If the world is to re-imagine a new energy paradigm for a sustainable future, the catalyst for converting these ideas into reality will be leadership.

You might think that talking about the end of oil in Texas would be like advocating gun control. But when Heidrick & Struggles hosted a dinner at the Houston Country Club a little while back, the conversation quickly turned to wind power and alternative energy.

Local hero T. Boone Pickens, who made his fortune in oil, is now a huge proponent of wind. We have more wind farms in Texas and Oklahoma than any other area and Houston has become the home of alternative energy start-ups.

But the idea of the US becoming energy-independent and removing our reliance on foreign oil is a “pipedream” – at least, according to the man who wrote the book on the subject, Robert Bryce (author of Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of ‘Energy Independence.’)

We asked Robert to be the guest speaker at our Houston office’s annual CEO dinner. Robert sparked heated debated by shooting several sacred cows. He not only de-bunked the idea of independence as “hogwash,” but he also:

• Dismissed ethanol as a scam which uses more carbon than it saves and consumes valuable food-production lands
• Advocated more widespread use of nuclear power
• Killed the idea of wind and solar as viable alternatives
• Called for a big increase in domestic oil and gas production by opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and much of the Outer Continental Shelf to exploration.

CLEANER FUELS
Robert says we should be optimistic about our energy future. The good news, he says, is “decarbonization” or the ongoing and increasingly rapid trend toward consumption of cleaner fuels that contain less carbon.

Decarbonization can be understood by looking at the ratio of carbon to hydrogen atoms in the most common fuels. From pre-history through the 1700s and early 1800s, wood was the world’s most common fuel. Wood has a carbon-to-hydrogen (C:H) ratio of 10 to 1. That is, wood has about 10 carbon atoms for every one hydrogen atom. But as the western world industrialized during the 1800s and early 1900s, wood lost its dominance to coal.

Coal was a dramatic improvement over wood because it is a far denser source of energy, with a C:H ratio of about 2 to 1.

But coal was destined to lose out to oil, particularly for use in transportation, because of oil’s superior energy density. Oil also has the virtue of being cleaner, a product of its C:H ratio of about 1 to 2. Over the coming decades, natural gas (CH4) consumption will increase because it is the cleanest of the fossil fuels, thanks to its C:H ratio of 1 to 4. That is, it has just one carbon atom for each four atoms of hydrogen.

Robert Bryce says he’s “all for renewables” but they will be a fairly small part of the decarbonization trend for the next couple of decades. The bigger and largely overlooked story is the decarbonization that’s being accelerated by greater use of natural gas.

At the Houston Country Club, the debate about the future of energy raged far into the night.

ENERGIZED LEADERS
But what do biofuels and wind power and gas have to do with executive search and leadership consulting, you might ask?

The answer is that we are seeing a surge in activity across all of our practices that deal with energy. And the threatened shortage of executives to lead the charge into an energy-abundant future is, like the shortage of energy itself, a myth.

There are leaders available in abundance. But they need a special set of skills and they need to be hunted down and persuaded to go into new areas that are high-risk, high-reward.

We recently identified a type of candidate who fits the new paradigm: a founder of an Internet search advertising business, he made his fortune at the height of the dot com boom after a career with McKinsey. He then worked for a state government and served on nonprofit boards.

This executive is now heading up an energy startup. He has vision, an ability to operate with ambiguity and without a roadmap. He has huge business skills, having found revenue streams where none existed before. Critically, he has the patience to juggle the interests of multiple stakeholders, including governments. And he has passion. He's an evangelist for the cause.

If the world is to re-imagine a new energy paradigm for a sustainable future, the catalyst for converting these ideas into reality will be leadership.