by Kevin Collins, President and CEO

Last week Evergreen Energy participated in the Jackson Hole Policy Institute’s 2007 Energy Summit. The summit’s goal was to bring together thought leaders from the energy, environmental and policy sectors for frank and open discussion of the challenging energy security and environmental questions facing this country.

The panel included a utility CEO, a venture capitalist working with emerging energy technologies, a global energy director for a large environmental group, an energy/utilities executive from a major software and hardware provider, and the North American president of a major oil company.

The audience was comprised of energy industry executives, environmentalists and policy makers, including state legislators from Wyoming and California.

Three clear themes emerged, and foremost was the extreme urgency of our energy supply situation. We’re walking on a tightrope. For example, we’re importing one million gallons of gasoline each day from Europe and delivering it to the east coast so that gasoline production from the Gulf of Mexico can be funneled to the rest of the country. Without that European supply gas would be even higher or not available at all in some places. As for diesel, this past summer farmers in South Dakota lacked fuel to plant or harvest their crops.

Second, the uncertainty about future government CO2 regulations has put a damper on new power plant construction, especially integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) coal plants.  Nearly as troublesome as the lack of direction from Washington is the balkanization of clean air regulations through multiple state and regional controls, such as the regional greenhouse gas initiative (RGGI) in the northeastern U.S.

Third, and perhaps most important, is the near total absence of understanding by the public and some of their elected officials about the big energy/environment picture. They don’t know where their energy comes from, how hard it is to produce and the fragility of the supply chain. All they know is that they want to fill up their cars and turn on the lights as cheaply as possible.

For example, one audience member who was active in the California legislation that banned the import of electricity from any source dirtier than natural gas was under the false impression that IGCC with carbon capture and storage (CCS) was practically a slam dunk and available today. That’s hardly the case. The energy department doesn’t think we will see IGCC with CCS on a widespread basis until 2045.

The session agreed, however, that there is hope.  While some environmental groups will always oppose any energy development, the environmental organization representatives attending the meeting agreed on the need to work with the energy industry to address their mutual concerns, and there was acknowledgment as well that Congress is slowly but inexorably waking up to the complexity of the matter, as evidenced by Sen. Norm Coleman’s bill to study the pipeline engineering and infrastructure issues related to CO2 capture and transport to sequestration points.

For Evergreen, the conference underscored once again that there is no magic bullet to solve our energy and environmental needs and that there is a clear requirement for both long-term solutions and bridging technologies like refined coal to take us through the next 30 or 40 years.