The Sage of Hastings-on-Hudson: The Wit and Wisdom of Ron Cascone

March 7, 2021 |

In New York, Ronald F. Cascone died on Friday, March 5th from complications of COVID and after a long battle with esophageal cancer. He was 77. Cascone was known around the world as one of the foremost authorities on the advanced bioeconomy, an acerbic critic of cant, pettifoggery and hype and a champion of emerging technology. 

A chemical engineer by training, he was a principal in the Nexant energy consulting practice (and its predecessors) for more than 30 years, after many years at Scientific Design Company. In the past 10 years he graced the ABLC stage many times, often as a member of the Due Diligence Wolfpack. He leaves behind his wife, Judith, daughters Kristina, Elena, and Gabriella; his brother Peter Cascone and nephews Alex and Max Cascone; sons-in-law Thomas Bracken and Geno Donnelly; and grandchildren Brielle and James Donnelly.

In recent years, he fought off a series of illnesses with little complaint: stomach and esophageal cancer, an arachnoid cyst on his spinal column, and a MRSA infection which cost him a toe. His great gifts were a rare ability to mentor, a ready wit, generosity of spirit, and a skill in calling balls and strikes in advanced technology that in baseball would have landed him at Cooperstown in the Hall of Fame.

Though work called him to the east side of Westchester, just north of New York City, home was on the west side of the county, in Hastings-on-Hudson, on the bluffs above the Hudson River, in that stretch of land north of Yonkers and south of the Tappan Zee Bridge that is often called “Washington Irving country” after the author of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow and other tales. Cascone lived about four miles south of Irving’s home, Sunnyside, and they shared a belief that, as Irving once put it, “Great minds have purposes, others have wishes.” 

He had purpose, in spades, and an ability to spot winners early. He was such as early champion of Origin Materials that he might have been the first to bring it to The Digest’s attention (as Micromidas) and he took pleasure in the company’s gigantic success in recent months and years. But his commitment to a transitioning economy made him nobody’s fool, and he never let his heart interfere with conclusions drawn from hard data. In that sense, he was everything that an engineer should be.

Washington Irving also wrote that “the natural effect of sorrow over the dead to to refine and elevate the world,” and in that spirit, I offer up a sampling of Ron Cascone’s wit and wisdom over the years, not previously published. 

On Carbon Capture and Utilization: 

I don’t mean to be a downer, because I am basically optimistic, but all the CCU developers I am aware of, including chemicals, fuels, and algae paradigms (God bless their souls), are way far from making a serious impact on GHG emissions in my lifetime.   And, most of them depend on the deus ex machine of renewable electricity to work (e.g., OakBio, great people, great platform, but notice, they are defaulting from fuels to chemicals).   The supply of renewable electricity is a zero-sum game, unless you can use your technology as a way of exploiting off-peak electricity for which there is no demand (but this must be shown to be better than the energy storage alternatives)

Feeding a chemical or fermentation process on CO2 is an uphill climb on the entropy ladder.  I say, unless you are making a non-recourse transportation fuel (jet and/or marine), use the renewable electricity for automobile, truck, or train mobility, lighting. Home heating, etc., and avoid using fossil fuels for these or power generation in general.   Plants fix carbon – I should not have to build a machine to do that.  CCU, in general, is playing games with CO2 emissions. 

On Carbon Capture and Sequestration:

As usual, your use of popular culture memes like Monty Python’s Dead Parrot is fun. But, no, the parrot really is dead. 

Scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere or from combustion stacks (CCS) is utter nonsense.  That is, until we have dealt in some useful/profitable way with all of the essentially pure CO2 coming out of every fermentation stack on the planet.   For the global ethanol industry alone, that is in the order of 125 million tons per year. In addition to this are all the breweries and other commercial fermentations around the planet.   If we got “down to” $100/ton with the Solar Fuels approach and collected this much with their process, that would be wasting “only” about $12.5 billion relative to the ethanol stacks alone.  

Next, we should look at the stacks of partial oxidations like ethylene oxide which are also nearly pure CO2, and at cement plants, lime kilns, and glass plants, with CO2-enriched stacks.  About 4 billion tons of Portland cement are made a year, with emissions from calcining thereby alone at 1.1 billion tons ($110 billion dollars potential wasted). Add to that lime, glass, bauxite, and other minerals calcining, My guess is that the larger global opportunity for accessing CO2-rich stacks is on the order of $0.25 trillion vs. Solar Fuels.

On making oils from woods:

If you find anyone who wants to  have due diligence done on this or another tree-based, non-food natural oil production, I have my own Wolf Pack here that would be very eager and is highly qualified to nip at the heels of this particular caribou.     

On GMOs

I fear that rationality is only one component in this discussion.  There is a tribal phenomenon afoot more in food than perhaps in any other area. Good luck with marketing GMOs. And the other side is not totally wrong – de gustibus non disputandum est, (“In matters of taste, there can be no disputes”).  Some people believe that heirloom cultivars, locally grown, taste better. I agree. Obviously, the likes of Monsanto painted themselves into a corner by acting like the Evil Empire/Death Star.

We cannot afford to be Luddites, with all the problems we have.   The organics movement has lots of good ideas, but GMO has also.  Nature is so awesome, and we have only scratched the surface.  We cannot approach these issues with unsupported beliefs and magic ideas. We have to find the best of each to move forward.

On Bio vs Fossil and fixed thinking

I have just one point on the idea of a low/no-wax FT operation, which. as you report correctly, would reduce the capex and opex drastically. In this area, there is an extreme dichotomy between the petro world and the bio world. If you operate a conventional FT under perfectly feasible conditions that minimize wax production, you make a lot of methane and some LPG. This is to be avoided if feeding fossil methane (you don’t want to reform methane just to make more methane).  However, if you use syngas from cow manure, wood chips, or other biomass fed to a gasifier, or even whole biogas from an AD, and you make lots of methane along with liquids, that’s called RNG, and it is very valuable in California, the EU, and other jurisdictions. This solution has been available to us all along, it’s just that people can’t think outside the box.

On Ammonia:

Ammonia is related to, but much better than H2 as a fuel. Let’s remember that, while hydrogen is an important, even critical, industrial chemical, “it is the fuel of the future, and always will be”. Compared to hydrogen as a fuel, ammonia is much more energy efficient, and could be produced, stored, and delivered at a much lower cost than hydrogen which must be kept compressed as a cryogenic liquid.  However, unlike hydrogen, ammonia is not a high-tech “bright shiney object” so it doesn’t get as much R&D attention and funding.

On Fuel Cells:

I am not against fuel cells, I am just disdainful of proton-exchange membrane fuel cells, for much as the same reasons as hydrogen for transportation. They need very pure hydrogen and are thus impractical for consumer use  and part of the same scam (guilt by association). On the other hand, SOFCs, such as from Bloom Energy, can utilize NG/RNG, LPG, methanol, ethanol, DME, syngas, and even low S diesel. For power applications, these more than competitive with GTs, with a fuel to power efficiency claimed to be around 60% and a fuel to CHP efficiency of 80%.

On swapping, and book-and-claim systems for renewables 

Is the BP gasoline you fill up with always a refinery product of BP?  Do you care? How about the electricity you buy from an ESCO in Texas?  Maybe you are buying “green power”.  Are those electrons actually coming from Texas? Swapping has long been the way of life for many fungible commodities the world over.  I think a guy named JD Rockefeller may have used something like it to get in business.

On Risk and technology:

Perception of risk is a funny thing.  Humans have not evolved to recognize or respond to long term risks, like Climate, smoking, dying from poor diet or alcohol, versus short term gratification.  A plane crash happens (in the old days), and people are afraid to fly for weeks, despite that people are dying in vastly greater numbers in cars, buses, or even showers.  The classic example is that “if all the people that die in the UK from smoking were to do so all together on Sunday afternoon on a day in June in Trafalgar Square, there would be no more smokers in the UK after that.”   I am not so sure, because when I took a clinic to stop smoking at NYU Hospital 32 years ago, there was a guy who was still coming back after three lung cancer treatments, and another that was still smoking through his tracheotomy.

On Carbon pricing:

“If I could predict oil prices, I would be rich”.   I fervently hope and pray that we will have a carbon pricing regime in the USA and elsewhere within the next couple of years.   I dearly love the NRDC, and have contributed to them, but they sometimes make mistakes.   They make a religion of hating methane, so their thinking is skewed. If there was ever a poster child of rejecting the good for the better, this is it. What they are missing is the cost of implementing the solutions they prefer, which indeed are part of the overall solution.

On “Green” hydrogen:

I am also concerned about the provenance of green hydrogen. As far as moving it from a stranded place, say, without biomass (maybe like in the Saudi desert by solar PV with minimal grid demand) is to make green ammonia that one can dissociate extremely easily (reverse Haber process) to H2 and N2.  In small scale, this technology is practiced at thousands of sites for metal working, electronics manufacturing, and other high tech.  This gives me a chance to vent some more about the stupidity and naivety of the “hydrogen economy” idea with pipelines, blah, blah.  Rather than twisting ourselves into pretzels looking for solid state H2 carriers, use ammonia as the carrier.  We have known for ages how to make, handle, and transport ammonia, and it is a great liquid zero-carbon (at point of use) fuel on its own in ICEs, GTs, SOFCs, etc.

On Oil & Gas companies

I have been knee deep in petrochemicals for five decades.  I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly, but we all have to admit that the O&G top people knew for several decades about the impact of what they were doing on Climate Change and hid it from the public, shareholders, and regulators.  Is there some reason we should not consider these people at least corrupt? Perhaps not as wanton as the sleazy, slash and burn frackers, but still criminally corrupt, more like the tobacco guys. Yes, perhaps the responsible majors were not like the wildcat mom and pop frackers in terms of controlling water leaks, methane leaks, and the like, but there was no fracking without massive diesel emissions from trucking water and sand, and pressurizing operations. We worked with BOC to get frackers to use cleaner LNG fuel for pump engines, trucks, etc. They weren’t interested.

Tributes from the Due Diligence Wolfpack

Steve Weiss: Ron was a global chemical industry guru, a real professional in the best sense of the word, delightful in discussion on any topic, and a true gentleman. He will be missed. No doubt, he will live on through the many others he influenced. The phrase that comes to mind is from the TV series Boardwalk Empire. A main character, Jimmy Darmody (a returnee from World War I fighting) would pour whiskey on the ground and say “to the lost”…

Michele Rubino: What a loss! The knowledge and experience for sure … but even more how he connected with people in a very personal way. He would always try to throw in some Italian in our one-on-one conversations. It was his way of making a personal connection. He will be missed

Steve Slome: I don’t think I even have enough words to express how Ron helped and shaped my career—and I know I’m one among many in that regard.  It warms my heart that you will pay tribute to him, and understand the  unpleasantness of the necessary work to do it, makes it that much more appreciated.  We were lucky enough to have worked with Ron Cascone while he strove to make the world a better place.   

James Iademarco: Sad indeed. I have known Ron for decades, and I always admired his candor and  dedication to our industry. 

Joel Stone: We have lost a very good friend and stalwart leader in support of the bioeconomy. His expertise and advice to so many of us will be sadly missed. Ron was a personal friend and trusted expert for so may years. For me this is an Oh Wow moment. I will remember him for his candid comments and honesty in all his dealings with me and others.

David Dodds: Ron’s clarity of thought, and his ability to articulate that clarity, set him apart from the rest of us.  He was always kind, and very gracious, especially when we disagreed on a technical point.  He always prevailed of course, and I received a great education from him on these occasions.  His passing is a true loss to the community, and to me personally.

Cascone and the Wolfpack unleashed

You can hear Ron’s wit and wisdom, unvarnished in a 3-part series he recorded with the Due Diligence Wolfpack for ABLC Digital last summer, on hydrogen, methanol  and methane and RNG.

 

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