People, Planet, Profits & Projects

When a country charters the largest construction project in its history, it’s worth sitting up and taking notice.  I highly recommend that you indeed sit up, grab a wienerbrød, and sip on a kaffe to best enjoy this post.  Just to give you an idea why this is exciting – here are some examples of projects on the scale that I’ll discuss here (the largest in a country’s history):

• Crossrail (UK)
• US Interstate Highway System, or Hoover Dam (US)
• Three Gorges Dam (China)
• New city of Brasilia (Brazil)
• The pyramids at Giza (Egypt)
• The Panama Canal (Panama)
• Delta Works (Netherlands)
• Narmada Valley Development Project (India)
• Al Maktoum International Airport (Dubai)

Most of these are in the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars (or equivalent currency).  That is a lot of wienerbrød!

So which country are we talking about here?  Well, there was a hint in the title of the blog post, because that is (or is supposed to be) Danish.  The story is about what is going to be a brand new Danish island, an Energy Island.   Yes, you read that correctly – a brand new island in the North Sea, purpose built to generate and store power.

The island will be located about 80 kilometers off the coast of Jutland, the large peninsula which contains the Danish mainland (see map, source: https://ocean-energyresources.com/2021/02/12/north-sea-energy-island-can-make-denmark-and-belgium-electricity-neighbours/).

The cost?  Oh, about 210 billion Danish krone ($33.97 billion).  The benefit?  It better be huge, with that sort of expense.  And it is: the island’s turbines will produce enough energy to power 10 million homes in Europe, including, of course, the entire country of Denmark.

The construction project, believed to be the biggest in Danish history, will – aside from the construction of the island itself, no small feat – will build and link hundreds of wind turbines to deliver enough electricity for millions of households.

Have a look at this brief video for details and striking images:

What’s the rationale for this project?  After all, you don’t just go building islands in the ocean for $30B for no reason.  In this case, the rationale is directly traceable to Denmark’s Climate Act, in which the country has committed to an ambitious 70% reduction in 1990 greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and to becoming CO2 neutral by 2050. Last December it announced it was ending all new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea.

When built, the island will supply both clean power to homes and green hydrogen for use in shipping, aviation, industry and heavy transport.  The decision came as the EU unveiled plans to transform the bloc's electricity supply. The bloc aims to rely mostly on renewable energy within a decade while increasing offshore wind energy capacity roughly 25-fold by mid-century (Ecowatch, 2021)

From a project management perspective, what’s the time, cost, scope, value, and fit for this project?  And the value?

• Time and cost: the planners hope to have the hub operable by 2033. The first phase of the project is expected to cost around 210 billion Danish crowns ($33.87 billion, €28.28 billion).
• the wind turbines will have a capacity of at least 3 gigawatts, ramping up to 10 gigawatts over time.
• Fit into program/portfolio: The energy island is an important part of country's legally binding target to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 70% of the 1990 levels by 2030.  The country also already has plans for a second such island, to be located in the Baltic Sea… a Portfolio of Islands!
• aside from the economic payback, this is a bold move to get the wheels turning (pun intended) on green energy.  "Only by inspiring others and developing new green solutions they also want to use, can we really do something to combat climate change,'' Denmark’s Climate Minister Daniel Joergensen recently said (AP News, 2021).

Find more information about these projects here:

https://www.nesoi.eu/content/1st-energy-island-will-be-built-danish-north-sea-coast

https://www.thebalancesmb.com/top-ten-largest-construction-projects-844370

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/denmark-wants-to-build-a-renewable-energy-island-in-the-north-sea.html

https://cphpost.dk/?p=122213

In the prior post, "Repurposed Rigs", I discussed the ways in which oil rigs at their end of life were being repurposed - as diving resorts, or coral reefs.  One company, Blue Latitudes, specializes in the research, consulting, and planning for such projects.

Co-founders, and marine biologists Emily Hazelwood and Amber Sparks have been featured in Forbes magazine (see this article) in their "30 under 30" section.  I recently had the privilege of speaking with them about these initiatives from a project, program, and portfolio perspective.

If you haven't already, please have a look at this amazing video that gives the background of the work Blue Latitudes is doing.

Let me start with their backgrounds and then just have you take a look at the interview.

Blue Latitudes' Mission (from their website) is:

Our vision at Blue Latitudes is to find silver linings in our oceans at the intersection of industry and the environment.

We unite science, policy, and communications to create innovative solutions for the complex ecological challenges associated with offshore industry. 

As to the co-founders, there's a photo above from a profile on Scubapro.com, and below, a photo of them with an old friend; then we get right into the biographies and the interview itself.

Emily Hazelwood is a marine conservation biologist, oil and gas consultant and explorer. She has a B.A. in Environmental Science from Connecticut College and an M.A.S degree in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation from Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Emily was recognized on Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the energy sector for her work with Blue Latitudes to develop sustainable, creative, and cost-effective solutions for the environmental issues that surround the offshore energy industry.

Emily has extensive experience conducting both international and domestic environmental impact assessments for governmental agencies and private sector clients, and specializes in developing sustainable environmental strategies for offshore energy development and decommissioning.

Mrs. Hazelwood previously worked as a field technician on the BP 252 Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico. This is where she witnessed first hand the destruction and devastation wrought by an oil spill. However, it is also where she learned of a unique silver lining despite the realities of offshore oil and gas development, the Rigs to Reefs program. She is a PADI certified Dive Master and an AAUS Scientific Diver.

Amber Sparks is an oceanographer, environmental scientist and entrepreneur. She has a B.A. in Marine Science from UC Berkeley and a M.A.S in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation from Scripps Institution of Oceanography. In 2018, Amber was recognized on Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the energy sector for her work with Blue Latitudes to develop sustainable, creative, and cost-effective solutions for the environmental issues that surround the offshore energy industry.

Amber also has a strong background in technology. A former Ocean Curator at Google, she engineered and launched intelligent layers in Google Earth and Google Maps that distill and relate complex concepts in ocean science for a variety of audiences. Today she uses those skills in the oil and gas industry to map fishing activity in proximity to offshore structures and inform decommissioning decisions in relation to commercial fisheries.

Mrs. Sparks has extensive experience as a project manager specializing in ecological impact assessments, marine biological monitoring and habitat restoration through the Rigs to Reefs program. She is certified as an AAUS scientific diver.

Here's the interview (about 37 minutes):

Photo: Getty Images

This introductory blog post is the first part of a series that is themed heavily around “thinking past the end of a project” with an inspirational implementation of that idea.

If you have been following People, Planet, Profits, and Projects, or if you have read Green Project Management or its follow up book, Driving Sustainability Success, or you have any sense of what ‘sustainability in project management’ really means, you know that it is not only about projects to build wind farms and solar panels.  It is about integrating a thoughtful, holistic, responsible, long-term view into planning and executing projects, which, we like to say, means “thinking past the end of the project”, even to that point in time when the product of your project is (for lack of better words) dead, useless, kaput, “finito”, over-and-done-with.

We don’t like to think that way, do we?  As project managers, we think about the ribbon-cutting ceremony, the celebratory party, the congratulations-on-a-project-well-executed, and we want to begin working on our next project.  It’s in our blood, our DNA, to get things done.  And we see “done” as that time when that black diamond milestone that says “END” has passed.

Let’s say your project is an oil rig.  Or, perhaps it’s a drilling project based on an oil rig. 

Should you be thinking about what happens to the rig when it is no longer useful?  After all, an oil rig, at some point, reaches its end of useful life.  It then has to be decommissioned.

A primer on the Waste Hierarchy

All of us, I’m sure, have heard the phrase, “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”.  And many of us do a good job living our lives with that mantra.  But not everyone is aware that there is a certain precedence to these different ways of reducing impact on the environment, or even that those are not the only three ways to do so.

There are several version of this, but I prefer the one below (see image).  It involves not three, but six ways of dealing with waste (whether that’s the plastic beverage bottle you from the iced tea you just finished while reading this, or an unusable oil rig).  From Zero Waste Europe comes the Waste Hierarchy shown below.waswaswwaswwdd

At the top, you see “Refuse/Rethink/Redesign”, which, in the case of the oil rig, would mean moving away from carbon-based energy.  That’s a non-starter for the existing 12,000+ oil rigs already out there.  So let’s drop down a level and look at Reduce and Reuse.  That’s where we are.  Although it doesn’t say “repurpose” that’s what we’re going to discuss here – giving a new use to an oil rig – a new purpose.  Note that Recycle is further down on the hierarchy.  In fact, as we’ll dive into (excuse the pun) later, the recycling of materials from an oil rig is exceedingly costly, from both an economic and ecological perspective.

To summarize, we want you to think past the end of the project.  Designing, deploying, and drilling from an oil rig – all are projects. 

Let’s look at some statistics.  Already mentioned are the 12,000+ oil rigs in the Earth’s oceans.  It costs about US$50M to decommission each oil rig.

However, it costs about US$1M to repurpose them to become artificial reefs.

And that is where we have a whole bunch of new projects to consider: repurposing these defunct oil rigs to become reef habitats.

A January 2021 article in BBC Future is what sent me down this path, and it features two marine scientists, Emily Hazelwood and Amber Sparks, based in California, who founded an organization in 2015 called Blue Latitudes.  Their mission: to find silver linings in our oceans at the intersection of industry and the environment. We unite science, policy, and communications to create innovative solutions for the complex ecological challenges associated with offshore industry.

In this introductory post, we just want to stress the importance of looking past (and thinking through) the end of your project by having you watch this visually stunning and engaging 38-minute video that will prepare you for the following posts.  To understand the title, know that a transect is a method consisting of a field survey performed with a video-camera along a line of fixed length, with the registered images further analyzed using a computer.

Really.  Don’t skip this.  Watch it.  Watch it to be entertained by the amazing and quite beautiful underwater photography, and watch it from the perspective of a project manager (which  you probably cannot help doing!).  Make sure you watch for a key statistic at the end which compares a natural reef's ability to support a habitat for fish and coral with the same ability for a repurposed oil rig.  The statistic will probably surprise you!

We would like you to also consider some of the controversy here – it plays well into our role as PMs to consider multiple stakeholder views.  Some environmental groups think this repurposing is actually counterproductive because it encourages more drilling.  Some think this is an elegant solution for the existing oil rigs and should be pursued extensively.  I will discuss that in the follow-up posts, and will also discuss how government (another stakeholder!) is playing a role.

But for now, we would like to build your interest in this initiative because it is so intertwined with our discipline of PM, and helps make the point that sustainability is not an afterthought, or even a forethought – it needs to be integrated into our PM mindset.

For one of my first posts of the NEW year, I would like to start with something old.  Something very, very, VERY old: stromatolites.

You, your dog, your cat, your friends, relatives and the ancestors of all of those mammals are only here today because of stromatolites.

Wait, what?

First of all what is a ‘stromatolite’?  I found about these things in a BBC travel article, featuring strange, round formations found in certain places around the world, in this case in Western Australia, north of Perth called the Pilbara. From that article:

…stromatolites are stony structures built by colonies of microscopic photosynthesising organisms called cyanobacteria. As sediment layered in shallow water, bacteria grew over it, binding the sedimentary particles and building layer upon millimetre layer until the layers became mounds.

OK, you’re thinking, fine.  But what does that have to do with me and my ancestors?  And my DOG?  Or my CAT?  Well, that becomes clear with this next paragraph:

Their empire-building brought with it their most important role in Earth’s history. They breathed. Using the sun to harness energy, they produced and built up the oxygen content of the Earth’s atmosphere to about 20%, giving the kiss of life to all that was to evolve.

These have been around for billions of years – the same age as the solar system.  So this speaks to sustainability.  But it also speaks to something else important to projects and project managers – balance.  The cyanobacteria which builds the stromatolites are sensitive to their environment, and thus the Hamelin Pool in which they reside has the highest level of protection from the Western Australian government.  See details in this recently-published research.

A quick way to learn about this is to view this 2-minute video:

So to review: these cyanobacteria provided the earth with the oxygen balance we need to live.  The cyanobacteria that create the stromatolites are, themselves, prone to a very careful balance to survive.  You sense a theme here? Balance.

But wait – the plot thickens. The balance becomes even more interesting.  These same cyanobacteria – the ones that helped give rise to the rest of life on the planet…?  Those same cyanobacteria have appeared here in my very own blog as a villain – a bad guy!

You may recall that I blogged about the negative effects of what is (incorrectly) called ‘blue-green algae blooms’.  You can visit that post here.

You may recall this photo:

Cyanobacteria giveth – and taketh away.  Just like risk can be opportunity or threat.  And to further make the connection to our profession, just as we, as project managers must balance scope, time, cost, risk, quality, team engagement… and more, life on earth depends on balance, going back – way, way back.

This is fascinating science in my opinion.  You can learn more below in this summary and from other references.

References

From a Guardian article

• Stromatolites are the oldest fossil records of life on Earth.
• The oldest are found in the Pilbara in Western Australia, and date to 3.7bn years old.
• Stromatolites are formed by bacteria that grow in a “microbial mat”, depositing layers of sand and calcium carbonate held together with a glue-like secretion.
• For most of the history of life on Earth they were in great abundance, peaking about 1.25bn years ago.
• The bacteria that form them were among the earliest photosynthesisers, responsible for starting the process that boosted the oxygen in the atmosphere from less than 1% to more than 20%.
• The mild conditions they caused, and the abundance of life they allowed to evolve, were ultimately the seed of their own destruction.
• Only a handful of locations have been found with active stromatolites, with world heritage-listed Hamelin Pool in Western Australia containing by far the biggest colony.
• A 202,000-hectare private reserve, created by Bush Heritage Australia, will help protect Hamelin pool and the 100m stromatolites it is home to.

https://www.westaustralianexplorer.com/stromatolites-at-lake-thetis/

https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/what-doomed-the-stromatolites/

I thought it would be a good idea to start 2021 on a positive note – about climate change.  You know – the other existential problem we have as a globe right now?

I will draw heavily from this BBC article, called “Why 2021 Could Be a Turning Point for Tackling Climate Change”, by Justin Rowlatt, which actually starts off a little gloomily. 

… we’re way off track to meet carbon-cutting goals. On current plans the world is expected to breach the 1.5 degrees C ceiling within 12 years or less and to hit 3C of warming by the end of the century.  What could turn that around?

Luckily, it gets more optimistic.

There are five points made in the article, aimed at answering that last question. I will summarize them for you briefly and provide a project management angle as well.

1. The crucial climate conference

2. Countries are already signing up to deep carbon cuts

3. Renewables are now the cheapest energy ever

4. COVID-19 changes everything

5. Business is going green too

#1 The Climate Conference – COP26, Glasgow

There have been 25 COPs (Conference of Parties) so far.  The most famous, of course, was the Paris COP (#21), at which most nations agreed to cut carbon outputs.  Read more about the Paris Agreement here.  Under the terms of the Paris deal, countries promised to come back every five years and raise their carbon-cutting ambitions. That was due to happen in Glasgow in November 2020, but COVID-19 aborted that plan.  It is now scheduled in Glasgow but much later in the year (read on).

The Bureau of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), with the UK and its Italian partners, agreed today new dates for the COP26 UN climate conference, which will now take place between 1 and 12 November 2021 in Glasgow.

The agreement followed consultation with UNFCCC members, delivery partners and the international climate community. The conference was originally set to take place in November 2020, but had been postponed due to COVID-19.

The decision on the new date comes as the UK Government announces that over 25 experts in multiple global sectors will be advising the COP26 Presidency.  Here is the announcement of that change:

While we rightly focus on fighting the immediate crisis of the Coronavirus, we must not lose sight of the huge challenges of climate change. With the new dates for COP26 now agreed we are working with our international partners on an ambitious roadmap for global climate action between now and November 2021. The steps we take to rebuild our economies will have a profound impact on our societies’ future sustainability, resilience and well-being and COP26 can be a moment where the world unites behind a clean resilient recovery.

Everyone will need to raise their ambitions to tackle climate change and the expertise of the Friends of COP will be important in helping boost climate action across the globe.

Alok Sharma, COP26 President and Secretary of State for the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy

If you want to get involved, COP26 is encouraging you to visit “The Race To Zero” which you can learn about here.  Race To Zero is a global initiative, backed by science-based targets, to commit businesses, cities, regions, investors and universities to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 at the very latest.

#2 - Countries already signing up

At the UN General Assembly in September, the Chinese President, Xi Jinping unexpectedly announced that China aimed to go carbon neutral by 2060.

From the article:

Environmentalists were stunned. Cutting carbon has always been seen as an expensive chore yet here was the most polluting nation on earth - responsible for some 28% of world emissions - making an unconditional commitment to do just that regardless of whether other countries followed its lead.

A very insightful video from the Wall Street Journal, from which I’ve taken some important screenshots, discusses this – and I’m sure you can see below (from the graphics alone) what this means for the launching of new projects, programs, and portfolios related to this mammoth effort.

To achieve this goal, China will need to launch a portfolio of programs and projects.  The sheer size is astounding – it will take 5 to 20 Trillion $US to make this transition.  We’re talking about carbon capture, and a massive switch away from coal to renewable energy.  Looking at these figures - imagine the depth and breadth of project management prowess it will take to oversee this transition.

On top of this transition of energy supply, it’s also about energy use.  Look at the way number of forecasted electric vehicles dwarfs the current number – that ball on the left representing a planet 7 times the size of Jupiter and the little pink ball representing Earth.  We’re talking about a nearly 100-fold increase in just 30 years.

China's Huge Transition to Electric Vehicles by 2050

#3 - Renewables are getting cheaper

To learn about this in a fun way, check out the interactive graph here.

With it you can find (sorry, US only) data for the entire country or go state-by-state, with Texas shown as an example to look at the rise of renewables.

From the article:

That is because the cost of renewables follows the logic of all manufacturing - the more you produce, the cheaper it gets. It's like pushing on an open door - the more you build the cheaper it gets and the cheaper it gets the more you build.

Think what this means: investors won't need to be bullied by green activists into doing the right thing, they will just follow the money. And governments know that by scaling up renewables in their own economies, they help to accelerate the energy transition globally, by making renewables even cheaper and more competitive everywhere.

As evidence of the dropping costs of renewables, have a look at this data from energypost.eu:

(PV is Photovoltaic – solar panels, and CSP is Concentrated Solar Power)

#4 - COVID changes everything

I’m not going to dwell on this (after all, this was supposed to be an optimistic New Year’s Day post) but it should be clear that there are immediate effects (less travel, factories at reduced levels, building occupancy down) as well as lasting effects (switch to more virtual work locations on a more permanent basis).  You can look at the curve and see that the curve does bend down a bit.

# 5 - Business is going green, too

From the article:

The falling cost of renewable and the growing public pressure for action on climate is also transforming attitudes in business.

There are sound financial reasons for this. Why invest in new oil wells or coal power stations that will become obsolete before they can repay themselves over their 20-30-year life?

Indeed, why carry carbon risk in their portfolios at all?

The logic is already playing out in the markets. This year alone, Tesla's rocketing share price has made it the world's most valuable car company.

Meanwhile, the share price of Exxon - once the world's most valuable company of any kind - fell so far that it got booted out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average of major US corporations.

All told, there are 5 things to get your positive attitude boost for the start of 2021 – at least with respect to climate change and sustainability-in-project-management thinking!

Happy New Year!  Stay safe and remain hopeful!