Category: ESG

In The Global Race for Fusion Energy – the U.S. Leaps Ahead

Posted on by phoffman@channelchek.com
U.S. Department of Energy (Flickr)

Why Fusion Ignition is Being Hailed as a Major Breakthrough in Fusion – a Nuclear Physicist Explains

American scientists have announced what they have called a major breakthrough in a long-elusive goal of creating energy from nuclear fusion.

The U.S. Department of Energy said on Dec. 13, 2022, that for the first time – and after several decades of trying – scientists have managed to get more energy out of the process than they had to put in.

But just how significant is the development? And how far off is the long-sought dream of fusion providing abundant, clean energy? Carolyn Kuranz, an associate professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan who has worked at the facility that just broke the fusion record, helps explain this new result.

What Happened in the Fusion Chamber?

Fusion is a nuclear reaction that combines two atoms to create one or more new atoms with slightly less total mass. The difference in mass is released as energy, as described by Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc2 , where energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Since the speed of light is enormous, converting just a tiny amount of mass into energy – like what happens in fusion – produces a similarly enormous amount of energy.

Fusion is the same process that powers the Sun. NASA/Wikimedia Commons

Researchers at the U.S. Government’s National Ignition Facility in California have demonstrated, for the first time, what is known as “fusion ignition.” Ignition is when a fusion reaction produces more energy than is being put into the reaction from an outside source and becomes self-sustaining.

The technique used at the National Ignition Facility involved shooting 192 lasers at a 0.04 inch (1 mm) pellet of fuel made of deuterium and tritium – two versions of the element hydrogen with extra neutrons – placed in a gold canister. When the lasers hit the canister, they produce X-rays that heat and compress the fuel pellet to about 20 times the density of lead and to more than 5 million degrees Fahrenheit (3 million Celsius) – about 100 times hotter than the surface of the Sun. If you can maintain these conditions for a long enough time, the fuel will fuse and release energy.

The fuel is held in a tiny canister designed to keep the reaction as free from contaminants as possible. U.S. Department of Energy/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

The fuel and canister gets vaporized within a few billionths of a second during the experiment. Researchers then hope their equipment survived the heat and accurately measured the energy released by the fusion reaction.

So What Did They Accomplish?

To assess the success of a fusion experiment, physicists look at the ratio between the energy released from the process of fusion and the amount of energy within the lasers. This ratio is called gain.

Anything above a gain of 1 means that the fusion process released more energy than the lasers delivered.

On Dec. 5, 2022, the National Ignition Facility shot a pellet of fuel with 2 million joules of laser energy – about the amount of power it takes to run a hair dryer for 15 minutes – all contained within a few billionths of a second. This triggered a fusion reaction that released 3 million joules. That is a gain of about 1.5, smashing the previous record of a gain of 0.7 achieved by the facility in August 2021.

How Big a Deal is this Result?

Fusion energy has been the “holy grail” of energy production for nearly half a century. While a gain of 1.5 is, I believe, a truly historic scientific breakthrough, there is still a long way to go before fusion is a viable energy source.

While the laser energy of 2 million joules was less than the fusion yield of 3 million joules, it took the facility nearly 300 million joules to produce the lasers used in this experiment. This result has shown that fusion ignition is possible, but it will take a lot of work to improve the efficiency to the point where fusion can provide a net positive energy return when taking into consideration the entire end-to-end system, not just a single interaction between the lasers and the fuel.

Machinery used to create the powerful lasers, like these pre-amplifiers, currently requires a lot more energy than the lasers themselves produce. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, CC BY-SA

What Needs to Be Improved?

There are a number of pieces of the fusion puzzle that scientists have been steadily improving for decades to produce this result, and further work can make this process more efficient.

First, lasers were only invented in 1960. When the U.S. government completed construction of the National Ignition Facility in 2009, it was the most powerful laser facility in the world, able to deliver 1 million joules of energy to a target. The 2 million joules it produces today is 50 times more energetic than the next most powerful laser on Earth. More powerful lasers and less energy-intensive ways to produce those powerful lasers could greatly improve the overall efficiency of the system.

Fusion conditions are very challenging to sustain, and any small imperfection in the capsule or fuel can increase the energy requirement and decrease efficiency. Scientists have made a lot of progress to more efficiently transfer energy from the laser to the canister and the X-ray radiation from the canister to the fuel capsule, but currently only about 10% to 30% of the total laser energy is transferred to the canister and to the fuel.

Finally, while one part of the fuel, deuterium, is naturally abundant in sea water, tritium is much rarer. Fusion itself actually produces tritium, so researchers are hoping to develop ways of harvesting this tritium directly. In the meantime, there are other methods available to produce the needed fuel.

These and other scientific, technological and engineering hurdles will need to be overcome before fusion will produce electricity for your home. Work will also need to be done to bring the cost of a fusion power plant well down from the US$3.5 billion of the National Ignition Facility. These steps will require significant investment from both the federal government and private industry.

It’s worth noting that there is a global race around fusion, with many other labs around the world pursuing different techniques. But with the new result from the National Ignition Facility, the world has, for the first time, seen evidence that the dream of fusion is achievable.

This article was republished with permission from The Conversation, a news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It represents the research-based findings and thoughts of, Carolyn Kuranz, Associate Professor of Nuclear Engineering, University of Michigan. Carolyn Kuranz receives funding from the National Nuclear Security Administration and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She serves on a review board for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She is a member of the Fusion Energy Science Advisory Committee.

The Winners of California’s Floating Wind Turbine Projects

Posted on by phoffman@channelchek.com
Image Credit: Scottish Government (Flickr)

How Do Floating Wind Turbines Work? Five Companies Just Won the First US Leases for Building them off California’s Coast

Northern California has some of the strongest offshore winds in the U.S., with immense potential to produce clean energy. But it also has a problem. Its continental shelf drops off quickly, making building traditional wind turbines directly on the seafloor costly if not impossible.

Once water gets more than about 200 feet deep – roughly the height of an 18-story building – these “monopile” structures are pretty much out of the question.

A solution has emerged that’s being tested in several locations around the world: wind turbines that float.

In California, where drought has put pressure on the hydropower supply, the state is moving forward on a plan to develop the nation’s first floating offshore wind farms. On Dec. 7, 2022, the federal government auctioned off five lease areas about 20 miles off the California coast to companies with plans to develop floating wind farms. The bids were lower than recent leases off the Atlantic coast, where wind farms can be anchored to the seafloor, but still significant, together exceeding US$757 million.

So, how do floating wind farms work?

Three Main Ways to Float a Turbine

A floating wind turbine works just like other wind turbines – wind pushes on the blades, causing the rotor to turn, which drives a generator that creates electricity. But instead of having its tower embedded directly into the ground or the seafloor, a floating wind turbine sits on a platform with mooring lines, such as chains or ropes, that connect to anchors in the seabed below.

These mooring lines hold the turbine in place against the wind and keep it connected to the cable that sends its electricity back to shore.

Most of the stability is provided by the floating platform itself. The trick is to design the platform so the turbine doesn’t tip too far in strong winds or storms.

Three of the common types of floating wind turbine platform. Josh Bauer/NREL

There are three main types of platforms:

A spar buoy platform is a long hollow cylinder that extends downward from the turbine tower. It floats vertically in deep water, weighted with ballast in the bottom of the cylinder to lower its center of gravity. It’s then anchored in place, but with slack lines that allow it to move with the water to avoid damage. Spar buoys have been used by the oil and gas industry for years for offshore operations.

Semisubmersible platforms have large floating hulls that spread out from the tower, also anchored to prevent drifting. Designers have been experimenting with multiple turbines on some of these hulls.

Tension leg platforms have smaller platforms with taut lines running straight to the floor below. These are lighter but more vulnerable to earthquakes or tsunamis because they rely more on the mooring lines and anchors for stability.

Each platform must support the weight of the turbine and remain stable while the turbine operates. It can do this in part because the hollow platform, often made of large steel or concrete structures, provides buoyancy to support the turbine. Since some can be fully assembled in port and towed out for installation, they might be far cheaper than fixed-bottom structures, which require specialty vessels for installation on site.

The University of Maine has been experimenting with a small floating wind turbine, about one-eighth scale, on a semisubmersible platform with RWE, one of the winning bidders.

Floating platforms can support wind turbines that can produce 10 megawatts or more of power – that’s similar in size to other offshore wind turbines and several times larger than the capacity of a typical onshore wind turbine you might see in a field.

Why Do We Need Floating Turbines?

Some of the strongest wind resources are away from shore in locations with hundreds of feet of water below, such as off the U.S. West Coast, the Great Lakes, the Mediterranean Sea and the coast of Japan.

Some of the strongest offshore wind power potential in the U.S. is in areas where the water is too deep for fixed turbines, including off the West Coast. NREL

The U.S. lease areas auctioned off in early December cover about 583 square miles in two regions – one off central California’s Morro Bay and the other near the Oregon state line. The water off California gets deep quickly, so any wind farm that is even a few miles from shore will require floating turbines.

Once built, wind farms in those five areas could provide about 4.6 gigawatts of clean electricity, enough to power 1.5 million homes, according to government estimates. The winning companies suggested they could produce even more power.

But getting actual wind turbines on the water will take time. The winners of the lease auction will undergo a Justice Department anti-trust review and then a long planning, permitting and environmental review process that typically takes several years.

The first five federal lease areas for Pacific coast offshore wind energy development. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management

Globally, several full-scale demonstration projects with floating wind turbines are already operating in Europe and Asia. The Hywind Scotland project became the first commercial-scale offshore floating wind farm in 2017, with five 6-megawatt turbines supported by spar buoys designed by the Norwegian energy company Equinor.

Equinor Wind US had one of the winning bids off Central California. Another winning bidder was RWE Offshore Wind Holdings. RWE operates wind farms in Europe and has three floating wind turbine demonstration projects. The other companies involved – Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, Invenergy and Ocean Winds – have Atlantic Coast leases or existing offshore wind farms.

While floating offshore wind farms are becoming a commercial technology, there are still technical challenges that need to be solved. The platform motion may cause higher forces on the blades and tower, and more complicated and unsteady aerodynamics. Also, as water depths get very deep, the cost of the mooring lines, anchors and electrical cabling may become very high, so cheaper but still reliable technologies will be needed.

But we can expect to see more offshore turbines supported by floating structures in the near future.

This article was republished with permission from The Conversation, a news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It represents the research-based findings and thoughts of, Matthew Lackner, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, UMass Amherst.

Vanguard Drops Net Zero Pledge – Will Others Follow?

Posted on by phoffman@channelchek.com
Image Credit: Jim Surkamp (Flickr)

Will Asset Managers Start Stepping Back from ESG Pledges?

The Net Zero Asset Managers (NAZM) initiative is an international group of 291 asset managers with 66 trillion in combined AUM. They all signed that they are committed to supporting the goal of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 or sooner. This week the number of asset managers was reduced by one as Vanguard, with $8.1 trillion AUM left the agreement. Vanguard said it made the decision in an effort to better speak for itself on its views and to be certain to balance client’s needs and returns along with climate impact in its funds’ investments.

“Industry initiatives like NZAM can advance constructive dialogue, but they can also create confusion about the views of individual firms. We want to provide greater clarity that Vanguard speaks freely on important matters such as climate risk. After a considerable period of review, we have decided to withdraw from the NZAM in order to provide clarity on what our investors want about the role of index funds and how we think about material risks, including climate-related risk,” said Alyssa Thornton, a spokesperson for Vanguard.

Firms that have signed the NAZM agreement are coming under a lot of pressure from states, pension funds, and others to defend how this is measurably best for the assets left in the care of the manager.

Vanguard, the world’s top mutual fund manager, official statement read, “We have decided to withdraw from NZAM so that we can provide the clarity our investors desire about the role of index funds and about how we think about material risks, including climate-related risks—and to make clear that Vanguard speaks independently on matters of importance to our investors.” Again, the themes are to not be beholden to outside control over its decisions and the company developing its own measurements of material risks from world energy-related moves.

Vanguard, said the change “will not affect our commitment to helping our investors navigate the risks that climate change can pose to their long-term returns.”

Is This Going to Be a Trend?

There is a movement growing with large clients asking investment firms to explain how their energy-investment-related decision is in line with their fiduciary role. Roughly a week ago, Consumers’ Research and 13 state attorneys general asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to review Vanguard’s request to own energy company stocks. “Americans are paying sky-high electricity rates and companies like Vanguard are making the problem worse,” Will Hild, executive director of Consumers’ Research, wrote in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal.

Another issue Hild has with Vanguard is its meddling with strategic decisions and corporate governance at energy firms. Hild wrote, “With more than $7 trillion in assets under management, the Pennsylvania-based investment firm has publicly committed to pressuring utilities to lower their emissions.” Hild then accused, “Vanguard appears to be not only putting America’s critical infrastructure at risk but violating its agreement only to control utility company shares passively. To protect U.S. consumers and safeguard national security, FERC should investigate the company’s conduct.”

Vanguard isn’t the only firm of the 291 that are being questioned by their largest customers.

Today North Carolina State Treasurer Dale Folwell sent a letter to BlackRock’s board of directors calling for Fink to step aside because the CEO’s “pursuit of a political agenda has gotten in the way of BlackRock’s same fiduciary duty” to its investors. “A focus on ESG is not a focus on returns and could potentially force us to violate our fiduciary duty,” Folwell wrote. North Carolina has approximately $14 billion with Blackrock, and $111 billion under management.

But the fiduciary knife can be cut both ways. Those that are more concerned with any impact that continued fossil-fuel use would have on climate and economies stand behind the argument that it is not in anyone’s best interest not to follow a net zero 2050 goal. “It is unfortunate that political pressure is impacting this crucial economic imperative and attempting to block companies from effectively managing risks — a crucial part of their fiduciary duty,” said Kirsten Snow Spalding, a vice president at sustainability nonprofit Ceres and a NZAM founding partner.

Meanwhile in order to be able to best decipher how to view concepts like net zero investing, the Texas Senate Committee on State Affairs will hold a hearing on December 15 to discuss the impacts of environmental social governance (ESG) policies on state pensions. The panel has asked Vanguard, BlackRock, StateStreet and ISS to appear and answer questions about their ESG practices. Texas previously asked the four firms to turn over documents in August. The Lone Star state had subpoenaed BlackRock to provide additional documents in person after the firm failed to comply with certain aspects of the initial request.

Take Away

All trends, whether investment related or not go through a vetting period, followed by a continued push and pull to seek balance. Firms that have signed on to NAZM can do their own analysis and develop their own plans that best serve their customers. The NZAM may only get in the way. Yet, they don’t have to back-off of caring about and keeping in mind environmental principles, they can just better tailor them to those they are contracted to invest for. An outside global organization is less likely to understand how to be a fiduciary for a Vanguard fund that may be used in the Louisiana state pension system. And with more investment firms acting independently, more and better opportunities will grow from the competition.

ESG, which is in a related family, will also develop and evolve over time. Down the road, investors, analysts, and organizations providing ESG scoring can get revised measures on impact and adjust scoring based on effectiveness.

Paul Hoffman

Managing Editor, Channelchek

Sources

NetZeroAssetMgars (NZAM)

VanguardLeavesNZAM

VanguardPullsOut

VanguardAntiWoke

Crude Prices vs. Energy Company Prices –  Will the Gap Narrow?

Posted on by phoffman@channelchek.com
Image Credit: Mussi Katz (Flickr)

The Argument for Higher Oil Market Prices is Fairly Straightforward

The price of oil is near its 2022 low. This lower per barrel cost is normal when the commodities market perceives the economy as slowing or that it will slow. What is surprising is that the price is near the low for the year when the Chinese are easing Covid restrictions and will soon be requiring more fuel; at the same time, a Russian oil cap, which is sure to bring less supply to the market, was just instituted this week. In the meantime, energy producers, up 60.8% on the year, are not sinking at the pace of oil prices.

Source: Koyfin

Energy shares have been the big winners for 2022. And it is rare that they are flying solo, without the help of price increases of their underlying product. According to Bespoke Investment Group, last month marked the first time since 2006 that the S&P 500 energy sector has traded within 3% of a 12-month high while the price of West Texas Intermediate retreated more than 25% from its one-year peak.. 

The divergence has caught the attention of investors. Since drillers and miners tend to rise and fall with the prices of the commodities they produce, many expect the gap to narrow to its more historical norm. Most are looking for oil to rise rather than drillers to fall.

Pressures that could cause oil to rise include the EU winter season, the U.S. Strategic Reserves bumping up against depletion, OPEC+ keeping production quotas unchanged, and Western governments’ $60-a-barrel price cap on Russian crude. These, taken together, are expected to put upward pressure on per-barrel prices. The commodities market is not moving in accordance with these factors. Futures contracts for U.S. crude closed Monday 3.8% lower at $76.93 a barrel, its fourth-lowest settle of the year.

Working against the argument for higher crude prices is the expected slowing of world economies. The possibility of a recession in many global economies while central banks raise interest rates, is unknown. Any impact remains to be seen.

Paul Hoffman

Managing Editor, Channelchek

FTX, What Happened and Should Non-Crypto Investors Care

Posted on by phoffman@channelchek.com
Image Credit: Phillip Pessar (Flickr)

Dramatic Collapse of the Cryptocurrency Exchange FTX Contains Lessons for Investors but Won’t Affect Most People

In the fast-paced world of cryptocurrency, vast sums of money can be made or lost in the blink of an eye. In early November 2022, the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, was valued at more than US$30 billion. By Nov. 14, FTX was in bankruptcy proceedings along with more than 100 companies connected to it. D. Brian Blank and Brandy Hadley are professors who study finance, investing and fintech. They explain how and why this incredible collapse happened, what effect it might have on the traditional financial sector and whether you need to care if you don’t own any cryptocurrency.

What Happened?

In 2019, Sam Bankman-Fried founded FTX, a company that ran one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges.

FTX is where many crypto investors trade and hold their cryptocurrency, similar to the New York Stock Exchange for stocks. Bankman-Fried is also the founder of Alameda Research, a hedge fund that trades and invests in cryptocurrencies and crypto companies.

Sam Bankman-Fried founded both FTX and the investment firm Alameda Research. News sources have reported some less-than-responsible financial dealings between the two companies. Image via The Conversation.

Within the traditional financial sector, these two companies would be separate firms entirely or at least have divisions and firewalls in place between them. But in early November 2022, news outlets reported that a significant proportion of Alameda’s assets were a type of cryptocurrency released by FTX itself.

A few days later, news broke that FTX had allegedly been loaning customer assets to Alameda for risky trades without the consent of the customers and also issuing its own FTX cryptocurrency for Alameda to use as collateral. As a result, criminal and regulatory investigators began scrutinizing FTX for potentially violating securities law.

These two pieces of news basically led to a bank run on FTX.

Large crypto investors, like FTX’s competitor Binance, as well as individuals, began to sell off cryptocurrency held on FTX’s exchange. FTX quickly lost its ability to meet customer withdrawals and halted trading. On Nov. 14, FTX was also hit by an apparent insider hack and lost $600 million worth of cryptocurrency.

That same day, FTX, Alameda Research and 130 other affiliated companies founded by Bankman-Fried filed for bankruptcy. This action may leave more than a million suppliers, employees and investors who bought cryptocurrencies through the exchange or invested in these companies with no way to get their money back.

Among the groups and individuals who held currency on the FTX platform were many of the normal players in the crypto world, but a number of more traditional investment firms also held assets within FTX. Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm, as well as the Ontario Teacher’s Pension, are estimated to have held millions of dollars of their investment portfolios in ownership stake of FTX. They have both already written off these investments with FTX as lost.

Image: OTPP

Did a Lack of Oversight Play a Role?

In traditional markets, corporations generally limit the risk they expose themselves to by maintaining liquidity and solvency. Liquidity is the ability of a firm to sell assets quickly without those assets losing much value. Solvency is the idea that a company’s assets are worth more than what that company owes to debtors and customers.

But the crypto world has generally operated with much less caution than the traditional financial sector, and FTX is no exception. About two-thirds of the money that FTX owed to the people who held cryptocurrency on its exchange – roughly $11.3 billion of $16 billion owed – was backed by illiquid coins created by FTX. FTX was taking its customers’ money, giving it to Alameda to make risky investments and then creating its own currency, known as FTT, as a replacement – cryptocurrency that it was unable to sell at a high enough price when it needed to.

In addition, nearly 40% of Alameda’s assets were in FTX’s own cryptocurrency – and remember, both companies were founded by the same person.

This all came to a head when investors decided to sell their coins on the exchange. FTX did not have enough liquid assets to meet those demands. This, in turn, drove the value of FTT from over $26 a coin at the beginning of November to under $2 by Nov. 13. By this point, FTX owed more money to its customers than it was worth.

In regulated exchanges, investing with customer funds is illegal. Additionally, auditors validate financial statements, and firms must publish the amount of money they hold in reserve that is available to fund customer withdrawals. And even if things go wrong, the Securities Investor Protection Corporation – or SIPC – protects depositors against the loss of investments from an exchange failure or financially troubled brokerage firm. None of these guardrails are in place within the crypto world.

Why is this a Big Deal in Crypto?

As a result of this meltdown, the company Binance is now considering creating an industry recovery fund – akin to a private version of SIPC insurance – to avoid future failures of crypto exchanges.

But while the collapse of FTX and Alameda – valued at more than $30 billion and now essentially worth nothing – is dramatic, the bigger implication is simply the potential lost trust in crypto. Bank runs are rare in traditional financial institutions, but they are increasingly common in the crypto space. Given that Bankman-Fried and FTX were seen as some of the biggest, most trusted figures in crypto, these events may lead more investors to think twice about putting money in crypto.

If I Don’t Own Crypto, Should I Care?

Though investment in cryptocurrencies has grown rapidly, the entire crypto market – valued at over $3 trillion at its peak – is much smaller than the $120 trillion traditional stock market.

While investors and regulators are still evaluating the consequences of this fall, the impact on any person who doesn’t personally own crypto will be minuscule. It is true that many larger investment funds, like BlackRock and the Ontario Teachers Pension, held investments in FTX, but the estimated $95 million the Ontario Teachers Pension lost through the collapse of FTX is just 0.05% of the entire fund’s investments.

The takeaway for most individuals is not to invest in unregulated markets without understanding the risks. In high-risk environments like crypto, it’s possible to lose everything – a lesson investors in FTX are learning the hard way.

This article was republished with permission from The Conversation, a news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It represents the research-based findings and thoughts of D. Brian Blank, Assistant Professor of Finance, Mississippi State University and Brandy Hadley, Associate Professor of Finance and the David A. Thompson Professor in Applied Investments, Appalachian State University

Oil Market Drivers Attract Historic Bullish Positions

Posted on by phoffman@channelchek.com
Image Credit: Kurayba (Flickr)

Factors Still Point to Higher Oil Prices and Sizeable Bets on Crude

There are many factors impacting why traditional energy prices and producers may have a hurricane-force tailwind heading into the holidays and next year.

A boost in demand for oil is expected as China just announced that it is lowering its quarantine requirements for visitors from outside the country. But Chinese Covid policies aren’t the only impetus pushing up oil demand – around the globe, there are supply challenges that are playing out. Oil hasn’t risen above $100 a barrel since early Summer, some traders are speculating it will rise above $200 in the coming months. Here’s why.

China

In addition to the announcement that the CPR was cutting the required quarantine period for the country (to five days from seven, with three days of home isolation), the required PCR test hurdle is being lowered as well. And airlines no longer run the risk of being suspended if the travelers they bring in that test positive is five or more.

Europe

The European Union has agreed to stop all oil imports from Russia on Dec. 5. The plan is to cap the prices at which EU nations would buy oil from Russia, that price is expected to be near $60 per barrel. Russia has reacted by increasing exports to Asia, but the price cap is expected to reduce its exports and lower total supply by up to one million barrels per day.

United States

Back in May, the U.S. took the drastic step of increasing available supply by selling oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve at a rate of nearly one million barrels per day starting in May. The increased supply has kept oil prices down. But the sales are unsustainable and expected to be reduced. Congress has allowed another sale of 26 million barrels that are expected to carry through to October 2023. This is a much slower pace of oil releases from the reserves. Plus, the reserves will need to be replenished.

After the Congressionally approved release, the reserve will be down to 348 million barrels, this is half the quantity compared to January of this year —the lowest since 1983. Congress has said that the reserve must stay above 252.4 million barrels, and the incoming Congress is expected to be more conservative when it comes to using these strategic assets to control prices.

Production growth overall in the U.S. has stalled after having increased through most of the year. Government data show that U.S. production dropped to 11.9 million barrels per day last week, this is tied for the lowest level in several months. Supplies of products such as diesel and heating oil in the U.S. are at multiyear lows. So there is not abundant supply should a weather-related or some other fuel-demanding crisis surface.

Source: Koyfin

Prices

Oil is now trading between $92 and $93 a barrel. It had reached a high above $130 in March, shortly after the war began, and hasn’t seen the $100 a barrel level since late June.

Trading this week showed significant flows into an options contract that speculates that $200 per barrel may be in store. The most actively traded Brent crude options contract on Thursday was an option to buy Brent at $200 in March 2023. This was the most active oil contract of the day.

How significant is this bullish activity surrounding oil prices? The ratio of bullish to bearish bets in the options market is wider than at any time in recorded history, according to Bloomberg. Oil options traders are positioned more aggressively than ever before.

Take Away

Oil demand could rise soon in China as travel restrictions are lessened. Elsewhere in the world, oil demand is expected to increase as supplies remain the same or decrease. Demand remained elevated globally despite slower economies.

With supply likely to drop and demand ramping up, $200 by the third week in March is one price expectation for a record number of trades transacted at recently. More than doubling in a few months sounds unthinkable, but the massive trades were transacted by experienced institutional traders.

Paul Hoffman

Managing Editor, Channelchek

How Investors Really Feel About ESG Initiatives

Posted on by phoffman@channelchek.com
Image Credit: Fauxels (Pexels)

How Investors Really Feel About ESG Initiatives

When a person invests in a mutual fund, ETF, or other managed asset pool that owns stocks, they are usually relinquishing a right to the fund manager. This is the right to vote as a shareholder on one’s own behalf. Shares held in the fund or trust are instead voted by the fund manager.  Are the managers voting in a way the participants in the pooled assets would prefer? Does the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) vote on by fund managers meet their average client’s own leaning for their investment fund shares?

There is newly reported results of a research survey by Stanford University. The survey’s goal was assessing individual investors’ views about ESG investing. The authors surveyed 2,470 investors in the summer of 2022, with accounts ranging from $10,000 to more than $500,000. The survey found that investors’ tolerance or support for ESG measures, including a willingness to have poorer returns, varied by their age, current wealth, as well as the specific ESG issue.

Looking at Return vs. Alternative Objectives

Investors closest to retirement age, 58 years old and over, were the least likely to support ESG objectives. Those farthest from retirement age, 18 to 41 were the most likely. The data showed more than one-third of the younger investors said they would be willing to lose 11% to 15% of their retirement savings to encourage companies to have gender and racial diversity mirroring the general population. Of the more experienced older grouping, only 3% said they would risk or be willing to lose that amount for an ESG priority. A full 66% of the older investors said they were unwilling to lose any money to support ESG principles.

“Older investors want fund managers to generate financial returns to support their spending needs during retirement and don’t have a lot of time to recoup big losses,” says David Larcker, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and one of the researchers.

The survey further confirmed that those where a loss was less troubling were more inclined to support and allow a large firm like Blackrock to decide what to support. The results showed wealthier young investors tended to be the largest group of ESG positive investors. For example, young investors with at least $250,000 under management said on average that they would be willing to lose about 14% of their retirement savings to have companies reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. Alternatively, young investors with savings of less than $50,000 they would be willing to lose 6% on average to accomplish that goal.

Not all ESG initiatives rank the same for investors. Those surveyed held a higher level of support for those involving environmental issues. Social issues came next, and they were concerned  the least about governance.

Vote Preferences

The investors surveyed also said they wanted the investment managers’ vote to reflect their own individual personal views related to ESG initiatives. In a related inquiry, 79% of the survey’s respondents with money at BlackRock managed assets said they approved of the firm’s use of its voting power to promote diversity on corporate boards.

Fully reflecting their clients’ views on ESG initiatives would be a high hurdle for investment managers, given the range of investors’ positions on so many issues. One potentiality is Investment managers could split their votes to weight individual investors’ views, Prof. Larcker says. For instance, that could mean voting 70% of their shares in a company in favor of a specific ESG proposal and 30% of their shares against the proposal.

Return Expectations

The older, more experienced respondents also had a significantly different view of expectations of return on investments.

Investment managers may want to provide data to try to improve fund participants’ understanding of the extent to which they have increased their risk to support the plans of an ESG-managed fund. Prof. Larcker suggests this could entail making it clear how returns of voting choices differed financially and from an ESG perspective, he says: “Did a vote improve or hurt the company’s financial performance in the short or long term? Was there a tangible effect on the environment or on employee diversity?”

“Fund managers need to acknowledge that there is likely to be some trade-off between ESG and financial returns,” he says, “and that trade-off may matter to individual investors.”

Take Away

Investing for the social good is not a new concept. The latest incarnation, ESG, has gained much more traction than the socially responsible investing initiatives of the past. The performance data, both financial and goal satisfaction, are difficult to measure. The survey done this past summer demonstrates the differences between demographic groups, a difference of expectations, and the weight of importance of, say, environmental issues over others.

As ESG-based investments evolve, Channelchek will keep you up to date on how others are looking at this category, what is new within the category, and other news that can keep you aware of the changing face of ESG. Sign up for Channelchek emails and information here.

Paul Hoffman

Managing Editor, Channelchek

Sources

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/publications/2022-survey-investors-retirement-savings-esg

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publication/pdfs/survey-investors-retirement-savings-esg.pdf

https://www.wsj.com/articles/esg-initiatives-investors-survey-11666975292?mod=hp_user_preferences_pos4#cxrecs_s

Will Equity Investors Return Back to the Future?

Posted on by phoffman@channelchek.com
Image: Statue of Liberty Torch, Circa 1882 – Ron Cogswell (Flickr)

Current Technology May Be Leading the Next Shift in Stock Market Investing

Investor exposure to the stock market has grown and evolved through different iterations over the years. There is no reason to believe that it isn’t evolving still. The main drivers of change have been the cost of ownership, technology, and convenience, which are related to the other two drivers. There seems to be a new transformation that has been happening over the past few years. And with each change, there will be those that benefit and those that fall short. So it’s important for an investor to be aware of changes that may be taking place around them.

Recent History

Your grandfather probably didn’t own stocks. If he did, he bought shares in companies his broker researched, and he then speculated they would out-earn alternative uses of his capital – this was expensive. Mutual funds later grew in popularity as computer power expanded, and an increased number of investors flocked to these managed funds – the price of entry was less than buying individual stocks. Charles Schwab and other discount brokers sprang up – they offered lower commissions than traditional brokers. Mutual funds were able to further reduce fees charged by offering easier to manage indexed funds or funds linked to a market index like the Dow 30 or S&P 500. Indexed exchange-traded funds (ETF) took the indexed fund idea one step further – they have a much lower cost of entry than either mutual funds or even discount brokerage accounts. An added benefit to indexed ETFs is they can be traded at intraday prices and provide tax benefits.

Just as Schwab ushered in an era of low-commission trades, Robinhood busted the doors open to no-commission trades, and most large online brokers followed. This change allows for almost imperceptible costs in most stock market transactions. It also changed the concept of a round-lot, or transacting in increments of 100 shares. In fact, the most popular brokers all offer fractional share ownership now.

Are Index ETFs Becoming Dinosaurs?

Funds made sense for those seeking diversification of holdings, it used to take a large sum of money to do that; investors with a $10,000 account or more can easily achieve acceptable diversification with odd-lots and fractional shares ability.

Today investors can create their own index-like “fund,” or as they called it in your grandparent’s day, “portfolio management.”

One big advantage to creating your own portfolio, even if you rely heavily on stocks from a specific index to choose from, is that you can adapt it more toward your sector or company expectations. Indexed funds are stuck with their index holdings, they have no ability to change. One may increase or decrease risk by leaving out stocks or even whole industry groups. Also, it can be managed with greater tax efficiency than an index fund tailored to your situation.

There is also the DIY thrill that one gets from creating anything themselves rather than to just buying one off the shelf. There have been a number of renowned investors like Peter Lynch and Michael Burry warning that indexed funds no longer provide expected diversification and that many of the stocks are valued higher because so many dollars are on “auto-invest” into indexes that the bad has been pushed up with the good.  

An example of what added demand does to the valuation of a company when being added to an index can be seen over the last month when it became clear that Twitter would be leaving an empty slot that would be filled by Arch Capital (ACGL). The added demand for ACGL pushed up the value by an estimated 25%. Was it undervalued before (when stand-alone), or is it over-valued now? Some stocks that are getting more attention because they are in an index could, as Michael Burry warned, be in bubble territory.

Source: Koyfin

Setting Up a Portfolio

The more you do to ensure your portfolio weightings mimic an index, the closer your performance is likely to be to that index. You may want to limit your holdings to names that are actually in the index and shift the weightings for return enhancement. Another concern often cited with indexes is the way that they weight holdings; you may choose to weight your portfolio using the market capitalization of each company to own the same percentage of the company’s value or use another method like pure cost measures or cost per P/E.

Picking Stocks

While studies suggest that market diversification can be achieved by owning as few as five stocks and doesn’t improve much after 30 holdings, the more you own, providing they aren’t overweighted in a sector, it stands to reason the more diversification protection you can achieve.

As a DIY, self-directed investor, it makes sense not to chase after whatever YouTube influencer, loud-mouthed-TV analyst, or Stocktwit tells you. This is your baby, and the results, good or bad, are yours. Do what you can to make informed decisions, even if some turn out unexpected. The benefit of this is you can lean away from stocks that are still in indexes that don’t have good future prospects and lean into more companies that do.

I’m hearing from more of my self-directed investor friends and investment advisors that more people are looking to own companies that have non-financial objectives they, as an investor, support. And for some of them, there is no standard ESG framework that they support. They have decided, because they do care, to do more portfolio management with individual stocks than before. This is so they can individually look under the hood at employee policies, or environmental stature, etc. While ESG funds exist, the investor or client of the investment advisor would prefer not to own anything they oppose if they can avoid it. What better way than being able to say no to $XYZ company because they do this, this, and this that is against my own fabric?

Channelchek is a great resource for any percentage of your personally managed fund that includes stocks in the small-cap or microcap categories. These stocks could add a bit more potential for return but could also change your risk characteristics. Sign-up to get research from FINRA-licensed analysts.

Take Away

Stock investing has evolved and become more inclusive. But the future may be more like the past, with individuals creating portfolios of stocks for themselves. You don’t have to be rich anymore to buy stocks, and you don’t have to own a fund to get affordable diversification on nearly any size account. There’s a trend toward building one’s own personalized, diversified, low-transaction portfolio. Channelchek is helping investors find possible fits with its free research platform.

Paul Hoffman

Managing Editor, Channelchek

Less Expensive Batteries Don’t Always Come from Cheaper Materials

Posted on by phoffman@channelchek.com
Image Credit: 24M Technology (MIT News)

Zach Winn | MIT News Office

When it comes to battery innovations, much attention gets paid to potential new chemistries and materials. Often overlooked is the importance of production processes for bringing down costs.

Now the MIT spinout 24M Technologies has simplified lithium-ion battery production with a new design that requires fewer materials and fewer steps to manufacture each cell. The company says the design, which it calls “SemiSolid” for its use of gooey electrodes, reduces production costs by up to 40 percent. The approach also improves the batteries’ energy density, safety, and recyclability.

Judging by industry interest, 24M is onto something. Since coming out of stealth mode in 2015, 24M has licensed its technology to multinational companies including Volkswagen, Fujifilm, Lucas TVS, Axxiva, and Freyr. Those last three companies are planning to build gigafactories (factories with gigawatt-scale annual production capacity) based on 24M’s technology in India, China, Norway, and the United States.

“The SemiSolid platform has been proven at the scale of hundreds of megawatts being produced for residential energy-storage systems. Now we want to prove it at the gigawatt scale,” says 24M CEO Naoki Ota, whose team includes 24M co-founder, chief scientist, and MIT Professor Yet-Ming Chiang.

Establishing large-scale production lines is only the first phase of 24M’s plan. Another key draw of its battery design is that it can work with different combinations of lithium-ion chemistries. That means 24M’s partners can incorporate better-performing materials down the line without substantially changing manufacturing processes.

The kind of quick, large-scale production of next-generation batteries that 24M hopes to enable could have a dramatic impact on battery adoption across society — from the cost and performance of electric cars to the ability of renewable energy to replace fossil fuels.

“This is a platform technology,” Ota says. “We’re not just a low-cost and high-reliability operator. That’s what we are today, but we can also be competitive with next-generation chemistry. We can use any chemistry in the market without customers changing their supply chains. Other startups are trying to address that issue tomorrow, not today. Our tech can address the issue today and tomorrow.”

A Simplified Design

Chiang, who is MIT’s Kyocera Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, got his first glimpse into large-scale battery production after co-founding another battery company, A123 Systems, in 2001. As that company was preparing to go public in the late 2000s, Chiang began wondering if he could design a battery that would be easier to manufacture.

“I got this window into what battery manufacturing looked like, and what struck me was that even though we pulled it off, it was an incredibly complicated manufacturing process,” Chiang says. “It derived from magnetic tape manufacturing that was adapted to batteries in the late 1980s.”

In his lab at MIT, where he’s been a professor since 1985, Chiang started from scratch with a new kind of device he called a “semi-solid flow battery” that pumps liquids carrying particle-based electrodes to and from tanks to store a charge.

In 2010, Chiang partnered with W. Craig Carter, who is MIT’s POSCO Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and the two professors supervised a student, Mihai Duduta ’11, who explored flow batteries for his undergraduate thesis. Within a month, Duduta had developed a prototype in Chiang’s lab, and 24M was born. (Duduta was the company’s first hire.)

But even as 24M worked with MIT’s Technology Licensing Office (TLO) to commercialize research done in Chiang’s lab, people in the company including Duduta began rethinking the flow battery concept. An internal cost analysis by Carter, who consulted for 24M for several years, ultimately lead the researchers to change directions.

That left the company with loads of the gooey slurry that made up the electrodes in their flow batteries. A few weeks after Carter’s cost analysis, Duduta, then a senior research scientist at 24M, decided to start using the slurry to assemble batteries by hand, mixing the gooey electrodes directly into the electrolyte. The idea caught on.

The main components of batteries are the positive and negatively charged electrodes and the electrolyte material that allows ions to flow between them. Traditional lithium-ion batteries use solid electrodes separated from the electrolyte by layers of inert plastics and metals, which hold the electrodes in place.

Stripping away the inert materials of traditional batteries and embracing the gooey electrode mix gives 24M’s design a number of advantages.

For one, it eliminates the energy-intensive process of drying and solidifying the electrodes in traditional lithium-ion production. The company says it also reduces the need for more than 80 percent of the inactive materials in traditional batteries, including expensive ones like copper and aluminum. The design also requires no binder and features extra thick electrodes, improving the energy density of the batteries.

“When you start a company, the smart thing to do is to revisit all of your assumptions  and ask what is the best way to accomplish your objectives, which in our case was simply-manufactured, low-cost batteries,” Chiang says. “We decided our real value was in making a lithium-ion suspension that was electrochemically active from the beginning, with electrolyte in it, and you just use the electrolyte as the processing solvent.”

In 2017, 24M participated in the MIT Industrial Liaison Program’s STEX25 Startup Accelerator, in which Chiang and collaborators made critical industry connections that would help it secure early partnerships. 24M has also collaborated with MIT researchers on projects funded by the Department of Energy.

Enabling the Battery Revolution

Most of 24M’s partners are eyeing the rapidly growing electric vehicle (EV) market for their batteries, and the founders believe their technology will accelerate EV adoption. (Battery costs make up 30 to 40 percent of the price of EVs, according to the Institute for Energy Research).

“Lithium-ion batteries have made huge improvements over the years, but even Elon Musk says we need some breakthrough technology,” Ota says, referring to the CEO of EV firm Tesla. “To make EVs more common, we need a production cost breakthrough; we can’t just rely on cost reduction through scaling because we already make a lot of batteries today.”

24M is also working to prove out new battery chemistries that its partners could quickly incorporate into their gigafactories. In January of this year, 24M received a grant from the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program to develop and scale a high-energy-density battery that uses a lithium metal anode and semi-solid cathode for use in electric aviation.

That project is one of many around the world designed to validate new lithium-ion battery chemistries that could enable a long-sought battery revolution. As 24M continues to foster the creation of large scale, global production lines, the team believes it is well-positioned to turn lab innovations into ubiquitous, world-changing products.

“This technology is a platform, and our vision is to be like Google’s Android [operating system], where other people can build things on our platform,” Ota says. “We want to do that but with hardware. That’s why we’re licensing the technology. Our partners can use the same production lines to get the benefits of new chemistries and approaches. This platform gives everyone more options.”

Reprinted with permission of MIT News  ( http://news.mit.edu/)

Leadership and Embracing Existing Technology May Get Us to Net-Zero Quicker

Posted on by phoffman@channelchek.com
Image Credit: Mussi Katz (Flickr)

Getting to ‘Net-Zero’ Emissions: How Energy Leaders Envision Countering Climate Change in the Future

What’s behind this view, energy leaders say, is their deep degree of skepticism that renewable energy technologies alone can meet the nation’s future energy demands at a reasonable cost.

With the federal government promising over US$360 billion in clean energy incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act, energy companies are already lining up investments. It’s a huge opportunity, and analysts project that it could help slash U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by about 40% within the decade.

But in conversations with energy industry leaders in recent months, we have heard that financial incentives alone aren’t enough to meet the nation’s goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.

In the view of some energy sector leaders, reaching net zero emissions will require more pressure from regulators and investors and accepting technologies that aren’t usually thought of as the best solutions to the climate crisis.

This article was republished with permission from The Conversation, a news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It represents the research-based findings and thoughts of Seth Blumsack, Professor of Energy and Environmental Economics and International Affairs, Penn State and Lara B. Fowler Interim Chief Sustainability Officer, Penn State; Interim Director, Penn State Sustainability Institute; Profess of Teaching, Penn State Law, Penn State.

‘Net-Zero,’ With Natural Gas

In spring 2022, we facilitated a series of conversations at Penn State University around energy and climate with leaders at several major energy companies – including Shell USA, and electric utilities American Electric Power and Xcel Energy – as well as with leaders at the Department of Energy and other public-sector agencies.

We asked them about the technologies they see the U.S. leaning on to develop an energy system with zero net greenhouse gases by 2050.

Their answers provide some insight into how energy companies are thinking about a net-zero future that will require extraordinary changes in how the world produces and manages energy.

We heard a lot of agreement among energy leaders that getting to net-zero emissions is not a matter of finding some future magic bullet. They point out that many effective technologies are available to reduce emissions and to capture those emissions that can’t be avoided. What is not an option, in their view, is to leave existing technologies in the rearview mirror.

They expect natural gas in particular to play a large, and possibly growing, role in the U.S. energy sector for many years to come.

What’s behind this view, energy leaders say, is their deep degree of skepticism that renewable energy technologies alone can meet the nation’s future energy demands at a reasonable cost.

Costs for wind and solar power and for energy storage have declined rapidly in recent years. But dependence on these technologies has some grid operators worried that they can’t count on the wind blowing or sun shining at the right time – especially as more electric vehicles and other new users connect to the power grid.

Energy companies are rightly nervous about energy grid failures – no one wants a repeat of the outages in Texas in the winter of 2021. But some energy companies, even those with lofty climate goals, also profit handsomely from traditional energy technologies and have extensive investments in fossil fuels. Some have resisted clean energy mandates.

In the view of many of these energy companies, a net-zero energy transition is not necessarily a renewable energy transition.

Instead, they see a net-zero energy transition requiring massive deployment of other technologies, including advanced nuclear power and carbon capture and sequestration technologies that capture carbon dioxide, either before it’s released or from the air, and then store it in nature or pump it underground. So far, however, attempts to deploy some of these technologies at scale have been plagued with high costs, public opposition and serious questions about their environmental impacts.

Think Globally, Act Regionally

Another key takeaway from our roundtable discussions with energy leaders is that how clean energy is deployed and what net-zero looks like will vary by region.

What sells in Appalachia, with its natural-resource-driven economy and manufacturing base, may not sell or even be effective in other regions. Heavy industries like steel require tremendous heat as well as chemical reactions that electricity just can’t replace. The economic displacement from abandoning coal and natural gas production in these regions raises questions about who bears the burden and who benefits from shifting sources of energy.

Opportunities also vary by region. Waste from Appalachian mines could boost domestic supplies of materials critical to a cleaner energy grid. Some coastal regions, on the other hand, could drive decarbonization efforts with offshore wind power.

At a regional scale, industry leaders said, it can be easier to identify shared goals. The Midcontinent Independent System Operator, known as MISO, which manages the power grid in the upper Midwest and parts of the South, is a good example.

Among the major power grid operators, MISO has a broad, varied territory, which also extends into Canada, which can make management decisions more difficult. FERC

When its coverage area was predominantly in the upper Midwest, MISO could bring regional parties together with a shared vision of more opportunities for wind energy development and higher electric reliability. It was able to produce an effective multistate power grid plan to integrate renewables.

However, as utilities from more far-flung (and less windy) states joined MISO, they challenged these initiatives as not bringing benefits to their local grids. The challenges were not successful but have raised questions about how widely costs and benefits can be shared.

Waiting for the Right Kind of Pressure

Energy leaders also said that companies are not enthusiastic about taking on risks that low-carbon energy projects will increase costs or degrade grid reliability without some kind of financial or regulatory pressure.

For example, tax credits for electric vehicles are great, but powering these vehicles could require a lot more zero-carbon electricity, not to mention a major national transmission grid upgrade to move that clean electricity around.

That could be fixed with “smart charging” – technologies that can charge vehicles during times of surplus electricity or even use electric cars to supply some of the grid’s needs on hot days. However, state utility regulators often dissuade companies from investing in power grid upgrades to meet these needs out of fear that customers will wind up footing large bills or technologies will not work as promised.

Energy companies do not yet seem to be feeling major pressure from investors to move away from fossil fuels, either.

For all the talk about environmental, social and governance concerns that industry leaders need to prioritize – known as ESG – we heard during the roundtable that investors are not moving much money out of energy companies whose responses to ESG concerns are not satisfactory. With little pressure from investors, energy companies themselves have few good reasons to take risks on clean energy or to push for changes in regulations.

Leadership Needed

These conversations reinforced the need for more leadership on climate issues from lawmakers, regulators, energy companies and shareholders.

If the energy industry is stuck because of antiquated regulations, then we believe it’s up to the public and forward-looking leaders in business and government and investors to push for change.