(Semi-live blogging from the Going Green event at Cavallo Point in San Francisco.)
Lee McIntire, CEO, CH2M Hill
- "What really worries me is water, not energy."
- A steak has 6,000 to 8,000 liters of water embedded in its production. (Stop eating meat?)
- Upwards of 15,000 liters of water embedded in your daily diet. (Corn-derived sugars are extremely water intensive.)
- Soon there will be water and carbon metrics in the front of your newspaper. (Newspaper?)
- 50 percent of water is lost in piping. (A number of startups trying to solve this problem.)
- What if we believe there is a peak water situation? How will people react? (War.)
- Desalination takes too much energy whether distillation or membrane-based (Only reasonable in the Mideast.)
- "We have not seen a project in a long time that has not had a holistic solution to it." (Most of their projects have a cogeneration element.)
- "My own personal dream would be real-good energy storage."
Neal Gutterson, CEO, Mendel Biotechnology
- Mendel is working with Monsanto on seed and plant yields to create step changes in yield. The company is also partnered with BP in its biomass project.
- "You have to have innovative business models to match innovative products."
- "Our basic goal is to create new varieties for farmers that will provide biomass feedstocks." The innovative business case is to have one time sales from seeds and royalties and revenues from annual products.
Jared Potter, CEO, Potter Drilling
- Geothermal technology startup founded in 2004 now with 13 employees. It has raised $6 million with $4 million from Google. Two DOE grants are in place.
- The mission of the company is to improve drilling technology for EGS (Engineered Geothermal) – basically a large heat exchanger in the ground.
- The problem is drilling – we need to get to 10 kilometers to be able to do EGS anywhere in the world. Potter's goal is to get to 10-kilometers deep.
- Looking to raise another round in 2010.
Ira Ehrenpreis, General Partner, Technology Partners
- Cleantech is the top of the agenda in Washington and the fastest growing segment of the VC asset class.
- "But is sustainable investing sustainable?" The upcoming A123 roadshow can help.
- We've had incredibly insufficient federal leadership and chronic underinvestment in this sector (compare to defense or NIH).
- Traditional energy companies spend only half of 1 percent on R&D. It's this historic underinvestment that provides the greentech investment opportunity. What gives me hope about cleantech is the amount of money going into cleantech in the next few years. The real test is satisfying global energy needs.
- "Entrepreneurial optimism can overcome skepticism and naysayers."
- "What we do now is going to set the stage for life in the U.S. in the next century."
Clean Conventional Energy Panel
- Oil, Gas, Coal, Nuclear, Hydroelectric energy sources be clean and sustainable?
- Moderator: Ira Ehrenpreis, General Partner, Technology Partners
Tim Vail, CEO, Accelergy Corporation
- Accelergy's technology combines coal and biomass – novel new catalytic technologies
David Huard, Partner, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips LLC
- How much of the RPS is renewable and what is the carbon footprint of the entirity of the load?
- Carbon Capture and Storage can allow us to use domestic sources and ease our reliance on imported sources
- We have virtually unlimited coal and natural gas in the U.S.
- We have no national energy policy."
Chris Poirier, CEO, CoalTek
- CoalTek converts low-quality fuel to high quality fuels.
- We cannot move entirely away from coal in a couple of decades. The application of technology is the only way to meet aggressive RPS.
- Clean coal is not an oxymoron.
- "We need to put a value on CO2."
