Raufer Updates

I had a nice long visit in Bangkok, spending a month (mid-November through mid-December) in UN ESCAP’s Energy Security Section working on a variety of Asia/Pacific projects related to energy access, efficiency and security. While there, I also attended a three day ‘Experts Working Group Meeting on Enhancing Regional Cooperation for Energy Security in Asia and the Pacific,’ and was invited to chair one of their sessions (addressing the concerns of energy importing countries). The meeting was quite lively, with lots of divergent viewpoints from country experts.

Bangkok view, with strings attached

My stay in Thailand was during ‘high season’ – I didn’t see a drop of rain the whole month, and we had beautiful sunny weather. I had an apartment off Petchburi Road, up on the 26th floor, and you can check out my balcony view in the picture. Note that I had to tie down my running gear; I learned the hard way that Bangkok that high up is a pretty windy place. My shorts ended up on another balcony downstairs, but luckily I was able to retrieve them…. (and yes, of course I used the inside stairs to do so!)

Roger on the River Kwai

I took advantage of my time in Thailand to stay at some really nice resorts in both the mountains (Khao Yai) and the beach (Hua Hin)…. but one of the more interesting trips was to Kanchanaburi to see the Bridge on the River Kwai. The one remaining today is made of steel (not wood, like in the movie or in Pierre Boulle’s memorable novel), but the bridge was just part of an incredible story of the 250 mile long ‘Death Railway’ from Thailand to Burma, built by POWs and forcibly conscripted Asian labor during World War II. Many of the POWs came from Changi (see last year’s Singapore posting), and it has been estimated that more than a hundred thousand persons died building the railway. I took the train for several miles over wooden trestles & cut-away sections overlooking the river, and then a boat trip on the river itself. On the tour I met an Australian fellow whose father had been captured at Singapore, and spent 18 months as a POW working in the brutal conditions. He survived the war, and passed away just two years ago. I asked about his war stories, but was told that there weren’t any: his father refused to ever talk about the experience.

Blue Sky Awards

A Shenzhen visit in mid-November came at the invitation of Professor Yu Yuanqi, who runs the Shenzhen International Technology Promotion Center for Sustainable Development (in conjunction with UNIDO). Prof. Yu coordinates the international Blue Sky Awards for renewable energy, and I was part of the nine-member panel of experts who reviewed this year’s technologies. We received info about the nominated technologies beforehand, and each company had a opportunity to make a demonstration/presentation, followed by a Q&A period. We then had an electronic vote, so the audience could follow our tallies. I got to present one of the awards to Mariwasa Siam Ceramics, Inc. of the Philippines, whose ‘Zero Waste Renewable Energy and Raw Materials from Rice Husk for the Ceramics Industry’ was a winner.

Prof. Yu also arranged a technical meeting, coordinated with the China Hi-Tech Fair meeting occurring at the same time, and I was invited to make a presentation about the ‘leapfrog’ emissions trading approach. Shenzhen has an interest in establishing an emissions exchange (much like other cities in China, including Beijing, Shanghai, & Tianjin), and the session included a signing ceremony for an MOU exploring such an entity with representatives from Australia and Hong Kong.

I was sitting in a Starbucks on a late Saturday afternoon in mid-November, next to one of my regular HK haunts — the Page One bookstore in Times Square at Causeway Bay — catching up on HK local news & reading the South China Morning Post….. when one of their reporters approached me. And that’s how I ended up in a front page story in the next day’s edition of the SCMP about Hong Kong’s “potential net migration index” (i.e., the number of people who would like to leave the city compared with those who want to move there). I told the reporter that I worked on environmental issues, and he concluded his article as follows:

That’s right, they should. I agree with that guy Robert.

My visit to HK was really part of a Shenzhen/Bangkok trip, but it allowed me to catch up on things with a number of colleagues & friends – including Simon Powell and Charles Yonts of CLSA. They went far beyond the call of duty, coming out to join me for coffee on a Sunday morning – an especially notable courtesy, since there had been a big party the night before welcoming Simon back to HK (after an extended stint in Taiwan). Charles was putting together a new CLSA ‘Clean & Green’ research report on climate change, and invited me to add a few words – so please check out the note on page 29 about ‘Copenhagen and emissions markets in Asia.’ And so you can see that it was really nice to be back in HK once again — despite any of that air pollution!

Those of you who follow urban planning & renewable energy matters can guess that a highlight of my trip to Abu Dhabi would — of course! — be a visit to the new eco-city at Masdar. And I was extremely fortunate to have a truly expert guide to the construction site — Ms. Zeina Ghanem, one of my former students, who has been working in the Carbon Management Unit at Masdar for the past fifteen months.

Proposed Masdar city

Masdar is a $22 billion, car-free, zero-carbon, zero-waste urban planning development that will eventually have 40,000 residents, 50,000 commuters, and 1500 cleantech companies. It is a “sustainable energy initiative from the heart of oil and gas world,” according to a recent article in the journal Renewable Energy World, and it’s already off to a great start – earlier this year, the city won the competition to become host of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), a new international agency with more than 130 member states whose objective is to “promote the widespread and increased adoption and the sustainable use of all forms of renewable energy.” General Electric, our Abu Dhabi client, will also be establishing a 4000m2 regional ‘Ecomagination’ center in the city, supporting the development of energy efficiency, renewable energy, water treatment, and other comparable GE products.

Ms. Zeina Ghanem at Masdar

Zeina was an MES student (Masters of Environmental Studies) at Penn when she took my course, and later worked in the Arab Bureau at UN headquarters – so I would sometimes see her up in New York as well. She then moved to Lebanon and worked for UNDP in Beirut (and in the private sector there too), and since moving to Abu Dhabi she has been working on carbon trading issues at Masdar. [You can see from ‘Raufer Updates’ postings over recent years that I’m really very fortunate to have such a marvelous network of bright and talented former students, all over the world, working on significant environmental matters!]

In the picture, you can see Zeina standing in front of a solar product test area, where Masdar is checking out the claims and durability of various solar energy devices. Obviously those solar energy vendors hope to find a significant market in Masdar’s development…. and the rest of the world is hoping for similar results from the city itself!

In late October and early November I was in Abu Dhabi, giving a training course at the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) for General Electric and IFP. This course was very similar in structure to the one we gave back in 2005 in Italy, although the carbon market certainly looks a bit different than it did then!

Al Raha Beach Hotel

The Financial Times notes that Abu Dhabi is now on its way to replacing Dubai as the “cash-rich heart of the Middle East’s construction industry,” with more than $100 billion of state-funded projects under way or in the planning stage…. a fact readily apparent in the number of cranes and construction sites visible from my hotel window. I stayed at the Al Raha Beach Hotel, a part of a major seaside development complex — and the nearby office tower (if you can call it that?) gives an idea about the visually stunning nature of projects in the country.

Dubai skyline

Dubai certainly isn’t lagging in that department either. I headed over there to check out the new Burj Dubai — now the world’s tallest building, eclipsing Taipei 101 – & shown in silhouette in my sunset photo. It will open early next year. [Note: it was dedicated in Jan. 2010 as the Burj Khalifa.] Other well-known attractions included the Palm Jumeirah, an offshore artificial island complex in the shape of a palm tree; the Burj Al Arab, a luxury hotel that looks like the sail of a dhow (an Arabian sailing vessel); and yes, I even went out of my way to check out the snow & ski slopes of ‘Ski Dubai‘ in the shopping ‘Mall of the Emirates’ – truly a bizarre sight in the 35oC (95oF) November weather. Climate activists know that the UAE is second in the world in per capita greenhouse gas emissions (Qatar is #1)…. so hopefully our course will have some impact.

In mid-October, I was down in Guayaquil, Ecuador once more, working with my friends & colleagues at Efficacitas. Back in one of my first postings, I described a pollution control effort we did at a power plant in northern Ecuador, and this time we’re doing a very similar project for a facility in Guayaquil. It was really great to see Juan Carlos Blum (the firm’s General Manager, and one of my former students); Mario Patiño-Aroca and Jorge Duque-Rivera, engineering professors at ESPOL (and officers in the firm); as well as their very talented staff (mostly mechanical engineers by training — but they’ve decided to let in a few chemical engineering-types too!).

Ecuador sugar mill

I had a chance to visit the power plant site, as well as that of another Efficacitas client, a sugar mill in the nearby countryside using bagasse in a CDM project. I hadn’t been in such a bagasse-burning plant since my days teaching energy management at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica in the early 1980s, & so it was really fun to see how much the technology has changed. And of course, it wasn’t all work – we also headed over to the Pacific coast at Playas for a wonderful seafood feast – courtesy of Prof. Patiño (pictured on the right with his son, Gustavo, & Juan Carlos on the left).

At the beach in Playas

One of the interesting factors in our study is the potential role of Chinese vendors for flue gas desulfurization (FGD). Given the massive investment that China has been making in FGD, they have significantly begun to affect the worldwide marketplace for such equipment – especially since they have managed to drive costs down dramatically (most estimates put the cost reduction at about 50% within China, although anecdotally I have heard even lower numbers). There have been numerous concerns about equipment quality associated with such significant cost reductions, however, so our project work in Guayaquil should be both interesting and challenging!

New T-shirt

I hope you’ll forgive yet another non-work-related posting – but definitely another fun one! My three daughters grew up listening to Bruce Springsteen records in our house (and yes, they were still vinyl records then), and when they heard that he was performing the last concerts at Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands in New Jersey – a local hometown hero coming back for the venue’s last hurrah — they decided to treat their Dad to a truly memorable event! So along with almost 60,000 other dedicated Boss fans, we were there when he & the E Street Band burned their way through more than thirty songs – Badlands, Born to Run, & the whole ‘Born in the USA’ album – in a triumphant fifth & final concert on October 9th. You can get a sense of the energy level in some of the bootleg clips of the concert posted on YouTube, including a favorite ‘No Surrender.’

On the way to see Bruce

My daughters know that I’m a big Bruce fan – I once drove the 140 miles from Chicago to Urbana, IL, to see him because I couldn’t get local tickets – and the hometown setting at Giants Stadium (soon to become a parking lot) made it especially fun. Three hours of high energy rock-n’-roll without any breaks is apparently now the benchmark for sixty-year old guys (thanks, Bruce), so I was told that I should no longer expect any sympathy whatsoever after a piddling three-mile run. The concert ended with inside-the-stadium fireworks, and his seventh & final encore was ‘Jersey Girl‘– an especially fitting tribute to my own three special & absolutely wonderful ‘Joisey girls’. You can see them in the picture (Lisa, Jessica & Sarah, from the left)…. and in the very lower left, the back of the head of my four-year old grandson Jackson, who is obviously taking after his grandpa (see the China CCTV note two postings below).

In early October 2009 I made a presentation for the International Assessment and Strategy Center (IASC), a DC-based ‘think tank’ that focuses on a variety of medium and long term international security concerns. My presentation was entitled “The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and Energy,” and discussed the current energy situation in Central Asia, SCO’s attempt to develop an “Energy Club,” and China’s rapidly developing energy needs and their environmental implications. Professor Arthur Waldron, a well-known China expert and history professor at Penn, is IASC’s vice president, and I’ve found sitting in on IASC workshops and working with their scholars over recent months to be a really fascinating — & educational! — experience.

Roger at CBEEX

Back in Beijing again in late July & early August – this time on behalf of Winrock International, a well-known NGO, and home of the American Carbon Registry. USAID recently solicited applications for a new US-China Clean Energy & Climate Partnership, and I was in Beijing to help Winrock put together their partnership team and technical proposal. We have some really great partners, including Peking University’s College of Environmental Science & Engineering; the Asia Foundation; and the China Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Another very interesting partner is the China Beijing Environment Exchange (CBEEX). I had first met with CBEEX folks on a previous visit, and this time they invited me to the signing ceremony for their first domestic (i.e, China-to-China) Voluntary Emission Reduction (VER) transaction. Check out the CCTV coverage… [& maybe you can find the back of my head??] The Chicago Climate Exchange got its start with exactly such transactions, and we hope that the partnership will open up a new venue in the US for Chinese VERs — much like the Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) under the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol currently sold (mostly) in Europe.

Rodeo in Cody

Another non-work-related posting – but truly a delightful one. My middle daughter got married in Montana in a beautiful open air ceremony in the mountains, so we headed out to Red Lodge, MT in late July to be there for the happy event. Red Lodge is an old mining town about sixty miles from Yellowstone National Park, and we stayed in a mountain resort a few miles south of town…. and then went over the Beartooth Mountain pass into Wyoming to visit her new in-laws’ summer cabin. Of course, any visit to Wyoming also had to include a stop at the Cody rodeo!

Washoe coal mine remains

Red Lodge was a coal-mining town – it’s the county seat of Carbon County, no less – and nearby Washoe was the site of the deadliest coal mining disaster in Montana’s history. Those mines are all closed today, and most of the state’s coal comes from strip mining.

“Liver-Eating” Johnson’s Cabin

But an even bigger claim-to-fame is that Red Lodge was the home – for a while, anyway – of “Liver Eating” Johnson, whose log cabin is now located near the entrance to town. According to local folklore, Johnson pretty much took on the whole Crow Indian nation after they killed his Flathead Indian wife. A fascinating book about him (Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson, R. Thorp & R. Bunker, Univ. of Indiana Press, 1958) became the basis for the 1972 movie “Jeremiah Johnson,” starring Robert Redford. [Warning: the book, written in a different era, is certainly not for the politically correct!] We rented the very scenic & picturesque movie after returning home — & I’m sort of glad it got the glamorized Hollywood treatment it did. Redford is certainly a much better looking guy than the original Johnson — but more importantly, the movie left out all of the liver eating stuff, which played such a big part in the tale of revenge.