In the recent years military leaders have extended SA approaches from pilot training to field troops navigating a combat theater of small networks distributed across remote rural regions and embedded inside challenging urban environments.   SA principles have also been embraced by crisis response teams seeking to create an information architecture for relaying real-time information across a temporarily disabled system.

Situational Awareness is the ultimate user-focused experience layer for infrastructure assessment and utilization.  Now what happens when we expand our definition of infrastructure to engage users and where  might SA principles be applied?  How might we imagine the positive decentralized benefits of situational awareness in non-military applications?

Six Areas to Explore:

1. Driving/’Connected Cars’
2. Political Transparency / ‘Civicware’
3. Geospatial / Real-time for Policy-making and Public Safety
4. Infrastructure Management
5. Learning Systems
6. Business Intelligence

#1 ‘Connected Cars’, Smarter Drivers
The most likely near-term application of situation awareness systems will experienced inside our cars! Instead of engaging military pilots, we will engage civilian drivers to increase the safety and flow of our roadways!

Situational awareness software is likely to play a major role in the changing driver experience.  Automakers are already beginning to integrate ‘sensing’ systems inside and outside vehicles based on sensors, radar, and video recognition that relay information to drivers and to other cars.  In this future our cars are collecting data and relaying information that will help drivers make better decisions on congested roadways.    This era of ‘connected cars’ is likely to make roads safer for drivers and pedestrians, and increase the flow of traffic on our highways. [Telematics examples: Ford Sync; GM OnStar; Kia UVO]

#2 Political Transparency / Civicware
Political transparency is a major driver of change in emerging economies and fledgling democracies.  Civicware systems based on situational awareness allow us to gather real-time, onsite information based on a distributed network that is resilient to attack or centralized control.  In this light, we can view the situational awareness role that Twitter played in Iran during political protests in 2009 as adding an SA layer of new inputs and on the scene conditions that could never had existed prior to the age of mobile social networks.

Another widely cited example of SA systems in political transparency is Ushahidi – an effort to build a mobile phone based infrastructure for ‘crowd-sourcing’ information that could prevent post election violence based on misinformation (e.g. groups rioting when in reality they are not!)   The Ushahidi Engine allows anyone with a cell phone to gather and distribute real time situation information via SMS, email or web or view aggregated data on a map or timeline.

#3 Policy Making / Public Safety
Geospatial visualizations are an emerging platform for communicating information based on place.  We can imagine a future in which social support services are based on a greater understanding of data sensed, synthesized, visualized and anticipated in communities afflicted by a wide range of events or socio-economic conditions.

In 2004 Christian Nold released an innovative map-based platform for gathering real-time information on emotional states.  His ‘biomapping’ projects can reveal where people are happy, hungry, angry, fearful or sad.    Imagine the public policy implications for supporting decision-making, policy analysis, and responses based on this bottom up data collection that can be conveyed on maps!

And let’s not forget about policies that support public safety and enforcement against violent crimes!

In recent years police agencies around the world have implemented gun location directional systems to help them gain real-time situational awareness in an area with detected gunfire.  These stories are widely reported in the media, but what happens when there are ubiquitious sensors and mobile phone ‘apps’ that can create an open distributed infrastructure for safety.  What happens when community members build their own layers of situational awareness?

What are the implications of lowering the cost of community safety oriented situational awareness systems?

#4 Smart Infrastructure Management
Situational Awareness is at the heart of emerging ‘smart’ infrastructure models that attempt to reveal real-time data and conditions within major infrastructure components for energy, transportation and water.  This allows infrastructure operators and users to make better decisions in managing resources and anticipating potentially disruptive events.  (e.g. electrical grid failures, peak demand, rush hour) [See PNNL Laboratory Situational Awarness for ‘smart grid’)

#5 Lifelong Formal and Informal Learning
Situational Awareness systems go beyond mere ‘sensing and anticipating’—and can be applied as a tool for learning how to improve our performance in responding to complex systems.  SA systems that are user and outcomes centric might find a home in formal and informal learning applications!

Pilots will often train in mock environments to improve their ability to sense.  Field troops will train in mock situations that teach them how to protect themselves in hostile environments.

But how might we apply staged-learning and/or scenario based learning to improve learners’ ability to reveal their mental models that guide their responses.  How might SA layers expand our desire for more sensing inputs based on real-time information and a stronger understanding of structure, relationships and feedback loops within the environment?

#6 Business Intelligence and Capital Markets
What about the world of business?  Both small and large companies are operating inside increasingly complex market environments that are fragmented and shaped by events and rapidly changing conditions (many of which are not currently measurable).

We can already see growth in enterprise solution markets for situational awareness  systems such as ‘complex event processing’ and business intelligence ‘dashboards’ and decision support systems.  Real-time market situational awareness might indeed offer the biggest return on investment for SA systems.

What is Beyond?
Situational Awareness principles will likely have to be re-framed and re-packaged before mainstream audiences are likely to embrace and adapt systems designed to increase our ability to perceive, comprehend and anticipate.

We are probably a 5-10 years away from mainstream market users understanding and demanding early stage SA capabilities in their everyday world.   And 15-20 years away from more advanced systems and wider spread institutional adoption.

And I suspect transportation will be the first market followed by enterprise business intelligence applications.

So I suspect ‘situational awareness’ might be the next big thing for Tweeting web geeks and industry pundits… in 2018?!!

I suspect life in a world of ‘smart, connected’ devices will push SA to the forefront as a way of managing life in this ultra-connected landscape.

In the meantime, I will be looking for the positive applications of SA systems and the potential of a learning culture of systems thinking based on awareness, focus and foresight.

Image Credit: Eyes at Williams College by dbking (Thank you!)
Flickr Creative Commons License Attribution 2.0 Generic

Situational Awareness Resources to Explore: Notable Projects:

• Global Incident Map https://www.globalincidentmap.com/
• BioWatch – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioWatch
• UK SA Driving Program –  http://www.2pass.co.uk/awareness.htm
• Global Seismic Monitoring - http://www.iris.edu/seismon/bigmap/index.phtml
• Cisco-NASA Planetary Skin
• HP Central Nervous System for the Earth (CeNSE) (Thanks @wendyinfutures)
• IBM Smart Planet

Papers / Academic

• Knowledge Structures for Situational Awareness (Learner) http://www.dodccrp.org/events/2006_CCRTS/html/papers/220.pdf
• Situation(al) Awareness (SA) in Effective Command and Control  by Derek J. Smith http://www.smithsrisca.demon.co.uk/ http://www.smithsrisca.demon.co.uk/situational-awareness.html
• An Approach to Collaborative Sensemaking Process http://www.dodccrp.org/events/11th_ICCRTS/html/papers/101.pdf
• Inferring High-Level Behavior from Low-Level Sensors http://www.cs.rochester.edu/~kautz/papers/High-Level-140.pdf
• The Knowledge Structure of the Commander in Asymmetric Battlefield: The Six Sights and Sensemaking Process http://www.dodccrp.org/events/2006_CCRTS/html/papers/220.pdf
• USE OF TESTABLE RESPONSES FOR PERFORMANCE-BASED MEASUREMENT OF SITUATION AWARENESS http://web.mit.edu/aeroastro/www/labs/ASL/SA/sa.html

Companies

• SA Technologies – http://www.satechnologies.com/
• EchoStorm – http://www.echostorm.net/index.html
• Logos Technologies – http://www.logostech.net/index.htm
• Swarm Micro Aerial Vehicles  – http://www.swarmsys.com/index.html
• Raytheon Intelligence and Information Systems – http://www.raytheon.com/businesses/riis/

I’m looking for non-military situation awareness companies?!!! Any thoughts?

Forecast & Outlook:  Coal is the world’s fastest growing source of energy and leading fuel source associated with carbon emissions.  There is a two-fold path to rethinking our relationship with coal’s carbon molecules based on ‘Cathedral Thinking‘ and ‘Manhattan Project‘ strategies.  The end result and legacy we might leave future generations is a new capacity to better deal with carbon molecules through nanostructured materials and bio-energy technology solutions that master the fundamental molecular interactions of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen.

Part One: Cathedral Thinking
Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers is the utility sector’s (coal’s biggest consumer) leading voice associated with the long term approach of Cathedral Thinking. Rogers has been refining his public ‘building cathedrals’ message since a 2007 commencement speech, but was most targeted at energy entrepreneurs during an MIT event in 2008 [video below].

A Cathedral Thinking approach to coal begins with the vision and commitment to realizing a low carbon emission future, then developing the technology strategies and regulatory framework to support efforts that will likely occur across generations of innovators.  Rogers’ guidelines for framing this issue?  ’We need a sense of urgency, but not a sense of panic…a sense of hope, not a sense of fear… politics of possibilities, not the politics of punishment‘.

Rogers is clear that technology will play the critical role in achieving this vision of a low carbon future, but falls short of detailed blueprint or roadmap.  So, if I could propose a few broadly accepted enabling ideas that support a new relationship with carbon.

‘Cathedral Thinking’ Foundations: Geo, Bio and Nano Engineering
Geo-Engineering capacities to support carbon sequestration via capture and storage.  Bio-Engineering capacities based on carbon-fed bioreactors that tap the molecular powerplants inside algae and bacteria to assemble bio-hydrocarbons.  And Nano-scale Materials Engineering capacities using nanotechnology inspired membranes and catalysts that enable coal gasification and/or chemical processes (Fischer-Tropsch) that convert carbon into synthetic fuels.  Together, these are the long-term enablers of reducing carbon emissions from coal.

In Part Two, we will look at a supplemental strategy to ‘Cathedral Thinking’ that brings a higher sense of immediacy via disruptive energy systems supported by a ‘Manhattan Project‘ style effort towards carbon science and engineering.

How might we accelerate changes by shifting investments to basic science and applied engineering of biological and materials technologies that could be more disruptive in giving humanity the knowledge and know-how of mastering the molecular interactions of carbon to avoid CO2 atmospheric release?!

MIT World talk titled:
Building Technology, Talent and Policy Bridges to a Low-Carbon Future (April 12, 2008)
[Video [47 minutes]

Newsweek article: Cathedral Thinking Interview by Fareed Zakira
[Reprinted with permission via Duke Energy]

Related Blog Post by Jim Meredith

Duke Energy – Executive Viewpoints

Build Your Own Cathedral Queens University Commencement Speech Transcript [PDF]

MIT Report on Coal

US EIA Coal Report 2009

Coal: Some Inconvenient Truth [PDF] by Geologist David Hughes

Articles from The Energy Roadmap.com

Forecast: Leveraging and supporting India’s ‘demographic dividend’ will soon become the focus of many nations (beyond India) as a driver of economic growth and geopolitical stability in the next fifty years.

Having spent nearly two years of my life living in South Asia (Nepal and India), I will admit a favorable (and optimistic) bias towards the subcontinent (India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan).

Despite the many obstacles, I think South Asia’s influence in the next century will be overwhelmingly positive across a wide spectrum of indicators for economic growth and quality of life for people around the globe.  South Asia has a lot to contribute in the next century, and there is little doubt that leveraging India’s demographic fortunes will be key to success.

In this TED Talk we hear from past CEO of Infosys turned visionary Nandan Nilekani about ’four brands of ideas that will determine whether India can continue its recent breakneck progress’:

Forecast & Outlook: Learning Systems certainly have what it takes to become a ‘next big thing’ in the world of business.  (Sarcasm intended!)  Yes, we are still years away from personal learning systems becoming functional and widespread.  But, there are signs that conversations about a learning culture are shifting from  classroom to boardroom.  Company leaders are starting to realize that their workers are more productive when they see themselves as lifelong learners (not just people who have jobs).  The lifespan of relevant skill sets and mindsets are likely to become shorter as the global economy shifts gears.  And this includes factory, service and knowledge workers.  My forecast?  Companies, Regional and National economies will soon make significant investments in emerging Learning Systems as ‘learning’ becomes the perceived driver of global economic growth and quality of life for the next century.

Creating Institutions a Marketplace for Lifelong Learning?
What if the most forward looking conversations around the Future of Learning had less to do with present day notions of school reform, teachers, test scores, graduation rates, or the merits of online learning– and instead focused on rethinking the value and role of non-institutional learning, and empowering the ‘learner’ for a lifetime of continual learning.

What if we avoided prescribing incremental strategies and saved ourselves from the painful (and often futile) political battles of fighting incumbents and the status quo?  Instead we might start to explore more transformational concepts of cultures and marketplaces of learning that move beyond the notion of traditional institutional and life-stage based education.

A Culture & Marketplace for Learning
Changes over the next decade might give birth to a very different conversation about education and learning  based on more relevant concepts and expectations suited to the 21st century (e.g. software facilitated learning systems, Personal Learning Environments (PLEs), workplace learning, social learning, micro-courses, et al).  Life in the future might not be transformed by efforts to ‘de-institutionalize‘ education, but instead positively disrupted by the creation of a more expansive marketplace that serves 7 billion learners.  To get there, we might explore the differences of three sets of assumptions and sources of tension ahead:

1) Blending Institutional and Informal Learning
The first assumption to challenge is this belief that real learning is something that only occurs inside a classroom or the institution of ‘school’ or ‘workplace’.  This is the ‘teacher’ oriented world of education- and it needs more innovative institutions.   The alternative assumption to embrace is that learning is something that happens in the world, not inside a classroom or formal workplace.  This is the ‘learner’ oriented world – and it needs a marketplace!

Yes, we must work to improve our institutions (e.g. schools) but the biggest opportunities are developing learning experiences that permeate life outside of the classroom.

2) Shifting Expectations from Life stage to Lifelong Learning
The second assumption to challenge is this unspoken expectation that we are somehow ‘done’ with learning after we graduate high school or college (or when we get hired).    Continual learning remains an elusive idea for most people and organizations.   The alternative assumption is that learning is something that continues throughout our entire lifetime and is not bound by a ‘semester’ or a ‘grade level’-  or a job title.  Instead of framing education around stage-based institutions (elementary to higher education) and degrees, how do we rethink the personalization of skills-building over a lifetime?

3) Start with the Vision of a ‘Post PC’ Web of Learning
Forget about ‘learning on a computer’.  Let go of this image of sitting in front of a computer screen reading text as the future of digital learning!  Banish these images from your head as we explore the future of learning culture.

The web has delivered on its promise of creating ‘access to information’, but we are still building systems that enable genuine learning in any environment!  We must imagine a future in which we can access and learn from the web while we are walking in a forest, or buying a bottle of wine in a store.  Mobile devices are the first step, but not the last.  New interfaces and web experiences are being developed that integrate new forms of interactions based on voice and natural language conversations… video based augmented reality and ‘smart’ object experiences.

The web is being brought into the physical world…

Learning as the Economic Driver of the 21st Century
I suspect that the next decade might give birth to new cultural expectations, business models and marketplace supported learning platforms that make a cleaner break from the 20th century worldviews of ‘education’.  But before we get there, we will need leaders capable of clearly communicating a new  vision that has less  to do with test scores or ‘school’ reform, and more to do with engaging people around an aspiration for continual learning and curiosity based living.

Until we have that vision communicated by national and international leaders, the best visions of continual learning and curiosity based living are promo commercials from NatGeo and Discovery Channel.  But I’m a sucker for viral videos- and they certainly capture the spirit of a culture of learning.

National Geographic: If. Live Curious video

Discovery Channel’s I Love the World song:

Original Version

My delicious tags:

http://delicious.com/garrygolden/learning

Forecast & Outlook: Our evolving knowledge base and capacity to design molecular manufacturing systems will be a primary driver of social and economic change in the decades ahead.  Bioindustrialism and the Nanoscale design of carbon-based structures are two ‘game-changing’ ideas ripe for capital investment and commercial applications. Properly harnessed, carbon bonds are our best eco-friendly building block for improving quality of life and wealth creation in the next century!

Carbon Capitalists of the World Unite!  It is time to move beyond today’s politically and emotionally-charged ‘climate & carbon’ conversation and move towards something more constructive based on bigger ideas, not bigger battles.

The problem isn’t the gap between ‘OECD’ vs ‘Non OECD’ national interests.  The problem is the gap between what many people ‘want to do’ versus what we are able to do based on our current industrial and energy paradigms.

Instead of demonizing carbon we should be embracing it around bigger ideas that remain off the radar of activists, politicians and most business leadership.   We need to make the foresight case that in this century no molecule will be more important than carbon as a source of wealth creation and platform for uplifting the quality of life of people, planet and profits.

Carbon Capitalists of the World Unite… around Bio & Nano!
Capital capitalists are builders not bankers.  There is minimal value created via fees or trading schemes based on carbon pricing mechanisms.  True carbon capitalists see carbon as a resource for building added value products like biomaterials and biofuels.

Carbon capitalists transform the conversation by expanding the marketplace beyond CO2 trading into an industrial and energy era defined by carbon+hydrogen chains assembled for biomaterials and bioenergy, and/or carbon+carbon or carbon+metals for industrial catalysts and high performance materials. 

Carbon capitalists are those people focused on reinventing the physical world and consciously evolving our global industrial paradigms around two 21^st century platforms for prosperity: bio-based industrial processes and nanoscale materials engineering.

Bio Industrialism

The first ‘leap’ for Carbon Capitalists to make is from chemistry to biology.

The great industries of the last century emerged from advances in chemical engineering and materials processing.  Thebirth of modern industries including pharmaceuticals, polymers, to semiconductors were all based on new ‘chemical industrial’ paradigms.  The consumer economy exists only because we have created abundance via synthetic (not naturally occurring) materials.  The ‘information age’ exists only because we created materials that could manipulate electrons and photons.  So your iPhone is as much a triumph of chemical engineering as it is software engineering.

Chemistry is not going away, in fact, its role in the ‘nano’ age is likely to evolve in ways we cannot imagine.  But there is a ‘new kid on the block’ that is capable of changing our industrial base.

Bio Industrialism is a broad concept for any goods (or services) delivered via a biological process or byproducts (e.g. biological agents for low cost pharmaceuticals, algae or cellulosic based biofuel production, et al).   So if chemistry helped give birth to many of our largest 20^th century industries, it is biology that will likely to be the platform for new industries in the 21^st century.  We will explore these new industries in future posts!

[Related fields and concepts: synthetic biology, bio-energy, bio-materials, biologics (biopharmaceuticals), biomechantronics, biomimcry, genomics, proteomics, bioplastics, ‘green chemistry’, biocatalysis, bioimaging, biosensors, et al]

Industrial Age of Nanoscale Materials (From ‘micro’ to ‘nano’)

The second industrial paradigm ‘leap’ is based on a new scale for materials design.  We have reached a plateau in our performance properties of ‘microscale’ (millionth of meters) design to ‘nanoscale’ (billionth of meters) engineering in which we control precise formation of molecules to yield entirely new performance properties of basic elements.

The nanoscale era of materials design redefines what we think of as a ‘resource’.  In this future carbon-carbon bonds can be designed to perform on par with higher cost precious metals.   In this future ‘carbon’ emissions can be re-assembled (and resold in the marketplace) with hydrogen bonds using the metabolism of algae.

Nanotechnology is often sold around more futuristic concepts like ‘nanobot’ machines floating through your bloodstream.  But the near term future is much more sober.

‘Phase One’ for nanoscale materials engineering is based on materials design using: carbon nanotubes, nanoparticles and nanosheets (graphene) in a range of applications from energy production and storage and conversion, high strength composites for light weight airplanes, cars and  textiles, to new ways of building electronic devices from carbon (instead of silicon).

Hype Warnings & Core Assumptions

I want to be clear about my message!  Professional futurists often warn audiences: ‘avoid the mistake of overestimating the amount of change likely to happen in the short term, but avoid a bigger mistake of underestimating how much change might happen in the long-term.’

Today it is easy to dismiss ‘nano’ and ‘bio’ as too futuristic so I want to be clear about two assumptions that I hold quite comfortably at the same time:

1. Neither of these industries (Bio & Nano) will be ‘big’ anytime soon
   Real GDP growth over the next two decades will likely come from old industrial activities (e..g iron-ore/steel, geo-extraction, et al).   Both ‘bio’ and ‘nano’ related industrial activities are operating at early stages of development, and are likely to favor the incumbent platforms in the short-term before they are able to supplant them.  In other words, the first wave of commercialized nanostructured materials (coatings, nano-tubes/particles, et al) are likely to improve performance of old micro-structured materials in the short term.

   So we must adjust our expectations about how fast these industries can grow!   But avoid making the mistake of waiting too long to start as we think of skeptics who dismissed the case for ‘synthetic plastics’ and ‘electronics’ in the 1950s and the ‘Internet’ in the 19990s!

2. Both of these industries will dwarf all historical ‘industries’ known to man
   In the long term, bioidustrialism and nanoscale engineering profits will surpass any and all economic values created by industries that exist today.  They are emerging at the exact right time – as billions of people transition into new demographic phases (e.g. aging) and socio-economic levels (e.g. middle class).  And their impacts are likely to be felt across all industrial sectors from energy, human health/wellness, military, transportation, information technology, et al.

So let’s be clear!

I’m not ‘hyping’ bioindustrialism or nanotechnology in the short term!!  I am trying to open a door for two platforms of wealth creation in the 21st century.

From the standpoint of the ‘carbon conversation’ we need to move forward around bigger ideas, not bigger battles. Bioindustrialism and Nanotechnology are big ideas!

Upcoming posts:

In my next ‘carbon capitalism’ post I will look at companies redefining our industrial base by tapping the power of carbon molecules!

Suggested Readings:

OECD report: The Bioeconomy to 2030 report is available at www.oecd.org/futures/bioeconomy/2030.

The Carbon Age – by Eric Roston http://www.ericroston.com/

Forecast & Outlook: The future of unconventional natural gas is the buzz topic within the world of energy forecasting.  Natural gas is a clean, versatile fuel that could eventually expand beyond centralized utility power plants into markets for smaller scale Distributed Power systems, as a cleaner transportation fuel in the ‘Electric-H2 Age’, and if all else fails- as a hydrocarbon materials feedstock for the nano-age.

Exxon-Mobil‘s $41 billion stock and debt deal for XTO Energy has sent positive shock waves through the energy community by validating the future of unconventional shale natural gas resources.

Analysts are quick to point out the obvious market reasons for Exxon’s big bet on the US natural gas sector: future of utility power generation favoring natural gas over coal, macro policy desires to increase US domestic energy production, corporate political ‘drill baby drill‘ capital of bringing resource wealth to ‘shale counties’ in places like Texas, Lousiana, [Watch: Haynesville Documentary], Pennsylvania and New York.

On the downside this return to domestic unconventional resources speaks to new fundamentals for the hydrocarbon industry in the post ‘cheap conventional oil’ era. A brighter future for shale natural gas does not mean our conventional oil production problems disappear!

Let’s be clear…. hydrocarbons are not going away!  But it is increasingly difficult for energy majors (Shell, BP, Exxon, et al) to expand their resources around traditional strategies.  Hence, Exxon is jump-starting the era of non-conventionals that include shale natural gas, ‘tar sands’, deep water fields, et al.

Shale Natural Gas steals the ‘future’ away from LNG
Natural gas has a high hydrogen to carbon ratio, and is a favored cleaner transition fuel as we look to decrease reliance on carbon-heavy fuels and turn towards renewable resources over the long haul.

For years analysts claimed global ‘liquefied natural gas’ (LNG) production would eventually steal market growth from oil, but it now looks like unconventional domestic supplies could be the favored growth fuel over the next few decades.

The most likely future for natural gas is a fuel for utilities who own large central power plants that push electrons across regional energy grids.  So very 20th century!

But what about the alternative futures for natural gas beyond fuel for centralized power plants?

How does the versatility natural gas apply in a future with some profound energy system discontinuities and new markets applications?

How about distributed power generation, electrification of the auto fleet, and nano-structured composite materials?

Distributed Power Generation

All eyes are on the role of natural gas in US utility power generation, but what are alternative assumptions about the economic feasibility of distributed power generation that might disrupt the 20th century utility-grid model?

Consider this alternative assumption:
In the 21st century, global energy markets will grow around distributed power generation rather than through large centralized power plants and ‘grid’ connections.

In this future, the most important elements are: access to ‘fuels’ not the grid, and  low cost, reliable energy conversion systems (e.g. fuel cells) based on electrochemical conversion (not combustion via large power plant turbines).

So the most disruptive concept for utility providers is not a new fuel source (wind/solar),  but new energy conversion devices (e.g. fuel cells) that can create electricity onsite at the same (or lower) cost with more reliability.  Throw in cheap abundant fuels and we can imagine the whole notion of a ‘grid’ becoming less relevant.

Envisioning a world without a ‘grid’ requires a leap of faith (and knowledge base on the disruptive developmental path of distributed power systems).

But let’s imagine…

Stationary Power (e.g. Home / Factory)
Imagine Best Buy and Home Depot selling GE branded low cost energy appliances for powering our homes and offices.  Connect it to your natural gas line or refuel it with natural gas from the retail market and you can have six months of electrical energy onsite without any fear of grid disruption or variable monthly costs.

If you do not have a  natural gas pipeline into your homes, imagine buying solid-state ‘packets’ or ‘bricks’ sold in Walmart or Whole Foods (or delivered using a ‘milk’ truck model).  In one trip you could bring back enough energy for several months.

[Hard to imagine not being connected to 'the grid'?  Just ask a 15 year old to imagine having a 'landline' phone connection in an age of cell phones?]

Portable Power (e.g. Object based)
Imagine a world in which gadgets and appliances do not have to be ‘plugged in’ for power!

How?

We evolve from a ‘grid energy storage’ model (the battery) to a ‘fuel conversion’ (micro fuel cell).

Instead of plugging in every night, we’d simply ‘refuel’ (via a ‘packet’ of liquid fuel or solid gas).

In this future micro fuel cells (e.g. micro power plants) are embedded inside every object (toaster, cell phone to washer & dryer).

No more cords, no more grid dependency.

We simply refuel (How often? Obviously, adoption will depend that it is orders of magnitude more convenient)

Future of the ‘Fuel’ Provider
In both futures the ‘fuel’ provider becomes the critical stakeholder as energy conversion shifts from central to distributed- and from storage (battery) to conversion (fuel cell).

In this future, energy majors can bypass lower margin , long-term contracts with Utilities, and focus on more profitable end consumer markets.   The profit potential has some precedence – e.g. price premium paid for battery electrons is higher than grid energy; the price premium paid on bottled water is higher than tap!

Natural gas (via pipelines or retail shelf distribution) could emerge as the preferred ‘fuel’ for distributed power generation.

Transportation ‘Fuel’ (vs Grid Storage)
Oil’s biggest problem is its lack of substitutability.  We cannot put electrons from solar or nuclear energy inside a combustion engine gas tank.  And despite the vision of the “Pickens Plan” to subsitute oil for gas, natural gas is unlikely to take away any significant market share from gasoline in this waning era of the mechanical engine. It is hard to imagine winning market share in a liquid fuel market match up.

But the future of natural gas might be brighter in the era of electric vehicles powered by the integration of batteries (storage) and hydrogen fuel cells (on board fuel conversion).

If indeed, the current ‘fuel’ and on-board conversion model extends into the electric age, natural gas will be in a solid position for growth beyond oil.

Why are fuel cells and ‘fuel’ model so relevant to the automakers and energy majors?

First, low cost manufacturing incentives for car makers!  Automakers need a low cost, scalable power generation system for electric motors.  And despite all the hype, batteries are not the end game.   Fuel cells offer better performance, lower cost per mass, and preserve the ‘fuel’ and on-board conversion model (rather than a pure storage model of batteries).

Second, Utilities operated within a highly regulated market, and are unlikely to innovate in any meaningful way.   Plug in for ‘fleets’ is doable, but extending fixed wall socket access to a world with over a billion vehicles is an expensive vision.  It is hard to imagine us moving away from ‘portable’ fuels in the transportation sector.

The incentive for energy majors is to maintain their dominant role in the transportation fuel market even beyond the era of oil and the combustion engine.

So ‘fuels’ still matter.  And this is the big mental barrier in the public conversation about vehicle ‘electrification’:

Electricity stored in a battery is a ‘storage’ model.  It is grid dependent. No fuel is converted on board.

Electricity produced from hydrogen converted in a fuel cell is a ‘fuel’ model.  This is the end game.

And despite all the challenges of hydrogen storage (gas, liquid or solid) and infrastructure (commercial pump, retail shelf or home production) it is much more likely that energy majors will out-innovate utility companies and retain their ‘fuel’ provider role in the post combustion engine era of transportation.

Natural gas has a high hydrogen to carbon ratio making it an ideal source of hydrogen for electric vehicles.

Materials Feedstock

Natural gas is already the preferred hydrocarbon feedstock for most polymer-based materials manufacturing.  But what about for emerging classes of high end materials based on nanostructured molecules like carbon nanotubes and carbon-based particles?  Again, we see natural gas as holding its ground as preferred feedstock for nanostructured materials.

Most carbon nanotubes are produced from natural gas that reacts over metal catalysts.   So even in this ‘carbon age’ of materials engineering, natural gas is likely to hold its market position as the feedstock of choice!

What else to watch? The ‘anti’ positions to Shale Gas production

There is little debate over how clean natural gas is compared to coal and oil.  But the extraction of unconventional shale gas reserves is not without its own environmental footprint.   The process of ‘fracking’ uses water and sand to push out gas molecules from shale deposits.  And environmental groups are already raising some small red flags about the unknowns of shale gas field development.

So consider this the beginning of Round One in the PR campaigns for and against natural gas!

Hans Rosling takes us on another data-driven journey looking at past, present and future with a special focus on the  social and economic re-emergence of India and China in the 21st Century.

Direct link to TED Talks Video Recorded at India’s first TED Conference

TED Talk – Hans Rosling 2006

TED Talk – Hans Rosling 2007

TED Talk – Hans Rosling 2009

How much change might we expect in the balance of global economic power over the next ten years?  How might financial markets evolve alongside the dramatic geopolitical market transition occurring between the dominant Western consumer economies of the 20th Century and the rapidly rising Asian consumer economies of the next century?

Over the past year, the World Economic Forum (sponsor of the annual Davos Meeting) has been exploring key drivers and potential outcomes for the future of global financial markets and government institutions.  Follow this link for a wealth of resources or get started by watching this 8 minute video exploring four financial market scenarios: Financial Regionalism; Fragmented Protectionism; Re-engineered Western-centrism; and Rebalanced Multilateralism

Learn more here

Downloads:
“The Future of the Global Financial System: A Near-Term Outlook and Long-Term Scenarios.”
“The Future of the Global Financial System” [PDF 12 MB]