James Wood
By Samantha Cart
James Wood has worked in the energy industry for more than 30 years and has lived in India, Belgium, Colombia, China and Italy representing the interests of top-tier energy companies. While his career has taken him around the world, he now calls the Mountain State home, where he was recently named the interim director of the West Virginia University (WVU) Energy Institute.
A Résumé for Success
Wood’s impressive work history is what made him a prime candidate to lead the WVU Energy Institute. In the past, he has served as chairman and CEO of ThermoEnergy Corporation; co-founder, president and CEO of Babcock Power Inc.; president and COO of Babcock & Wilcox Co.; executive vice president of McDermott International, Inc.; president of WTI International Inc.; and senior vice president and general manager of Wheelabrator Environmental Systems Inc.
He also served as the deputy assistant secretary of the Office of Clean Coal in the U.S. Department of Energy from 2009-2012, during which time he oversaw the Clean Coal Program and $4.5 billion of congressional appropriations for coal-related research and projects. He represented the U.S. as a delegate to the 1995 Presidential Mission on Sustainable Energy and Trade to China and has accepted federal appointments to the National Coal Council and the U.S.-Egypt Presidents’ Council.
Along with serving the WVU Energy Institute, Wood is also the director of the U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center’s (CERC) Advanced Coal Technology Consortium (ACTC), which is based at WVU.
A joint initiative between the U.S. and China to accelerate the research, development and deployment of clean energy technologies, the ACTC engages scientists, engineers, researchers and industry leaders from around the U.S. to make strides in five focus areas, including advanced coal technologies and carbon capture.
A Hub for Innovation
As the university’s central hub for energy research, the WVU Energy Institute is dedicated to facilitating innovative and sustainable solutions for the future of energy in the Mountain State and the U.S. As interim director, Wood works with stakeholders both within the university and across the state and region to promote economic development, provide counsel to the state’s energy sector and facilitate research projects and partnerships. Wood’s first directive upon joining the institute was to merge it with the National Research Center on Coal and Energy.
“I wanted to put together an organization that is more responsive to the kinds of things WVU intended when it drew up the energy institute,” he says. “I think WVU intended to advance the commercialization of intellectual property (IP), bring in funding and help researchers in terms of project management and looking for equity partners. Making an organization structure that combines the power of two groups seems to work, is cost effective and brings relevant IP to fruition.
The WVU Energy Institute is working on a number of exciting research projects, including capturing rare earth elements from acid mine drainage, developing fracking techniques that reduce leakage from well-pad laterals and conducting early-stage research to see if methane can be broken up into different components, the outcome of which would be carbon fiber and hydrogen produced at a lower cost with little to no CO2 emission
“Pure natural gas is methane, and we’re looking for ways to separate that into its components,” says Wood. “The way that is done in the market today is by steam methane reforming, which releases large amounts of
carbon dioxide. Researchers here are trying to produce inexpensive, high-strength carbon fiber and hydrogen. I think they’re making progress, and if they do, it will make major changes to that industry.”
While Wood was named interim director in late 2018, he has actually been at WVU in some capacity since 2014.
“When the DOE and China formed the U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center, one of the elements was the ACTC,” he says. “WVU competed and won management of the ACTC, but it was having a problem getting cost share. The consortium consisted of a few universities and private-sector companies. The private-sector companies weren’t enough, so I joined to see if I could find additional cost share partners. I managed to convince a few utilities like Southern Company and Duke Energy and put together the money we needed. I’ve been here ever since.”
While Wood’s background is not in academia, his career experience is what landed him the interim role when the previous director, Brian Anderson, Ph.D., left to lead the National Energy Technology Laboratory
“I don’t have a Ph.D., I’m not a professor, and I’m not tenured, but I’ve been in business for many years,” he says. “I know a lot of people, technologies and users of energy, and that background is important at this institute because there is an expectation here that we will be helpful in finding ways to commercialize the technologies we’re researching and creating. I co-founded Babcock Power from elements of a bankrupt German company.
There is a lot of experience in the background I’ve had running companies, conducting research and funding research. I also had a 20-year run as a trustee of Clarkson University, which gave me a working knowledge of how universities operate and what to expect.”
A Shifting Industry
With his notable background and experience, Wood brings a unique perspective on the state of the energy industry in West Virginia and the U.S. as a whole. He believes that by 2040, the country will have drastically reduced its carbon emissions in the energy sector, thanks in large part to the oil and natural gas boom.
“When I was growing up, people would say we’re running out of oil, the last barrel of oil will be sold in 10 years and the last molecule of gas in 12 years,” he says. “Today the U.S. is an exporter of oil and gas, and West Virginia sits on an ocean of natural gas in the Marcellus and Utica shale plays. In terms of oil and gas, the country is moving forward in ways I wouldn’t have thought possible years ago.”
While he is encouraged by the use of solar and wind energy in many parts of the country, Wood understands they are not a replacement for all fossil fuels.
“Solar energy would be pretty dire in an area where you have 200 days of cloudiness,” he says. “It’s a risky investment, but it’s also inevitable that coal, in terms of its use in producing electricity in the U.S., is going to drop off.”
According to Wood, when coal is combusted and cleaned as well as it can be, it still produces twice as much carbon as the same amount of energy in natural gas, which is why he is so excited about the exploration into what West Virginia can do with its natural gas—particularly its natural gas liquids (NGLs).
“We’re just beginning to explore NGLs here, which are valuable in their own right and can be refined into useful products like plastic,” he says. “Today, those NGLs are being shipped to the Gulf or stored in tanks or on railroad cars while people think about how to form a petrochemical
industry here that would take those NGLs and refine them into usable products. In other parts of the country, when resources like this exist, most people send them elsewhere to be distributed. In West Virginia, there is so much, it would be a huge advantage to form a distribution center here.
Like his predecessor, Wood believes the creation of the Appalachia Storage and Trading Hub and the downstream manufacturing opportunities it would create would be overwhelmingly beneficial to the Mountain State
“The gas is definitely going to be produced here. The question is whether the NGLs will be produced here too,” he says. “The other choice is to send our resources south to the Gulf states and let their refineries convert the liquids into higher-chain, usable products and send them back north to be sold, but the storage hub would help reduce the chances of gas leaking out of the pipelines and other transportation components while being moved around. The work can be done here for quite a bit less than in Texas, so we have an advantage there, and that advantage should help sell that natural gas. It’s going to be produced anyway, and we should appreciate it based on its carbon footprint as compared to coal. This location is a fine place to put refinery activities. They get along in the neighborhood, they produce economic value, they provide taxes for schools, and they offer a lot of employment. What would be wrong with having that here?”
Wood believes the number one resource needed to get the storage hub off the ground is investment capital.
“We will need investors willing and able to take a risk,” he says. “That is something I think needs to achieve a higher level of focus in West Virginia. If you walk down the street in New York City for five minutes, you walk by more investment capital than you would if you walked from Morgantown to Charleston. The ability to attract and retain investment capital is very important here, and that is a focus we have at the energy institute.”
A Push to Go Green
While West Virginia works toward the creation of the Appalachia Storage and Trading Hub and restarting its various pipeline projects, the threat of additional environmental regulations is always looming. However, Wood believes the state’s change in focus from coal to natural gas has softened the environmental community’s gaze for the moment.
“I don’t know if we’ll see more regulations on carbon emissions from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),” he says. “It seems the environmental community is waiting to see how natural gas might be a transition fuel away from coal, so why should it impede the growth of natural gas-powered plants? The reduction in CO2 emissions from the U.S. over just the past four years has been dramatic. There is a lot of data on it. Some of it is conflicting data, but all the data says it’s down.”
While the EPA may continue to dole out regulations and the WVU Energy Institute continues working hard to find creative ways to reduce CO2 emissions, Wood believes it will ultimately be the investing public that pushes the hardest for a more responsible emissions economy.
“Consumers are pushing hard on utility corporate management and utility boards of directors to be greener and produce less carbon emissions,” he says. “While utilities need reliability and safety—these are their primary issues—they are also responding to this push in big ways. We have relationships through CERC, including domestic utilities, and we know leadership is working hard to make their companies carbon free by 2025-2040. That is an amazing change. It is not a change made by government mandate—this is the consuming and investing public telling management they want clean energy. I think it’s an amazing turnabout from days gone by when those decisions would go to a public service commission and be debated forever and eventually some decisions would be made. Because much of U.S. energy is independent and less regulated, the utilities are free to do this on their own and make decisions they think are in the best interest of their owners and consumers, and they’ve gone to great lengths to do this.”
While WVU may eventually begin the search for a new full-time director of its energy institute, Wood is more than happy to stay and continue his diligent work for the betterment of the Mountain State.
“WVU is an R1 research institute—the highest category of these type of institutions in the U.S.,” he says. “We intend to use the energy institute to strengthen the research capabilities of WVU and produce value-added, outcome-based research in the energy field.”
