Since 1995, David Fridley has been a staff scientist at the Energy Analysis Program at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. He is also deputy group leader of Lawrence Berkeley’s China Energy Group, which collaborates with China on end-user energy efficiency, government energy management programs, and energy policy research. Mr. Fridley has nearly 30 years of experience working and living in China in the energy sector, and is a fluent Mandarin speaker. He spent 12 years working in the petroleum industry both as a consultant on downstream oil markets in the Asia-Pacific region and as business development manager for Caltex China. He has written and spoken extensively on the energy and ecological limits of biofuels.
Articles / Blogs
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The End of Cheap Coal
David Fridley, Richard Heinberg
World energy policy is gripped by a fallacy — the idea that coal is destined to stay cheap for decades to come. This assumption supports investment in ‘clean-coal’ technology and trumps serious efforts to increase energy conservation and develop...
Reports
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Alternative Energy Challenges
Alternative energy depends heavily on engineered equipment and infrastructure for capture or conversion. However, the full supply chain for alternative energy, from raw materials to manufacturing, is still very dependent on fossil fuel energy. The various obstacles to alternative energy compound the fundamental challenge of how to supplant a fossil fuel–based supply chain
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Nine Challenges of Alternative Energy
Unlike conventional fossil fuels, where nature provided energy over millions of years to convert biomass into energy-dense solids, liquids, and gases–requiring only extraction and transportation technolgy for us to mobilize them–alternative energy depends heavily on specially engineered equipment and infrastructure for capture or conversion, essentially making it a high-tech manufacturing process. However, the
Books
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The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises
John Kaufmann, Daniel Lerch, Bill Sheehan, Anthony Perl, William Rees, Tom Whipple, Stephanie Mills, Peter Whybrow, Michael Shuman, David Orr, Cindy Parker, Chris Martenson, Brian Schwartz, Richard Gilbert, Warren Karlenzig, Wes Jackson, David Hughes, Rob Hopkins, David Fridley, Gloria Flora, Joshua Farley, Hillary Brown, Michael Bomford, Asher Miller, Zenobia Barlow, Sandra Postel, Richard Heinberg, Erika Allen, Bill Ryerson