Until today I thought energy transition was a consequence of the fourth industrial revolution. Now I am convinced it is fundamental driver of change.
I have been an advocate of digitalization being at the heart of the fourth industrial revolution for a few years now. One of the reasons for it is that it is a “horizontal technology”. It is called this because it affects many other industries. Farming gets better, industrial processes get better and (when they get self-driving to work) others, like taxi driving, cease to exist. While I still think digitalisation is at the core, I don’t think it stands alone.
I am a gen-Xer and, 5-10 years ago, I started to notice there was a lack of interest in careers in engineering of fossil fuels from new entrants. I blamed that on all the old folks in grey suits not listening to new hip ways to be digital. While the ignorant old men rejecting digitalisation (and pooh-poohing new ways to work) was definitely correlated I’m no longer sure it was causal.
When I went to the energy sessions at London tech week, no one was talking oil and gas. No one. Not a single fossil fuel company was present. It was all renewables, smart grids, energy efficiency. Now I know why.
Energy transition – and in a broader sense decarbonisation – affects every industry. In the same way that digitalisation is not doing business the same way and just replacing paper with computers, energy transition is not about going about life in the same way and just changing the fuel used.
Today I watched this remarkable video by my friend Rob West who has been in the Bestem Network for a few years now.
It also looks like Rob might think that video is a new skill that’s going to be required to function in the commercial world soon. I do.
Not only has he provided me with a light-bulb moment around energy transition, but also he explained the dilemma of being true to your metier while trying to get people to pay you to do more of what you think is important work. In a way he also shows how digitalisation allows businesses to be more specialised and to reward those who know what they are talking about rather than just those that can harness the power of others. That’s how I intend to run Klynetic Innovation.
This year everyone appears to be talking about innovation. Many think it’s being driven in response to the pandemic. If that were so, all we would need to do is wait until the vaccine is delivered and we can forget about it and go back to the way it was. Almost no-one believes this to be true.
The commercial world is evolving, and the end state is not yet known. This means traditional budgeting, planning, efficiency drives and cost reduction will not be enough for success. Organisations must accelerate their innovation agenda – this is not about inventing something new; it’s about taking what you know, reconfiguring it to be relevant and continuing to adapt and evolve.
In the previous three posts I set out some of my thinking about the fourth industrial revolution because I think this model serves well to explain why we are experiencing change. As part of your innovation thinking you may want to consider seven fundamental factors that underpin the revolution. They may not have an immediate impact on today’s business but as Wayne Gretski almost said – it’s best to skate to where the puck is going, rather than where it is now.
It is hard to untangle these factors because they influence each other and form self-re-enforcing feedback loops (which accelerates change). I find it useful to use this when considering issues and deciding where to focus, I hope you do too.
1. information creation and connectivity
The ability to create, share and access information has implications across social, political, and industrial spheres. Whether as flash-mob revolutions, exposure of tax fraud, mob-trolling of celebrities or remote monitoring of industrial plant and machinery.
Transparent information undermines authority by revealing the inconsistencies, lies and hypocrisy required to govern. Anonymous transmission of ideas on social media leads not only to emboldened action but also to misinformation and on-line bullying. Information is conflicting and unreliable and knowledge and certainly is displaced by opinion. The ability to sift and evaluate data and then apply rational analysis is not evenly distributed among populations.
The cost and availability of creation, capture, and transmission equipment has reduced nearly to zero. It is ubiquitous. The creative idea, installation of capture equipment and the editing of results is rare and not free. One cannot go back and measure the past, so value may be found in stored experience. If you can curate information and control its presentation, then there is power to influence perception.
Commercial innovation is likely to arise from creative firsts, unique archives, collection networks, influencing curation, and low-cost data organisation, error-correction, and editing.
2. understanding and acting upon information
Advances in computing power have led to new ways to analyse information, methods to learn and infer meaning and procedures to decide how to act. This leads to automation – unattended service, purchase reccomendations, warehouse picking and self-driving vehicles.
Too much data causes problems with human-led processing such as overload, decision biases and selective world-models. We have evolved to make binary conclusions “being decisive” and “acting with confidence” are perceived as star qualities. Leading based on flexible decisions resting on the probability afforded by analysing emerging information is uncommon. Motivating others to make swift progress in the face of uncertainty will require a new set of leadership skills.
Commercial innovation is likely to arise from increased quality of service accurately targeted towards needs, as well as reduced cost of provision. Companies that can harness learn to direct activity and make progress under conditions of uncertainty will also benefit.
3. additive manufacture
This is not just 3D printing. Many things are traditionally created by removing material using techniques like cutting, drilling, thinning, and shaping. This wastes material, energy, and time. The materials we use – cement, steel, rubber, plastics are chosen because they lend themselves to these processes.
Additive manufacture will change the materials we pick, it will reduce waste in production and change the shapes we create and the material performance we obtain. It will not only impact factories but also it will change extraction industries and trade routes. It will be possible to email design files and create what’s needed on site without the need to ship raw materials, sub-assembled parts or finished goods.
We are seeing the rise of extrusions and laser-melted metal powders and will shortly embark on assembly at the molecular level. This will mean the same forces that change building materials will impact other wasteful processes including agriculture, slaughtering, drug formulation, paper making and paint manufacture. We can expect to also see different flow-processes with lower temperatures and pressures, lab-grown meat, structured drug design and smaller-batch runs. Additive manufacture principles will impact a diverse range of industries including specialist machine makers, house-hold construction, manufacturing, farming, and medicine.
Commercial innovation is likely to come from creative designs, disintermediating supply chains and creation of innovative not-possible-before shapes and material-performance. There will be insights for applying this technology to industries not considered before.
4. planet maintenance, collective responsibility
Some call this activism or environmentalism, but whatever you call it there are growing movements encouraging (and forcing) vested interests to consider the impact they have on the wider world. This encompasses the materials consumed, the energy used, and the waste products created.
Fuelled by information and analysis governments have concluded that there is a climate emergency which calls for rapid decarbonisation. This is leading to energy transition, smart-grids and electric drive trains on the one hand, and examination of the energy intensity of industry and ways of living on the other. It has also given rise to the notion that resources on earth are finite which leads to the circular economy (where goods are recycled into new goods) on one hand, and the drive for mining of materials from asteroids and the seabed on the other.
Commercial innovation is likely to occur around opportunities afforded by legislation – such as carbon pricing, outlawing of practices as well as the inclusion of sustainable methods and transparency of operation. Smart ways to redirect and reuse energy will become valuable.
5. organisation of labour
We now have remote working and video conferencing; people don’t need to go to the office. People don’t need to be in the same town or the same country. The COVID crisis of 2020 saw mass adoption and made it normal to use.
On-line retail, automation, self-driving cars, and additive manufacturing will reduce demand for labour in many sectors and, due to our global supply chains and clustering of industries, this is likely to create geographic areas where traditional work will become scarce.
The gig economy is at one end of a spectrum of employment that runs from employee, through contractor, project team into gig work. The quantum of work purchased is becoming smaller and pay is more related to outcome rather than time spent on a task. Bonds and exclusive service to one employer is becoming less common.
Commercial innovation is likely to encompass ways to facilitate remote interactions, telepresence, and ways to build trust (both emotional and technical). Ways in which goods and people are transported will change leading to opportunities in non-traditional geographies and innovations are possible in the way labour is accessed, motivated, managed and rewarded.
6. culture, art, craft and beauty
The 4th industrial revolution moves us more towards a world where less human labour is needed to produce and distribute the goods, services, and energy we need. Other factors will come to the fore in determining what is more “valuable”.
Where we are used to optimise for low-cost production, we will increasingly favour products, services and experiences that appeal on an emotional level. Emotions will become more important. This is occurring already via inclusion policies, social movements, and campaigns for various forms of justice. We can see on-line culture forming value through influencers and followers whose product is purely an experience and a connection between people with similar perceived values.
How one spends time will become more important. Dedicating large amounts of time to an employer will seem less likely to determine level of “success”. This will lead people to choose to do more things that they like – leading to more artisan production.
Commercial innovation may occur in the labour market by enabling people to find their vocation and navigating the changed expectations required to transition career thinking to match the 4th industrial age. The types of products and services sold, and the labour conditions required for workers will increasingly require taking account of design, beauty and evoke emotions, resonate with the values of buyers and be fun.
7. politics of wealth and power
This is likely to be the slowest area of the 4th Industrial revolution to mature. But it will be the most profound and biggest determinant of outcome. While it is tempting to ignore this because it does not lend itself to traditional commercial analysis, it is likely to prove one of the biggest source of disruption and should not be left unattended.
Changes in this factor are likely to occur in (possibly hotly debated) jumps because this deals with fundamental and, for many, unimaginable changes to basic principles of societal organisation. If labour is no longer in short supply this could lead to what used to be called mass unemployment.
I believe that we are less likely to tolerate wide-spread poverty such as that experienced when people moved from the land into the cities during the first industrial revolution. Perhaps we will find a way to allocate resources to people other than by labour, while still maintaining civil and ordered society. What was once called welfare may become a universal basic income.
Accepted definitions of wealth may change to include more than money. Because time is an immutable constraint, this may become a currency. How it’s spent may differentiate between rich and poor. Manners, deportment, compassion and popularity may be qualities that people will support to determine unequal reward for others. Honour and shame may become fashionalbe once more. In some socieites this may instead become enforced compliance. Human groups naturally form hierarchies. When traditional methods of determining who has more worth changes then so will our definition of who is more worthy. Some people want to be “top-dog” and will use every method to be so (or remain so) – not only by pulling themselves up, but also by pushing others down.
As information asymetry combines with confirmation bias, we are likely to see politics become more fractional. Groupings will emerge like sides on a battlefield. They may be wealthy industrialists with their capital and bankers, career politicians with their nationalistic tendencies, intellectually enlightened middle classes, disenfranchised and once-proud working classes and individuals who want to be made to feel special and better than their peers. These interests will come with different ideas about what to optimise for success and how to go about doing it.
Different factions with competing ideas, their votes, their followers, and their financial means will be pitted against each other. They will use new technologies, historic resources, traditional oratory, and brute force. They will use the structures and institutions of society – as well as whatever form of subterfuge is available – to further their conflicting objectives. Human history suggests that without acceptable compromise frustration will lead to anger, irrationality and even violence.
Conclusion
Commercial innovation here may be hard to achieve but being alert to the political and social dimensions will provide early warnings and adaptation may keep you on the right side of history.
This is the third post in the series considering the left-field consequences of the 4th Industrial revolution (4IR). Not only are there several technology trends leading to breakthroughs in productivity but also there are drivers pushing changes in approaches to energy. This is a long post, so apologies in advance, but there’s quite a lot to say on the topic.
If you were in Surrey and was asked “does the world need any more cars or need a better standard of living”, you might be tempted to answer no. If, however, you were in the poor parts of south east Asia or Africa you might instead agree that raising living standards is good idea. To do that output per person must go up and that will require technology, know-how, organisation, and energy. As living standards rise demand for domestic energy rises too.
Development has implications for energy demand, supply, and emissions. For capitalism to continue to provide improvements to people’s lives different economic drivers will be required if we are to address environmental constraints. Some will come from technological advances, some by regulation and some by changing desires of consumers. In short, we need a transition in our approach to energy.
I’m going to address energy transition in four ways: energy substitution, energy efficiency, decarbonisation, and decommissioning.
Many members of the Bestem Network are involved in the oil and gas industry. Please don’t read this post as a prediction for oil prices, it’s not. It’s also not about the short-term outlook for the oil industry. It doesn’t deal with the decades of piped gas and LNG and the abundant shale gas available. Instead it explores inescapable (if inconvenient) long-term trends. Guided by the insights from members of the Bestem Network, I am concerned to know if I am investigating along the right track more than demonstrating “being right”.
For oil veterans “Energy Transition” is firmly on the agenda in 2021. Many people I talk to are experiencing declines in their current business. Some are starting to believe the value of resources and capabilities that drove business success in the past should now be reconsidered. For them, it’s tempting to term any new line of business as energy transition – because it is a transition away from the energy business they knew. This phrasing doesn’t aid analysis. That’s why I decided to consider this topic in four dimensions.
There’s a lot of resistance and denial about change in the Oil and Gas industry. People can’t comprehend that skills, resources and assets that seemed so valuable three years ago, may no longer be so. Oil companies are writing off reserves, there is talk of stranded assets. Of course, there are people whose interests are served by changing the public discourse and some of the “illogical” conclusions of proponents of the new order may be “wrong”. Perhaps all parties have the same priorities, but in a different order? If enough people subscribe to a new paradigm, they can sway the outcome. Watch out, history only calls this way once.
What’s the data say?
If you haven’t read the BP statistical report on energy and oil – you’ve missed out. LINK
For my oil and gas colleagues, please note the graph above is for energy usage and therefore does not include consumption of oil and gas for other purposes such as chemical feedstock. These other uses account for about 15-20% of consumption. LINK
Perhaps petrochemicals will become a relatively more important use for oil. There are important developments including the configuration of the new Yanbu refinery that hint at this. Perhaps this market will be dominated by the middle east. LINK.
By far the most important sources of energy are Oil, Gas and Coal. Our modern world is built on their consumption which has increased 10x since 1900. In many ways the history of the 20th century is the history of oil. I am currently reading Daniel Yergin’s book the New Map, it’s a great reminder of how mega-politics is tied up with energy. LINK
Figures from the USA indicate that approx. 40% of energy is consumed in the home (heating, lighting, powering equipment, etc.), 30% is used for transport (private cars, lorries, boats, planes etc.), and 30% is used in industrial settings (steel, cement, manufacturing, mining, oil production, etc.). LINK
As other parts of the world catch up with the lifestyles of the Europeans and North Americans sheer weight of numbers could mean another 100x increase in energy consumption is on the horizon unless something changes.
Unfortunately, this poses two problems: Firstly, consumable resources are finite causing scarcity and price rises which slow global development, and secondly it appears that the emitted gasses are inconveniently killing us all (albeit quite slowly). LINK
Apparently we must emit no more than 100GigaTonnes of CO2 before the end of the century. LINK. In 2018 we emitted 40MegaTonnes. LINK. Carbon concentration in the atmosphere stands at 400 parts per million (up 50% from where we stood in 1850). At the current rate, excluding growth, we hit our upper limit in about 25 years, leaving us 55 Years where we must emit nothing at all. So, we must grow and use more energy but emit less carbon.
On top of this, advances in power semi-conductors, computerisation and battery technologies are making electricity more interesting. The use of oil, coal, and gas to create electrical energy that will then be transformed into stored potential and then to kinetic energy is less efficient than directly generating electricity in the first place. This is especially true when the price of new generating equipment is benefitting from economies of learning and scale. Since 2010, utility-scale solar PV power cost has declined 82% LINK and LINK
The upshot of all of this is that:
The human population of the world cannot safely advance until its growing energy requirements are met by means other than oil, gas and coal
Not only must we not increase the rate of CO2 production, we must reduce it
Combine this with some trends:
There is a growing desire to use electrical power
Measurement, algorithms, and power-switching leads to reduces losses in electrical power systems
Cost of generating electricity from the sun and wind is reducing
It’s possible to capture CO2 as it is produced so it is not released
It’s possible to remove CO2 already present in our atmosphere
There are other fuels that don’t produce CO2 when they burn
All this points to: growth in renewable generation; a stop in demand for oil, gas, and coal for electricity generation; reduction in the tasks that need doing; ways to use less energy to perform tasks; moves to reduce the production and release of carbon dioxide; and ways to remove the darned stuff from the air if at all possible. This is neatly summed up in categories Energy Substitution, Energy Efficiency and Decarbonisation. And will inevitably lead to Decommissioning.
Energy Substitution
Perhaps this is the first true energy substitution? We’ve had fuel augmentation before – adding coal on top of wood, and oil on top of coal. Sure, there was a little displacement, but mainly it was new growth that accounted for the new fuel and we continued to consume the old stuff pretty much at the same rate as before. The method for conversion from chemical to mechanical-power did, however, change – steam, internal combustion, turbine. This time is different as we’re transitioning on three fronts simultaneously: the primary method of capturing energy; displacement of established uses; and finding new (more efficient) ways to consume.
The benefit of electro-mechanical conversion
Direct use of electric drives to replace fuel combustion is occurring in both transport and in industrial settings. There are some areas that prove harder to electrify – especially when heat is the desired end-product. These include steel making, cement manufacture, distilling, cooking, and domestic heating.
There are positive drivers pushing the direct use of electricity in mechanical drives. This method provides excellent controllability using complex sensors, computer control and high-power semiconductors. It also provides excellent scalability – very small motors up to massive monsters. Electricity is also relatively easy to distribute.
The downside to electricity has always been difficulties related to is use in temporary, new, or moving applications. This relates to portability, transport, and storage. Battery technology is an issue as is gaining a connection and maintaining grid reliability. Users tend to fall back on diesel-based generation for both portability and reliability.
In transportation (especially aviation) weight is an important factor because, unlike fuel tanks, batteries do not get lighter when they are empty.
The business drivers of electric energy adoption:
Falling cost of direct electricity generation from wind and solar
Increasing battery performance
Requirements for fine-control and monitoring driven by computer control enable new solutions
Opportunities for efficiency from system level monitoring and prediction coupled with intelligent distributed control
Obstacles are:
Cost of infrastructure for grid establishment
Time to establish connection
Difficulty in transporting stored energy
Difficulty of use in mobile applications (battery storage and weight)
The societal drivers are:
De-carbonisation
Energy security
Under the current business rules, when positive drivers are strong enough and the obstacles small, users will naturally substitute. To maximise the societal drivers (or public good) regulation changes may be required to tip business decisions. These can come in the form of subsidies, penalties or license-to-operate. The decision is dynamic – what doesn’t make sense today, may do tomorrow (note the 82% fall in the price of solar over the last decade). The more that electrification occurs: the more technology is developed and the more the price falls; the more experience we gain and the less risky the outcome becomes. As demand and volumes fall for older technologies, they become more expensive and less convenient. Over time tipping points are reached and business decisions become easier to make. I explained this dynamic in relation to electric cars here LINK
There is a great piece by Tim Harford examining the shift from steam to electrical drives at the turn of the 20th Century. It provides a framework for understanding the drivers of the elongated time lines required for a transition. LINK
Scale Matters
Renewable generation used to be a cottage industry, but scale matters and it’s starting to swing the economics decidedly in favour of renewables.
Solar power is a factory manufacturing and construction problem. Site operation is pretty much zero intervention. Factors that have driven down cost will continue to do so with manufacturing costs decreasing and per-cell-output rising. While it’s unlikely to rival Moore’s law, research into cooling, focussing and reflected energy is promising a 10x improvement in output, which will compound the learning economies we’ve already seen. Solar is already the cheapest way to make power, and result of development may mean that we see a further 10x fall in price per MW generated.
Scale in wind power matters. GE are trialling a 12MW turbine in Rotterdam LINK It won’t be the last.
Standardised production
Unlike oil and gas platforms each turbine is essentially the same as the last one. There is no top-side processing to be designed and no process modification during its life. Wind has already achieved the standard, reusable, modular offshore design that Oil and Gas have been talking about for so long and never managed. This will lead to reduced requirement for engineering design and economies of scale and learning for installation and operation.
Oil and gas have been very wasteful for decades by creating bespoke engineering solutions on a field-by-field basis. There are many apocryphal stories of cost escalation in oil and gas facility engineering. Including one operator specifying 20 shades of yellow for sub-sea valves, which may or may not be true. But here’s a link that makes me think maybe it is LINK
Large generation assets promise cheap, reliable power distributed by a common connection. That’s a welcome development because small-scale generation posed unexpected public-good problems. In several underdeveloped countries central generation is unreliable, and users are tempted to go off-grid. Unfortunately, this has a detrimental effect on the public grid subsidy and leads to a death spiral for national utilities resulting in even worse service for citizens.
Energy Efficiency
There’s not a huge amount to say about energy efficiency other than its about stopping waste which means: for heating more insulation; for energy conversion making less heat and noise; and for moving parts less friction and less weight. Overall, it means stopping doing what’s not really needed – such as unnecessary journeys by better planning and routing, and not heating or lighting spaces no one is occupying.
This leads to energy reduction technology using predictive algorithms, sensing and fine control of systems.
Examples include google reducing energy consumption of its data centres by 30% by predicting the weather. LINK
High-power semiconductors enabling DC power transmission and reduced line-losses.
And there is tons of work going on using big data and AI to reduce logistics costs. LINK
There are activities that can not only be made more efficient but also completely replaced by new technologies. For instance, additive manufacture and additive construction may displace some of the need for energy used making materials such as cement and steel, thereby increasing construction efficiency and reducing energy requirements and carbon emissions.
Decarbonisation
I’m not a climate scientist but if enough smart people tell me there is a problem, I tend to believe them. Though, in my view, this is not about saving the planet – the Earth will be fine – it is about preserving an environment within the tight tolerances required for the human life we’ve come to expect.
For climate change, my reading of the situation is that we have a problem related to imbalances of gasses and particles in the atmosphere. Energy substitution and energy efficiency will naturally reduce carbon emissions in some areas. It may help continued growth of middle classes across Asia and Africa without a proportionate increase in carbon emission. However, this won’t be enough as there are still areas where electrification is not yet practical, and efficiency gains not enough.
This leads to two approaches to decarbonisation: chemical fuels which are not carbon based; and methods to rid the atmosphere of un-eliminated carbon emissions.
Alternative fuels maintain the thermal cycle but don’t produce CO2. The two most often noted are Hydrogen and Nuclear. I would not want either if it were not for the carbon argument (in almost every application it’s a compromise) but they may be necessary as sub-optimal answers until better ones can be found. Hydrogen wins on portability and Nuclear on reliability and capacity (and portability in applications like marine warfare and space exploration).
Its unfortunate reactions with steel aside, hydrogen is interesting as replacement fuel in domestic settings where pipes, compression and metering etc are available. Like copper phone lines, it is unlikely that any country that does not already have the legacy infrastructure would invest in it now.
Capture and storage
Talking of legacy, the oil and gas folks are pretty good at drilling holes, moving fluids, and running large pipelines. They also have some bits of kit in the North Sea (and pipes running to and from them) that it would be great to find a use for these when the oil stops. There is a lot of interest in finding ways to pump CO2 through the system and store it in underground spaces vacated by the oil that was pumped out.
I can see why you’d want to do that if you owned the infrastructure, and it’s an interesting short-term measure but it doesn’t seem like this would be a scalable solution to on-going growth and just like oil wells run dry, storage facilities will eventually get full. The idea that we have to add a complete industry with scale and complexity of oil and gas solely to deal with the emissions of other industries adds a layer of inefficiency and cost that, if allocated correctly, would make them even more open to replacement by alternatives.
Fuel Cells
The use of hydrogen in fuel cells makes little sense in the long run if battery and super-capacitor storage improves. Generating electricity, to convert to hydrogen, to transport under high pressure, to convert back to electricity seems absurd to me.
In my view, hydrogen is not part of the endgame of energy transition. It may be an interim step where direct electrification and transport/time-shift of stored electrical-energy is not yet practical. It does make sense to accelerate decarbonisation when an alternative has not been established, but it is inferior to many other forms of chemical energy except for its emission properties.
Hydrogen is more viable while legacy resources and assets exist in abundance such as low-cost infrastructure, fabrication facilities, mechanical engineering, and process engineering. It would require a lot of careful handling under pressure, temperature and, combustion. Luckily it can be consumed (less well and with modification) by legacy assets such as internal combustion, jet engines and domestic boilers.
Nuclear
The same arguments apply for Nuclear energy, but not so strongly and even less for fusion. Nuclear fuel is abundant and (with care) easy to transport and energy conversion is centralised. Energy is, however, still derived from the release and recapture of heat and the physical movement and containment of molecules and (and particles) under extreme conditions.
Decommissioning
When thinking about decommissioning my mind normally turns to removing infrastructure from the North Sea at the cessation of oil and gas operations. To be fair with an almost £80Bln prize at stake in the UK alone it’s not surprising that there is interest. LINK
But there is much more. If we are going to move to a low carbon world based on electrification, then there are many more assets that need to be decommissioned or refreshed. Ranging from filling stations, pipelines, car plants, car scrappage, domestic boilers, lorries etc.
If we combine this with the other changes in technology coming from the fourth industrial revolution, we are also going to find new uses for car parks, high streets, out of town retail centres and the list goes on.
It goes without saying though, that we will have to make sure we can decommission without emitting carbon dioxide in the process.
Implications
Implications: Energy Substitution
Even now, without any change in the incentives there are many areas where renewable generation is the best commercial choice. It is only going to get more so as more breakthroughs occur in generation and grid-level and portable energy storage.
The demise of internal combustion engines will have knock-on effects for manufacturers of components including radiators, hoses, vibration dampers, seals, drive belts, spark plugs, lead-acid batteries, gearboxes, and pumps. Innovators may want to consider how to reskill and serve power engineering, distribution systems and electric control. Additionally, they may want to consider which ancillary manufacturing assets will be affected (either interrupting supplies or creating opportunities for low-cost acquisitions). Innovation is also likely to be available in any area which relies on diesel or other fuel oil to create electricity or provide non-transport related rotary motion.
Will cars and solar panels be manufactured and sold as consumer white-goods and semi-conductors? In which case they are going to come from Taiwan, Korea, and China.
As turbines become common place and large ones most economical, they will become like the Airbus A-380. There will only be a few manufacturers. They may not be operators. Unlike an oil-field that starts as a risky proposition but then provides a natural monopoly, offshore wind generation will become routine and be open to competition. Capital may be cheaper, but the returns will be lower. The bloat of the oil and gas industry cannot continue to be supported.
Implications: Energy Efficiency
Anything that can be done to increase the amount of useful energy output from the energy we consume will help. This comes in two forms – reducing the things that need to be done and improving the way they are done if they are unavoidable.
Innovation will come from increasing the utilisation of energy through sharing, careful planning, insulation, and conversion efficiency. Search out unoccupied space in containers, trucks, and aircraft. Plan who goes where when and in what sequence. Predict when power will really be needed and when it’s not. Any process that gets hot when heat is not its primary objective should be examined.
Transmission of energy is inefficient, as is standby generation. Expect to see DC supply, smart grids, community generation and local storage/recharge solutions emerge. Expect the need for AC power to diminish – semiconductors and high-frequency switching is much more efficient, light weight and controllable.
Look for opportunities to displace concrete and steel in manufacturing processes, perhaps finding a new use for solid-state carbon fibre or graphene and for additive manufacture.
Implications: Decarbonisation
In the absence of market distortions there is no business case for decarbonisation. But the world needs it to happen. This will require a combination of intervention policies (subsidies, penalties, regulation) and a willingness for consumers to pay extra for low-carbon products.
Programs to capture carbon at source and sequester it in some form add to the costs of production and only make sense if the alternative (in the form of penalties or sale of credits) tip the balance. The cost of carbon-inclusive production will provide opportunities to innovate in no-carbon alternatives at price points not currently viable, once these products start being adopted, learning and scale economies will kick in to speed adoption.
As carbon pricing becomes widely adopted across industries, innovation is likely. From understanding sources of carbon in supply chains (and engineering it out), planning for low carbon production and finding alternative ways to operate that do not produce carbon.
Fundamental research opportunities are still available for atmospheric scrubbing and short-term opportunities may be available around capture and storage of carbon from industry.
Implications: Decommissioning
Unfortunately, no-one wants to pay for decommissioning. The activity does not create productive assets so there is no return on investment and traditional business cases don’t work. It’s only done because it’s mandated and because there is a sense of responsibility for the environment (which may have brand and license implications).
Contracts will be let to the lowest price operators; innovation will therefore be required to reduce the cost to enable profit while bidding at the lowest price. All Seas managed to do this with their vessels – low cost but, by moving first with large capital assets and capacity to dominate demand thereby deterring competition. They can charge a low price but well above their cost resulting in healthy profits. LINK
When it comes to decommissioning infrastructure such as high voltage AC power transmission lines, domestic boilers and old cars, efficiency in the operation will be important, but so will re-use of the materials. Removing old infrastructure and scrapping cars may not sound like a gold mine, but perhaps it is. Literally.
Decommissioning old power stations, nuclear or conventional, is risky business where quality will count. There are stringent standards for Nuclear and projects that will last for decades. Conventional can be a little more “cowboy”. With wide scale decommissioning perhaps new rules and regulations will be needed to avoid this sort of tragedy? LINK
Points to Ponder
As of January 2021 ExxonMobil was valued at about $175 per barrel of oil equivalent from upstream production over the past nine months. French nuclear generator EDF is valued at $280 per barrel of oil equivalent produced over the same period. Spain’s Iberdrola, with its high renewables output, trades at $1,200 per barrel of oil equivalent produced. LINK
There is some evidence that there may be a squeeze on oil supply in the short term, and there may be a last hurrah of the oil and gas industry, but the writing seems to be on the wall.
We are likely to see more policy interventions around CO2. Business cases need to be dynamic and make space for emerging scenarios. The direction of pricing is clear but magnitude and timing are yet to resolve.
I fear for my friends in Aberdeen and Stavanger who expect to be involved in renewable generation. Despite these places being repositories of skills and expertise, I doubt there will be labour shortages significant enough to drive a search for talent – and the inflated labour prices and high-cost working practices are unlikely to be appealing.
Areas such as decarbonisation are likely to be subsidised. Engineering skills bases exist in the North West ship building areas, in Teesside, the Welsh Valleys as well as the South East coast of Norway, southern Sweden, Northern Germany, industrial Belgium and Denmark. There is no obvious reason that governments will bestow subsidies on the oil-rich provincial towns, and there is no unusual depth in high-power electrical engineering skills or modular manufacture that creates a pulling force. Look to Airbus and RollsRoyce for a hint on which locations may be subsidised.
Energy production is turning into a 4th industrial age process now. Over time energy will become essentially free to western consumers (in the absence of new taxes) and will become affordable for developing countries providing the elements required to swell the educated middle classes
Tax and Trade
In the UK fuel is taxed at the point of consumption, domestic electricity is taxed at a lower rate than petrol. North Sea oil has its own tax and royalty regime (on a field-by-field basis). When electricity moves cars and oil stops pumping, these tax revenues will need to be replaced. Expect changes to the tax system.
Globally this tax issue is one of national wealth, balance of trade and currency. Many economies are supported by petro-dollars. That may cease. Even if impoverished populations can benefit from cheaper energy, it is still likely that there will be political tensions within and between many countries.
As we continue to electrify there will be increased demand for copper, nickel and rare earth metals. These extractive industries are out of keeping with 4th industrial age processes. Perhaps we will see a boom in resource rich areas such as Africa and south America until such time as we can harness graphene and ceramic based super conductors.
Business models that are based on bespoke designs, complex operations, resource scarcity and speculative exploration are likely to be replaced by ones supported by more standardisation, predictable un-manned operation, with steady, predictable returns. This will lead to reduction in man-power requirements, creativity, and variability. Cost structures and operating characteristics (and associated returns) across the energy industry are likely to evolve to resemble those of other utilities such as water.
Large oil and gas companies are currently moving to re-invent themselves as renewable energy companies. They have spotted the trend, but there is no guarantee that they will bring the right behaviours to the table to be able to operate in the way that will be required. Their strong balance sheets, engineering skills and ability to operate in harsh environments internationally may provide them with a well-financed head start.
During the 1980s RACAL was a military radio, radar and missile guidance provider. They were highly experienced in complex frequency hopping radio systems. This gave them a well-financed head start into a new industry, just like oil companies have today. Racal were well placed to develop mobile phone technology.
However, Racal was the wrong place create a consumer marketing and general-public-facing service. By 1991, as the technology became mainstream, the Racal board took the wise decision to float the division and spin it out as a standalone company that could develop its own culture. RACAL ceased to be independent when it was acquired by Thales in 2000. Vodafone, the division it spun out has done rather well. LINK
Perhaps we will see the renewables divisions of Shell, BP and Statoil spin out and compete with Iberdrola if they want to be utilities or Siemens, GE and RollsRoyce if they want to make turbines. Unlike Vodafone, their spin outs will be competing with established successful companies with long track records. It may not work out as well as it did for Racal shareholders.
Innovation is Key
In whatever way this pans out there is one thing clear – there are lots of unknowns and lots of variables. The only way to survive will be to be vigilant of the macro forces and constantly innovate to evolve offerings as events reveal themselves.
I have lots of new ideas to share, but not the time to commit them to words.
I’ve not found time to update this blog for a while. To be honest I don’t think the uncertainty that comes with this crisis makes it wise to take too rigid a point of view. And, like many others I speak to, my days seem to be slipping past. I seem to be doing a lot of work, but I am finding less time to invest in new areas for the future and many discretionary tasks I no longer have the concentration to focus on.
Some of my friends and colleagues have noticed similar fatigue levels affecting performance in their businesses too. As one put it, we are now six months into a three week crisis.
All the emergency measures we put in place are all still there, the system is starting to creak and it no longer seems temporary. And it doesn’t really work for the long-run. We have learned new ways to use technology and have become expert in the tools for remote working. What we must now do is rethink our processes and routines to take advantage of these while making space to grow and learn.
Ken & Mark from AGM transitions, and I have been working on turning our small guides into a book. It’s now available from Amazon here: [LINK] – I hope that the practical advice and structure are something that will help you through this stage of lock down.
The cost of innovation is going down, barriers to entry are falling
Keeping it special
If you work in heavy industry and are near technology, you will know that there are some very robust pieces of kit out there. What I’ve always been surprised at is:
1. how simple many of the devices are in terms of functionality; and
2. how “special” they are in terms of obfuscating the obvious.
The effects of these two factors has been, for years, to reduce competition. By making it difficult to get hold of units (via price) and creating a jargon around the obvious configuration/deployment it has promoted a closed shop approach.
Keeping up standards
In some ways keeping out the riff-raff can be promoted as a good thing – it provides assurances around quality and safety. But it slows down innovation. You might say that perhaps this is good. Maybe you don’t want to be too innovative around safety and compliance systems. Afterall making mistakes is expensive and dangerous.
Keep up!
One of the aspects of the 4th industrial revolution that will challenge that thinking is simulation. I used to think that digital twins, virtual worlds and simulation would help reduce the cost of maintenance, let the experts create new ways to work and basically bring down the operating costs for the incumbents.
What if it leads to a whole new raft of competitors? What if anyone can have low-cost access to a virtual oil rig, or virtual power station, or virtual chemical plant? Not only will they learn how it’s supposed to work, they can try things and see what happens – learn by doing, learn by breaking, but do it virtually. Perhaps this will lead to:
they might come up with much better ways to operate it that you do; and
train themselves to operate it before you hired them
Result: Better ways of working, access to more talent, incumbents get beaten.
If you have ever witnessed teenagers playing fortnite, you will know how fast their thinking can become and how fast their brain-hand connetion is. Imagine how quickly they will be able to react to real-world situations and think through the information being thrown at them.
Examples
I’ll provide two examples of where “public access” and “new ways of working” are already influencing established hierarchies. It won’t be long before these mechanisms appear in heavy industry.
Don’t expect today’s engineers to enter the workforce unprepared nor unwilling to take on the establishment. Watch out for competition from smart people who are not part of the established hierarchy. Don’t think the way you work today, will be the way you work tomorrow.
Example 1: Team Huub-Watt bike
I was lucky enough to see this cycle team win gold at the Track Cycling World Cup in December 2019. The team is comprised soley of amateur racers and they ran a completely novel strategy calculated using simulations and software. Their budget is £15,000 per year. They beat Team GB who have the best coaches, facilities and trainers available – and a budget this year of £26m. That’s over 1,000 fold decrease in cost and substatially BETTER performance.
Response from the establishment was to change the rules, enforce the status quo. This may not work forever. It probably won’t work for you.
They were not, however, afraid to make use of the technology for their own ends. Zwift is a cycle simulator that people can use at home and join in real-time cycle events and ride-outs while collecting performance statistics. It is now being used by pro-teams to identify and recruit talent.
In the gentleman’s toilet at the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall – in the heart of establilshment London – there are a series of framed caricatures of some of motor racing’s greats from the last 100 years. These include W.O. Bentley and Mike Hawthorn. Motor racing is glamourous. And costly. The money needed to race in formula 1 are legendary, but even the karting in a 125cc class will likely cost you the best part of £50K a season. Developing cars, tracks and drivers costs money.
So what do you think will be the outcome of last weekends win for James Baldwin in the first of the British GT Touring Car championship races? It’s a pretty big series, and winning a race is not easy.
Especially if it’s your first race you’ve ever competed in.
James honed his skill as a driver in a simulator he set up at home for under £1,000. And his talent was found when he entered a competition in an “E-Sports” event.
Turns out that the simulation prepared him surprisingly well.
I don’t want to be the Cassandra who brings bad news, but this is not over. In fact, it will never be over. I think we are transitioning.
Through this blog I’ve shared some of my exploration of the fourth industrial revolution, what we will experience and what technologies will drive it. When we look back at this time, we will see this as the moment the old world ended, and the new world began. Of course, there were hints of what was to come that happened before now, and there will be vestiges of the old world carried forward – but this is the moment we will talk about. It will be like we mark the start of the jet age by referring to the end of the second world war.
It’s in the news
The headlines in the papers have been about: job losses; social distancing; and remote working. We are seeing a drop in demand, an increase in cost to serve and reduction in capacity and competition. This must lead to increased prices and suppressed demand. The consequence of this is inflation of real-prices that will drive out the old ways and encourage emergence of new ways of doing business with lower structural costs that will create new ways to consume.
Innovation will be required
Every sector will be affected and the only way to respond is through systematic commercialisation of innovation. The future may be unpredictable, but the direction is clear. What will your strategy be?
FT stories today
Today’s FT had two stories that I think are indicators of the future:
How long will it be until we can have a general factory which can assemble anything using software and downloaded designs? In 50 years will we have one in every town? Every home? What will that mean to distribution, logistics and manufacture? How can you have international trade? How can you secure intellectual property? How will you distribute wealth?
He makes a clear case for the use of direct real-time monitoring of digital data and how we can compile and use this information to guide our actions. He talks about central government’s role in disseminating information (like inflation), and the use of drones to reshape our military.
Previous writings
If you’ve not read them already – here are a couple of blog posts that explored my thinking around this topic.
It’s an economic emergency. Every company is having to rethink what they do and how they operate. Together with AGM Transitions we’ve asked our networks to share their recent experiences. We’ve written three guides:
Since I published my post on March 9th the world turned upside down. Covid-19 is a “big one”, certainly when considering the economic impact of the measures taken to stop its spread.
Couple that with the shocks to both supply and demand in the oil world and members of the Bestem Network have been left slightly shell shocked.
What will happen next?
We are starting to understand where we are – but we’re battling to understand where we will need to go.
As Gordon Ballard said in the FT on Saturday: “In the past, activity decreased then picked up again — each time, we saw it come back,” he said. “Now it’s not entirely clear if things just come back as normal. Everything has changed.” [Link]
For some context however I should point out that even with 30% drop in oil demand we are now only at the level that was normal in 1996 [Link]
What have I been up to?
Alongside my hour’s cycling, home cooking, housework and playing with electronics:
Looking after my clients
Contributing my skills to my community to innovate systems to support neighbours in need; and
Working out what we have to do to come out of this ready for the next phase.
In December and January, I was writing about what we might face this year. The world looked very different than it does this morning.
As I write the London market is off 8%, the Oil Price has dived to $35/BBl and Energy stocks are off 20-30%.
Continued shocks
The world seemed a rosy place in 2013. Since 2014 we’ve experienced a series of shocks – 2014 Oil Price crash, Brexit, Trump, refugee crisis, Syrian wars, trade wars, climate strikes, energy transition, Covid-19 and now Saudi & Russia are playing poker. None of this was predicted widely.
As we head deeper into the 4th Industrial revolution we will see more “externalities” that will further disrupt our best laid plans.
What about Covid-19?
Maybe Covid-19 isn’t “THE ONE” maybe it is. But it has certainly exposed how susceptible our current end-of-3rd Industrial Age, free-trade, globalised and business-case-obsessed economy is.
We have not priced risk correctly and we have not built in contingency. Workers on zero hours contracts can’t self-isolate, just-in-time imports from China are not working. To address this will require changes in policy and macro-rules to make a response possible in the face of short-run economic competitive pressure.
For more information on Covid-19 McKinsey has an excellent primer here [link]
Will business need to change
It seems clear that changed business practices will be needed if we are to become more resilient in an era where travel can be minimised, whole communities quarantined and trade in physical products localised.
Perhaps we will quickly switch to business that makes more use of information-rich scenarios (video conferencing, designs for 3D printers, remote controlled operations)?
We also now have another example of what can happen when information travels wider and quicker than knowledge. In this case panic buying of toilet roll. As we become more information-reactive in our business processes we need to bear this in mind.
Innovation is the answer, now what’s the question?
The only strategy I can see that will help is to learn to innovate quickly and be ready to react with purpose and knowledge as the future reveals itself to us.
When I started the Bestem Network 7 years ago I focussed it on issues surrounding the Oil and Gas industry – specifically how to use technology and reconfigure operations to develop and produce projects at lower cost and risk.
Last drop or leave it in the ground?
The Wood report was flavour of the month and much of my work centred around MER-UK (Maximum Economic Recovery). One of the categories of posts on this site was (and still is) labelled “Last Drop”; it focussed around the changes that would be required to make it possible to cooperate economically to achieve the maximum aggregate profit for the industry. It tackled things like tying together infrastructure, developing small pools and draining the basin over the long-haul and not to optimise short-term or locally.
While I never expected that the industry would return to 2012 levels, I did expect that it would come back and stabilise at a more “normal level”. I was concerned that the “big-crew-change” would mean that young people would not have the knowledge to operate our much-needed oil and gas infrastructure. I had no idea that they would reject oil and gas completely. That thought occurred to me in 2019 when I visited London Tech Week.
In 2017 I wrote that exploration was really of waning interest [Link] but I didn’t expect one of the primary reasons was that we didn’t want any more hydrocarbons.
Contrast this recommendation from Wood in 2014: “Government and Industry to commit to a new strategy for maximising the recovery [of oil reserves] in UK Continental Shelf] with the growing idea that we might leave reserves in the ground.
I wonder what the report on maximising the economic recovery from the whaling industry said.
Could the oil industry just disappear?
Despite sounding the drum for the 4th Industrial Revolution and arguing (nicely) with Patrick Von Pattay ( I was the more conservative because I thought that oil and gas really wouldn’t change fundamentally). It appears I may have underestimated things.
A very successful (and foresighted) businessman recently told me that the plastic-straw industry had simply ceased to exist within six months of the revelations of the damage it did to the oceans in the TV programme the Blue Planet. This chap now takes into account environmental position before bidding for work from a company – not for ecological reasons. He wants to direct effort to customers that will remain in business!
Surely we can’t do without oil?
Of course, there are oilmen who will tell you that the world economy cannot work without hydrocarbons – their case has always been that growth will come from renewables, and that demand would be flat. I tend to agree. But what if we’re wrong?
Here are a couple of thoughts for this (exceptionally) rainy Feb morning.
Solar is the cheapest form of energy production already. It’s getting cheaper and more efficient at a blistering rate.
Petroleum products might become classified as a dangerous substance – think asbestos or CFCs, what would that do to demand and price when supply, licensing, permitted uses and public perception of the product changes.
Microeconomics – which is what many businessmen optimise for – operates within Macro economic boundaries. Macro economics are formed by policy, are political and by nature are ideological. Think about: Soviet Russia, China, Thomas Pickety, Trade Wars, Sanctions. Things you think are “real” business decisions can be usurped by political will in an instant.
The IPCC report on climate change was issued in 2007, the Paris agreement was 2015 we seem likely to go beyond this and as a world embrace Net Zero sooner rather than later. For insight listen to Myles Allen on the life scientific (BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000fgcn )
Engineering will still be important
With all this doom and gloom around it’s easy to get despondent. But, here’s the good news: if the world decides it wants to change then this will call for difficult and complex engineering, delivered in remote locations across political divides on an unprecedented scale over a mulit-decade period.
Not only will we need to invent all sorts of new technology for carbon reduction, energy efficiency, generation, storage etc. etc. We will need to deploy them all and decommission all the legacy assets.
There are not many companies that can muster the amount of engineering talent, capital control processes, large scale international project management, logistics construction that will be required. In fact, I can think of two that could – Energy and Shipping. And of course, if the world doesn’t change, oil and gas will have a renaissance.
Under all circumstances the people inside the oil industry will have skills that are needed and which are hard to replicated at scale. The only loss of value will come from those who can no longer exploit their control of underground deposits of oil in the future, and those that must pay for legacy assets and impact from the past.
Fundamental engineering practice still matters
With all the digital wizz (which I fully support) it is important not to lose sight of the practical situational requirements, human organisation and civil society that we need to enable the “platform” in which the innovative start-ups, electric cars and energy transition can happen.
Basic engineering discipline still matters, and is sometimes overlooked by hand-waving innovators and wet-behind-the ears management consultants.
It’s a sobering thought when flying :- if the wrong culture takes hold and introspective and solid processes are overtaken by gregarious and extroverted leadership.
Sorry for the title. It’s not very original. Everyone’s been using that for the last decade, but still it seems appropriate. Every January I’ve made a post predicting the year ahead. I normally write this in December and publish it at the beginning of the year. It normally makes a few tongue in cheek exaggerations to in order to raise a smile. I stole this idea from Old Knights Almanac that used to appear each year in the RETRA magazine [Link ]
Today is the day we leave the European Union. My advice is to ignore this and go and buy today’s FT. It has many stories that summarise the transition we’ve witnessed and sets out the stall for next year. Below I’ve taken extracts and headlines and they tell the story. The one thing not mentioned is the UK Government’s industrial strategy, more on that in another post. Oh, and my watch phrase for this decade is “Society 5.0” – I think we’ll be hearing more about this in the comming while.
This caught my eye because it illustrates the emerging tech leadership that is flowing from a very entrepreneurial and exceedingly smart China, the comming tech trade-wars and how there is a shift in earnings among tech players reflective of the shift in tech approaches – showing even when you are the innovator you have to keep innovating!
BT has said the cost of implementing the UK government’s cap on the use of Huawei equipment will cost it £500m over the next five years as it reported its third quarter figures.
[…]
There’s a bumper crop of earnings to report: Microsoft reported a 14 per cent advance in revenues, to $36.9bn, helped by cloud revenues which grew 39 per cent to $12.5bn, Tesla has notched up its first-ever back-to-back quarterly net profits. The electric car pioneer called 2019 “a turning point”. AT&T’s entertainment business WarnerMedia revealed a $1.2bn hit due to costly investments in its upcoming streaming service to rival Netflix. Nintendo’s quarterly operating profit rose 6 per cent to $1.5bn, missing expectations. Samsung Electronics confirmed its fifth straight quarterly decline in profits but said it expected memory market conditions to improve in 2020.
To avoid the risk of plagiarism I am going to direct you to today’s FT (go buy a copy or have Amazon deliver you one). The headlines from these stories paint the picture and tell the story all by themselves.
Why Microsoft and Tesla are the decade’s big disrupters
