Gorilla Sized Opportunity Blindness
by Stafford “Doc” Williamson (Biofuels Digest) … Just barely less than a year ago, I was working with a volunteer “mentor” we had drawn into a working group who wanted to find financing for a pair of technologies still in the labs of a nearby university. This mentor, clearly a man who was not only wise, but wiser than we gave him credit for being at that time, had insisted that we make calculations based on a wholesale price for raw algae oil, so-called “green crude” at US$1.00 per gallon.
Collectively (and silently, I think) we all groaned, but went to work on mashing the budget into something that would support a wholesale price of just US$1.00 per gallon.
We assembled our pitch, and faced a panel of decision makers. …
Various questions were raised, I gather my answers were less than persuasive, and I thanked them for their attention. Clearly my communications skills needed honing to reach my audience and their wallets, but as if I needed proof, one final blow was delivered as I exited.
It was not a question so much as a comment. I had been talking for half an hour about vast quantities of land, oil and markets, but primarily discussing dollars per gallon (for the algae oil). As I departed one of the panel tossed this at me: “When are you going to be able to compete with $100 per gallon (sic–barrel?) crude?”
Up to that point, no one had spoken of BOE (barrel of oil equivalent) or any similar term for the entire time I was in the room, and it left me stunned. It didn’t register in my brain that he was even talking about the same subject any more. I had just spent a half hour talking about US$1.00 per gallon algae oil wholesale price, and he wanted to know when algae oil could compete with $100/bbl petroleum, which, of course was 42 gallons worth of oil (WTI or otherwise). Somehow I had failed to register with this gentleman that I was already talking in terms of US$42/BOE.
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I have to wonder if it was not, at least partially, what is known in psychological circles as “change blindness”. The phrase refers to a tendency we humans have which causes us to believe that we are seeing what we expect to see.
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This gentleman, the one who spoke out, apparently expected to see yet another presentation that did not solve the cost to value problem in cultivation and production of algae oil as a fuel. His perception failed to grasp that we were so far beyond this issue that it was not even a question of petroleum prices being relevant (because oil was, at that time somewhere in the US$100/bbl range). He heard the cost of US$2.5 to 3 million just to get these technologies out of their labs and into demonstration scale operations, yet he simply could not see the “invisible gorilla”…
In this case our “invisible” part was that we had already exceeded the standard he was used to hearing about of $100/bbl. of petroleum. Not merely exceeding it, but exceeding that level by nearly 60% as we began our discussion.
Now, of course, the opposite might have been true. If this person, with the apparently negative view toward “algae as fuel” economic viability within the foreseeable future had noticed the figures his reaction might have been quite different. If he had noticed that the gallons produced number and the dollars of gross revenue were the same, down to the penny, he might have fallen out of his chair laughing at the impossibility that he would have (or could have) perceived as completely implausible in the first place.
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Let’s not allow short term economic conditions to cause gorilla sized opportunity blindness. It has been my observation that the answers already exist in the labs of the scientists, we just have to help them provide proof that they solve the problems of economic renewable fuels. READ MORE
