Houston was home to two dueling energy conferences this week: the Offshore Technology Conference, the big daddy of oil and gas conferences at the Reliant Center near the decrepit Astrodome (where some exhibitors offered massages and caricatures to get people into their booths); and the Clean Technology Conference & Expo, which was downtown at the space-age George R. Brown Convention Center ("It's like a small planet," said one conference goer). Given swine flu worries, anti-bacterial spray was being handed out and dispensers were all over the place.
Not much deal news at either joint, however. Oil patchers were generally in a cheerful mood with oil prices inching near $60 per barrel and their hopes of the government opening off-limit areas to drilling not yet dashed, but were fuming over the possibility of new taxes by the Obama administration and its energy policy in general. Meanwhile, green energy developers were enthusiastic about the administration giving them stimulus checks and more tax breaks but lamenting the lack of capital to fund their developments because of the economic crisis. Bankers and lawyers at both conferences thought distressed asset sales and possibly bankruptcies could continue on both sides of the energy sector, especially in oil services (one banker said he's seen restructuring assignments pick up recently).
The highlight of the week had to be Wednesday on the more green side of town, where representatives from General Electric Co. (NYSE:GE), Royal Dutch Shell plc (NYSE:RDS.A), Exelon Corp. (NYSE:EXC), Simmons & Co. International and Austin Energy shared a panel to discuss the future of energy. The consensus? That the world shouldn't rely on any one single energy source to power its cars, homes and businesses and that we all need to do a better job taking care of the environment. James Woolsey, a former government official (he was CIA chief in 1993 to 1995) who is now a venture partner at VantagePoint Venture Partners, gave a thought-provoking preface that included references to Muir, Patton and Gandhi. "We've got to destroy oil's monopoly on transportation," he said. "We are going to have to use alternative fuels and electricity and move away from petroleum." Investment banker Matt Simmons was probably the most sober of the bunch, repeating his refrain that fossil fuels are unsustainable. "It's a pretty grim future," he said. "We have to radically change the way we live." Don't tell that to the folks on the other side of town. -
Claire Poole
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