A Traveling Day

12 May 2011

A traveling Day

Today I depart Chicago for home. My flight is at noon, which is a strange of time of day for me to depart. The conference started at 10, so I didn't have time to spend there at all. Ken will have to cover the activity alone today, as I did yesterday. He can handle it. I arrived at the airport a bit early and now I am sitting in the Delta Crown Room, the special area with free booze and food for frequent travelers. Since my personal policy is not to drink until after 5:00 normally I am having a cup of tea and a jam-filled thing that looks like an oversized Fig Newton. Very tasty.

Last night was the Gala Reception put on by one of the big companies at the Power Conference, complete with free drinks, food, and dancing girls. They started a rumor that these were the GooGoo Dlls, but I don;t think that is true. They did sing and dance, however, and the party was well attended. I suffered a burden of riches, as I was invited to this one, and to another one. Ken and I attended both, but we bolted the one for the other, thinking the fancy party would be better than the stodgy, guys-only work party. We gave up a better bar and better food for a floor show, which actually didn't seem like that great a trade to me.

The conference was filled with vendors again, and many were singing the blues with respect to biomass projects and lack of orders for equipment. I had to work this morning on re-submitting a final proposal for a project in Stockton CA that is worth $3.6 million, and they are going to issue the PO to us next week. No, really. So we have that one, and there have been several others in the past month that add up to several million dollars in rock solid sales, so I am not quite as negative about biomass as others. We are doing very well.

The Power Conference is all about electric power in its many forms, but mostly about coal power. One of the hot topics is the prospect of exporting coal to other countries, primarily China. The economics seem to work, and with the curtailments of coal use in the USA in favor of more expensive fuels there is excess capacity in the existing coal mining and transportation industries. All they need is an export terminal and empty boats. Bellingham is #1 on the list of new ports to be built, and everyone with any possible interest in that project was talking about it. We were encouraged to offer our equipment, too.

In Washington there are people who are not in favor of having trains of coal rumbling through town, and don't want to see "USA raw material resources" exported to 3rd world countries. They seem to think that China would be better off with some other energy source, and perhaps they would be, but the economics of coal are hard to ignore. China needs to clean up their processing facilities, for sure, but I'm not sure I oppose the exporting of coal when we are already exporting trees from Washington and buying back finished goods. We used to complain that Japan was sucking up all the good trees in the PNW, and they were, but now China and Korea have joined the party in this regard. Customers on the Olympic Peninsula are struggling to find enough wood to run, even when they have hardly any orders for lumber to fill! It is a strange confluence of factors at work here.