Shale of the century shifts carbon consumption

The rise of shale gas in the US has had unexpected consequences as well as the more obvious effects. It was bound to do wonders for local energy prices, but who would have thought that it would play a part in increasing Germany’s emissions of carbon dioxide? 

You can get an idea of shale’s impact on energy markets from a new paper from Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs. In US Energy: the New Reality John Mitchell reviews recent changes in the energy scene in the US. He shows just how quickly those changes have happened. In 2006, natural gas production in the US reached a low of 18 trillion cubic feet (tcf). (They still use 19th century measurement units there.) By 2012 it had risen by a third to 24 tcf.

The gains for the US are obvious. “Low natural gas prices have expanded the domestic gas market and enhanced the competitiveness of US industries,” says Mitchell. And this will be a long-term effect. Gas-based petrochemical and electricity-intensive industries in the United States “will continue to benefit from cost advantages that are beginning to approach those enjoyed by Middle East petrochemicals industries with oil-related (though discounted) input costs”.

This industrial benefit is in contrast to the UK where last week Sir Alan Rudge, in his farewell address as President of the ERA Foundation, complained that “we are struggling with a disastrous expensive energy policy that is based upon an illusion of a green economy with a huge dependence on imports”. Sir Alan, who has been banging on for some time about the price that industry in the UK has to pay for its energy, lusts after the US’s shale gas. This has, he says, “already reduced energy costs there by a staggering 40 per cent, made them a net exporter of gas, and commenced the rejuvenation of productive industry”.

One consequence of the shale bonanza is, as Sir Alan said, that it has “significantly reduced [CO2] emissions in the USA”. That is because shale gas has half the CO2 content of coal.
This switch from coal to gas in the US has not brought about the dent in CO2 emissions that you might think. It has just exported the carbon for other people to chuck into the atmosphere. One recipient of this carbon looking for a home is Germany.

Mitchell explains what has happened in his paper. Natural gas companies, he points out, have increased their share of the US electricity market by 5 per cent. And it has done this “partly at the expense of coal (which has lost 3 per cent of the electricity generation market)”.

Coal producers haven’t thrown away their picks and shovels and gone on to greener pursuits. They have replaced this loss of domestic sales “by exporting to growing markets in the power sector in Asia and in Europe (the latter reflecting the phasing-out of nuclear power in Germany)”.

So, all those German environmentalists saying no to nuclear power have been bad news for climate change. Yes, Germany is bigger in renewable energy than the rest of Europe, but it still needs to keep the lights on.

A far from green bamboo computer

How one company’s plans to make a green computer caused a headache for the recyclers.

When the computer company Dell wanted to “go green” it alighted on “bamboo” as a neat environmentally friendly material. Had Dell stuck to what it called" “Nature’s Eco-friendly Packaging Solution” for the boxes that keep hardware safe during transit there might have been no complaints. After all, as it proclaimed, you can just “Toss that Bamboo Packaging into the Compost Pile”.

Unfortunately, the company’s designers didn’t stop there. In 2008, they launched what Dell called an “eco computer”, with a case made

Technorati Tags: materials,polymers,recycling

out of a bamboo based material that looks and behaves just like the ABS polymers used in other computers. You can’t just add that to your vegetable waste and throw it on the compost heap.

Nat Hunter, co-director for Design at the RSA (the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce), tells of going to a recycling plant in Kent. The plant takes old PCs and subjects them to “big rock crushers” – a wrecking ball – to reduce the obsolete computers to piles of rubble, a materials mine.

The waste then goes through sorting line to separate out the different materials for recycling. Unfortunately, Hunter explained at a recent meeting, the sorting system cannot tell the difference between the bamboo plastic and ordinary ABS plastic and shoves it into the same receptacle, thus polluting the real polymer waste.

As Hunter says, the bamboo PC completely failed in its attempts to be ‘eco friendly’. You buy it as a green computer but it ends up being "very problematic" for the recycling industry.

Hunter was talking about Dell’s foray into panda territory at a meeting put on by, among others, the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST). The meeting, back in January, marked publication of a POST Note Maximising the Value of Recycled Materials. Much of the event – more details here in a piece I wrote for the Materials Research Society in the USA – dealt with the business of recycling plastic, which often entails sorting a pile of mixed polymers, an increasingly sophisticated task made more difficult if the mixture harbours a polymer that masquerades as something else.

Hunter, who is a part of the team behind The Great Recovery – Redesigning the future, a project funded by the Technology Strategy Board, tackled a broader theme, designing manufactured goods to be green from the start. She takes the line that “waste really is a design flaw”.

Designers need to put a lot more effort into thinking about the fate of their products. Dell isn’t the only electronics company in her sights. Hunter, who has spent time watching the recyclers in action, also tells the tale of TVs from Philips that comes with 300 screws holding it together, “all of them different”. By contrast, Samsung makes TVs with half as many screws, all of them the same. Much easier to dismantle.

What have academics ever done for us?

Is seems that academics can never do anything right, especially when it comes to their work with businesses. Companies complain that university “boffins” don’t want to know about the sort of science that makes money, and when they do show interest in how businesses work, they are dismissed for being out of touch.

The latest manifestation of the latter complaint shows in the responses to a news item on Times Higher Education (THE), Business schools unveil plans for enterprise research centre. The story itself is a straightforward report of plans by Warwick Business School and Aston Business School to set up a Enterprise Research Centre.

The announcement was one of a PR binge that the government went on to mark Global Entrepreneurship Week, in a desperate attempt to appear to be doing something about business. Aston University, in its announcement of the initiative, says “The new £2.9 million centre will become a national and international focal point for research, knowledge and expertise on small and medium-sized businesses.” What possible objection could there be to that?

Back at the THE, ‘whatalife’ whines “I do find these ‘setting up’ of Business Schools to encourage enterprise very amusing. The vast amount of academics could not run their own weekly shopping budget and yet they try to tell business men how to run a business.” Then we get another comment from yet another person who does not want to reveal their real identity, ‘John’, who adds “Coming from the industry, I wonder whether these academics from business school know about real world business at all, let alone doing research in this area.”

I wonder if any of the business people who slagged off business schools on the THE site have actually read any papers based on the academics' research. I regularly read and write about papers about R&D management, for example. While these publications rarely deliver staggering intellectual insights, they are much better than all those expensive consultants when it comes to providing details of what they have done and in analysing their material. They are certainly superior to the ‘make it up as you go along’ style of management that has brought many British companies to their knees.

You won’t read papers from commercial consultants, unlike academic who consult on the back of their research. The ‘borrow your watch to tell you the time’ brigade don't dare reveal their sources, lest the audience see that there is nothing there. Just read the bland articles that many commercial consultancies put on their websites.

Jibes about academics' inability to manage their shopping seem to fall into the trap of thinking that understanding something is the same as doing it. Academics understand how water flows through pipes – it is called fluid dynamics – but no one expects them to be great plumbers.

The independence of academics – and perhaps the fact that their primary motivation is not to re-package old ideas in the mode of some commercial consultants – means that they are free to talk at great length to many many managers, far more than a practitioner can hope to reach without shirking on their paid work.

Academics also have the advantage that they are not in competition with the businesses they study. Companies will say things to academic researchers that they would never put on the record and would certainly not say in front of a rival. As a result, academics are more likely to have a better understanding of what goes on in the business world than many of the wonderful managers who have been so successful in recent years.

Unlike, it seems, these critics, I have read papers from both Warwick Business School and Aston Business School. They have interesting things to say and have worked with some of the more successful business around. Putting the two together in this way makes sense, not least because they sit in the middle of an industrial hotspot, stuffed with just the sort of businesses that the Enterprise Research Centre will study.

I have no idea if business schools are any good at training managers, although there is evidence to suggest that they are not a complete waste of time. I wouldn't be surprised if they are less than great. But that isn't what the new centre is all about.

A not so snappy camera seller

Retailers succeed or fail on the strength of their communication with customers.

With my now very old, all of four years, digital Canon PowerShot 1000is on the way out, I thought it would be a good idea to move on a couple of generations for my next point-and-shoot camera. A sucker for Canon even before the company flew me to Japan on a couple of press tours, where I saw the quality of its technology close up, I found a likely candidate in the new PowerShot SX260. Nice looking camera with an impressive zoom range.

Looking around, I could see that Amazon and Jessops have similar

Technorati Tags: customer service,Jessops,retailers,communications,Amazon

prices, when you factor in Canon’s cashback deal. I dropped into Jessops on The Strand to see what it looked like. Satisfied that it would fit into a pocket, and good enough to let me leave the Canon SLR at home, after checking that my favourite supplier, Park Cameras in Burgess Hill, could not hope to match the on-line prices, I decided to order from Jessops on the grounds that while the company might be a little bit dearer, unlike Amazon, it does not refuse to pay corporation taxes in the UK.

Jessops had the item in stock. So, order placed on Sunday. Would you believe it? “In stock” for “next day delivery” suddenly turned out to be a myth.

On Monday the camera magically turned out to be “On Back-Order” with the promise of a 10-day wait, making it a bit tight before I am go off on holiday at the end of the month.

This did not stop Jessops from despatching a pair of spare batteries to go with the non-existent camera, despite the fact that they are pointless on their own. But what about getting the camera itself?

Jessops, it seems, does not believe in communicating with customers. No email to say that delivery is delayed. No suggestion as to how long it might really take. Just a message about sending the useless batteries.

OK, give them the benefit of the doubt. Use their web system to ask about changing the order from delivery to the much touted shop collection – Jessops’s system suggests that it is in stock at a couple of shops near me. Unfortunately, the promised “response within 24 hours” turns out to be a myth. The next move is to try to cancel the order to see if that will get some sort of response.

Communication is what sets suppliers apart. Customers don’t mind the odd hiccup if they know what is going on. Jessops fails on that front. So, corporation tax or not, it isn’t likely to get my business in future. Pity, the assistants in the store on The Strand were friendly, helpful and knowledgeable. They are just let down by the systems that are supposed to support their efforts.

Update – While writing this I finally received a reply. Not a solution, or any suggestion as to when new stock might arrive. But at least a reply. Maybe the solution will happen tomorrow.

What does proof reading prove?

The second annual review from the UK’s Government Office for Science lets itself down with sloppy proofreading. 

What do we make of a document that tells us that “the GCSA met with senior officials from organsiations such as the World Bank, USAID and the National Academy of Sciences to disucss opportunities for UK-US collaboration and cooperation”? Yes. Those spelling mistakes really are in there, buried towards the end of The Government Office for Science Annual Review 2010-11.

At one time, the UK’s Office for Science and Technology, as it was before someone thought it trendy to turn it into the Government Office for Science – GO-Science, get it? – hired people to weed out  such sloppiness. Sometimes, there were capable writers and editors in house who cared about these things.

A disclaimer here, I was one of several people who earned a bob or two working on documents for the OST and other departments, before the coalition government decided that all consultants were evil and expensive and should never darken its doors. But this isn’t just a whinge about lost opportunities to bid for work. It is about the message that an organisation sends out by releasing poorly edited material like this.

No one expects literary masterpieces from a chief scientist or anyone else in government but you do expect some attention to detail. Isn’t that what science is about?

Mistakes like these are an invitation to look more closely at the document itself. Sadly, it begins to fail as soon as you do so. What, for example, do we make of the notion that GO-Science is there to “strengthen confidence in climate science”?

What on earth is confidence in climate change? Do they mean confidence that it is happening? Confidence that the government knows what to do about it?

Scope for improvement

Then there is the inevitable lapse into policy speak. What does they do when they “scope potential future developments in technology”?

That  one can take some unravelling. First there is the “scope” bit. My now slightly aged copy of Collins English Dictionary doesn’t like the idea that scope is a verb. Even the current on-line version agrees and has the fuddy duddy notion that scope is a noun.

Perhaps GO-Science means anticipate maybe even investigate. It could even be “think about”, or is that too colloquial for such a high minded bit of the government?

How about the next bit, “potential future developments”? What is the “future” doing in there? I can’t think of any way in which someone could study, let alone scope, potential past developments: potential developments in technology says it all.

Here’s a few more: “GO-Science participated in Exercise Watermark, a national exercise to asses the UK response to flooding.” Please, no jokes about beasts of burden please or rear ends of North Americans. Funnily enough, they get it right several times, so someone must know how to spell assess.

You can’t say that about “phenomonon” which appears just once. They shouldn’t have used the word anyway. At least, not in the sentence “Scientists, planners and emergency managers from around the globe discussed their concerns and the risks this phenomonon poses to societal and economic well-being and national security.” It would have been better to have said  “space weather”, which is what that paragraph is about. And what is “societal and economic well-being”?

We could go on about other spelling gaffes and the inconsistent use of capitals – as in government and Government – not to mention a layout that manages to separate headings from the associated text, but what the heck? They have never been good at that sort of think in any government department.
GO-Science also worries about Influenza and influenza. The Government Chief Scientific Adviser “has continued to engage with UK pandemic influenza preparedness”.  How do you engage with preparedness?

We also read that “December 2010 was the coldest recorded for some years”. Coldest what? December? Month? Temperature?

The sad bit is that one of the better, and mostly widely read, guides to clear writing started life as a government document. The Complete Plain Words, by Sir Ernest Gowers and Revised by Sir Bruce Fraser, showed that even knights of the realm could string a few words together. At one time, HSMO published this book. But that venerable institution, which also used to help the government to make sense, joined many other fine agencies on the bonfire in the slash and burn of privatisation and “outsourcing”.

One final nit to pick, whoever turned the document into a PDF file pressed the wrong buttons and managed to use a font, Velvenda Cooler, that chucks up an error when you open the file.

Questions of meaning

A decent editor doesn’t just pick up typographical errors. They also question the meaning where it is unclear, trying to decipher the use of phrases like “engage with preparedness”, for example.
A good editor also picks up howlers of the “security needs of the 2010 Olympic Games” variety. Did I miss something? I hope so.

It may be that in the days of text messages and Twitter, the English language has become a joke. There are some of us, though, who still think that it is important to have white papers, reports and other documents that make sense to the largest number of people. You don’t achieve that with poor editing.
Sloppy presentation of the type that pervades this document, which should be the highlight of the year for GO-Science, really isn’t much help. If nothing else, it could provoke readers with grammatical sensitivities to throw the document across the room. That would be a pity. It does have one or two interesting leads. I was particularly taken by the short bit on the Royal Academy of Engineering’s plans to get at people in the civil service with a background in engineering. But that will have to wait for another day.

PS This rant has a major shortcoming. Like most blogs, it has not come under the eye of a subeditor. So there is no guarantee that it is error free. But at least it has had the benefit of being written with software that has a spell checker. I even had to tell it to ignore the "deliberate" errors lifted from the report. The ubiquity of that technology makes it all the more puzzling that documents can escape from the government with so many errors.