Notes from Cleantech Investors Summit (CVX)

If there was any lingering doubt that the cleantech investment space is hot these days, attending this week's Cleantech Investors Summit event in Palm Springs dispelled it. There were well over 200 attendees for this event, and I'm guessing that the upcoming Cleantech Venture Forum in San Francisco will have even more buzz, given its track record...

One of the more interesting speeches, among several interesting talks and presentations, was Don Paul's. As the CTO of Chevron (ticker: CVX), Don was able to speak to several interesting questions -- where is Chevron putting their R&D and investment efforts, how do they expect to bring new technologies to market, and have we reached "peak oil"? Some notable statements (as always, I'm not a reporter, so these are directionally correct but not 100% accurate):

The fact is, there's a finite supply of oil available. We can argue about when the production peak is... Some argue that we're at the peak now, on the other end of the spectrum you have Exxon Mobil saying it's probably 30 years away. I tend to come down in the middle somewhere, thinking that it's 20 years or so... One implication is that the future of energy is about diversification of energy sources, we're going to need every molecule and electron we can find.

How are these technologies brought to market? Start with someone's good idea, and someone invests some money in developing it. Then it comes time to build a pilot plant, spend $5-10M to build a plant that can produce one barrel per day. But then you want to build a world-scale plant? That will take billions of dollars. We're missing that intermediate step. That's one reason I'm a big proponent of a distributed system with smaller, precision-manufacturing plants closer to end markets. However, because of economies of scale, we still need to aggregate capital, and expertise in manufacturing to six-nines quality levels is also difficult to find.