Tally’s Law and the Energy Transition

Do you remember The Lorax? Dr. Seuss’ illustrated children’s book explained something I’ve struggled with for almost two decades.

We live in a time of great tension and consequence for the relationship between energy, the environment, and the economy. Emissions from hydrocarbon energy consumption are contributing to climate change and increasing the risk of environmental and economic disruptions. In response to these threats, a growing number of environmentalists and political leaders have understandably proposed the rapid cessation of hydrocarbon energy production, including bans on various types of energy production techniques, and an immediate switch to alternative energy sources.

A transition is indeed necessary for environmental reasons. However, the realities of today’s energy system and the engrained relationships between hydrocarbon fuels and human life will control the timeline. It therefore is our responsibility to make the existing carbon-based energy system as efficient and clean as possible until a new non-carbon energy system is actually ready.

An abrupt switch is not realistic. A transition process from fossil fuels to alternative energy sources is the only realistic option to create the necessary change in the least disruptive manner. This transition has already begun and will accelerate, although it will require decades of time and many tens of trillions of dollars in total. The complete energy transition will require greater adoption of existing technologies as well as the invention of new technologies, some of which have not even been imagined. Until that new system is built, we must continue to provide (and increase) access to affordable energy, which is primarily fossil-fueled. During the transition period, our responsibility is therefore to produce and consume fossil fuels in the most efficient and environmentally protective manner possible.

The energy transition is imperative environmentally, however, a smooth and continuous process of energy provision is required to protect human life and livelihood throughout the process. The environmental risks are the “why,” and the economic constraints are the “how.”

Unfortunately, many people think about the wrong environmental risks and imagine a distorted economic picture, which blurs the picture in two respects. To better frame the energy transition, the best place to begin is with the environmental imperatives and a concrete understanding of why we must change.

Climate Black Swans: The Dice We Cannot Roll

“Tail risks” are possibilities that happen infrequently but with enormous consequence — they are at the tail end of a frequency distribution, and are often called “Black Swan” events because they change what everyone understands to be real and possible. Climate related tail risks are poorly understood and rarely discussed. Media generally focuses on more predictable and visible factors like storms, fires and rising seas that have a clear and near-term impact on humans. These are white swans. Their effects will be material for affected areas, but minor relative to the global and existential black swan possibilities.

There are many tail risks associated with climate change. One example is frozen methane, of which there is an enormous amount on earth. This particular climate black swan entails an irreversible tipping point leading to the rapid release of shallow methane deposits from tundra and coastal margins called “methane hydrates.”

Methane hydrates contain many times more carbon than all oil, gas and coal deposits combined. An image of a methane hydrate sample is provided below — this sample is slowly melting and flashing to the gas phase, and the methane gas is burning. Each cubic foot of solid methane hydrate expands to about 160 cubic feet in gas state, which is why the total carbon volume of methane hydrates is so large — the concentration factor is enormous. An estimate of gigatons of carbon reserves by coal, oil, gas and hydrates is also provided below and shows the scale of frozen methane relative to other hydrocarbon concentrations.

The melting of methane hydrates is a prime suspect for the largest extinction event in geologic history on this planet, called the Permian Extinction or the “Great Dying.” The Permian Extinction started 251 million years ago when volcanoes in Siberia outpoured large quantities of basalt lava, emitting CO2 and gradually increasing the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere. This process warmed the air and oceans. Warming led to the melting of methane ices, called methane hydrates, previously frozen in permafrost and ocean floors. Over a 20-year timeframe, methane is 84x more potent as a greenhouse has than carbon dioxide. A tipping point occurred: as methane melted and entered the atmosphere, warming accelerated, so the rate of additional melting increased and a vicious cycle emerged.

The process abruptly dumped a huge volume of methane gas into the air. The result was an environment changing faster than species could adapt or evolve. 70% of terrestrial species died and 96% of marine species died. Even the hardiest species failed; for example, it was the largest known extinction of insects. In total, 57% of all biological families and 83% of all genera perished into extinction — it was the most severe extinction that has ever occurred on planet earth. The chart below shows the timing of the Permian Extinction relative to atmospheric carbon concentrations.

Unfortunately, methane hydrates are just one of many possible tail risks and black swans associated with climate change. Today we already observe an alarming decline in the planet’s biodiversity due to habitat changes outpacing evolution. A true climate tipping point could amplify extinctions or alter habitats even more dramatically, with unforeseeable knock-on consequences. Tail risks of ocean acidification, which occur as CO2 concentrations and ocean temperatures rise, are also significant.

Of note, the Permian extinction is just one example of a mass extinction being linked to rapid changes in atmospheric carbon concentrations. The Devonian Extinction that occurred 365 million years ago was linked to a rapid reduction of atmospheric carbon. Multiple other minor and major extinctions are also believed to be linked to rapid changes, either up or down, in atmospheric carbon concentrations. The important lesson to take from the geologic record on extinctions is not that any given ppm level of CO2 is dangerous, but that rapid changes in either direction are the hazard due to climactic changes outpacing species' ability to adapt and evolve. “Rapid” in geologic terms can be a change that happens over hundreds of thousands or millions of years.

To be clear, Permian-type extinctions are not predicted in the near term by serious scientists. More broadly, it is important to highlight that climate alarmism is a big problem. Many climate campaigners, politicians and media outlets take information out of context in order to generate fear, which they perhaps view as a justified tactic to generate action for the climate. Humans do not face the threat of a cataclysm or extinction from the climate within the current generation or even the next several generations. In fact, the UN’s own analysis indicates that humans will be far better off at the end of the 21st century than the beginning, regardless of which warming scenario plays out, since the benefits of economic growth far outweigh the costs of climate change, especially when factoring in humans’ ability to adapt and adjust to changing conditions.

However, whereas humans can generally adjust to the changing climate by means of technology, infrastructure, adaptation or simply by moving to different areas over time, most other species do not share these advantages. Most species have evolved for countless generations to be well-adapted to their environmental niche, which also developed over countless generations along a relatively stable long-term climate trajectory. If human emissions abruptly change the macro climate, this has knock-on effects into every micro climate and habitat. Some disruption is clearly manageable, but too much can stress a species to the brink.

The data below was published in the journal Science, and is one of the studies on biodiversity impacts of climate change that is widely cited, including by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). For tens of thousands of species, researchers analyzed what portion of the species’ climatically defined habitat would change under various warming scenarios by the year 2100. It shows that under modest warming of 1.5 or 2 degrees centigrade, the impact to habitats is relatively moderate at less than 10% of species in each category affected severely in the 1.5 degree scenario and less than 20% in the 2 degree scenario. However, under a 4.5C warming scenario, which is in line with a “business as usual” development trajectory without material climate mitigation policies, the impacts balloon.

Charts from the same study show that even with realistic dispersal and adaptation efforts by species (blue bars), large portions of species across all categories come under significant stress even in a 3.2 degree C scenario, which is consistent with performance of current climate pledges.

These data project the impacts by 2100. Continued warming beyond 2100 would likely exacerbate these effects. This kind of long-run biodiversity impact is the real climate concern, in my view. Plants and animals simply cannot adapt as effectively to changing conditions as humans, and ultimately humans depend on a thriving global ecosystem and complex environmental supply chains that enable human life.

So, the environmental risks I worry most about are not the obvious and well-predicted near-term disruptions to human life (flooding, storms, heat waves), but tail risks that can impact or eliminate large portions of all life on this planet: extinctions that demark boundaries between geologic eras. Even a small chance of such existential consequences should motivate us to act preventatively. These are the dice we cannot roll.

Agent Smith’s Observation

Through this lens, I sometimes feel like Agent Smith in The Matrix. At one point during Smith’s interrogation of Morpheus, he shares his view of humans, “Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague.”

If I’m being honest, there are days when I struggle to disagree with this assessment. But then I reflect on all the goodness in humanity. Humans are capable of incredible benevolence, creativity, compassion, art, culture, storytelling, invention and imagination. We make movies like The Matrix. To me, we are the most interesting species on the planet. The planet would be duller without us.

We are also able to understand our predicament and our impact on the world in a way that no other species can, and as a result we have an opportunity to adjust and improve in ways that no other species can. The best outcome is not a planet with no humans at all, but a planet where humans live in that natural equilibrium described by Agent Smith.

Today our energy system is not in equilibrium with the natural environment. In the geologic record we see that atmospheric changes of hundreds of ppm in CO2 generally took millions of years (and still made significant impacts on climate and ecosystems). Humans are adding 2–3 parts per million of CO2 to the atmosphere each year, meaning that we will cause millions of years worth of atmospheric carbon concentration in the span of a century.

This rate of change is extremely fast on geologic and biologic time scales — far faster than ecosystems and life can generally adapt through evolution. When life cannot adapt quickly enough in response to change, it tends to perish. This is the nature of climate-related black swans: we are emitting carbon at a rate rarely observed in geologic history, increasing the odds of tail risks rarely observed in geologic history.

Hopefully the necessity to mitigate these existential risks through reduced emissions will be clear. Where do the emissions come from? Mostly from the consumption of energy in the form of combusting fossil fuels:

While most CO2 in the air today came from the developed world, new emissions mostly come from the developing world, especially China and increasingly India. If Africa rapidly develops, it will also become a major contributor with its population of >1.3 billion, but that trend is yet to emerge in earnest:

Given the risks associated with climate change, can’t we just stop producing hydrocarbons immediately? Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple.

Tally’s Law

I’ve had the opportunity to work broadly across the energy industry, including many dozens of international business trips and several years lived abroad. I’ve seen how energy affects economies and how economies affect human life in countries ranging from the poorest to the most developed.

As the grandson and son of oil entrepreneurs, I began my life viewing oil and gas as the savior of the free world (my grandfather’s view) and the basis of prosperous modern society (my dad’s view). As a geology and economics student in the liberal enclave of Middlebury College in Vermont, my friends and professors like Bill McKibben force-fed me a diet of Inconvenient Truths about human emissions and climate change. As a Thomas J. Watson Fellow, I was funded by the founder of IBM to roam the earth in search of what I called the “Triangle of E’s,” or the relationships between Energy, Economy and Environment — I came to view myself as a student of the morality of energy. As an international renewable power plant developer, I furthered my insights into the exciting potential and the frustrating limitations of renewable energy and battery technologies. After completing an MBA at Oxford, I returned to my family’s line of work as a financier of oil and gas exploration.

I began as an investment banker, then as an executive at an exploration company that discovered and developed a new pocket of shale using horizontal drilling and the much-vilified technique of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.” Along the way we flared (burned in the air) large volumes of natural gas due to the lack of available pipeline capacity. Despite every effort to solve the flaring problem with available technologies in the marketplace, none were commercially or technically viable for our small company. I felt moral and environmental shame due to the wasteful burning of natural gas. That experience led me to my current mission, which is to end natural gas flaring.

But before getting into that, I need to share Tally’s Law, which explains why we can’t just flip a switch to end our reliance on hydrocarbons, why the transition must be a process, and why technology development is the key.

Tally’s Law is a set of relationships I’ve observed and gradually described. It is the mathematical equation at the center of my life’s passion, which is to understand how the economy and environment relate to energy.

Tally’s Law holds:

r = natural resources

t = technology

p = population

q = quality of life

v = environmental health

c = economy

e = energy

I have observed the relationships:

rt = pqv

pq = c

rt = e

Simplifies to the general relationship: e = cv.

Tally is not a professor or scientist. Tally is a Sheepadoodle. I had an important lightbulb moment while walking Tally late one night after an unpleasant trip to the vet. She looked up at me lovingly through her protective cone of shame, bleary eyed due to the cocktail of painkillers and sedatives prescribed by the veterinarian. I looked back and said, “rt = pqv.” So, I suppose Tally is my muse, and as such she gets the naming rights to my theory of general relativity for environmental economics.

If we assume that r is a constant (or a slowly declining function composed of renewable plus non-renewable resources minus depletion), then some interesting and difficult tradeoffs become evident*. For example, any increase in quality of life or population will reduce the environment’s health unless facilitated by better energy technologies. Said another way, the only way to support a large population with a good quality of life is to improve technology, or else the environment suffers.

“Quality of life” does not mean venti lattes at Starbucks. For many people on this planet it means the difference between an extra bowl of rice or none at all. The United Nations measures quality of life using the Human Development Index, which is equally weighted by lifespan, average years of education and GDP per capita. When plotted against electricity (first graph) and oil (second graph), the relationship described by Tally’s law becomes clear:

The second graph was produced by the U.S. Department of Energy. In their report, they write, “Figure 3 illustrates that a nation’s standard of living depends in part on energy consumption. Access to adequate energy is now and will continue to be required to achieve a high quality of life.”

I have traveled to India several times, but will never forget my first arrival in New Delhi in 2008. During the drive from the airport to my hotel, I saw, among other things, a pile of refuse that had accumulated to a height almost reaching overhead power lines. This trash pile was located next to a large stream running through a slum. Some people were gathering and burning garbage from the pile, perhaps for heating or cooking. A light breeze caused pieces of plastic and fabric and various tattered materials to tumble down the trash mountain into the stream, which was so polluted as to be colored black. In the stream, there were dozens of gaunt humans bathing alongside various animals.

I have seen scenes like this throughout the world. You can find these conditions in Africa, Asia, South America and increasingly in my home country of the United States. There are alarming numbers of tent villages and slums in places like San Francisco, Portland, and even in my beloved Denver. We have all witnessed the size and frequency of those tent villages grow during the economic crisis caused by COVID-19. Unemployment rose, and so did the tent villages.

When I think of the word “economy,” I do not visualize central bankers or board rooms. I visualize a seething mass of people striving to escape from slums, and then striving for the next rung of the ladder, and so on.

It is impossible to see the suffering of a slum or a tent village and fault people for wanting a better quality of life. At any station in life, I believe it is also impossible and unnatural to resist improvement. Most people are simply unable to decline an opportunity to improve their lives and the lives of their families, regardless of how comfortable they may already feel. As a result, the global economy moves towards more, bigger and better — GDP rises inexorably and has done so forever.

When a slum dweller saves enough money to buy a bicycle, she wants to then buy a motorbike for even greater mobility. When she buys a tin roof to replace the leaking plastic tarp, she then wants to buy a front door for security and privacy. She wants to transition to propane from the wood-burning stove that causes her children to die from inhaled soot and bronchial infections. This is the essence of an economy — an endless upward striving that begins in a slum and cascades upwards all the way to an upper-class life.

An essential ingredient in ascending that economic ladder is and always will be access to affordable and abundant energy. Without abundant energy, there is no modern economy, meaning there is no quality of life and populations decline. To put it even more bluntly, without energy there is poverty and death. Perhaps it is becoming clear why an abrupt ban on existing energy sources will be difficult.

To make this relationship more clear, here is a look at where our life-sustaining energy comes from today on a global basis:

And here is where energy comes from for the United States, specifically:

Clearly, without oil and gas we would have a very large problem today, and that is true domestically as well as globally. Renewables like wind and solar are growing, but remain minor single digit contributors in terms of percentage total primary energy production. Transitioning to a renewable or carbon-free economy will require much more investment, invention and time to complete. I imagine the process will require several decades and tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars and multiple new technological innovations. The scale of this obstacle is no reason to delay, in fact, it is the reason to accelerate investments and efforts around renewables; however, this should also illustrate why an abrupt pivot to renewable energy is not feasible. A transition process is the only way.

Consider a recent shared experience: the COVID pandemic. During the depths of COVID-related lockdowns, global consumption of oil declined from about 100 million barrels per day to about 90 million barrels per day throughout 2020 — about 10% — and has since rebounded to pre-COVID levels. This illustrates that oil is so essential to the modern world that even the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression can adjust demand by only a small fraction. Said another way, if you want to know what the economy would look like if we abruptly turned off just 10% of the world’s oil supplies, it would look like one of the worst economic crises in modern history.

In fact, a world with restricted or expensive energy would be very much like the world we know with COVID: you can’t really go anywhere or do anything, and things are just worse. The Arab Oil Embargo in 1973 illustrates this dynamic with a slightly more historic example:

My home state of Colorado offers a final example of the current economic necessity of oil and gas. Throughout my lifetime, Colorado’s government has gradually pushed the oil industry to adopt higher and higher environmental standards: finding and fixing gas leaks, eliminating natural gas flaring, and preventing emissions of tank vapors. The state was generally viewed as implementing difficult but ultimately workable measures to protect the environment and the population while still allowing energy production.

Colorado was the first state in the nation to develop regulations specifically targeting methane emissions from oil and gas production, a regulation estimated to reduce more than 60,000 tons of methane emissions per year, as well as reduce 92,000 tons of VOC emissions per year. By 2019, Colorado had the strictest oil and gas regulations in the country and could claim to produce the cleanest oil and gas in the United States. Although these regulations certainly turned some operators and investors away from the state, the industry was generally able to adjust and proceed under the gradually increasing level of regulation. In late 2019 the oil industry employed more than 300,000 people, kept 27 drilling rigs running, and contributed about a billion dollars annually to state and local governments through various severance taxes.

However, 2019 brought a departure from incrementalism and a shift to more rapid regulatory change with the passage of Senate Bill 181. The bill was positioned by advocates as an effort to prioritize human health and the environment by allowing local authorities to exercise more restrictive control of oil and gas permitting. Opposition (largely the oil and gas industry as well as pro-business groups) noted that similar ballot measures had been repeatedly voted down by the public in recent years, and that the additional regulatory burden would abruptly restrict oil and gas development. SB 181 was combined with an overhaul of and new appointments to the COGCC (Colorado’s oil and gas regulator), which were generally viewed as incrementally more antagonistic towards the oil industry. These and other regulatory changes were viewed as abrupt and overreaching by many in the oil industry, and were widely discussed in 2019 as a “back door ban” on oil and gas activity.

While the result was not an outright ban, many of industry’s concerns did play out. Permitting approvals fell by 58% in the six months following SB-181, leading one law firm to comment,

“One of the primary effects of SB-181 has been a steep decline in the approval of new well locations and drilling permits, which were down nearly 57% and 58%, respectively, in the six months after SB-181 was enacted. While some of this decline can be attributed to local government moratoriums, the COGCC has also indicated that the permitting slowdown is “a reflection of the new emphasis on health, safety and the protection of the environment” created by SB-181. Indeed, shortly after SB-181 was passed, the COGCC adopted interim permitting criteria requiring additional analysis of some drilling permit applications “to ensure the protection of public health, safety, welfare, the environment, or wildlife resources.” The recent decline in permitting has exacerbated an existing backlog, increasing operators’ uncertainty, interrupting drilling programs, and decreasing overall production.”

More significantly, permit applications fell by 96%. Certainly, part of the decline was due to COVID, however Colorado’s decline far outpaced other parts of the country with similar oil economics (North Dakota and Texas). Colorado’s regulatory burden became too high, so companies simply stopped drilling in the state. Many companies announced layoffs, the rig count fell from more than 20 to 4. Severance tax revenues to the state and counties fell as a result, impacting budgets.

From a climate and emissions perspective, the initiative was also a failure. As local production declines, Coloradoans now import dirtier oil from states with worse environmental protections. Texas does not restrict flaring or monitor for leaks as closely as Colorado, for example, and Canadian oil sands are among the most polluting resources on earth. Mexico’s standards are worse, and Venezuela’s are worse still. One thing is certain: Colorado’s near and medium-term demand for oil remains, and only the source of supply has changed (for the dirtier).

Extrapolating this to a national scale, a ban on oil development would not reduce the demand for oil in the United States. It would just cause refiners to import oil from Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Russia, or other places where environmental and safety standards pale in comparison to American requirements. Without addressing demand, it is counterproductive to interfere with supply because:

rt = pqv

Back to Tally’s Law. Given that people can’t help themselves but to seek a better life (q rises), and controlling population size is either illegal or deeply unpopular in most places (p rises), and natural resources are limited (r is a constant or declines), then technology is the only chance that the environment stands against Tally’s Law.

Technology and the Energy Transition

Visualize early homosapiens eating uncooked meats, nuts and grains in the wilderness. If they scoured or over-hunted one area, they were forced to mobilize to a new area. Their economy was limited until the invention of agriculture allowed for an increase in energy supplies (through metabolism of greater food supply). Fast forward to medieval farmers chopping down more and more trees to feed more and bigger fires to cook more and bigger meals. At some point they either reached the carrying capacity of the environment and their quality of life or population plateaued, or they learned to mine coal in order to keep growing. But soon the air was black with soot and cities like London were soaked in a choking fog. Then they discovered oil and gas, relieving the immediate environmental problem again and allowing for another temporary burst of economic growth.

Each of these historical changes in energy technology allowed for an expansion of the economy (population and quality of life) while also relieving a local and highly visible environmental crisis (overhunting, deforestation, choking air quality, etc.). Today the environmental threat is not local or easily visible, but the solution remains the same: technology.

Like each of the historical energy transitions, our transition from a fossil fuel system to a clean energy system will take generations to complete in full. For example, the transition from coal to oil and gas required the construction of automobile factories, paving of roads, and the invention of traffic signals. In fact, the transition from coal to oil and gas is more than a century old, and is still not complete as we continue to source more than 30% of the world’s energy from coal. In many parts of the world, humans have not even transitioned fully away from biomass (trees and dung), and many families cook their daily meals over poorly ventilated indoor fires, often causing tragic health consequences.

Because we cannot cut off the flow of energy to the economy, we must transition through time from carbon-intensive fuels to non-carbon fuels. This transition will be a process, and in reality will require decades of investment, invention and innovation. Broadly, there will be two aspects of the transition: 1) cleaning up the existing energy system to buy time and mitigate impacts and 2) building the new energy system to effectuate the transition. Let’s start with the latter.

Building the New System

Building the new energy system is the sexy part. It’s the shiny brochure version of energy. It involves better and longer-lasting solar panels, windmills and batteries. It involves safe nuclear and enhanced geothermal systems. It’s the stuff that they advertise on large billboards at Heathrow, and it’s the dreams of college students. We need this new energy system, and it will come, but it’s going to take a while.

Just look at the charts of primary energy above to get a sense for how fast we are cracking this nut. Renewables are growing, but not as fast as total energy demand is growing. As a result, they are still a single digit percentage of total energy supplies.

The biggest issue facing the industry is how to produce “baseload” clean energy supplies. Baseload means a resource that can produce 24/7. Solar and wind are not base load because the sun and wind are only available intermittently. A solar project produces at its capacity for about 25–30% of the hours in a day, and a great wind project might hit 45%. As a result, utilities must back-up renewable plants with gas, coal or nuclear.

Battery Storage

The solution to make solar and wind Base Load is storage. Batteries. I spoke at an energy conference at Stanford University in 2018 where one interesting statistic offered by another speaker was that the amount of additional natural gas consumed during Chicago’s 2019 “Bomb Cyclone” arctic storm was about 60 billion cubic feet over about a week (the entire US typically uses about 74 Bcf daily). The presenter shared that to supply the incremental energy in and around Chicago with batteries would require 66,000 Tesla battery systems (like the one Tesla built in Australia, which was then the world’s largest existing battery farm). That battery system would apparently cost $4 trillion. That is for one storm in one portion of the country.

The cost of batteries must decline. Fortunately there are amazing researchers and companies working on new solutions that hold the promise of cost reduction. Much like the decline of solar and wind power costs, battery costs are following a steady downward trajectory.

Large scale cost cutting in the battery industry is the result of many smaller savings: raw materials, design, manufacturing, automation, chemistry. For example, Tesla’s 2020 Battery Day presentation illustrated how cost savings must be achieved through many parallel efforts, vertical integration and larger scale:

Exciting battery innovation is also occurring at the startup stage. Companies like Quantumscape have hundreds of PhD’s advancing the future of solid state lithium-metal batteries, which hold great promise around cost and performance improvement:

Innovation is also creating breakthroughs around battery-related natural resources and production technologies. Lilac Solutions, funded by Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures as well as Chris Sacca and Clay Dumas’ LowerCarbon Capital, is finding new ways to access lithium from deposits previously considered uneconomic. Lilac also offers greater resource recovery, huge time savings and avoids nearly all water waste compared against traditional evaporation pond techniques:

Energy Vault is another battery startup that may help achieve economic base load capability for renewables. Based in Switzerland, funded with $110 million from SoftBank and soon to complete a public launch via SPAC, Energy Vault does not use chemical batteries like Lithium-Ion, but instead stores potential energy by lifting and stacking massive concrete blocks into tall towers. Lowering the blocks on a cable connected to a generator then releases energy as electricity. Unlike chemical batteries, the mechanical system can store potential energy endlessly without losses, and does not rely on exotic or rare minerals:

Renewables’ Cost of Capital

Even as battery costs decline, massive amounts of capital will still be required to build and connect new renewable power and storage projects to the grid. Cost of capital has fallen substantially for renewables, but new innovations can help financing costs decline further and improve the economics of renewable energy projects.

For example, companies like kWh Analytics have amassed huge pools of data about solar project performance from PV installations throughout the world. Using Big Data analysis, they have partnered with the reinsurance giant SwissRE to provide revenue guarantees called “Solar Puts” to solar project developers and lenders. Essentially, kWh Analytics uses data about every component in a solar project to accurately forecast the project’s performance over time with such a high level of confidence that they can write an insurance policy guaranteeing the solar project’s production and revenue. This guarantee reduces borrowing costs and allows for higher debt-to-equity ratios, enabling more investment in solar projects. An example of their datasets and analysis is depicted below.

Safe Nuclear

In addition to base loading renewables with better financing and cheaper batteries, the other holy grail of clean energy supplies is safe nuclear. However, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima have created massive political and NIMBY obstacles to nuclear development. Nuclear power development in the U.S. is therefore restricted by public opinion, cost and safety — at least for now. New technologies are solving issues around cost and safety, and perhaps in time public opinion can change as a result. There are examples of nuclear success in other countries, for example France produces about 75% of its power from Nuclear, and has never suffered a significant accident. The same is true of the U.S. Navy’s nuclear-powered fleet.

New nuclear technologies hold great promise. Small Modular Reactors (SMR’s) offer a new degree of cost efficiency, and can be mass-produced. For example NuScale has invested more than $800 million into its new SMR design, which has been jointly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the engineering firm Fluor.

Another example of nuclear innovation is breeder reactors, which can consume the spent uranium fuel rods from existing nuclear plants. In the process, breeder reactors convert radioactive waste into a safer and more inert byproducts while producing electricity. Because fast breeder reactors consume almost 100% of the uranium fuel vs about 1% in traditional nuclear thermal plants, breeder reactors could extend the world’s supply of uranium by almost 60x. An example of a Russian breeder reactor design is depicted below:

Beyond the traditional nuclear power technologies built around fission (splitting of atoms), there is the possibility of real breakthrough developments around fusion (combining of atoms). More than two-dozen companies are working on fusion, with several announcing key milestones of technical progress and ambitious commercialization target dates. Commonwealth Fusion Systems in Massachusetts, First Light Fusion in the UK and TAE Technologies in California are three examples of well-funded teams hoping to produce commercial fusion reactors by 2030 or before. These and other companies aim to ultimately exceed the key technical hurdle of “energy breakeven,” meaning that more energy comes out of the system than goes into it. Fusion power technology remains elusive today, but if accomplished, fusion could completely transform the energy-environment-economy equation by producing abundant energy without carbon emissions or the NIMBY concerns association with fission.

Electric Vehicles

A factor that needs little discussion given the popularity and media coverage: electric vehicles. As one of the first and a very happy owner of a Tesla Model 3, I can say with certainty that EV’s are awesome. They are better products than combustion-powered cars, and will come to dominate the auto market. However, despite all the fanfare, EV’s represent a 1–2% share of automobiles today, and it will be decades before they can grow into any kind of majority. During the decades-long transition to electric vehicles, we can certainly benefit from better fuel economy standards on conventional combustion vehicles and greater adoption of efficient hybrid technologies.

Research and Development

To fully meet the dual challenge of protecting both our environment and broad human welfare, we will need new technologies and innovations, some of which are in the infant stage, and others that likely have not yet been imagined. Much economic research points to energy technology R&D providing the best “climate returns” for dollars invested, yet sadly public investment in clean energy technology continues to lag behind other priorities, and private investment into green energy research has been declining since 2012.

Globally in 2020, taxpayers subsidize green energy solar and wind energy by $141 billion, but only $6 billion of that made its way to R&D with the remainder going towards direct solar and wind project subsidies. Increased investment from both private and public sectors into energy R&D means that future projects will produce, store and transmit more energy, more cheaply and more cost effectively — this is why we see such a huge multiplier on R&D over the long run. Research can enable the forward leaps that make the energy transition faster, cleaner, cheaper and easier in the long run, so R&D should be a central strategy for our climate transition planning.

For example, Nuclear technologies discussed above require such enormous capital investment and R&D capability that public-private partnerships would appear to be the only practical way forward. Similarly, large-scale carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and direct air capture (DAC) projects have and will require support to progress from idea stages to commercialization. If successful, CCS and DAC can dramatically extend the climate runway while allowing humans to continue benefiting from hydrocarbon fuels; however, current market structures do not appropriately incentivize this work in the absence of a fair price on carbon.

Geoengineering is another field that would require government support to research — if proven to be reliable and safe, geoengineering technologies would allow humans to moderate climate change through techniques that increase the planet’s deflection of solar radiation (by seeding white clouds over the oceans, adding reflective gasses to the stratosphere or laying millions of micro mirrors on glaciers).

Summary: Building The New System

Better batteries, safer nuclear, mass production of electric vehicles, cheaper solar and wind: these are some of the paths we must travel to build a low-or-no-carbon energy system for the future. I am extremely excited about these areas of development and innovation, and I personally support and invest capital towards these goals, including in many of the start-ups and technologies described above. However, the transformation of a global energy system takes time. As discussed, the transition will require decades or generations and tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars and many new inventions.

While one group of innovators and investors work to deliver that clean energy system of the future, another group needs to work just as hard to buy them time. We need to clean up the existing system as much as possible to extend our runway. Remember: we need an abundant, affordable and increasing amount of energy supply throughout this transition, so as long as we depend on fossil fuels we had better make the most of them and cause the minimum possible harm.

Cleaning Up The Current System

If you care about moving the needle on climate immediately, not over decades, then you’ll find yourself in the “cleaning up the existing energy system” category. This is not the glossy brochure version of the energy transition that they distributed at Middlebury College. However, after half a career analyzing the tradeoffs between environment and economy, there is no doubt to me that this is where the biggest environmental and commercial opportunities exist today. It is the low hanging fruit where the largest environmental benefit is achieved per dollar invested today.

This category includes switching power plants from coal to gas (the single biggest driver of avoided emissions in the past 25 years), managing supply and demand on the electric grid to minimize dirty peaker plant activity, finding and fixing gas leaks throughout our extensive infrastructure, eliminating natural gas flaring, and adjusting (without expecting to materially reduce) lifestyles. Hybrids and EV’s are certainly also a part of this near-term process, and can serve to reduce emissions per mile driven, particularly when grid power comes increasingly from efficient combined cycle gas power plants and renewables instead of coal. This category also includes the basics like upgrading building insulation, fuel economy standards and energy efficient lighting, appliances and HVAC systems.

Finally, there is also new and exciting technology around direct air capture and sequestration of CO2, which is not yet economic, but could become viable through technological improvement and/or carbon pricing mechanisms such as a carbon tax or cap-and-trade systems. If scaled, carbon removal and sequestration technologies would allow for the continued use and benefits of abundant hydrocarbon energy while mitigating the worst of the climate impacts. A key mechanism to making these technologies commercially viable is likely to be pricing carbon — a concept that is increasingly embraced by climate campaigners as well as energy producers. Even ExxonMobil’s favored path forward on climate policy centers around carbon taxes and carbon pricing.

Here are my three rules for cleaning up the current energy system:

1. Waste not want not: seize any opportunity to eliminate or repurpose waste because it will reduce upstream demand and total emissions.
2. Pick low hanging fruit: leaks, flares and unnecessary emissions are the low hanging fruit of the energy system — solve these first to achieve the biggest possible “climate bang for your buck” in the shortest amount of time.
3. Economics first, incentives second, and regulations as last resort: the fastest and least economically harmful way to transition the energy system is to find win-wins, such as coal-to-gas switching, where the economics align with environmentalism. Incentives are a good second option to stimulate research and investment in areas that wouldn’t otherwise advance. Solar, wind and geothermal have all risen on the back of investment tax credits, production tax credits and grants, and carbon pricing mechanisms seem to be a logical extension of this framework. Regulations and bans should only be used in situations where no economic or market solution is possible and where the environmental harm is very clear — aggressive regulations are the moves that tend to reduce “e” and therefore reduce “p” or “q,” and should be avoided wherever an economic or incentive solution can work instead.

Coal-to-Gas Switching

Coal-to-gas switching is the biggest near-term environmental opportunity of them all. Did you know that the United States met the Kyoto Protocol carbon reduction goals accidentally? America didn’t even sign the Kyoto Protocol — we reduced our emissions simply because natural gas became cheaper than coal after the shale revolution flooded the American market with cheap and abundant gas.

The chart below indicates how coal power production began a rapid decline decades before renewables took off. Coal has lost about 30% of its market share of electricity production while natural gas gained about 25% with renewables gaining less than 9% — so far it has been mostly gas that displaced coal, not renewables.

This transition from coal to gas is great for the climate. The graph below shows that gas plants are far less carbon intensive than coal plants. Only the dirtiest 2% of gas plants on the right (old and inefficient designs with sub-optimal operations) emit more CO2 per unit of energy than even the cleanest coal plants on the left:

In their analysis of coal to gas switching, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) states, “While there is a wide variation across different sources of coal and gas, an estimated 98% of gas consumed today has a lower lifecycle emissions intensity than coal when used for power or heat. This analysis takes into account both CO2 and methane emissions and shows that, on average, coal-to-gas switching reduces emissions by 50% when producing electricity and by 33% when providing heat.”

The chart below shows the immense scale of CO2 savings achieved by coal-to-gas switching across geographies, with the United States leading the way in light blue due to the economics facilitated by the shale revolution:

I lived in China in 2011. The Wall Street Journal covered coal-to-gas switching as part of an analysis of the Kyoto Protocol goals as well as a broader discussion of China’s rapid industrialization. I have always saved this excerpt from the article:

Today China is still funding the construction of one massive coal power plant per week throughout Asia. The single biggest environmental benefit I can imagine would be to assure China of a reliable and abundant supply of liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports so that the world’s largest polluter could stop building coal plants and transition to gas plants that emit half as much carbon per unit of energy. The carbon savings from that kind of coal-to-gas transition would dwarf anything that renewables can hope to offer in the near or medium term.

Methane Leaks

Natural gas is a lot cleaner than coal, but not if we leak tons of methane into the atmosphere during production and transportation.

The EIA report cited above continues, “Enhanced efforts from the gas industry to ensure best practices all along the gas supply chain, especially to reduce methane leaks, are a cost-effective means to reduce the emissions intensity of gas supply and are essential to secure and maximize the climate benefits of switching to gas.”

Natural gas creates an incredible opportunity to reduce carbon emissions during the energy transition process, but only if the oil and gas industry doesn’t leak, vent and flare it into the atmosphere along the way. The environmental promise of natural gas is real, but realizing that promise requires a higher level of focus on fugitive methane emissions. The chart below shows that if methane leaks add up to 11% or more of total volumes, then gas would be more damaging to greenhouse emissions goals than coal.

Fortunately, estimates of total leaks are below 11%. EPA estimates national methane leakage in the 2–3% range, but with significant uncertainty. Even at these levels, fugitive methane emissions are responsible for about 6% of total global CO2-equivalent emissions — an inexcusably large proportion given that these leaks achieve zero beneficial use. This is why waste reduction is such low hanging fruit for the environment and the economy.

One emerging threat is the growing number of abandoned and “orphaned” wells, which are increasingly recognized as significant sources of methane leakage. Many old wells were drilled before state bonding rules required producers to pre-fund reclamation and plugging costs. Other orphaned wells may have bonds funded to the state, but the amount of money is insufficient to properly plug the well. Other times, producers go bankrupt and abruptly leave dozens or hundreds of wells without an operator responsible for safely plugging the wells, so the responsibility falls to the state.

The U.S. EPA estimates that there are 3.2 million abandoned oil and gas wells in the country. Compared to state-funded plugging activity that amounts to hundreds or perhaps thousands of wells per year, this situation could spiral out of control as wells age and degrade and eventually fail into a leaking condition.

While gas-oriented fields focus heavily on gas capture (it is their primary commodity for sales), oil-oriented producers focus more on oil and see a far lower economic incentive around gas. As a result, oil-weighted shale fields like the Permian Basin leak natural gas at least twice as much as the national average, and have set records for the largest methane emissions and flaring volumes in U.S. history.

New technologies such as drones, specialized cameras, electronic pipe integrity sensors and gas volume monitoring systems (mass balance systems) can help to detect leaks from pipelines, wells and tanks and dispatch workers to repair them. Where operators have gone bankrupt, there will need to be some mechanism for funding or incentivizing plugging work by third parties.

Flaring

Methane emissions come from leaks and from flaring. The latter is the process of combusting natural gas (burning it in the air) when no pipeline is available to transport the gas. Flares do not achieve 100% combustion efficiency, so some portion of the gas escapes into the atmosphere. Given the huge volumes of gas blown through a shale well’s flare, even a small percentage of non-combusted gas adds up to a large volume fairly quickly.

The scale of flaring is also enormous, with approximately 14 billion cubic feet of gas burned wastefully each day — enough to power all of sub-saharan Africa.

Whereas leaks result from accidental failures of components, pipes, tanks, pressure vessels, valves or other equipment, flaring is a more pernicious and long-term source of methane emissions. Flaring is the result of transportation and logistics problems — pipelines that are sized too small or delayed in construction or impossible to build in the first place. Fortunately, there are some innovative solutions growing in the marketplace that economically eliminate flaring using on-site equipment.

The example nearest and dearest to my own heart is the company I co-founded, Crusoe Energy Systems. Crusoe very much aligns with my three rules for cleaning up the current energy system: “waste not, want not,” “pick low-hanging fruit” and “economics first.” As a result, Crusoe has rapidly moved the needle on climate goals.

Crusoe captures natural gas that would have been flared and uses the gas to power energy-intensive modular, mobile data centers. The data centers are shipping container-sized modules filled with energy-hungry servers as well as sophisticated electrical engineering and networking systems. Deployed directly to the wellhead, the modules capture gas that was otherwise wastefully lit on fire and instead uses the gas to fuel advanced computing systems:

To date Crusoe has deployed more than sixty mobile, modular data centers (like the ones pictured above) throughout North Dakota, Montana, Colorado and Wyoming. We now employ more than 100 people, and recently passed a major milestone of reducing natural gas flaring by more than one billion cubic feet since inception.

Our business, like many other clean technology companies, has been able to attract capital for our mission to clean up the energy industry. In fact, we have raised more than $200 million to date from respected venture capitalists like Founders Fund, Bain Capital Ventures, KCK, Valor Equity Partners. project financiers like Upper90 and lenders including Northbase and Silicon Valley Bank. Our investors also include leading climate-focused funds like LowerCarbon Capital and My Climate Journey.

Reduction of flaring is a key solution for reducing methane emissions. Methane is 25–84 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2, depending on the time scale considered, so reducing methane emissions from flaring is very impactful in terms of “extending the climate runway.”

The Environmental Defense Fund surveyed hundreds of flares in the Permian Basin in 2021, and released a comprehensive report that on average, 7% of the methane that goes to flare is actually leaked to the atmosphere. Even advanced enclosed flare systems combust only 98% of methane, still emitting 2% to the atmosphere. Multiplied by 25x to 84x, these fugitive emissions streams are massive contributors to total CO2-equivalent emissions and resulting climate change.

Instead of lighting the gas on fire as a wasted byproduct, Crusoe runs the flare gas through a generator, which achieves 99.89% combustion efficiency, thereby dramatically reducing methane emissions. Equally important, Crusoe harnesses this energy for beneficial use through energy-intensive computing. Computing activity that would have drawn power from a carbon-fueled grid, which would have added incremental carbon to the atmosphere, is now fueled by a process that reduces methane emissions, thereby achieving a double carbon mitigation benefit.

Compared to windmills that produce power perhaps 40% of the time or a photovoltaic solar system that generates power around 30% of the time, a Digital Flare Mitigation (DFM) system operates continuously. As a result of the higher run times and additional methane reduction benefits, Crusoe delivers amazing “bang for your buck” climate results. The chart below reflects this difference using the IPCC’s 20-year global warming potential (GWP) factors for methane net of CO2 emissions from combustion power generation:

The opportunities for cleaning up the current energy system are huge, and tend to have the benefit of paying for themselves. For example a drone with a FLIR camera can spot a leak from the air. Plugging that leak not only avoids the emission of tons of CO2-equivalent methane into the atmosphere, but it means that more methane can be sold and used beneficially by customers, which supports the economy. Similarly, capturing flare gas with Crusoe’s system creates a low-cost energy source for valuable computing services. This is how improving technology (t) helps us keep quality of life (q) high while protecting the environment (v).

Lifestyle Changes

I’ve explained my view that humans are not really capable of voluntary reductions of their quality of life. Even in the developed world, most people simply can’t resist the temptation to increase “q.” In the developing world, a reduction of “q” is not even part of the conversation. However, any discussion of how to clean up the current system would not be complete without addressing lifestyle adjustment.

The view here is likely controversial, but the single most environmentally beneficial choice we can make is to have fewer children as a species. There is very strong data showing that the number of children per woman declines towards two as countries rise in prosperity — this is because impoverished agricultural communities required more children to help with farming labor and to act as financial safety nets for aging parents later in life. The carbon impact of various lifestyle adjustments is depicted below, so people can form their own conclusions without much additional commentary.

Again, I don’t put much stock in the idea that we can expect or ask people to curtail their quality of life, but on the margin we can certainly make improvements:

Carbon Capture and Sequestration

The idea of pumping CO2 underground for long-term sequestration has been historically plagued by economics, but is theoretically promising. The most prospective projects seek to directly capture CO2 from the exhaust systems of fossil-fired power plants (coal or gas), and then pipe the CO2 to an injection well. One promising example is a company called Net Power, which has developed a new power generation system based around supercritical CO2 and a proprietary combustor technology. Their pilot project in Texas is depicted below, and additional projects are under development around the globe:

Direct Air Capture

As we work to minimize emissions from the existing system, there is a new field of engineering and science that may allow us to remove emissions that are already in the atmosphere. One such company called Carbon Engineering has developed a system that can convert atmospheric CO2 into liquid fuels. A photo of the first pilot system is below:

Carbon Engineering is also developing a project with Occidental Petroleum that would inject the CO2 underground as a form of carbon sequestration.

Conclusion

In Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax, an industrialist named the “Onceler” begins chopping down beautiful trees to harvest their special fibers. The entrepreneur uses the tree fiber to knit a “Thneed,” a word that I suppose Seuss invented to represent a “thing you need” = “Thneed.”

First one customer buys a Thneed, then a few more, then a huge line builds up for the Thneeds. After all, p and q tend to increase, and the Thneed is just another aspect of increasing q for a growing p. Soon the industrialist sets up a big business with automated tree choppers, mass production lines and complex distribution for Thneeds.

Expansion continues to grow unabated. This leads to environmental degradation, forcing all of the cute bears, birds and fish to flee from the landscape.

In geologic history, this part might be our warming phase building up to the Permian Extinction:

Finally, the business chops down the last tree, representing complete environmental collapse:

Seuss doesn’t sugar coat it. He paints a grim scenario in which more and more people demand more and more Thneeds (p and q rising = rising c). In Seuss’ world, like in ours, natural resources are finite and diminish as the economy grows. As r declines and c rises, the environment (v) gets squeezed from both sides of the equation and eventually collapses.

The Lorax is a small, brown, wooly creature who speaks for the animals and the environment. When the final tree falls, he flies away through the polluted clouds, leaving a monument reading “unless.”

The message is clear, and could not be more perfect for this moment of jeopardy in the world’s energy system. Unless we clean up the current system to extend the climate runway for a clean energy future, and in fact succeed in transitioning to that future, then we risk environmental black swans and tipping points. We must avoid the future depicted in The Lorax.

Instead of chopping down every tree, we need to build new technologies. To mix metaphors, technologies can make the most of each tree we do need to cut until new technologies can avoid cutting trees altogether. Technology is the only way out of Tally’s Law. New technologies and innovations can clean up the current system by switching from dirty fuels to cleaner ones, finding and plugging leaks, eliminating flaring, and boosting efficiency. This lets each tree go farther, reducing the speed of our chopping while still producing the economic opportunities that all humans crave and deserve.

Similarly, new and improved technologies will rise to the challenge of a truly clean energy system. The transition from here to there will be exactly that: a transition process. We can’t abruptly turn off the hydrocarbon fuels that sustain life and livelihood today, but we can replace them with cleaner alternatives over time, and we can accelerate that transition with greater effort, investment and focus.

Our mission at Crusoe Energy is to help clean up the existing energy system by eliminating waste and emissions. We recognize and appreciate the value that energy producers deliver to humanity, and our technology is designed to ensure they can deliver their life-sustaining and life-enhancing products as cleanly and efficiently as possible. We are in the business of extending the climate runway. A new initiative at our company is also developing projects to power datacenters with curtailed renewable power as a way to incentivize the development of additional solar and wind resources. As we pursue our mission, we cheer for our colleagues who have found other ways to clean up the system, or are working diligently to build the energy systems of the future.

With these efforts, I believe we can prevent Seuss’ dystopian future in The Lorax. But it will not happen automatically, and that is why the final message of his book was “Unless.”

Notes:

*A more nuanced (and complex, thus harder to quickly visualize) version of Tally’s Law includes a relationship between natural resources, resource extraction, and environmental health, specifically:

natural resources = r = n + w - d, where

n = non-renewable resources

w = renewable resources

d = depletion (of n)

and

Environmental health = v = lg, where

l = local/micro habitat health, of which n may be a large part

g = global/macro habitat health, of which n is typically a small part, and which includes climate health

This expanded version of Tally’s Law reflects a directional relationship where natural resource extraction, for example mining activity, depletes a non-renewable resource and in turn impacts environmental health, mostly through local environmental health and also to a degree through macro environment or climate impacts.

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