The Power of Place

The power of place. As people, we are always intimately connected to our place. Even those of us that have been relative nomads in our lives – each place is important. We care about our places.

Promoter or pusher?

Also, as people we care about what we do. How we exercise our hands and minds from day to day, in our livelihoods, can come to almost define us. There are dangers in that perhaps, but what we do is an important aspect of who we are, and we become attached to it. Often it becomes, almost without us noticing, part of our self-identity. That’s OK, but we should be aware of it and how it influences us. The issue is that we can - if not careful - become a walking soundbite, fixed on a thing, or way of doing things. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to raise awareness of the things we do. We need to watch though – if our objective is truly what works best - that we don’t pass the line from promoter to pusher.

Resource tide

At the same time, I struggle to find a phrase that is more adventurous and imaginative than “energy transition” to describe what we are going through. It feels so tired and Monday afternoonish, and in making it only about energy, it puts a restraining label on something that is actually much bigger. It’s not some revelatory rapture with trumpets sounding – the world has been through other changes just as dramatic and more so – but it is nevertheless a significant time we are living through. A big time. If the century was a stratigraphic column, 2020 would without doubt, be an erosive unconformity. And a storm deposit. 

Just for a change of phrase though, for the rest of this article, let’s call it the “resource tide” instead. The sense of a change, and the sense of cycle, not formed of one incoming wave, but many. Widening the brief too from just energy, to resource - of which energy is just one. A cycle not in the typical commodity boom and bust sense, which happens quasi-regularly, but in the waxing and waning of a major technology – as happens on a more century scale. 

Typically, when we look around at this “resource tide” we see many different camps proposing many different methods and technologies. The emphasis is almost always on the method.  Wind, solar, ongoing hydrocarbons but with CCS, nuclear, geothermal, hydroelectric, and so on. There are many others, and various types of resource storage too, and complicated permutations and combinations of each. Such diversity is of course good news and to be welcomed.

Transmission and transportation - at a cost

Yet in our incredibly connected 21st century world, have we become too disentangled from place? From local? Too focused on methods? One of the things about hydrocarbons, love them or loathe them, is that they are not that hard to transport from one place to another. Transport hydrocarbon from Abqaiq to Nagoya and it still goes bang in the combustion chamber at destination as well as it would have done at source. There is a cost to transportation of hydrocarbons, but it is a relatively minor part of the cost of exploiting them. Find them and you can move them around. We have become very used to doing so.

A lot of the energy alternatives today – and the world is with each passing year insisting further on alternatives - involves extra difficulties in moving them around. Power takes grids which are expensive, entail mining and refining new raw material resources (or recycling old ones), and involve lost efficiency the longer the transmission. Likewise, transporting heat around through a medium of water involves energy loss and expense, including all those new pipes. Other energy storage media are not without their own issues – they can be moved, but typically not without energy intensive intermediate steps to achieve that versatility. All this is the natural order of the universe and its chemical and thermodynamic straightjackets.

What does it tell us? It tells that the more resource we can find locally, the more efficiently we can resource.

There are limits to this. When some place can do something ten times more efficiently than we can locally, then the lost efficiency in transit becomes secondary. However, it means that it is never a bad idea to look in the first instance at what is local. To look at place. To understand it, and to understand its power. To make the most of it. It’s an idea beautiful in its simplicity really. The power of place.

Reach for the reset button

This may seem like some hippie dream, and in a way that’s true. And hey, what's wrong with that? It can perhaps be taken to excess I suppose, but the projects I find truly inspiring happening around the world, are about place. They are less about someone turning up with a black box energy machine and saying “you need this”, though new black boxes are always exciting and correctly deserve consideration. A new machine is always wondrous. No, the projects that are most exciting are rather about stepping back and saying – what is this place? Really, deeply, what is this place?

Holistic is a loaded word but I use it stubbornly despite all past connotations. The ability to look at a place in detail and detach ourselves from all past pre-conceptions of what has worked elsewhere, and think about what it can offer, drawing on both the new and the old. All its different resources. How they can work together, or not. Feeling free to experiment a bit, but also being ruthless about ditching all those that are non-optimal. They may have been transformational in the county next door, but here, let’s push the reset button. 

That doesn’t mean becoming obsessive about being local. If something outside, that’s needed, can come to us much more efficiently than it can be provided locally – then being open to that. The world after all is in many, many ways an increasingly small place. Not before though, we have come to understand our place, to look around and be as clever as we can. Recognising that transmission and transportation almost always involve loss that is good to avoid or minimise - if we can.

Subsurface less a foregone conclusion, more a component to consider

As a geoscientist in 2020, I could list the resource potentials in the subsurface we can look for, and there are many. When we look at a place, we should consider the full list of subsurface potentials and not just one of them. Yet when we recall the power of place, the real challenge as a geoscientist I feel today is to remember the rest of it, after I’ve looked at the bit I understand. The parts of a place that are not deep in the subsurface. The soils, the rivers, the wind, the hills, the sunshine. 

It is a discipline, if we are geoscientists, to ask ourselves - is the subsurface really the best source of resource here? It may well be but to presume so is something we should be wary of. Digging big or deep holes is after all rarely cheap. That’s not an immediate disqualifier for the subsurface or indeed for any other difficult things – such as offshore, because often the resource accessed is big, long-lived, and worth the spend - even if there is some up-front hassle, uncertainty, and cost. Part of the trust and credibility we need in order to convey those initially tough options though, comes about through also recognising the times, honestly, when the surface competitors win.

Efficiency jig-saws

Afterwards, when all the components of a place are assembled, surface, subsurface, and skies above, then the task is to soberly ask what can be done best, there in that place. Not what can be done there, because that is not the same thing. Searching for the particular unique permutation in a place which makes the most of both its own resources, and the strengths of other places near and far, in a cacophony of efficiency. 

In these days of technological wizardry, it is scary how many things can be done. That, of course, doesn’t mean they should be. Let’s bring a lot more things to the table though than we are used to, and strive to understand the purveyors of other methods. Working together to make 1+1 =3, might not be an option very often but it is a shame if the assertion is never tested. Detaching ourselves from a fixation on method and looking at the options in a place is a pre-requisite. Those who live in a place always want us to think in this way – optimising it for them, their place, not for a method.

Optimising - perceiving a portfolio

Achieving this optimisation is a tough dream, always open to different interpretations through different eyes, of course. We won’t all, from our different backgrounds, go off singing and skipping hand-in-hand into the sunset in a field of daisies - but looking for optimisations in this way is a process that is happening increasingly around the world. Not only that, but it seems to be happening most easily in those places starting from the blankest resource canvases, with the least preconceptions, and the least to lose from change. Those wild “resource” beaches most unmodified by past construction, and most open to receiving the waves of a new tide, unencumbered. 

There is something about December in 2020 I suspect that has brought out the reflective in many of us. That is not necessarily bad thing though I guess it’s good to catch ourselves if we get too fluffy. The day jobs continue, and there are no easy answers. However, I can’t help thinking that the way of energy, the way of resource, in the coming years, lies in the power of place. Those who truly get to know places and understand (at least in part) a portfolio of resource technologies and the people who perform them, will hold the keys to the most interesting resource doors of the 21st century.