Blessed by the Potato

Spring is in the air, and the flu season is pretty much over. Colds are a different matter: everyone I know seems to have caught this nasty cold that’s going around. I’ve been fighting it myself for almost 3 weeks now: I’ll be miserably sick for a day or two, then feel almost all better for a few days, just to have it sneak back up on me again when I’m not looking.

The H1N1 seems to have burned itself out in North America, and indeed it’s been months since I’ve even heard it mentioned on the news. Steven Novella over at the Neurologica blog provides an update of how it played out in the US. I believe the numbers for Canada are similar, but I haven’t gone to look them up yet. What’s interesting is that we were hit quite hard here in London with it, very early on in the flu season, but then it fizzled out shortly after the vaccination program/holidays. I can’t say whether it’s because the vaccination (and hand hygiene) program was so effective, or if it would have gone away on its own… but either way, it wasn’t all that bad. What’s interesting is that the normal seasonal flu didn’t look to be as bad this year for us too.

Now I expect people will start to second-guess the vaccination program, since there was so much hand-wringing about it to begin with. I’m still not really convinced H1N1 was “overhyped” that much — it did look like it had the potential to be quite serious, and based on the information I had at the time, I don’t regret at all getting the shot myself.

I took a look at Zenn Motor Company (ZNN on the toronto venture exchange) and it looks pretty bad, maybe bad enough to short.

They’re a company that produced what are basically glorified golf carts (low speed electric vehicles). Their plant is in Quebec, so they were a bit of a Canadian success story for a while, except that they couldn’t quite turn a profit, and Canada wouldn’t license their cars to be used on our roads.

Now they’re going to shut down their manufacturing business and become a “solutions provider” — try to sell their electric drivetrain to a larger OEM. Makes sense since they’ve been burning through their pile of cash and their prospects haven’t been improving much. Except almost all the major car companies already have home-grown electric car divisions, so I can’t see this strategy actually working for them, especially since their drivetrain was fairly unremarkable.

The one thing they do have is an interest in EEStor, a private company developing a “revolutionary” energy storage system for electric cars. Zenn owns 10% of EEStor and has exclusive rights to distribute the EEStor capacitors for automotive use.

Tangible book value of ~$0.30/sh, and ZNN is trading at ~$2.50, so people are basically paying $2.20 for that piece of EEStor.

Now EEStor may have something that works as claimed — supposedly someone at Lockheed-Martin got to look at a prototype, but they haven’t been too open about what they have yet. More importantly, they claim that their capacitors can be produced cheaply, which has yet to be demonstrated. Production was supposed to have started in mid-2008 originally, and here we are into 2010 and we have yet to see the first unit.

I seriously suspect EEStor is just smoke-and-mirrors, and was considering putting my money where my mouth is on that front by setting up a short on Zenn.

Unfortunately on the off chance that they do have something real a short could go quite badly. Also, since Zenn has essentially no debt to speak of, there’s no near-term default-type event to push them down, so we could be right but still lose money if it takes years for them to finally burn through their cash and hit zero.

It looks like a case where the short thesis could be completely right: the company may be worthless in the long run, and EEStor’s long-awaited technology may not be competitive with what the big players have developed in-house for batteries if it ever comes out at all… but you still couldn’t make money off the short since the stock is all hype, and more empty promises from EEStor could send the stock to the moon between now and when it does finally hit zero.

The Globe and Mail looks to have been taken in by a perpetual motion machine type scammer in today’s article “Texas university has eureka moment for coal-to-gas”.

I’m not saying that there’s necessarily anything wrong with the main topic of the article: it is possible to make gasoline or other liquid fuels from coal, and researchers in Texas may have found a way to do so economically. What I take issue with are these lines:

“Far better, he said, to capture CO{-2} right at power plants and convert it into crude on the spot. ” … “Assuming, arbitrarily for the moment, that Texas has struck oil in a huge way yet again, UTA’s announcement shows that energy research has finally begun to move in the right direction – simultaneously toward clean coal and the commercial exploitation of carbon dioxide. The reasons are obvious. The world has enough coal reserves to last for centuries. And it has enough CO{-2} – used as an abundant new raw material – to last forever. Harnessed together, this cheap coal and this greenhouse gas could drive the global economy for hundreds of years. “

Carbon dioxide is the product of burning fossil fuels. You have some energy-carrying molecule, you release the energy, and you get carbon dioxide. In order to take carbon dioxide and turn it back into an energy-carrying molecule (oil, coal, sugar, whatever), you have to have a source of energy to get the energy back into the system. For biofuels, this reaction takes place inside plants using energy from the sun. To think that you can simply take the carbon dioxide from a power plant and convert it to crude on the spot is ludicrous — akin to the perpetual-motion machine ideas like putting a windmill on your car.

On top of that, it doesn’t sound like much of a breakthrough: a tonne of coal has something like 15 GJ of energy. To turn that into 1.5 barrels of oil would reduce that to something like 9 GJ of energy, and only about 25% of the mass. Where has the other 1500 lbs of coal gone? Probably used up to supply the energy for the conversion, and out as carbon dioxide. It may be economical (due to the cheap price of coal vs oil), but it’s not particularly green or efficient. Except for rare cases where liquid fuels are needed for range (or where you need to keep the tanks in the blitzkrieg rolling, no matter how much of your total energy reserves it eats up), for transportation purposes it would be far better to burn the coal to make electricity, and then use electrified transportation, than to convert it to gasoline at that kind of conversion ratio.

Update: I contacted Mr. Reynolds at the Globe to inform him that something wasn’t right in his article. He provided me with the original source, which still is missing that key ingredient of how this isn’t just a perpetual motion machine:

“Though refining the technology for converting coal and oil shales to oil is a CREST priority, converting smokestack carbon dioxide to hydrocarbon fuels is also high on the research list.

“The idea that we can dispose of massive quantities of greenhouse gases like CO2 by piping them underground or into the oceans is not very practical,” Rajeshwar says. Better to capture carbon dioxide at power plants and cement plants, convert it to carbon monoxide and then add hydrogen from a renewable source like the water trapped inside lignite coal to make what’s called syngas.

“What’s produced is a liquid hydrocarbon fuel—synthetic oil—from which we can then make any conventional fuel, like gasoline or diesel,” Rajeshwar says. “The oil produced is very similar to that produced from coal.”

These are not the only ideas making the rounds at CREST. Others abound but are not as advanced.

“This is not hypothetical academia,” Billo says. “What we’re doing here is producing real solutions to this country acquiring sustainable and affordable energy.”

And what a St. Patrick’s day it was.

I locked myself out of the house today, what must be the first time ever in my life that’s happened. My new place has these stupid locks that automatically lock when the door closes (except at the cottage I’ve always lived with deadbolts where you need the key to lock the door, so it’s impossible to lock yourself out). I left my cell phone and my wallet inside as well.

Fortunately, a friend has a key to my place and could let me in later on in the evening… but going out with my friends was going to prove to be a challenge without ID or money. That’s when the luck o’ the Irish came into play. On Monday my new license arrived in the mail, which I picked up as I was walking to work. So I had opened it there, and left my old license in my desk drawer at work. Boom, ID, I could get into a bar.

Money was then not such a big issue: I could borrow from friends, or, as it turned out, get some from work since I had reimbursed a subject out of my own pocket yesterday, and was able to get paid back in cash today.

The biggest challenge turned out to be the lack of a cell phone for coordinating with my peeps. I got myself locked out because I was running out of the house in a big rush to do something at work… so I was at work while my friends were starting the day-long liver killing festival. I was supposed to meet them at Mike’s house. They knew I didn’t have my cell phone and would be just a little late… yet they left without me for the bar, but I didn’t know which bar.

Ah-ha! I remembered that Mike’s apartment intercom/buzzer system called his cell phone (since he doesn’t have a landline), so I just buzzed him that way. Unfortunately, he couldn’t hear me and just told the intercom that he wasn’t home (“I know that” I shouted in his lobby “but WHERE are you?”). He buzzed the door for me and hung up.

So much for that plan. Luck struck again though when another member of our group walked by on the street and told me where to go to find them.

Then it was us against the crowds. London’s a student town, and the weather was awesome today, so even though St. Paddy’s day fell on a Wednesday, there were lineups at all the bars. To try to avoid that, we went to one of the smaller ones away from Richmond St., and even they had a lineup. So Mike, like a ninja, goes and sneaks in the fire exit in the back. The place was nowhere near full, but they were being really anal about capacity (even though no other bar in the city was)… so without too much guilt, other members of our party start sneaking in. But with such a small place, they quickly found the ninjas out and kicked them out. In the frustration of being kicked out of a bar that they were behaving civilly in and paying good money for beer, one of Mike’s friends swiped a funny St. Patrick’s day hat (which I now have).

Anyway, it was a fairly crazy day. I feel like such a kid for all the shenanigans. I mean, I’m an old-ass man. I shouldn’t be locking myself out of the house, hiking around town without money or ID, let alone sneaking into crappy London bars on green beer day. But there you have it. Despite the disastrous start, it didn’t turn out to be all that bad a day in the end.

Hat tip to Jonathan Chevreau’s recent blog post: “Younger folk aged 18 to 24 are leading the charge, with those “very likely to buy” almost doubling to 15% from 8% per in 2009.

This is one of the signs of the end stages of the housing bubble.

Low/no downpayments allow people to buy earlier and earlier in their lives, stealing demand from the future, and driving up prices in the present. Skyrocketing prices convince people to buy now or be priced out forever. But there is a limit to it all, unless we start selling houses to children. Home ownership rates are at ~70%, and here we have 15% of people in the youngest (least home-owning) age bracket planning to buy (more than that, actually, since there’s another bunch in the “likely to buy” category below “very likely”), and presumably ~8% who bought over the last year. Won’t take too much more robbing of the cradle here before we run out of ways to bring demand up and hit a wall when high school students can’t join in bidding wars.

That is of course assuming that tightening of interest rates doesn’t do the job first (and now most bank economists are calling for that to happen before the end of the year).

I’ve been bearish on real estate for going on 3+ years now, and I’ve been hesitant to get too excited about the correction that I know must be coming because real estate moves in long, slow cycles. It’ll be years before the time to buy (the undershoot) finally arrives… plus, I get in trouble for being “optimistically bearish” from people with house lust that I’ve convinced to hold off (“the market’s up 20% this year! We could have bought last year, damn you!”). Nonetheless, I can’t help but feel that the stars are aligning for this nonsense to finally end.

Flaherty brought in some rules that I thought would be fairly minor tightenings to the mortgage market. Real basic, common sense tweaks, like that banks shouldn’t give someone all the money they can borrow at today’s rock-bottom rates, but instead have to qualify people on the still-low 5-year rate. I didn’t think there’d be anyone walking that close to the bleeding edge of affordability, but apparently CIBC is forecasting that this rule alone will have a ~5% impact on the mortgage market (hat tip: Canadian Mortgage Trends). The new rules also require a 20% downpayment for non-principal residences, which should help reduce the speculation out there.

Canadian Business had an article this week on “Why Buying a House is a Bad Investment”. Despite the title, it’s not nearly as bearish as I am, though that may be because they’re talking about “Canadian housing”, which is a tough concept, because the market in London and Charlottetown is vastly different than Vancouver or Toronto.

Even some realtors are starting to think that there may be, possibly, just the teenist whiff of a bubble happening, despite their inherent bias towards believing that real estate prices will always go up.

So I think the end is finally arriving (well, the end did arrive in the fall of ’08, but low interest rates drove it back for an age), and I can start to make some prognostications. Time may prove me wrong, but time’s a bitch like that. I predict that by the end of the year rates will begin moving back up as the need for the emergency stimulus eases and inflation returns. The real estate market will stall around midsummer; by this time next year, it will be clear that the market momentum is down, and by the fall of 2011, the media should start picking up on the slide. Since real estate moves in slow cycles you probably won’t find a decent time to buy until late 2013 (rent-to-buy of <150X), with the final bottom coming somewhere around 2016. For Toronto, top-to-bottom, my crystal ball says we’ll see a 35% drop — still about 10-15% above the 1996 trough in real terms, but a real kick in the nards for anyone that bought in the last few years.

These prophecies of doom are for entertainment only of course, and I’ll be changing my opinions as new data emerges… but now you know what I’m thinking.

In other eschatological news, Netbug has cancelled his World of Warcraft subscription. The end times, they are nigh.