Reality vs The Nanotech Lynch Mob

On June 8, 2010, in Development Issues, Economy 2.0, Energy Efficiency, Europe, Events, Legal Battles, Nanotech, Products, by Tim

Nanomaterials Producers React To Criticism Of Their Business Models

I don’t like nanomaterials companies very much. In fact they are usually nothing but trouble. If they are not squandering huge amounts of investors money chasing non existent markets then they are having messy legal spats with competitors and suppliers, or even prancing around bringing hugely expensive but ultimately pointless libel suits against anyone who questions their business model. Anyway, not to worry, most of them have either gone bust or found something more useful to do with their nanotech expertise than trying to put carts before horses and good riddance.

I’ll be doing my best to avoid a lynching at tomorrow’s Nanomaterials 2010 conference where I will be talking about “Trends and opportunities in the nanomaterials marketplace” – something I’m pretty sure that I will be able to manage without jumping up and down yelling “nanomaterials are the new gold so give me all your money” (actually as we and the World Gold Council proved a while ago, Gold is the new Gold).

However we do need to make use of nanomaterials to address a number of pressing issues caused by rising populations and declining resources unless we all want to go back to the Dark Ages, and this is where I think the opportunities lie, and perhaps this time it won’t be just large chemical producers who can take advantage.

If we look at most of our current crop of ‘sustainable’ technologies, from hybrid vehicles to wind turbines and solar arrays they are rubbish. There is absolutely no comparison with the elegance of nature’s solutions, almost all of which are built from the bottom up and which I often refer to as ‘materials by design’, a subject of eternal debate with my nanoclastic colleague Dexter Johnson. We need to start thinking seriously about how we can use our new found control over the properties of materials to address resource issues, create clean water and of course double food production in the next forty years, not producing tons of stuff that no one will ever want just because we can.

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New White Paper – Sustainable Technologies for the Next Decade

On May 13, 2010, in Economy 2.0, Energy Efficiency, Nanotech, Sustainability, by Tim

Prophets, priests, scientists and environmentalists have been gleefully predicting the end of the world for several millennia but it wont happen. One of the reasons that the human species has been so successful has been our ability to adapt to changing environments, enabling us, like viruses, to colonise almost every part of the planet, and make use of every available resource.

But there is a problem – we have made use of every available resource, and while some, like silicon make up 25.7% of the Earth’s crust by weight and are to all intents and purposes inexhaustible, many others such as indium are not. The problem is compounded by many of the scarcer elements being a small cog in a large wheel, so while materials such as aluminium, steel and many plastics can and are recycled, recovering the small amounts of indium from broken touch screens is neither feasible or cost effective.

So what can we do with increasingly scarce resources? The problems with elements, as opposed to compounds, is that as fundamental building blocks we cannot create more material, and nor is there an abundant source of material containing the elements in question. If we need hydrogen or oxygen they can be simply made from water, but there are few abundant compounds containing rare earths. As a result we need to find a new solution, and quickly.

Download Sustainable Technologies For The Next Decade (1.5Mb)

 
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Cleantech in Melbourne: No Worries!

On May 12, 2010, in Economy 2.0, Energy Efficiency, Events, Nanotech, Renewable Energy, by Tim

According to JP Morgan, flying to 21186 miles to Melbourne and back for a clean tech conference generated 5.63 tonnes of carbon dioxide, but unlike most conferences on this subject the hot air emissions were negligible.

The Sir Mark Oliphant Cleantech: Mainstream and at the Edge conference was refreshing for the positive outlook on cleantech rather than the self flagellation that usually goes along with this kind of event. While there were a few graphs showing frightening population statistics, with dire predictions of resource and energy use, they were mostly used to illustrate how a combination of human ingenuity and technology could be used to solve problems. None of the speakers even suggested smashing the corrupt capitalist system as happens so often at green events.

Megatrends

From my perspective, as hopefully a purveyor or at least enabler of technology based sustainability, the advantage of this kind of event is to see what the real drivers are, the market for the technology, and then try to find the science and engineering to solve the problem. This probably explains my rapt attention to talks like Stefan Hajkowicz’s excellent overview of Megatrends (the full report is available here), which looked at the “trends, patterns of economic, social or environmental activity that will change the way people live and the science and technology products they demand.”

I wasn’t too happy about the use of data from a rather flawed WEF risk report which identified nanotechnology as a risk on a par with an asset price collapse, a slowing Chinese economy, oil and gas price spikes, extreme climate change related weather, pandemic, biodiversity loss and terrorism. We seem to keep finding echoes of the grey goo fears of ten years ago in these kind of documents, something for the science communication experts to ponder.

Also fascinating was Ellen Sandell’s talk on her work with the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, a mobilisation of 50,000 young people who just couldn’t wait for Copenhagen, Davos or Canberra to reach an agreement, or for the Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace to stop politicking and decided to get things moving themselves.

So given that we know what to expect, and we have no lack of youthful enthusiasm to push us along, there’s no real excuse not to act.  We should be demanding of our politicians that we develop new technologies not new taxes, and that we use our scientific knowledge of the natural world to make it a better place.

The news gets even better, as many of the speakers mentioned, in that you can make the world a better place and make money.

No worries!

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Talking Cleantech In Melbourne

On May 5, 2010, in Energy Efficiency, Events, Nanotech, Renewable Energy, geoengineering, by Tim

The Sir Mark Olifant Cleantech conference has been a lot of fun so far, from Eric Isaac’s opening overview of the the issues (and solutions) to Stefan Hajkowicz’s analysis of megatrends that will shape our future technology development.

I’m still struck by how much cleantech seems to be focused in a few rather obvious areas, something which effectively prices a lot of technologies out of the market, and the excessive valuations thus generated tend to make it almost impossible to get a return for most investors. Sometimes meeting the problem head on isn’t the best strategy, and it is better to wait until a problem has been cracked and then capitalise on the myriad opportunities that spin out – as with mobile phones you don’t have to invent the device to make money from it.

My focus is more on how nanotechnology, by its nature is more akin to what nature does. As Eric Isaacs mentioned this morning, we are almost at the stage where we can create materials by design, or in his his words ‘we can almost taste it’ – something that opens up a whole new world of sustainable everything.

A preview of my presentation is available here – with the caveat that it works better if you hear me tell the story behind it!

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Sunfilm Eclipsed By Withdrawal of Government Subsidies

On April 7, 2010, in Energy Efficiency, Europe, Renewable Energy, by Tim

I have always been sceptical about investing in solar companies on the basis that the market is artificially distorted by government subsidises which can work with you, or against you.

Germany’s Sunfilm which manufactures amorphous silicon modules (a-Si), has today filed for insolvency claiming its business plans have been crippled by Germany’s plans to sharply reduce its solar feed-in tariff by July 1st.

A golden rule is to treat government subsidises as a bonus rather than an income stream, then you can keep the doors open when they evaporate.

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A Moment to Savour?

On October 7, 2009, in Energy Efficiency, Europe, Legal Battles, Nanotech, Products, by Tim

Regular readers will know all about the saga of Oxonica, the small university spin out that managed an IPO and then spent the following few years bogged down in legal battles while losing 95% of its value before finally delisting and scattering its executives to the four winds – presumably before they were ripped limb from limb by irate shareholders.

Yesterdays announcement that the only bit of the company that ever looked like making any money – before a dispute about royalties erupted – has been sold to the company that they spent two years and several million pounds fighting is particularly ironic.

There’s a tale of hubris, greed and huge egos behind this, and one that will no doubt emerge in time.

 
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Bringing UK Nanotechnology Into Disrepute?

On July 13, 2009, in Energy Efficiency, Europe, Legal Battles, Products, by Tim

The company that most have pointed to as the UKs leading nanotechnology company, Oxonica, finds itself in the news again this week after losing the second round of its court battle with Neuftec, and becomes the latest company to find itself in difficulties after being saddled with a  huge legal bill.

Well, companies go bust all the time, and it is usually confined to the courts and the financial press, so it was surprising to se how personal this fight had become, with the dispute migrating from the Court of Appeal to the Daily Mail!

Where do we go from here, to the House of Lords and the News of the World?

 
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Job Vacancy and Redundancies at Oxonica

On June 25, 2009, in Energy Efficiency, Europe, Finance, Legal Battles, Sustainability, by Tim

Our old friends Oxonica are looking for a new CEO and are making a number of other redundancies as well.

Having developed product offerings in all of its businesses, Oxonica is now focusing on partnering the Group’s businesses to secure profitable platforms for growth. In 2008, Oxonica’s Diagnostics business was partnered with BD and the Company is currently in partnering discussions for its remaining three businesses. The structure and value of the resulting partnerships will be announced on completion of the negotiations.

An interesting statement which could be read as the code for flogging off all remaining assets and hoping to get a few quid from licence fees and royalties but not attempting any further business development, something the company describes as a “sustainable, relatively low?-?risk business model”

 
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Losing Control of Geoengineering

On June 24, 2009, in Economy 2.0, Energy Efficiency, Nanotech, geoengineering, by Tim

The New York Times seems to be going to town with Geoengineering with an article Pressing the Case for Geoengineering yesterday and a column on Building a Better Biosphere? today.

Yesterdays article illustrates the worries that the eco lobby have over engineering solutions for climate change, and I recently heard the same line from Greenpeace.

Francelino Grando, a senior government official from Brazil, worried that geoengineering might be seen as a solution instead of a stop-gap. “It may give people the impression that we don’t have to worry about climate change because we can solve it through engineering,” he said. “But the only real answer is that we have to fundamentally change the pattern of energy use.”

Oliver Morton’s column today takes a slightly different look at the issue, looking at methods of engineering the biosphere to capture carbon or alter energy flows. The rationale is as follows:

Humans have had great success in increasing the amount of food plants can yield, the amount of fiber than can be spun from them and the number of pretty colors in which they can flower, but so far have not really turned their minds to the problem of simply making them eat and store as much carbon as possible. If that effort were made, significant improvements might result.

Cue horror from the Green lobby. Not only is there a suggestion that we can carry on as normal but also that we can use geoengineering, biotechnology and synthetic biology to clean up the mess afterwards.

Of course it is hard to get this past the green lobby in most governments and despite the US Chief Science advisor raising the subject “Mr. Holdren later clarified that the White House was not strongly considering pursuing geoengineering as a policy.”

So if we accept that getting Geoengineering on the agenda in the US and Europe may be tricky, the idea seems much more attractive from a Chinese perspective, and that is the problem. If the technology can be shown to work, it will be deployed, perhaps locally at first, and then globally.

China has already been experimenting with cloud seeding for a long time, and if Western governments refuse to even look at the issue then they risk losing control over it.

 
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Nanotechnology and Sustainability Podcast

On April 22, 2009, in Energy Efficiency, Events, Nanotech, Renewable Energy, Sustainability, by Tim

A number of people asked about the possibility of re-recording the podcast of the talk I gave at Green Futures at the weekend as the quality is a bit patchy. It’s something I have been meaning to do for some time, as I can talk several orders of magnitude faster than I can type. I should also point out that this was a talk given to an audience with no knowledge of (or prior interest in) nanotechnologies so the more sophisticated among you may already know most of this.

Here’s my first attempt, not word for word but using the same notes so it may be the same thing in a slightly different order, so now you can do something more useful while listening to my mellifluous tones with a bit of added hiss. If I do this again I promise to buy a proper microphone!

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