Now, when the world needs more oil than ever, it’s changing faster than we can keep up with
It’s Still the One
Oil’s very future is now being seriously questioned, debated, and challenged. The author of an acclaimed history explains why, just as we need more oil than ever, it is changing faster than we can keep up with.
BY DANIEL YERGIN | AUGUST 24, 2009
On a still afternoon under a hot Oklahoma sun, neither a cloud nor an ounce of “volatility” was in sight. Anything but. All one saw were the somnolent tanks filled with oil, hundreds of them, spread over the rolling hills, some brand-new, some more than 70 years old, and some holding, inside their silver or rust-orange skins, more than half a million barrels of oil each.
This is Cushing, Oklahoma, the gathering point for the light, sweet crude oil known as West Texas Intermediate — or just WTI. It is the oil whose price you hear announced every day, as in “WTI closed today at ….” Cushing proclaims itself, as the sign says when you ride into town, the “pipeline crossroads of the world.” Through it passes the network of pipes that carry oil from Texas and Oklahoma and New Mexico, from Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, and from Canada too, into Cushing’s tanks, where buyers take title before moving the oil onward to refineries where it is turned into gasoline, jet fuel, diesel, home heating oil, and all the other products that people actually use.
The QRCE recently announced the start of its 3rd Annual National Entrepreneurship Competition which will award $70,000 (USD) in total cash prizes.
Google will be offering a special $10,000 (USD) award for the best online focused business. The King Abdullah II Design and Defense Bureau (KADDB) is also offering $10,000 (USD) for the best business plan catering to defense and security.
To date the QRCE’s business plan competition remains the regions only technology focused business plan competition.
The Masdar Initiative: Going Green in the UAE
In 2006, Abu Dhabi launched the Masdar Initiative, a $15bn project that seeks to “embrace renewable and sustainable energy technologies.”
One of the ways that Masdar Initiative hopes to do this largely through the construction of Masdar City, a zero-emissions, zero-carbon, zero-waste city with a target population of 50,000.
According to VentureBeat:
Although much of that money will go toward construction and infrastructure requirements, Masdar is also becoming a significant force in fostering new technologies. The Masdar Clean Tech Fund has already sunk $250 million into cleantech ventures from its first fund, and is in the process of raising more capital for a second.
The investment dollars are going in large part to ideas for energy generation. The planned power supply of Masdar is to be split between several sources, with solar providing the majority; a 500 megawatt solar thermal installation a 100MW solar concentrator project (which funding has not yet been announced for) are in the works. Research is going into thin film, and the city will play host to a solar photovoltaic manufacturing plant.
However, another 500MW will come from a plant fueled by hydrogen, Al Jaber said in his speech. The new city will provide a rare opportunity to test out utility-scale use of hydrogen, which is estimated to be decades away in this country.
The initiative has also launched an eponymous Masdar Clean Tech Fund that seeks to invest $250mm .
Injaz: Social Entrepreneurship in Jordan
Social entrepreneurship is all the rage these days – save the world and make a buck at the same time – who can argue with that? It’s popularity in months past has been widely bolstered in part due to Muhammad Yunus’ success at Grameen Bank. Now Nicholas Kristof is writing about it as well.
While most social entrepreneurship ventures are based in the U.S. and focus towards the developing world, there are few that have emerged from the developing world itself. This one comes from Jordan:
One of the social entrepreneurs here is Soraya Salti, a 37-year-old Jordanian woman who is trying to transform the Arab world by teaching entrepreneurship in schools. Her organization, Injaz, is now training 100,000 Arab students each year to find a market niche, construct a business plan and then launch and nurture a business.
We often don’t hear of such news coming out of the region, but Jordan is nearly exceptional in this regard and has taken great strides (some unrealized) towards investing in its only asset: its people. The YEA has also done a lot to support and bolster entrepreneurship in Jordan and the region. (We covered them earlier here).
Internet in the Middle East
It’s no surprise that the stability of the internet is not the same in the Middle East as it is in the U.S. or Western Europe, but this latest incident continues to highlight the fragility of internet connectivity in the Middle East. When an errant ship’s anchor can disrupt internet service to large parts of the Middle East, that does not provide for desired stability in having an economy that’s bolstered by ICT
Neither of the cable operators have confirmed the cause or location of the outage but some reports suggest it was caused by a ship’s anchor near the port of Alexandria in Egypt.
As Middle Eastern businesses continue to come online, issues such as this reinforce the desire of others to remain offline. Worse yet, it harms the regions image of having reliable infrastructure for ICT development.
