People, Planet, Profits & Projects

For our last post of 2021, I am going to leave your head spinning.  Almost literally.

It’s going to be short and sweet, but I am going to follow up with you in the clean new year.

What’s all this about spinning…and cleanliness?

I want to end 2021 by sending you to a podcast episode from Malcolm Gladwell.  He has an OUTSTANDING podcast series called Revisionist History.  I would say every episode is worth a listen.

In its own words, here’s what the podcast says about itself:

Revisionist History is Malcolm Gladwell’s journey through the overlooked and the misunderstood. Every episode re-examines something from the past — an event, a person, an idea, even a song — and asks whether we got it right the first time. Because sometimes the past deserves a second chance.

The particular episode to which I implore that you listen (and then come back early next year for a discussion) is called Laundry Done Right.  And yes.  It is about washing your clothes.  What the (insert bleep here) does this have to do with project management, you ask? 

Well, for the past 10 years or so, I have been giving talks about sustainability in project management in Italy, Costa Rica, South Africa, Canada, the USA, The Netherlands, Malaysia, and China.  And I have been using the analogy of a washing machine as a way to get project managers to – well – to become project leaders, to think about delivering value rather than just producing outputs or outcomes.  The analogy (not to give away the punch line) has to do with where the ecological value could come from in improving the whole process of washing your clothes.   It's about a cycle, all right - but not a wash cycle - or at least not only a wash cycle.  More next year - in other words, in a few days.

Gladwell nails it in this episode.  Give it a listen and I promise to connect this to sustainability thinking in project management (read that as project leadership) on the other side of 11:59:59PM, 31-December, 2021.

Hope you enjoy it.  HAPPY NEW YEAR!  May all of your projects be successful, and deliver ongoing value!

Cheers!

Rich Maltzman, PMP

As project managers we are (or should be!) very familiar with the concepts of risk response, including secondary and residual risk.  As a quick refresher, secondary risk is new risk (threat or opportunity) generated by the risk response.  For example, an air bag is a risk response to the impact of a car crash on a human.  It is possible that this very air bag causes injury to you (this has happened - see this video).  The new threat, generated by the air bag, is a secondary risk (in this case, clearly a threat).  If the air bag does not do a sufficient job in reducing the impact (perhaps it does not inflate fully), and injury still occurs, then that’s residual risk.

In this post, I’ll talk about CO2 emissions (which 99% of scientists agree is a threat) and the threat responses that have been proposed.  This is taken mainly from a Nature magazine article from this month (Vol 575, P87) and 10 “pathways”, which we can consider risk responses, and the potential secondary and residual risks of these pathways.  

Below is the abstract from the article:

"The capture and use of carbon dioxide to create valuable products might lower the net costs of reducing emissions or removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Here we review ten pathways for the utilization of carbon dioxide. Pathways that involve chemicals, fuels and microalgae might reduce emissions of carbon dioxide but have limited potential for its removal, whereas pathways that involve construction materials can both utilize and remove carbon dioxide. Land-based pathways can increase agricultural output and remove carbon dioxide. Our assessment suggests that each pathway could scale to over 0.5 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide utilization annually. However, barriers to implementation remain substantial and resource constraints prevent the simultaneous deployment of all pathways."

The pathways focus on utilization of carbon dioxide, as opposed to carbon capture and storage (CCS) which I have blogged about several times on People, Planet, Profit, and Projects, for example here, and here.

Why talk about this in a project management blog?  Well, there’s already the connection to risk identification, analysis, response, and control, but the ten pathways discussed here each offer significant potential for project initiation – and project management jobs.  So there’s another good rationale to cover this topic!

So: on to the ten ‘utilization pathways’.  Utilization here refers to the use of carbon dioxide – not as naturally occurring, but ‘concentrated’ at levels above those found in nature – to serve as raw material to supply or fuel a machine or industrial process (feedstock).  One example is using derivatives of ammonia to capture and condense the CO2 from the air for use as feedstock.  The article defines utilization as “a process in which one or more economically valuable products are produced using CO2 whether the CO2 is supplied from fossil-derived waste gases, captured from the atmosphere by an industrial process, or – in a departure from most of the literature – captured biologically by land-based processes”.

Covered below are some – not all – of the utilization pathways, but the ten that are illustrated will give you an idea of the potential projects that could be launched, and some of the secondary and residual risks involved.

In short form, the 10 pathways are:

1. Chemicals from CO2
2. Fuels from CO2
3. Products from microalgae
4. Concrete building materials
5. CO2 Enhanced Oil Recovery
6. Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage
7. Enhanced weathering
8. Forestry techniques
9. Soil carbon sequestration techniques
10. Biochar (see this reference)

The image below (from Nature magazine) provides a clear graphic explanation, including net flows, and coding as to whether the pathway is closed, cycling, or open.

(Figure from cited Nature magazine article)

Fascinating to me as a project manager were facts such as this:

“perverse indirect effects – such as land-use change resulting from BECCS* – could increase net atmospheric CO2 concentrations”.

*Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage

This is actually up for debate.  See the video below for coverage of that scientific debate about BECCS:

As far as the 10 pathways, I won’t discuss them all, but here are a couple of examples (see the article for a table that summarizes all of them):

Enhanced Weathering:

In this technique, atmospheric CO2 is mineralized through the use of pulverized igneous rocks to be used for cropland, grassland and forests.  The product is agricultural crop biomass, and it has low probability of release, except under extreme acidic conditions.  The process is described in the 8-minute video below from Harvard University.

Products from microalgae:

CO2 from the atmosphere is absorbed by microalgae, producing biofuels, and bioproducts such as food for aquaculture (fish farming).  This has a high probability of release, based on combustion and consumption of the bioproducts.

This process is explained in the short video below:

Again, what was fascinating to me as a project manager was the attention that this article gave to secondary and residual risk.  In particular there is a sidebar in the article dedicated to “net climate benefit” which refers to doing LCAs (Life Cycle Analyses) on the entire pathway to see if the process under consideration actually does contribute a net benefit or a net problem with respect to carbon impact.  The conclusion of this article is as follows:

Life-cycle analyses on some industrial CO2 utilization pathways suggest that the potential for net emission reductions is much larger than for net removals (CCS) which appears very modest.

The article closes with a mildly optimistic view of the pathways of carbon utilization:

CO2 utilization is not an end in itself, and these pathways solely or even collectively will not provide a key solution to climate change.  Nevertheless, there is a substantial societal value in continued efforts to determine what will and will not work, in what contexts the climate will or will not benefit from CO2 utilization and how expensive it will be.

From a project management perspective, the “efforts to determine what will and will not work” sounds to me like a set of projects to be launched.  The 10 pathways are already launching real projects all over the world, and the lessons learned from the life-cycle analyses are applicable to projects of all kinds.

So whether this means a new job – or even a new career path – for you, or whether this simply yields a learning opportunity, there’s value in discovering what is being done in this area of CO2 utilization.

From a recent article in Scientific American:

"In July 2012 three of India's regional electric grids failed, triggering the largest blackout on earth. More than 620 million people — 9 percent of the world's population—were left powerless.

The cause: the strain of food production from a lack of water.

Because of major drought, farmers plugged in more and more electric pumps to draw water from deeper and deeper below ground for irrigation.  Those pumps, working furiously under the hot sun, increased the demand on power plants.  At the same time, low water levels meant hydroelectric dams were generating less electricity than normal ...

Energy, water and food are the world's three most critical resources.

Although this fact is widely acknowledged in policy circles, the interdependence of these resources on one another is significantly underappreciated.

Strains on any one can cripple the others."

Sound a little familiar?  Increase your project's scope, and you proably have a budget and schedule problem.  Fiddle with the schedule, bringing the date in by 3 weeks, and you probably have to spend money on overtime and may have to leave out some featres.  Got hit with a budget cut?  Get ready to just admit that the delivery date has moved out by a couple of weeks, and/or once again, you have to take a scissors to some features.

Sure enough, the Iron Triangle - or Triple Constraint - has lost its mojo recently, at least in terms of presence in the PMBOK(R) Guide.

But as Gene Wilder said so well in Young Frankenstein... "IT"S ALIVE!". 

Sure, the PMBOK(R) Guide 5th Edition talks about multiple contratints on page 6, and now leaves out the formal reference to the Triple Constraint, but you know - you feel - that it is still there.  And it often rules your proejct - doesn't it?

Now back to Scientific American.  The point of the article - definitely worth a read - is that the triad of Food, Water, and Energy is a similar set of constraints.  And as we work on our projects, it's worth thinking about the relationships that our project - and the project's outcomes - have on the social infrastructure around them.   We realize that not every project has the obvious connection to food, water, and energy, but any such connection is easier to imagine if you think about the product of your project in action -  cumulatively - say 5 or 10 years from now.  And it may not be the exact "Cripple Constraint" called out by Scientific American, it may be some other set of dependent variables.

We just urge you to think about your project - just as Gene Wilder did - not only in its assembly stages - but when... IT'S ALIVE!

As project managers we are often faced with tough descisions.

So it's a relief, isn't it, when you stop off at the market on the way home from a long day of progressive elaboration and rolling-wave planning, Monte-Carloing, Paretoing, and determining the Estimate at Completion, that the only decision you have to make is.... Paper or Plastic for your bag.

What a relief.  An easy, no-brainer.  Paper!  Right?  It's brown, it's re-used materials... right?  Right?  RIGHT?

Not necessarily.

We think there is actually quite a lessons-learned in the area of Procurement Management for your projects in the video we provide below.

The speaker,  Leyla Acaroglu is outstanding as she provides a flowing, logical description of how purchasing decisions should really be made.  She's speaking in general, but if you have your "PM antennae" on, and you're willling to think a little more holistically about your project - including the time after the moment you leave the project because it's turned over to your client - you'll find that this talk can help you in your PM decision making.

You're going to find definitions in this talk which will be helpful as well.

• extraction
• biodegradability
• Life Cycle Assessment (or Analyisis) - LCA

This is a highly-recommended talk.  You will be that much smarter after listening.