An Ill-conceived Tax Idea

Yesterday we learned that President Obama's final budget proposal includes a plan to raise money for transportation projects and other uses by imposing a per-barrel tax on US oil companies. Here are a few quick thoughts on this ill-conceived idea:

• As I understand it, the tax would be imposed on oil companies, exempting only those volumes exported from the US. The US oil industry is currently in its deepest slump since at least the 1980s. Having broken OPEC's control of prices and delivered massive savings to US consumers and businesses, it is now enduring OPEC's response: a global price war that has driven the price of oil below replacement cost levels. This is evidenced by the recent full-year losses posted by the "upstream" oil-production units of even the largest oil companies: ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and ConocoPhillips, particularly in their US operations. The President has wanted to tax oil companies since his first day in office, but his timing here would only exacerbate these losses, putting what had been one of the healthiest parts of the US labor market under even more pressure.
• This tax would also increase OPEC's market leverage, providing a double hit on the cost of fuel for American consumers: We would pay more immediately, when the tax was imposed and companies passed on as much of it as they could, and then even more later when OPEC raised prices as competing US production became uneconomical.
• Focusing the tax on the raw material, crude oil, rather than on the products that actually go into transportation, as the current gasoline and diesel taxes do, is guaranteed to produce distortions and unintended consequences. For starters, exempting exports--a sop to global competitiveness?--would give producers a perverse incentive to send US oil overseas instead of refining it in the US. It would also shift consumption toward more expensive fuels like corn ethanol, which provides no net emissions benefits but has been shown to affect global food prices.
• Singling out oil, which is not the highest-emitting fossil fuel and for which we still lack scalable alternatives, will put all parts of the US economy that rely on oil as an input at a competitive disadvantage, globally, and undermine what had become a significant US edge in global markets. Petrochemicals, in particular, would be adversely affected. The President's staff is well aware that the distribution of lifecycle emissions from oil, and the structure of the industry and markets, make policies focused on consumption far more effective than those aimed at production. This is why his administration's first act in implementing the expanded interpretation of the Clean Air Act to greenhouse gases was to tighten vehicle fuel economy standards. Taxing the upstream industry does nothing for global emissions but makes US producers less competitive, ensuring a return to rising oil imports and deteriorating energy security.

As widely reported, the Congress will not enact a budget containing this provision. It is hard to gauge whether this proposal represents a serious attempt to inject new thinking into the debate on funding transportation upgrades, or is simply one last shot across the bow of the administration's least favorite industry before leaving office in 349 days. It's not unusual for the wheels to come off as a presidency winds down, and this particularly flaky and futile idea might just be an indicator of that.

Disclosure: My portfolio includes investments in one or more of the companies mentioned above.

Is the Photovoltaic Price Trend Sustainable?

It has been widely assumed among pundits and policy makers that the continued expansion of solar photovoltaic (PV) installations will drive down PV costs until the electricity they produce is competitive with conventional power sources without the need for subsidies. This belief is grounded in both recent PV cost trends and the well-known "experience curve" effect in manufacturing, in which costs tend to fall in proportion to cumulative output. However, anyone following the fortunes of big PV manufacturers like First Solar, SunPower, and China-based Suntech and Trina Solar might have reason to question this conventional wisdom. Their latest earnings reflect an industry stressed by softening demand in its core market in Europe and facing global overcapacity along the supply chain. This has me wondering how much of the recent decline in PV prices was due to the inherent progression of the technology, and how much to unsustainable market and competitive pressures.

The solar industry has made tremendous progress in the last several years. One indication of that is the price trend for PV in the annual "Tracking the Sun" survey from Lawrence Berkeley Lab. Between 2007 and 2010 the average cost of PV installed in the US fell by around 22%, with the largest portion of that drop occurring last year, followed by a further 11% decline in the first half of this year. Most of the reduction is attributable to the falling price of solar modules, rather than from the non-module, or "balance of system" costs (inverters, structures, installation, etc.) The fact that these declines coincided with an explosion of global PV capacity and output seems entirely consistent with expectations about the likely path of PV costs. Cumulative global PV capacity doubled twice in that interval, based on figures in the newly released Renewables 2011 Global Status report from REN21, so we'd expect to see strong experience-curve cost reductions.

The problem is that the industry dynamic behind this trend didn't much resemble the pristine image that the term "experience curve" evokes, of diligent engineers relentlessly focused on continuous improvement. Without diminishing the contribution of a lot of smart people, a key driver was the tough competition for market share between silicon-based PV, which had to overcome a major bottleneck in the supply of its primary raw material, polysilicon--the price for which spiked and subsequently collapsed--and cheaper but less efficient thin-film PV technologies relying on entirely different chemistries such as cadmium telluride and copper, indium, gallium and selenium.

A further hint that this wasn't quite the standard picture of predictable cost declines promoted by the PV industry is that PV prices appear to have been falling faster than actual costs, which in the case of at least some manufacturers are no longer dropping much at all. This can be inferred from the compression of gross margins reported by the leading firms, and in results that show profits stalling or falling even as volume grows. SunPower, the largest US silicon-based PV maker, reported a net loss for the third quarter of 2011, following a loss in Q2, and issued guidance forecasting a loss in 4Q, as well. We'll get a better picture of the health of the big China-based producers when they report 3Q earnings next week, but in the second quarter Suntech, the world's largest solar panel maker, reported a substantial loss, even though sales were up by a third from a year earlier, similar to results at rival JA Solar. In response Suntech and other Asian producers have apparently slowed planned expansions and reduced throughput at existing facilities, while US PV leader First Solar postponed its new factory in Vietnam.

It's a testament to the ingenuity of the big, established PV producers that they haven't all shared the fate of Solyndra after investing so much in expanding capacity ahead of demand--a major accomplishment in itself when demand has been growing by roughly 80% per year--only to see the market weaken due to a prolonged economic slump and a financial crisis in Europe that has undermined the ability of governments to provide generous subsidies for PV installations. Assumptions about the future cost trend of PV won't mean much if the industry doesn't emerge from its current difficulties as a collection of healthy firms with solid balance sheets and financial performance that investors find attractive. That will require better margins achieved by some combination of improved pricing power--implying better matching of capacity to demand--and cost reductions that don't just rely on further scale-up, which will become less fruitful as experience-curve benefits stretch out.

In other words, even if PV manufacturing costs continue to fall quickly for the next few years, it's less clear that the PV prices paid by project developers, businesses and consumers will follow suit, particularly if the current low margins lead to a global shakeout or consolidation among producers. Time will tell whether the solar industry can sustain the cost path that it's been on, or if future cost reductions will be more modest, in which case a number of scenarios for future PV penetration and renewables-based emissions reductions would require revision.

The SUV Advantage

Thanks to some glitches in hotel broadband access, yesterday's intended posting became this morning's, and today's is now this afternoon's.

A colleague sent me a link to a story in the New Yorker advancing an interesting explanation of the apparent contradiction between Americans' support for improved fuel economy standards and our ongoing love affair with large, inefficient vehicles. It immediately resonated with something I had recently read in The Economist, on the topic of "ultimatum games." At the core of both of these ideas is the innate competitiveness of humans. Recognizing this might be the necessary first step towards diverting this competition onto a more generally beneficial path, at least in the way our vehicle choices affect national energy consumption.

The New Yorker looks at our desire for bigger and more powerful cars and concludes that it is a manifestation of the same underlying causes that led individual hockey players to eschew helmets until they became mandatory: the pursuit of a personal competitive edge. If you go back to the beginning of the SUV trend in the 1980s, it's easy to see how this could develop. The drivers of early SUVs were afforded a privileged position above the general sightline of traffic, and the resulting impressions of greater safety and dominance would be a natural, and probably self-reinforcing reaction. But as increasing numbers of SUVs entered the fleet, this advantage quickly eroded. If the car in front of you was an SUV, you were effectively back to where you had been in a sedan. The only solution would be a bigger, more powerful SUV.

Does this explain the size, weight and horsepower "arms race" that ensued over the next 15-20 years? Perhaps. It certainly wouldn't have been possible without improvements in the basic technology of the internal combustion engine, which, as I've noted before, were diverted into the horsepower necessary to deliver higher performance in increasingly heavy cars, rather than into fuel economy that looked unimportant with US retail gasoline prices averaging $1.20/gallon from 1990-2002.

And the results of the "ultimatum game", which The Economist describes as a preference for "relative rather than absolute prosperity" might help explain why, even after realizing that big car dominance had been largely nullified by the proliferation of ever bigger cars, new car buyers didn't quickly shift back to smaller, more efficient cars, when fuel prices started going up four years ago. Lags in future gas price expectations may have reinforced this reluctance.

But does knowing we are competitive make us less so? Or is our best option to try to alter the basis on which we compete? What would it take to elevate efficiency and low environmental impact above our perception that in cars, larger is automatically safer, and brisk acceleration is more reflective of the winners we aspire to be? Can we imagine a world in which we try to "out-green" each other, instead?

Short Memories

One of my ongoing themes here is that, despite high energy prices that now rival those of the last energy crisis, we are not experiencing the second coming of the 1970s. Unfortunately, we do seem fated to revisit every bad energy idea from that period, and today we have two on display. First, a columnist in the Washington Post proposes establishing a national oil company (NOC) to promote expanded supply, new refineries, and "hyper-competitive" pricing. Then later this morning the Joint Economic Committee of the Congress is holding a hearing on whether to pursue breaking up the largest US oil companies. At this rate, I'd better make room in my closet for the paisley shirts and leisure suits that must surely be on their way.

In his column Steven Pearlstein anticipates all sorts of oil industry opposition to the idea of a chartered national oil company set up to compete with them, and given all sorts of breaks on refinery siting and permitting and production from federal lands. Never mind that if the existing oil companies had been given those breaks when energy prices were low, we might not be in the present pickle. While I'm sure Mr. Pearlstein's plan would provoke the expected response from energy companies and trade associations, the biggest complaints ought to come from taxpayers and watchdog groups. This approach was tried all over the developed world in the 1970s, and with very few exceptions, it was given up as a bad idea. The successful NOCs are all in big net-producing countries, not net consumers. The history of Petro-Canada, founded in 1975 and 80% privatized in the early 1990s, illustrates this cycle. Mr. Pearlstein probably isn't serious, of course. His contrasting portrayal of a hypothetical NOC seems mainly intended to shame the publicly-traded oil firms for being profitable and rewarding their shareholders. But in today's climate, I wouldn't be surprised to see some legislator take up this mock cause.

Turning to today's Congressional hearing, it has become an article of faith in some quarters that the country's energy woes are the result of the industry consolidation that took place in the late nineties and early oughts. Smaller, more aggressive competitors would have apparently increased oil production and expanded their refineries at a faster pace, so that while global oil prices might now be high, at least refining margins would be lower, with consumers paying more like $2.40/gallon, instead of $3.22. But while you're unlikely to find an industry insider less enamored of merger mania than I am, this scenario flies in the face of the economic facts that drove those mergers in the first place.

From 1997-2001 I worked in Texaco's Corporate Planning & Economics Department. During that period, we experienced the disdain of investors for "old economy" industrial firms that needed capital to compete with the growing power of the NOCs in producing countries, which held more than 80% of the world's oil reserves. We just weren't New Economy enough. Then, to add insult to injury, the price of oil collapsed from the $20s to single digits, before recovering. The mergers triggered by these events weren't focused on market domination and pricing power: they were about ensuring the survival of an industry that had just come through a near-death experience.

One of the other concerns that occupied much of my time in that period was refineries. Simply put, they were dogs. Not only were US refineries consistently earning less than the cost of capital, but they were a constant drain on capital, because of wave after wave of environmental investments in reformulated gasoline and ever-lower sulfur diesel fuel, for which consumers didn't want to pay an extra penny. All that management wanted to do was to find ways to reduce our exposure to this awful sector, and that's exactly what we and the other majors did, through joint ventures and outright sales. Is it any wonder that, on the back end of such a cycle--when demand growth has outstripped domestic capacity and our reliance on gasoline imports from Europe and elsewhere has grown steadily--refining margins are finally enjoying a bonanza? If oil companies invested as much in new refining capacity as their critics would like--even if new greenfield facilities could get permits--the result would likely be another protracted cyclical bust. In the face of a 35 billion gallon/year alternative fuels mandate, that may just happen anyway.

I persist in my hope that enough of us actually learned something from the experience of the 1970s and the energy price cycles that followed that first energy crisis. If we want to ensure that the US has access to the oil and gas it will need during a lengthy transition away from fossil fuels, then what we need is not a national oil company, and certainly not a gaggle of smaller oil companies. Instead, we need a strong, dynamic energy sector, led by companies big enough to deal with the NOCs as equals and to take expensive risks on the frontiers of technology, whether in ultra-deepwater drilling or cellulosic ethanol. The times demand something much better than merely recycling the ill-considered notions of the past.