Tag Archives: autumn
Bigger Stink Means Higher Price as Men Crave Rare Oud Fragrance
By Susan Hack – Sep 19, 2013 For centuries, scent hunters have indiscriminately cut down old-growth forests in search of the resin produced by wild Aquilaria trees, which is burned as incense, carved into ritual objects and distilled into oud — the most valuable natural oil on earth. Photograph: Mitchell Feinberg/Bloomberg Pursuits The first time Mike Perez wore dehn al-oud — an essential oil distilled from the resin of Asian Aquilaria trees — he was so appalled by the smell that he hid inside his home. Enlarge image Musk Oud by Kilian. Photograph: Courtesy of Kilian Enlarge image M7 Oud Absolu by Yves Saint Laurent. Photograph: Courtesy of YSL “I put on way too much, and frankly, it smelled like animal butt,” says Perez, a 42-year-old manager for Barclay’s Real Estate Group in Miami. Fragrances reveal their true nature as they evaporate on the skin, Bloomberg Pursuits magazine will report in its Autumn 2013 issue, so Perez resisted the temptation to wash. “The barnyard note started changing into something intensely woody, damp and complex,” recalls the fragrance enthusiast, who has a collection of almost 1,500 scents. “It lasted 24 hours, and by then, I understood why some have described oud as transcendent. I invited a friend over to try a tiny swipe; after the initial shock, he became emotional as it evoked memories of a boyhood vacation by a lake and the smell of his skin and bathing suit and even the dock drying in the summer sun.” Akin to such potent, primeval scents as ambergris and Himalayan deer musk, oud (the name means wood in Arabic) is an alluring mystery even to those who know it well. Used by the Ancient Egyptians for embalming and mentioned in the Bible’s Song of Solomon, the resin is produced by a rare and little-understood defense mechanism: When disease-carrying microbes breach the trunk of an Aquilaria tree, a dark and extremely aromatic resin is secreted, invisible beneath the outer bark. Burned as Incense For reasons still unknown to science, fewer than 2 percent of wild Aquilaria trees ever produce resin. For centuries, scent hunters have indiscriminately cut down old-growth forests in search of the substance, which is burned as incense, carved into ritual objects or distilled into the most valuable natural oil on earth. Half a teaspoon of oud oil made from 100-year-old trees for Oman’s Sultan Qaboos in 1982 sold to a private collector in 2012 for $7,000. In China , demand for top-quality resin has pushed prices as high as $300,000 per kilogram. Despite a ban on the harvesting of wild Aquilaria by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species , such pricing has triggered widespread poaching and a race to perfect sustainable techniques for artificially infecting farmed trees. Smell of Money To the $31.6 billion fragrance industry, oud and its aficionados smell like one thing: money. Sales of oud fragrances rose 34 percent in 2012, according to New York-based consumer research firm NPD Group Inc. Such scents were virtually unheard of in the global market before 2002, when Yves Saint Laurent released Tom Ford ’s M7, widely acknowledged as the first Western oud fragrance. Today, out of more than a thousand new scents released annually, one in eight contains oud. The developing taste for oud reflects “trends for intense, intriguing, daring scents that tap into a desire to travel and experience other cultures,” fragrance historian Elena Vosnaki says, and has helped drive sales of prestige male fragrances in the U.S. alone to $953 million. In the past year, Armani, Dior (CDI) , Ferrari and even the Body Shop have all jumped on the bandwagon. Perfumer Kilian Hennessy — the cognac heir who introduced Musk Oud, the latest in his line of oud fragrances, in June under the By Kilian label — caught the bug on a 2008 trip to Dubai, where oud incense wafting through malls, mosques and hotel lobbies has become as signature a scent as lavender is to Grasse, France . ‘Weapon of Seduction’ “To Westerners, men’s fragrance is a weapon of seduction,” Hennessy says. “But to people in the Arab Gulf, oud is comforting, part of their olfactory world and an envelope in which they feel protected.” The oud used in all By Kilian fragrances is synthetic, bioengineered to approximate the real deal. That said, “I have never smelled a synthetic oud that re-creates the complexity and intensity of the real one,” Hennessy says. According to Robert Blanchette , a forest pathologist at the University of Minnesota , the scent released by the highest-grade natural oud oils comprises more than 150 separate compounds. “Even with mass spectrometry and gas chromatography, we still don’t have the complete signature,” he says. Blanchette, who has spent two decades investigating Aquilaria trees in conjunction with the Amsterdam-based Rainforest Project foundation, has patented a technique to artificially infect saplings, 100 percent of which go on to produce resin, although it’s less dense than that of centuries-old trees. Chemical Signature “The chemical signature is very close, and our hope is that in the future, it will become a viable source,” he says. Meanwhile, “harvesting wild trees will eventually kill oud, because of the loss of biodiversity,” says Ensar, an online purveyor of organic oud who declines to reveal his full name and who spends much of the year in Asia seeking out the best resin. “Aquilaria trees have to fight disease and sometimes die for oud to come into existence,” he says. “I wanted to cry when I cut down a farmer’s 60-year-old tree in Thailand that was fully loaded with resin. It’s all extremely existential.” “Oud takes a commitment, both financially and in the way you wear it,” Barclay’s Perez says. “I wear it only on special occasions and never to the office. But most of the time, I wear it for myself.” To contact the reporter on this story: Susan Hack at hacksusan@aol.com To contact the editor responsible for this story: Ted Moncreiff at tmoncreiff@bloomberg.net Continue reading
What Happened To Biofuels?
Energy technology: Making large amounts of fuel from organic matter has proved to be more difficult and costly than expected Sep 7th 2013 SCIENTISTS have long known how to convert various kinds of organic material into liquid fuel. Trees, shrubs, grasses, seeds, fungi, seaweed, algae and animal fats have all been turned into biofuels to power cars, ships and even planes. As well as being available to countries without tar sands, shale fields or gushers, biofuels can help reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by providing an alternative to releasing fossil-fuel carbon into the atmosphere. Frustratingly, however, making biofuels in large quantities has always been more expensive and less convenient than simply drilling a little deeper for oil. Ethanol, for instance, is an alcoholic biofuel easily distilled from sugary or starchy plants. It has been used to power cars since Ford’s Model T and, blended into conventional petrol, constitutes about 10% of the fuel burned by America’s vehicles today. Biodiesel made from vegetable fats is similarly mixed (at a lower proportion of 5%) into conventional diesel in Europe. But these “first generation” biofuels have drawbacks. They are made from plants rich in sugar, starch or oil that might otherwise be eaten by people or livestock. Ethanol production already consumes 40% of America’s maize (corn) harvest and a single new ethanol plant in Hull is about to become Britain’s largest buyer of wheat, using 1.1m tonnes a year. Ethanol and biodiesel also have limitations as vehicle fuels, performing poorly in cold weather and capable of damaging unmodified engines. In an effort to overcome these limitations, dozens of start-up companies emerged over the past decade with the aim of developing second-generation biofuels. They hoped to avoid the “food versus fuel” debate by making fuel from biomass feedstocks with no nutritional value, such as agricultural waste or fast-growing trees and grasses grown on otherwise unproductive land. Other firms planned to make “drop in” biofuels that could replace conventional fossil fuels directly, rather than having to be blended in. Governments also jumped on the biofuels bandwagon. George Bush saw biofuels as a route to energy independence, signing into law rules that set minimum prices and required refiners and importers to sell increasing amounts of biofuel each year. By 2013, America was supposed to be burning nearly 3,800m litres a year of “cellulosic” biofuels made from woody plants. Toil and trouble But instead of roaring into life, the biofuels industry stalled. Start-ups went bust, surviving companies scaled back their plans and, as prices of first-generation biofuels rose, consumer interest waned. The spread of fracking, meanwhile, unlocked new oil and gas reserves and provided an alternative path to energy independence. By 2012 America’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had slashed the 2013 target for cellulosic biofuels to just 53m litres. What went wrong? “Even if processes can be economically scaled up, that might in turn highlight a further problem.” Making a second-generation biofuel means overcoming three challenges. The first is to break down woody cellulose and lignin polymers into simple plant sugars. The second is to convert those sugars into drop-in fuels to suit existing vehicles, via a thermochemical process (using catalysts, extreme temperatures and high pressures) or a biochemical process (using enzymes, natural or synthetic bacteria, or algae). The third and largest challenge is to find ways to do all this cheaply and on a large scale. In 2008 Shell, an energy giant, was working on ten advanced biofuels projects. It has now shut most of them down, and none of those that remain is ready for commercialisation. “All the technologies we looked at worked,” says Matthew Tipper, Shell’s vice-president for alternative energy. “We could get each to produce fuels at a lab scale and a demonstration scale.” But bringing biofuels to market proved to be slower and more costly than expected. The optimism of five years ago may have waned, but efforts to develop second-generation biofuels continue. Half a dozen companies are now putting the final touches to industrial-scale plants and several are already producing small quantities of second-generation biofuels. Some even claim to be making money doing so. Consider Shell. Raizen, its joint venture with Cosan of Brazil, produces more than 2,000m litres of first-generation ethanol annually from sugarcane juice. Usually the fibrous stalks left over are burned for power or turned into paper, but next year Raizen will start turning them into second-generation bioethanol, using a cocktail of designer enzymes from Iogen, a Canadian biotechnology firm. Raizen hopes to produce 40m litres of cellulosic ethanol a year, cutting costs and boosting yield by co-locating its cellulosic operation with a traditional ethanol plant. Under this model, second-generation biofuels complement and enhance first-generation processes, rather than replacing them outright. Three plants in America are expected to start producing cellulosic ethanol from waste corn cobs, leaves and husks in 2014: POET-DSM Advanced Biofuels (75m litres) and Dupont (110m litres), both in Iowa, and Abengoa (95m litres) in Kansas. But the first company to produce ethanol using enzymes on an industrial scale is Beta Renewables, a spin-off from Chemtex, an Italian chemical giant. An 80m-litre cellulosic ethanol plant in Crescentino, near Turin, has been running at half capacity over the summer, using straw from nearby farms. It will run on corn waste in the autumn, rice straw in the winter and then perennial eucalyptus in the spring. Beta Renewables has already licensed its technology for use in Brazil and Malaysia, and expects to sell several more licences by the end of the year. All Beta’s plants can already make biofuels at a profit, albeit only in areas with very cheap feedstocks, says the firm’s boss, Guido Ghisolfi. Just as this cellulosic ethanol comes on to the market, however, demand for fuel is waning in many developed countries due to improvements in fuel efficiency and lingering economic weakness. As a result, demand for ethanol for blending is falling, too. In America, petrol containing up to 15% ethanol, while permitted by the EPA and promoted by ethanol producers, is still a rare sight on station forecourts. Other biofuels companies are continuing to pursue drop-in fuels. One attraction is that compared with ethanol, the demand for which depends to a large extent on government mandates that it be blended into conventional fuels, drop-in fuels are less susceptible to changing political whims. Another is that drop-in fuels are commonly made with sugar as a feedstock, either conventionally sourced or cellulosic, and sugar is widely available and easily transported. Stepping on the gas Amyris, based in California, genetically engineers yeasts and other microbes to ferment sugar into a long-chain hydrocarbon molecule called farnesene. This can then be processed into a range of chemicals and fuels. After a few rocky years when it over-promised and under-delivered, Amyris is now producing limited quantities of renewable diesel for public buses in Brazil and is trying to get its renewable jet fuel certified for commercial use. Solazyme, another firm based in California, is also focusing on renewable diesel and jet fuels, in its case derived from algae. Microscopic algae in open-air ponds can use natural sunlight and atmospheric or industrial-waste carbon dioxide to produce oils. But harvesting the fuel, which is present in only very small proportions, is expensive and difficult. Solazyme instead grows algae in sealed fermenting vessels with sugar as an energy source. The US Navy has used tens of thousands of litres of its algal fuels in exercises, and Propel, an American chain of filling stations, recently became the first to offer algal diesel. But although its technology clearly works, Solazyme remains cagey about the economics. A 110m-litre algae plant in Brazil, due to be up and running by the end of the year, may clarify Solazyme’s commercial potential. If drop-in biofuels are going to have an impact worldwide, they will have to be economic away from the tropical climes of South America, where sugar can be grown cheaply. The only commercial facility currently making drop-in fuels directly from woody biomass is operated by a start-up called KiOR. Its 50m-litre plant in Columbus, Mississippi, turns pine-tree chips into drop-in petrol and diesel for customers including FedEx, a logistics firm, and Chevron, an oil giant. KiOR uses a thermochemical process called fluid-catalytic cracking that borrows many technologies from conventional oil refineries and, unlike fussier biochemical systems, should scale up easily. KiOR is planning a 150m-litre facility in nearby Natchez. However, the Columbus plant is not yet running at anywhere near full capacity, and KiOR has a lot of debt and is still losing money. In August disgruntled investors launched a class-action lawsuit. Some observers doubt whether even the most sophisticated biofuels can compete with fossil fuels in the near future. Daniel Klein-Marcuschamer, a researcher at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, conducted a comprehensive analysis of renewable aviation fuels. He concluded that producing first-generation bio-jet fuel from sugarcane would require oil prices of at least $168 a barrel to be competitive, and that some second-generation algae technologies would require crude oil to soar above $1,000 a barrel (the current price is around $110) to break even. Mr Klein-Marcuschamer has made his model open-source in an effort to help the industry find ways to make biofuels more competitive. Even if second-generation processes can be economically scaled up, however, that might in turn highlight a further problem. To make a significant dent in the 2,500m litres of conventional oil that American refineries churn through each day, biofuel factories would have to be able to get hold of a staggering quantity of feedstock. Mr Ghisolfi of Beta Renewables points out that a factory with an annual output of 140m litres needs 350,000 tonnes of biomass a year to operate. “There are only certain areas, in Brazil and some parts of the US and Asia, where you can locate this much biomass within a close radius,” says Mr Ghisolfi. “I am sceptical of scaling to ten times that size, because getting 3.5m tonnes of biomass to a single collection point is going to be a very big undertaking.” Billions of tonnes of agricultural waste are produced worldwide each year, but such material is thinly spread, making it expensive to collect and transport. Moreover, farms use such waste to condition the soil, feed animals or burn for power. Diverting existing sources of wood to make biofuels will annoy builders and paper-makers, and planting fuel crops on undeveloped land is hardly without controversy: one man’s wasteland is another’s pristine ecosystem. Dozens of environmental groups have protested against the EPA’s recent decision to permit plantations of fast-growing giant reed for biofuels, calling it a noxious and highly invasive weed. Just as the food-versus-fuel argument has proved controversial for today’s biofuels, flora-versus-fuel could be an equally tough struggle for tomorrow’s. Continue reading
€603m Invested In First Six Months In Overseas Frenzy
Findlater House, O’Connell Street, Dublin, was sold for €6.1m An extraordinary six-month Irish asset-feeding frenzy by overseas firms has meant that there have been 34 investment transactions of more than €1m each completed here since January compared with a total of 35 for all of 2012. The report also highlights a trickle-down effect in the ongoing investment drive. It asserts that the number of prime property investments on offer has now reduced to the level that buyers eager to cash in on perceived Irish value are now moving down the value chain to look at secondary level opportunities. But investments are spread unevenly with 40pc of the money spent since January going into offices, the strongest commercial sector by far compared to 20pc for mixed investments, just 14pc for a still sluggish retail sector and a measly 1pc for industrial property. It also added that autumn looked like becoming “particularly busy” as investors scramble to avail of the capital gains tax waiver that runs out on December 31. Continue reading
