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Airships, which are best known today for their use as advertising blimps, have long been recognized for their potential as large, low-emissions transportation vessels that can haul huge amounts of cargo into areas without the need for runways or other infrastructure.

For a number of reasons — mainly funding — the technology has never taken off.

Two congressmen, Reps. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) and Tom Rooney (R-Fla.), are trying to change that. Last week, they announced the creation of the Cargo Airship Caucus in the House to try to boost financial support for the use of lighter-than-air vehicles for carrying military cargo and humanitarian aid.

"I have followed this technology for about 10 years now," Sherman said. "I hope this new caucus can help maintain the interest that many of my colleagues have shown in the potential for airships to improve cargo transport."

From the government’s perspective, a new breed of zeppelins could give the military the capacity to carry large cargos faster than by ocean and without the risk of trucking it into combat zones. Because airships don’t require long runways, they could be used in humanitarian catastrophes where infrastructure is wiped out, such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

American companies have built airship technology to varying degrees. For example, Lockheed Martin has successfully built and operated its P791, a smaller-scale version of a hybrid airship. Aeros, another American manufacturer, has test-piloted a prototype of its planned Aeroscraft, which if built could fly four times faster than a cargo ship, carry twice as much cargo as a C-5 cargo plane and fly more than 5,000 miles without refueling.

"Aeros applauds the Cargo Airship Caucus’ creation, the expanding Congressional support for harnessing the benefits of a new flexible and cost-efficient transport modality, and support for our emergent sector in the global logistics industry," Igor Pasternak, CEO at Aeros, said in a press release. "Aeros looks forward to collaborating with other industry partners toward the quick and safe deployment of cargo airship solutions for enhanced capability in global air mobility, military logistics, disaster relief response and environmental stewardship."

The caucus plans on working with all U.S. companies developing airship technology, a spokesman for Sherman’s office said.

Cutting aircraft emissions by 90%

Airships could have significant positive environmental impacts, Sherman said.

The total emissions of an airship is 80 to 90 percent less than that of ordinary aircraft, according to researchers at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

"You can go places without roads or railroads," he said. "Airships offer a means of transport that produces less in carbon emissions than other means of moving cargo on a per-ton-carried basis, and could make it much easier to develop green energy projects."

Blimp
Workers pull an Aeroscraft out of its hangar in California. | Photo courtesy of Flickr.

For example, airships could be used to transport wind turbines and massive pieces of technology to remote places, such as the top of ridges or away from roads and railways.

At the same time, airship technology could give companies access to resource-rich areas that were once unreachable.

The fire risk also is not what it once was. Today’s airships operate on helium, an inert gas, not hydrogen, which was once used and is what most people associate with airships because of the fiery crash of the German passenger airship the Hindenburg in May 1937 at the end of its 37th trans-Atlantic flight.

Currently, there are no airships being flown in a cargo-carrying capacity, said Nigel Hills, a council member of the Airship Association, a nonprofit trade group formed in 1971 to promote the use of lighter-than-air vehicles.

"The unrealized potential is vast," he said. "Lack of funding is a big killer."

In the past, the U.S. government has pitched in money toward the development of large airships. In a 2012 report, the Government Accountability Office identified 15 aerostat and airship efforts that were underway or had been initiated since 2007 by the Department of Defense. Those efforts totaled almost $7 billion in funding between 2007 and 2012.

Getting past the negative public perception associated with airships is just one hurdle. Speaking at Google’s Solve for X event last year, Lockheed Martin’s P791 program manager Bob Boyd said that even though his company has had the technology ready to go since 2006, it still hasn’t reached mainstream acceptance.

"The issue is growing the world to be ready to expect this kind of change because this is a big change," he said. "The transportation business has been the same for many centuries. We’ve pretty much used ships, and then we sort of moved to land modes. … It’s really difficult to add a new piece to that infrastructure, especially one that is radically different."

Overcoming technology and policy challenges

Airships have a rich but fairly painful history, Hills said.

"For a long time, airships have occupied the domain of hope, but the people who were creating them were either ahead of their time or behind their time," he said. "The reason people continue with their interest, despite lack of support, is because historically these vehicles have done some very interesting things."

With the technology overshadowed by the Hindenburg disaster, what isn’t often mentioned are the historical successes of airship technologies.

The first airline was conducted by airship from 1909 to 1914 in Germany. During World War I, the Germans used an airship to transport 14 metric tons of supplies to their colonial army in Tanzania. The British are rumored to have used a captured German code to turn the vessel around before it could reach its destination, but the vehicle was in the air for 95 hours and covered 6,700 kilometers, "a fairly impressive feat for 1917," Hills added.

By the mid-1930s, German airships were making regular passenger trips across the Atlantic.

The U.S. Navy used airships for nearly 50 years to conduct long-range scouting missions in support of fleet operations and maritime reconnaissance, although not to carry cargo.

There are a number of operational reasons why hundreds of airships aren’t currently floating in our skies, including that airships traditionally haven’t been able to deal with load exchange — or what happens when a 50-ton load is dropped off and suddenly the lighter-than-air vehicle is much, much lighter. Both Aeros and Lockheed Martin have developed different technological workarounds to resolve that issue.

Another potential challenge is the technology’s potential to upset the traditional ways cargo is transported, resulting in the possible loss of employment at traditional inter-modal transfer sites, Hills said.

Still, he said, he fully supports the idea of the caucus.

"The concept has been proven, 70-80 years ago," he said. "But the materials have changed quite significantly, and the technology has not been proven using modern materials and modern techniques."

In coming weeks, the two congressmen will begin recruiting additional members to join and are planning a meeting to highlight the recent advancements in airship development.

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The Energy Department has begun an inquiry into the vulnerability of large power transformers that are crucial to U.S. electricity delivery, officials confirm. The study could lead to a strategy for expanding a strategic stockpile of spare transformers to help the grid recover from major cyber or physical assaults or solar storms and other natural disasters.

The project, at DOE’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability (OE), addresses potentially existential threats to the interstate high-voltage transmission network that have been highlighted in government studies as far back as 1990, and increasingly since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The DOE study aims at key, still-unresolved questions that have held up a comprehensive federal response on the issue, according to officials.

"The question, as we frame it here, is what the risk is to transformers, and to the overall system, from a loss of transformers, and [what are] appropriate measures to mitigate that risk," said a DOE official, who spoke not for attribution.

The threat to the grid was highlighted by five senators who wrote in December 2014 to Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, urging DOE to support a larger stockpile of large transformers.

"For well over two decades Congress and successive administrations have recognized this critical vulnerability," the senators said. The power industry has created programs to inventory spares and share them in emergencies, they added. "However fully addressing this issue will require coordination and transparency between utilities, regulators and equipment manufacturers," the senators’ letter said.

The letter was sent by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.). He was joined by Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.).

Unresolved issues

The DOE official said that before creating a strategy for stockpiling transformers to bring back parts of the grid, the first step is to define the problem. "You realize you have more questions than answers. We don’t have a good sense for exactly what the scale of risk is," the official added. How many transformers would be damaged under various scenarios? How many would have to be replaced, and under what conditions? What would be the effects on the grid? the official said.

"If we can come to some resolution as to what is needed, that will give us what the solutions may be," the official said.

The Electric Power Research Institute has discussed the study with DOE, EPRI spokesman Clay Perry confirmed.

A confidential analysis by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in 2013 warned that an attack that took down as few as nine strategically vital transmission stations on a hot summer day could cause far-reaching cascading outages. If the stations’ transformers were wrecked, recovery could take months. But some DOE staff members privately called the scenario highly unlikely, according to a report by the Energy Department’s inspector general (EnergyWire, Feb. 5).

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, testified to Congress last month that rather than a "Cyber Armageddon" that wipes out an entire U.S. infrastructure, "we foresee an ongoing series of low- to moderate-level cyberattacks from a variety of sources over time, which will impose cumulative costs on U.S. economic competitiveness and national security."

Another issue is the potential impact of a once-in-a-century solar storm, triggering damaging rogue currents traveling through the grid. In the worst case, several hundred transformers would be fatally damaged, NERC consultants concluded (ClimateWire, Oct. 10, 2012).

The North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC), the FERC-appointed grid security monitor, challenged that conclusion. The disruption would most likely cause an immediate but short-lived blackout, so that transformers would not be destroyed, NERC said. The question of the likely damage from a possible massive solar flare is still unresolved, the DOE official said.

Last fall, DOE funded a study of the potential spare transformer reserve for the Western Area Power Administration, a DOE office that markets and transmits electricity over a 17,000-mile transmission system in 15 central and Western states. "The results indicated we need to do a lot more work to understand what the needs for spare transformers are," the official said.

Large transformers are essential to the grid’s operation, boosting voltages to facilitate long-distance power delivery and then stepping voltages back down to connect to utility distribution networks.

But the United States depends heavily on foreign suppliers, contributing to the procurement lead times. A DOE study by ICF International in 2012 found that six U.S.-based transformer manufacturers filled 15 percent of the demand for new units in 2010, and the dependence on foreign sources is even greater for the very large transformers used in the high-voltage grid.

A comprehensive DOE analysis could identify gaps in what is, so far, a voluntary industry response to expand the transformer stockpile.

NERC has created a database of critical transformers at U.S. power companies, and the Edison Electric Institute operates a Spare Transformer Equipment Program (STEP) that requires participating utilities to sell spares to other participants that lose transmission substations to a terrorist attack (EnergyWire, March 28, 2014).

FERC has two standards — one on physical security of grid facilities and the other on the threat of a solar superstorm — that could result in increasing investments in spare transformers.

The physical security standard drafted by NERC requires transmission companies to identify their most critical substations, and that information will feed into an analysis of transformer deployment and requirements for spares, an industry official said.

The Electricity Sub-sector Coordinating Council, an industry/government partnership of which NERC is a partner, will pull together proposals for industry and government collaboration on expanding a transformer stockpile, officials said.

Industry responses

The prospect of expanded orders for large transformers has stirred an industry response.

An email copy of the senators’ letter to Moniz was titled "Final ABB DOE letter," suggesting the involvement of ABB, a leading transformer manufacturer with a production plant in Jefferson City, Mo. ABB did not reply yesterday to a query about the letter, nor did Blunt’s staff.

ABB has developed a mobile, rapid recovery transformer, "RecX," in partnership with the Department of Homeland Security, EPRI and CenterPoint Energy in Houston.

Delta Star, a U.S. transformer manufacturer, says it is drawing up plans for a large mobile unit that would deliver 345 kilovolts — a common size in the high voltage grid.

"We know we have some technology to do that," said Steve Newman, Delta Star vice president based at its Lynchburg, Va., production facility. "We have indicated to a number of customers we think we are prepared to do that."

Newman said the company’s transformers can be delivered on highways and be running inside of four to 10 hours, permitting a much faster recovery than would be possible if a conventional transformer had to be shifted from one substation to another, he said.

"We want to be a good partners with the government, and we have had numerous conversations with them," Newman said. "We think there is a pathway that could allow for mobile units to be staged throughout the country, including military bases.

"A good policymaking decision for Congress and others is understanding the risk and making a determination what they want to do on the budget."

Delta Star’s 230-kilovolt transformer costs under $2.2 million, Newman said. A 345-kV unit would be significantly more, making the analysis of the number of spares the nation requires a big budget question.

"The industry is able to recover costs on spare equipment and is able to work with regulators to build those [grid] resiliency costs into the business," an industry executive said. "But there also is a role for the federal government if we are looking at extraordinary national security issues and big, big scenarios. You get to a point where you outstrip the customers’ ability" to provide enough spares.

Thomas Siebel, chief executive of C3 Energy, a California-based smart grid analytics firm, told House Energy and Commerce Committee members last week that he is pessimistic about a comprehensive grid defense program ever getting through Congress, at least under ordinary circumstances.

"Before we really do something about this … we are going to have the equivalent of 9/11," he predicted. "There is going to be some disaster, and it’s not going to be good. Then we’ll get serious."

Reporter Blake Sobczak contributed.

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Of all of the conservation groups that could irk a senior GOP senator from North Dakota, Ducks Unlimited isn’t an obvious example.

The group is part of the hook-and-bullet sportsmen’s corps, whose allegiance to Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation principles has broad appeal on both sides of the aisle. Ducks Unlimited, along with Pheasants Forever, Trout Unlimited, and other hunting and fishing groups, has long advocated for clean water and undeveloped lands to sustain the wildlife needed for its sport.

But Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.), a self-described "avid sportsman," told Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack at a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing last month that Ducks Unlimited, among other wildlife groups, was causing concerns in his state’s farm communities. USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service contracts the nongovernmental group’s biologists to help farmers make decisions around the 2014 farm bill’s conservation programs — voluntary initiatives growers can take to slow soil erosion, clean up waterways and rebuild habitat.

"There’s concern on the part of our farmers that [this] creates a potential conflict of interest or a problem when NRCS is using a group like DU on this wetlands compliance issue," Hoeven told Vilsack.

The "compliance issue" is conservation compliance. Since the passage of the farm bill last year, farmers must show they are meeting basic conservation standards before they are eligible for federal crop insurance. This includes not draining wetlands — a provision known as "Swampbuster," with origins in the 1985 farm bill when it was first tied to direct farm payments. Swampbuster was decoupled from payments under the crop subsidy overhaul of the 1996 farm bill, and reattached — this time to crop insurance — in 2014.

Wetlands play an important role in the Midwestern environment. In addition to providing habitat for a variety of birds, fish and mammals, they help filter water pollutants, recharge groundwater and mitigate flooding.

The Swampbusters issue is particularly heated in the Midwest’s Prairie Pothole region — North Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa and South Dakota — where wetlands far away from the nearest river or stream have generally been considered outside of the Clean Water Act’s jurisdiction over the past decade and a half. Although an NRCS wetlands determination is not a legal requirement here, it’s nevertheless critical given agriculture’s reliance on federal crop insurance. Growers have until June 1 to certify their compliance with USDA.

Thousands of farmers in the region are lining up for a wetlands determination as the agency’s backlog grows bigger, South Dakota Sen. John Thune (R) and Iowa Rep. David Young (R) told Vilsack and NRCS Chief Jason Weller in two separate hearings last month.

With the political turmoil rising in farm country, particularly around water protection issues like the Obama administration’s Waters of the United States proposal, even the most conservative of conservation groups are treated with heavy-handed skepticism.

Farmers "have a concern with all of the groups being there, working for NRCS, coming out of the farm, actually working for USDA but having a, you know, a different mission," Hoeven told E&E Daily last week. "They’re worried about the conflict of interest, because it seems like there’s straightforward concern on their part so we want to make sure we handle it in a way that addresses that concern."

Hoeven added he could imagine a possibility in which the issue would manifest into a policy rider on an appropriations bill, but that he would wait for a response from Vilsack first. If USDA can’t resolve it, Hoeven said he would look at addressing the issue either through an appropriations bill or through reauthorization. The agriculture committees in both chambers are set to reauthorize both the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the child nutrition programs this year.

Vilsack seemed taken aback by Hoeven’s suggestion of impropriety.

"Yours is the first comment that I’ve received expressing concern about the collaboration, and it’s — actually, to be honest with you, senator, it’s a little surprising," the secretary told Hoeven.

Steve Adair, Ducks Unlimited’s director of operations for the Great Plains regions, said the organization’s contract with NRCS is grossly misunderstood. USDA funds biologists, many of them fresh out of college, from Ducks Unlimited and other organizations to meet with landowners and help them fill out applications for conservation programs. These partnerships effectively double NRCS’s personnel while cutting costs. The biologists are barred from working on any regulatory practices, including wetlands determinations.

"NRCS created a firewall between them and the people who do that work," Adair said. "The concern is that these people work on wetland determination, and that’s not at all what they do."

Pete Hannebutt, director of public policy for the North Dakota Farm Bureau, said Ducks Unlimited does more than just paper shuffling.

"I’ll just tell you that’s bullshit," Hannebutt said when asked to comment on the biologists’ jobs of helping farmers fill out applications.

Hannebutt’s concerns center around wetlands mitigation, the remediation of one section of a wetland to offset the draining of another section for crop production. Ducks Unlimited does not oppose wetlands mitigation and provides for it under the Clean Water Act, though not for Swampbuster under the farm bill.

"DU has not performed any Swampbuster mitigation at this time. We do not oppose mitigation," Adair wrote in an email.

Hannebutt maintains that the presence of Ducks Unlimited runs counter to USDA’s mission of promoting agriculture.

"Fair is fair, we don’t expect to put our advisers in NRCS offices and take our pick of issues," he said, adding, "Nothing in the USDA charter says it’s there to promote ducks in the United States."

The 2014 farm bill boosted farmers’ mitigation options for complying with the Swampbuster provisions, setting aside $10 million to develop mitigation banks in which farmers could buy credits to offset wetlands drainage rather than having to do the restoration themselves.

While many conservation groups do not oppose mitigation banks outright, the science of making up wetlands loss must be rigorous and reflect real environmental benefits, said Jan Goldman-Carter, senior manager for wetlands and water resources at the National Wildlife Federation National Advocacy Center. For example, 10 1-acre wetlands do much more to restore wildlife habitat than one 10-acre wetland.

A square 10-acre pond "does not give you equivalent functions and values," Goldman-Carter said. But in the Prairie Pothole region, "that is not an atypical response."

Reporter Annie Snider contributed.

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It’s been just over a month since the Senate voted on climate change, clean energy development and environmental protection, but that’s too long for some Democrats, who are eyeing an upcoming amendment marathon to secure a fresh round of roll calls on those issues.

Next week, the House and Senate budget committees are expected to release their annual tax-and-spending blueprints, with the goal of reconciling the two chambers’ differences and providing guidance to appropriators by mid-April.

In the Senate, the budget process means a return of the "vote-a-rama," the lengthy series of nonbinding amendments that are typically offered to the budget resolution culminating in an all-night session of back-to-back votes. This year, with the budget expected to hit the Senate floor the week of March 23, it could be the last item of business before lawmakers adjourn for the Easter and Passover recess.

Last month’s consideration of legislation to approve the Keystone XL pipeline featured weeks of amendment debate and several votes that were far more dramatic than on the underlying legislation, which all along was destined for a presidential veto.

For example, Republicans stunned observers when they nearly all agreed that climate change was not a "hoax" in response to an amendment from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), although most continued to dispute the link to human activity.

The Senate also demonstrated ample bipartisan support for closing a loophole in tax law that spares oil sands producers from contributing to a spill liability trust fund and for reauthorizing the Land and Water Conservation Fund during its consideration of the KXL bill. Although no changes were made in law, those issues are likely to re-emerge later this year.

Amendments to the budget resolution also will be nonbinding, and their policy goals will have to be put into the somewhat awkward language required to avoid budgetary points of order. But Democrats are eager to find more opportunities to force their colleagues into tough spots.

"I want to use every opportunity we have to highlight the massive difference between where the Republican Party in Congress is on climate change — i.e., pretending it’s not real — and where the American public is, i.e., having to cope with it every day," Whitehouse told E&E Daily this week.

Reconciliation instructions

The budget resolution’s coming release also could mean a new opportunity to deploy "reconciliation," a policy tool that allows legislation to pass with just 50 votes in the Senate rather than the 60 necessary to overcome a filibuster. Budget Chairman Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) has said reconciliation instructions are a possibility in his budget resolution but declined to divulge details ahead of its release.

The most recent reconciliation language enacted came in 2010, when the procedure was used to finalize the health care overhaul after Democrats lost their 60th vote in the Senate. Reconciliation bills have been enacted 23 times since the first use of the optional procedure in 1980, according to the Congressional Research Service.

The Budget Committee can include in its annual resolution reconciliation instructions directing committees to enact policy changes necessary to hit the spending or revenue targets it includes. Committees are given a deadline by which to report back, and their proposals are typically assembled into an omnibus reconciliation bill that cannot be filibustered on the Senate floor. If just one committee receives reconciliation instructions (typically the Finance Committee), its reconciliation bill can proceed straight to the floor.

While Finance’s jurisdiction over taxes and entitlements makes it the most frequent recipient of reconciliation instructions, most committees have been called on at one point or another to contribute to the filibuster-proof package. Reconciliation instructions went 10 times to the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and 11 times to the Environment and Public Works Committee since 1980.

Notable policy issues addressed through reconciliation bills, according to a 2013 CRS report, included an unsuccessful push to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling in 2005.

In 1987, Congress used a reconciliation bill to implement the designation of Yucca Mountain as a disposal site for nuclear waste from the nation’s network of nuclear power plants, a move that was never fully implemented amid years of legal wrangling until the Obama administration pulled the plug a few years ago.

Democrats contemplated using reconciliation for cap-and-trade emissions legislation in 2009 but never followed through with the plan, and such proposals are likely to remain nonstarters for the foreseeable future.

This year, reconciliation is seen as a possible tool to address a Supreme Court ruling expected this summer that could affect who is eligible for Affordable Care Act subsidies, but it remains to be seen whether other policies areas would be pursued.

"We have to choose our targets. … It’s not a wide-ranging option that can be used for a number of issues," Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), a member of the Budget Committee, said in a recent interview. "So, it’s just more limited than people might think."

Wicker pointed to the appropriations process as a more likely venue to target regulations from U.S. EPA and other agencies. "You wouldn’t need reconciliation for that," he said.

Still, Wicker and other Republicans acknowledge that they would be unlikely to get the necessary 60 votes to overcome a Democratic filibuster if they were to try for a full repeal of EPA’s climate rules, the Affordable Care Act or other items central to President Obama’s legacy.

Republicans are nonetheless expected to attach a variety of policy riders to this year’s appropriations bills, and last month’s showdown over funding for the Department of Homeland Security revealed how difficult the process can be.

Democrats fear reconciliation could become a fallback option for GOP efforts to undo the president’s policy goals or pursue some of its own.

"The answer is yes, we are worried, but we just don’t know what the Republicans are doing at this point," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a recent interview.

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On a recent afternoon, Gregg Houghaboom pointed to a photo of a fish fillet and asked a room full of ocean experts to identify it.

They couldn’t. Absent a head, tail and scales, it looked like a hunk of grouper — but it was actually Lake Victoria perch.

Houghaboom’s point was simple: It’s hard to uncover seafood fraud, even when you’re looking for it. The perch was sold to grocery stores and restaurants as grouper, for a premium price, until Houghaboom, a special agent at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, helped expose the fraud.

"It’s extremely nuanced. It’s not like if you’re catching a vehicle with a trunk full of heroin and cocaine," Houghaboom said at a recent panel discussion on illegal fishing at the World Wildlife Fund in Washington, D.C. "If you catch a boat with a load of lobster in it, you have to find out … where it was harvested from, if it’s in season, if it’s undersized, if it’s egg bearing. There’s a lot more to it."

Houghaboom is now retired. But he and some of his former colleagues are concerned that NOAA doesn’t have enough investigators to tackle such cases, even as the Obama administration makes illegal fishing and seafood fraud a priority.

In December, a presidential task force released a set of recommendations to tackle illegal, underreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing (Greenwire, Dec. 16, 2014). Notably absent was any mention of NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement.

"There’s one presidential mandate that says, ‘Hey, you should do IUU fishing’ … but then the folks who are experts at it aren’t mentioned," Scott Doyle, another retired agent, told a WWF audience numbering about 30. He later added: "There are more people in this room right now thinking about IUU than doing IUU."

The recommendations — still in draft form — don’t ignore enforcement. But they focus on beefing up collaboration, rather than feet on the ground. For example, one suggests the development of a strategy for agencies to better share data and resources to prevent IUU. Another focuses on broadening agency enforcement authorities through congressional action.

Meanwhile, the number of NOAA’s investigators is in decline. The Office of Law Enforcement has 92 special agents, tasked with investigating both domestic and international cases for the entire country. In 2012, that number was 114; in 2006, it was 157.

A Baltimore Sun article last year linked that decline with a 75 percent drop in the number of cases sent to NOAA’s general counsel since 2008. In 2014, NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service opened 94 criminal cases and sent 164 cases to NOAA’s general counsel, according to the agency.

Some of that was expected. In 2010, the Commerce Department inspector general released a report after Northeastern fishermen complained of overly punitive action from NOAA. The IG questioned what it called a "criminal-enforcement-oriented structure," wherein NOAA had too many special agents who were too aggressive for regulatory infractions.

In response, NOAA cut back on investigators and beefed up patrol officers. But now it is faced with a renewed focus on tackling international seafood fraud and the complex cases that go along with it.

In its fiscal 2016 budget request, the agency asks for 15 additional positions to combat IUU. The breakdown follows the current workforce plan, with more officers hired than special agents. Of a total 20 potential hires (to add 15 positions and fill five vacancies), 14 would be officers and three would be special agents. The remaining two positions would be for a policy analyst and an investigative analyst.

Todd Dubois, assistant director of NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement, acknowledged that his office needs more special agents. But he said it’s not as simple as going back to 2010, when NOAA had 15 enforcement officers. The agency now has 29 officers.

Officers can act as liaisons with customs agents and other agency officials to help spot potential fraud, he said. NOAA needs both.

"It’s not fair to say, ‘Gee, we don’t need officers and we only need agents.’ I think that’s too simplistic," Dubois said, later adding: "I think over time we will find the right answer. More enforcement officers will give agents the time to do the investigations."

Needle in a haystack

At the WWF panel, Houghaboom, Doyle and a third former special agent, Paul Raymond, used a decade-old case to emphasize how daunting such investigations can become.

In 1999, David McNab owned the largest lobster fleet in Honduras. When NOAA investigators seized one of his U.S. shipments, they found more than 11,000 pounds of undersized lobster and more than 5,000 pounds of egg-bearing females.

It took the agency years to build a case. First, officials had to persuade a U.S. attorney to take a "fish case." Then they had to follow a convoluted paper trail. When they stopped McNab’s attempts to smuggle the lobster by ship, he started to smuggle it through commercial airlines.

In the end, evidence at trial showed 40 illegal shipments worth more than $17 million.

"It took us literally over three years to do this case," Raymond said. But he acknowledged that traceability — a cornerstone of the Obama administration’s IUU plan — would change that math. "From a traceability standpoint, this case could have been done in maybe six months."

Environmental groups have emphasized the need for traceability, or documenting a fish from boat to plate. In its IUU recommendations, the presidential task force laid out an 18-month deadline to establish the first phase of a program.

Michele Kuruc, vice president for ocean policy at WWF, emphasized in an email that enforcement and traceability are intertwined.

While WWF has no plan to call for more special agents at NOAA, the advocacy group "does support strong enforcement as part of the solution to combat IUU, including the appropriate number of skilled special agents who can work the complex, large-scale cases," Kuruc said. "Without a new system of traceability and proof of legality, enforcement will not be enough, though."

NOAA has so far focused on partnerships in an effort to spot illegal activity more effectively. It now works with U.S. Customs and Border Protection to "enhance targeting efforts" on commercial imports; that aims to alleviate the "needle in a haystack" problem of finding the illegal fish amid container ships full of legitimate catch.

The agency also provides training to developing countries on how to spot IUU fishing. And it aims to work with other countries. In 2011, for example, the Russian government helped in an investigation that resulted in the seizure of 112 metric tons of illegally harvested Russian king crab.

Dubois called it a "multi-layered approach to law enforcement" and pointed to several successful international cases in the last couple of years.

In one, NOAA helped dismantle a smuggling ring for narwhal tusks. In another, a U.S. Coast Guard ship apprehended a Chinese driftnet vessel in the north Pacific Ocean, as part of a partnership that puts fishery enforcement officers from China on Coast Guard ships. And in 2013, three convicted smugglers of South African rock lobster were ordered to pay $22.5 million in restitution to the South African government.

"We would certainly always be better suited with more resources. That’s not always possible," Dubois said. The approach for now: better data, more partnerships and leveraging what resources already exist.

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Clarification appended.

The new leader of the Department of Energy’s innovation agency loves "The Hobbit," J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous tale about a high-risk, high-reward search for dragon’s gold.

Now Ellen Williams, the former chief scientist for BP PLC and university physics professor, is chasing dragon’s gold for DOE.

In the book, the dwarf leader Thorin Oakenshield tries to explain the thrill of the hunt: "You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after."

Finding the unexpected is the charge of Williams’ Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), which identifies roadblocks to new energy technology and tries to find ways around them.

"The best thing ARPA-E can do is focus on the unusual and then innovate to provide energy options," Williams said in her first speech as ARPA-E director at the agency’s sixth annual energy innovation summit last month in suburban Washington, D.C.

"I am," she said, "dramatically excited to be in this role."

But her journey from the Detroit suburbs — where she grew up as the child of a Ford Motor Co. engineer — to D.C. was not planned, she said. There were plenty of surprises along the way, such as being chief scientist for petroleum giant BP during the catastrophic Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010.

But Williams, 61, said she has tried to approach everything — good and bad — with a childlike eagerness to learn.

"I was pretty naive when I was young," she said in an interview. "I just started and wandered around, always doing the next most interesting thing I saw in front of me."

ARPA-E Director Ellen Williams
New ARPA-E Director Ellen Williams checks out the Technology Showcase at the agency’s 6th annual energy innovation summit. | Photo courtesy of the Department of Energy.

Trained as a chemist — with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Michigan State University and a doctorate in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology — Williams strayed into surface physics, lured by the development of the scanning tunneling microscope that allowed scientists to "see" electron differentiation, or the disorder, on surfaces.

"The implications were so huge that I was filled with scientific lust — I immediately needed to build such a microscope for my lab," Williams told the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2008.

The new tool enabled her to turn her enthusiasm for statistical mechanics and thermodynamics — which had spurred countless childhood inquiries into why her soup got cold and milk got warm — and apply them to develop a way to study physical surfaces of silicon and electronic materials.

That passion is also what pushed Williams toward ARPA-E, she said.

"I think that at a time in my life I was really focused on technology and being a really outstanding technologist, and the thought that I would be in a large management role probably would have scared me to death," she said.

But she couldn’t resist the offer to be ARPA-E’s second official director, she said.

"ARPA-E," she said, "is like the candy store for me."

Williams loves that ARPA-E lets her dive into high-risk projects that might change the U.S. economy.

"A really cool high-risk technology is not enough," she said. "It also has to have an impact. So getting those two things together is what makes ARPA-E the coolest place in town."

What Williams does at the 6-year-old agency will be watched closely.

ARPA-E says it has invested more than $1 billion into more than 400 projects since 2009. Of those, 30 projects have formed companies to market their technologies, and 37 teams have partnered with other government agencies for further development.

In addition, 34 projects have attracted more than $850 million in private-sector funding to follow up on ARPA-E’s initial investments, according to the agency. Several of the technologies are already incorporated into products on the market, as well.

But many of ARPA-E’s early funding projects are at the sink-or-swim stage because the agency provides only about 36 months of funding.

One-third of the projects in 23 programs funded by the agency have ended, and another third are set to end this year. ARPA-E currently has several funding opportunities open for application that will modify the portfolio when the final projects are chosen for awards (Greenwire, Feb. 25).

"We have a greater opportunity now because we have so much more coming out of the pipeline," Williams said. "From all those projects, we are learning things and making partners."

Although its advocates insist the agency needs a $1 billion budget or at least a boost to the less than $300 million per year it runs on now to really give a significant jolt to the energy system, the possibility of tight finances doesn’t dismay the optimistic Williams.

"We always want more budget, but even with budget constraints we are in a position that just building on the success, the knowledge and mechanisms are going to allow us to expand the impact," she said.

‘Fog of war’

Besides her love for "The Hobbit" and technology, Williams has several other qualifications that make the energy community optimistic.

"She is analytically one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met and knows technology inside and out," said Drew Baden, chairman of the University of Maryland’s physics department, where Williams is a distinguished professor.

"She’s the one if you want ARPA-E to make an impact, and not just chip around the edges," Baden told Science after her 2013 nomination to lead the agency.

Williams shares an academic background with the first ARPA-E chief, Arun Majumdar, but she’s also worked in government and the private sector.

Majumdar had been a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and the associate laboratory director for energy and environment at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, before taking the reins for 2½ years at ARPA-E. He was followed by acting Director Cheryl Martin, who came by way of the venture capital industry and chemical firm Rohm and Haas Co.

Williams is on leave from the University of Maryland, where she once directed the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center and has taught since 1991. She leads a research group that specializes in the atomic-scale interactions on the surfaces of materials, particularly graphene.

She left the university to become BP’s chief scientist in January 2010 — four months before the Deepwater Horizon rig leased by BP from Transocean exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and spilling 3.19 million barrels of crude.

The spill was "really traumatic," Williams said, but it brought home to her the importance of the U.S. infrastructure of scientific and engineering knowledge to the nation’s success.

"I was tremendously impressed by the technical expertise required to shut down the spill," she said. "It was an amazing engineering and organization effort, and I really watched that with awe. If they had to start from zero without knowing anything, it would have been bad."

Still, Williams said experiencing the aftermath was "a little bit fog of war" between the media attention on the company and constantly shifting situation in the Gulf.

She was glad when BP asked her to establish the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative, an independent agency BP funded at $500 million for 10 years in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster that explores the impacts of oil spills and dispersants on local ecosystems, as well as developing improved spill mitigation, oil and gas detection, and other technologies.

"It really was a release and pleasure for me when I had something very concrete to do like the research initiative that clearly had a positive thrust," she said.

The spill didn’t alter Williams’ enthusiasm for working in energy, which she saw as an opportunity "to engage with such a crucial ecological problem with such large social impacts" — and what originally drew her to work at BP, she said.

During her time at the company she was also in charge of setting up BP’s $100 million International Centre for Advanced Materials, a research collaboration to accelerate research of advanced materials across a variety of energy and industrial applications, and BP’s Energy Sustainability Challenge, a consortium of universities examining the impact of limited resources on patterns of energy supply and consumption and the necessary technological advances to meet these challenges.

‘Cold-eyed and razor sharp’

Establishing these large programs from scratch at BP taught her what it takes to develop "buy-in" from multiple parties and to document and demonstrate why a project is important, which are valuable lessons for her work at ARPA-E, Williams said.

Her BP experience also brought her a "deep background" in how energy production relates to materials, land, energy and water, which Williams said will contribute to her understanding of the agency’s greater impacts.

"At BP, I had both the opportunity to work on sustainability issues and to pay attention to how a big company really does business," she said.

"I have seen really how important it is to just be cold-eyed and razor sharp when you are evaluating a technology because if it is not going to be getting any pull in the marketplace, it’s kind of like the tree falling in the forest with nobody there to hear it."

The "37th" month — or surviving beyond ARPA-E’s funding — has shifted to the fore at the agency under the leadership of former acting Director Martin, who will leave the agency this month.

Originally brought in to lead ARPA-E’s Technology-to-Market program, Martin has done her best to set up the awardees for success and says they are in good hands with Williams’ experience in academia, government and the private sector.

"If you think from the end, relationships matter," Martin said. "If I am going to invite people into the impossible, they’ve got to be with me while they make it plausible. I can’t just pop out the other end and say, ‘Hey, do you want my cool new thing that you never thought of and looks really weird?’" she said.

"I am excited about what we have done. I am excited about where the agency can go," Martin said.

Williams is "leaning on the strong technical side, and relationships through all those pieces will be beneficial, but she is also committed to the optionality of the agency," Martin added.

What’s next?

The importance of tuning into market demands was a key part in Williams’ work last year spearheading Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz’s efforts to improve DOE’s programs for moving ideas from the lab to the marketplace as she awaited Senate confirmation. Williams recommended and helped set up DOE’s new Office of Technology Transitions (Greenwire, Feb. 11).

"The industrial sector is looking for a more ‘de-risked’ technical product before they invest," she said. "There is a tremendous amount of interest and ability across the DOE complex and U.S. enterprise to make transitions happen. With a little bit of support and coordination from headquarters, there is a lot of opportunity to make that work better."

One market where ARPA-E has already made a "big difference," Williams said, is in energy storage, but consumers won’t see its impact "on the street" anytime soon.

ARPA-E’s five years on the job is not a long time in the energy technology world, she said. "I think … we are seeing examples probably a couple steps back from the street level."

ARPA-E programs focused on the grid, energy efficiency and a systems approach to energy are also ripe for innovation, she said.

Energy as a system currently has greater options because of the transition from analogue to digital — much as scientific discovery underwent a "huge transformation" when scientists no longer had to analyze results by plotting data by drawing lines on paper or taking Polaroid photographs, Williams said.

"We have all the power that we’ve seen change the world in so many other fields available to us in the energy system," she said.

Enabling a "smart grid" and other digital upgrades and software to reduce inefficiencies, increase communication and boost systemwide cooperation, she said, "is almost a something for nothing for us to get more out of our energy system while basically paying less in terms of emissions and costs."

‘Step out’

Williams is also committed to boosting women’s participation in science and engineering.

Her father originally dissuaded her from taking up engineering, pushing her toward the burgeoning field of computers and computer science, which turned out to be very helpful to her career, Williams said.

"He was a young engineer in the 1930s, and engineers then were on the production floor dealing with tough guys," Williams told PNAS. "From his perspective, it was no life for a woman."

Williams said her heroes are the female scientists in the generation before her who "had a tough time" and had been actively discouraged and told it was socially detrimental to enter the field, she said.

Women like Mildred "Millie" Dresselhaus, professor emerita of physics and electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Myriam Sarachik, professor of physics at City College of New York, as well as the University of Maryland’s Sandra Greer, professor emerita of chemical and biomolecular engineering, inspired and helped pave a path for her, Williams said.

Williams has kept science in the family. She is married to astrophysicist Neil Gehrels, the head of the Astroparticle Physics Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Their son is an electrical engineer, and their daughter is an applied physicist.

In her free time, aside from hiking, kayaking and reading, Williams speaks before young people, especially women, relating her experiences as a scientist and encouraging students to consider the field.

Her advice to women is much the same she gives to those pushing the energy technology envelope.

"One of my lessons from a whole lifetime is don’t be afraid of unfamiliar things," she said. "Step out because what you find could be really exciting."

Clarification: An earlier version of this story stated that the Deepwater Horizon rig was owned by BP; it has been clarified to say it was leased by BP from Transocean. The update also provides the total BP funding for the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative over 10 years.

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Bill Watkins is a short man of large appetites. He cusses a lot, drives a $200,000 Bentley, is a mogul of two obscure sports and expects to conquer the business of energy storage.

He is the CEO of Imergy Power Systems, a company that was kind of sleepy until he came along. Watkins, 62, is a turnaround artist who has transformed two major technology companies, and he says his new firm will do some impossible-sounding things in order to take down the electric utilities.

Here’s the plan: Target the small, medium and large parts of the energy-storage market — cellphone towers in India, college microgrids in California, giant installations feeding the U.S. power grid — and get to enormous scale faster than anything but lithium-ion. Beat everyone on price by getting the raw materials from oil and coal waste.

Wait, what?

"It’s kind of like stardust," Watkins said at his office in Fremont, Calif., and broke out into a loud snorting laugh, one of many during an interview. At times, while making a point, he whacked the table so hard that the water glasses jumped. He admits he doesn’t quite know how the technology works, or the details of how he’ll pull the turnaround off. He doesn’t mind playing the fool.

When it comes to business strategy, though, his competitors might do well to take him seriously. He has a track record of radically altering core technology, streamlining the business model and making his companies go bigger.

"Bill has no hidden agendas, he’s direct and he doesn’t sugarcoat issues," Ira Ehrenpreis, a venture capitalist who backs Imergy and recruited Watkins to the post, said in an email. "He and his teams have been known for defying conventions to achieve unprecedented success."

It’s impossible to tell whether Watkins’ stellar claims will be borne out. But customers and partners are biting. Watkins said the company has orders for its batteries from Africa, a growing roster of customers in India and a few pilot projects in California and is in the final stages of establishing a manufacturing line with Foxconn Technology Group, the giant Chinese manufacturer best known for fabricating the iPhone.

A different sort of battery

Imergy makes what is called a flow battery, which is very unlike the tightly coiled electronics that the world usually equates with batteries. The signature feature of flow batteries is voluminous tanks of liquid electrolyte, which are pumped through an electric cell in order to create an electric current. To recharge, the flow is simply reversed.

Bill Watkins
Imergy CEO Bill Watkins. | Photo courtesy of Imergy Power Systems.

Energy storage is often hailed as the missing piece that will make intermittent sources of power, like solar panels and wind farms, as useful to the electric grid as stalwarts like coal or natural gas. Flow batteries could be especially useful. With their big tanks, they are well-suited to unleash large quantities of electricity for hours at a time.

The active ingredient in Imergy’s electrolyte is vanadium. A number of companies, such as American Vanadium and UniEnergy Technologies, are also pursuing vanadium because it more durable and flexible than other chemistries. It endures years of use without needing to be replaced and performs better than other chemicals in delivering power in sustained bouts, in short bursts and when the level of charge is low, Watkins said.

"That’s why everyone loves working with vanadium in the flow battery space," said Sam Jaffe, an energy-storage analyst at Navigant Research.

But it is pricey. High-grade vanadium, of 99.9 percent purity, is usually teased out during the process of making steel or refining uranium.

Imergy’s remarkable claim is that it can make use of a lower-grade vanadium, of 98.5 percent purity, and yet create a battery that is denser than its higher-grade competitors. It could also operate at a wider range of temperatures, which would make it more usable in hot climates.

Sources of that vanadium? Mining slag, fly ash from the burning of coal and the byproducts of oil refining, among others, said Majid Keshavarz, Imergy’s chief technology officer. Vanadium from sources like these have been tested in the lab but not yet deployed in the market, he added.

Because these sources of vanadium are cheaper, and because vanadium can make up as much of 40 percent of the price of a system, Keshavarz projects that Imergy could produce electricity at $300 per kilowatt-hour — below the prices that its competitors are targeting.

"The driving force behind all this is cost," Keshavarz said.

But with so few systems deployed, and with most still operating with the help of subsidies, it’s impossible to tell how different flow batteries compare in terms of either performance or price, said Jaffe, the analyst. "You have in the energy storage space a lot of companies making a lot of claims," he said. "It’s very difficult to figure out who’s right."

Both Watkins and Jaffe agree that the stiffest competition among flow battery companies is not each other but the lithium-ion battery, which is already well-established in devices from cellphones to electric cars.

"I worry about lithium, and I worry about Elon," said Watkins, jerking his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the Tesla auto factory, a few minutes’ drive from where he sat. Elon Musk is the celebrity CEO of Tesla Motors, which is moving into some of the very markets Imergy is seeking.

Success, peppered with profanity

Watkins is a CEO who, like Musk, is possessed of a sharp business acumen and the ability to inspire people in a large organization. But Watkins’ persona is more lumpy.

Born in Venezuela as the son of a nomadic oil man, he went to high school in Texas. He enlisted as an Army medic and got a degree from the University of Texas. He then hitchhiked from Texas to California in pursuit of a girlfriend and wound up (sans girlfriend) in Silicon Valley.

Through a series of acquisitions and promotions, he ended up in 1996 running four factories for Seagate Technology, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of computer hard drives. When he started, only 2 percent of the company’s drives shared parts in common. He led a campaign to create common parts and manufacturing lines, and his success earned him the CEO slot, which he held from 2004 until a stormy exit in 2009.

Vanadium electrolyte
The electrolyte in Imergy’s flow battery is made of vanadium, which in different oxidative states takes on different hues. | Photo courtesy of NPS.

It’s a sign of a complicated personality that he earned great acclaim as a CEO while also getting a reputation for bluntness and profanity that could make a board member cringe.

His tenure at Seagate ended with a shouting match with the board. "I got in a big fight, and to be honest, I personalized it by insulting people and losing my cool," Watkins told the San Francisco Chronicle. "They thought I was going to punch out one of the board members. I didn’t, but I did call him, ‘You f- mother-.’"

The following year, he took over at Bridgelux, a light-emitting diode company, where he engineered a wholesale change in approach. He switched the substrate on which the company’s wafers were built from synthetic sapphire, a prohibitively expensive material, to silicon.

"Engineered" might be the wrong word; his college degree is in political science, and he admitted to the Chronicle that he arrived knowing little about lighting. But that didn’t stand in the way of ramping the business. In 2013, the Bridgelux wafer business was purchased by Toshiba for over $100 million. Toshiba has spent millions more on the technology and has yet to commercialize it, Watkins said.

After Bridgelux, he intended to take his winnings and retire to a former Christmas tree farm he bought in the nearby Santa Cruz Mountains. But he was recruited to Imergy by Ehrenpreis, the venture capitalist, who saw promise in what was then known as Deeya Energy, a startup that made relatively small flow batteries, mostly to power telecommunications towers in India.

Watkins accepted the offer in late 2013 and undertook yet another radical reboot. He changed Deeya’s name to Imergy, brought in an all-pro management team and swapped out the underlying technology, abandoning a chemistry called iron-chromium and turning to some tantalizing vanadium discoveries that had been made by Keshavarz, the CTO.

Imergy’s original, humble business of powering remote, off-grid telecommunications towers still exists and is expanding into Africa and China. But it is now the low end of an ambitious product line.

In the parking lot out back, workers were putting the finishing touches on batteries six times that size, each in a 20-foot-long container. These units would soon be trucked south to Naval Base Ventura County, while another will be shipped soon to power a Bay Area community college.

These flow batteries each has an output of 30 kW, and both installations are intended to be the power source of microgrids — essentially a proposition to use electricity that is generated locally and can disconnect from the larger power grid if needed. "My whole goal is to destroy the utilities," Watkins said with glee.

Next up is a far larger 250 kW unit, made up of two 40-foot containers, that will be the company’s offering to power both large organizations and to the utilities themselves. Imergy plans to bid into California’s huge program to add 1.3 gigawatts of storage to the grid by 2020, Watkins said.

Watkins volunteered the name of the first customer, an Indian call-center company, to the chagrin of his spokeswoman, who later pleaded that the name not be published.

"It’s not quite designed," Watkins continued, as if a reporter weren’t in the room. "Which has my engineers kind of freaked out. We’ve been kind of selling the product before we design them."

And he roared with laughter.

Ultimate team-building exercise

Watkins is a passionate sportsman, and he has merged sports with his day job in surprising ways. Nothing demonstrates this better than his love affair with adventure racing.

Adventure racing is an endurance event to end all endurance events. A squad of teammates, usually coed, cross great distances through the day and night, switching from trekking to mountain biking to paddling to rappelling. Watkins entered the hardest and most high-profile race of them all: the Eco-Challenge, a 300-mile race that in 2001 was held in New Zealand.

Midsize flow batteries
Erik Egan, Imergy’s vice president of engineering, and Chief Technology Officer Majid Keshavarz stand between two of the company’s midsize flow batteries. | Photo by Larry Lamsa, courtesy of Wikipedia.

His team did terribly, and a bad right knee hobbled him from racing again. But that didn’t prevent him from embracing the idea on a scale that had a ripple effect on both his company and the sport.

He booted up Eco Seagate, an adventure-race-slash-team-building-exercise he devised to change what he saw as a dysfunctional corporate culture. Every year, he spent $2 million to fly 200 of his employees to exotic locales, from Utah to New Zealand, to participate in a grueling 40-kilometer race of his own design.

And his role in the sport points again to a man who’s difficult to define.

"He has a power around him. People jump when he speaks," said Terri Schneider, an adventure-racing coach who used to train Watkins personally and also Seagate’s employees. "You really get a feeling that he has an ability to light a fire under people’s asses, yet he’s pretty self-effacing."

Simultaneously, in 2002, he launched Primal Quest, a North American race series meant to compete with the Eco-Challenge and showcase locations in North America. For a time, it was one of the sport’s biggest events. (Both are now defunct — Eco Seagate ended with Watkins’ tenure there, and he wound up selling Primal Quest. It hasn’t been held since 2009.)

That would seem to be enough sporting for one CEO — but wait. Watkins and his wife, Denise, are also co-owners of the Vancouver Stealth, a professional lacrosse team that the Watkinses purchased when the team used to play in San Jose. The Stealth won the national championship in 2010.

All of which explained why the only adornments in Watkins’ office were three cricket bats.

"Rather than adventure racing, I have embraced cricket as our team sport," Watkins said. Nearly half of Imergy’s 110-person workforce is based in India, and when they flew to California for a rare face-to-face meeting, Watkins shelled out for proper white uniforms for everyone. The cricket-mad Indians trounced the Americans.

It brought everyone together, Watkins said; he then disclosed, "I hate the game." Another raucous bout of laughter ensued.

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Imagine a law against doing "stupid stuff."

That might happen if Congress doubles the reach of the Coastal Barrier Resources Act, supporters say. First passed in 1982, it currently bans federal investments on undeveloped barrier islands to deter home construction, road building and the risk of death from hurricanes on 1.3 million acres of U.S. shoreline.

But there’s little interest in Congress in getting behind the expansion of the law, according to proponents. Instead, most of the attention by lawmakers is aimed at trimming back the program’s boundaries to give island communities more incentives for development.

The original law passed the House 33 years ago with four dissenting votes, and only one of them was cast by a Republican, Rep. Don Young of Alaska. Advocates say the measure has a special appeal for both environmentalists and fiscal conservatives.

"My judgment is that this is one of the few pieces of major environmental legislation that would have a very good chance in a Republican Congress," said Eli Lehrer, president of the libertarian R Street Institute and a key proponent of the plan.

The program protects ecosystems for fish and birds while preserving natural barriers against storm-blown waves that are getting higher with sea-level rise, supporters say. It could also save a great deal of government money. Federal flood insurance is off-limits within the protected areas, and so is funding to rebuild bridges and sewers and to replenish beaches after a storm.

It doesn’t outlaw development, but the program does make it less economical to build in areas where the federal government won’t provide those things. Supporters say those responsibilities should fall to the people who choose to build homes in harm’s way and not to taxpayers everywhere else.

It’s unclear how much money the program has saved over the years, but in a 2002 report, the government estimated that its lifetime savings were $1.3 billion. Supporters say it likely has prevented additional debt from accruing to the National Flood Insurance Program, which now owes the U.S. Treasury $24 billion. The protected areas would also stop the drain on disaster aid payments, including tens of billions appropriated in the past decade.

Can this Congress stop a ‘subsidy spiral’?

President Ronald Reagan said the program would help stop a "subsidy spiral" when he signed it into law in 1982. He noted that the government at the time paid $53,000 per acre to redevelop island communities after a storm.

"The Coastal Barrier Resources Act meets a national problem with less federal involvement, not more," Reagan said, calling it "precisely the sort of imaginative environmental legislation this administration encourages."

Bolivar beach after Ike
In 2008, Hurricane Ike caused $29.5 billion worth of damage along the U.S. Gulf Coast. Its high wind made an almost clean sweep of the beach houses on Texas’ Bolivar Peninsula. | Photo by Ed Schipul, courtesy of Flickr.

Congress isn’t alone in its apparent inability to come to grips with this message. Lehrer said environmental donors and other foundations haven’t shown a strong interest in funding reports and outreach efforts that could inform lawmakers of its benefits. It loses out to other priorities.

"In the cosmic sense, getting a carbon tax is, and ought to be, a higher priority," said Lehrer, whose group also promotes a revenue-neutral carbon tax that would help lower tax rates on things like income.

There have been small successes. In Florida, the state-run hurricane insurance program, Citizens Property Insurance Corp., stopped issuing policies in areas seaward of the "coastal construction line," essentially mimicking the Coastal Barriers Resources Act (CBRA).

And in Texas, where island development is booming (see related story), Lehrer’s group helped install language that restricts the use of public hurricane insurance in CBRA areas.

Vocal local constituents rule

Indeed, there’s more action to weaken the CBRA than to strengthen it. Lawmakers see local opportunities for new tax revenue, more jobs and additional federal funding. And they also get to please vocal constituents who see the program’s restrictions as unfair, including developers and real estate agents who sell beach houses.

In North Topsail Beach, N.C., for example, lawmakers in both parties introduced legislation in the last Congress to redraw the program’s boundaries to make federal funding available to areas that were developed after the law went into place.

Local officials say it’s only fair that their residents have access to the same level of funding for beach nourishment, roads, utilities and flood insurance as their neighbors down the coast have.

But supporters of expanding the law say those homeowners should be on their own, because they built in treacherous areas after the CBRA program was enacted.

"That’s what the CBRA says, ‘Don’t subsidize stupid stuff,’" Lehrer said.

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GALVESTON AND BOLIVAR PENINSULA, Texas — Up and down the barrier islands and peninsulas separating Galveston Bay from the Gulf of Mexico, construction is booming, whether that’s a good idea or not.

It’s been almost seven years since Hurricane Ike tore up this part of Texas, and recovery is continuing. On the Bolivar Peninsula, which was almost completely devastated, entire new communities of weekend retreats and rentals have sprung up. Sand is continually added to beaches on nearby Galveston Island, and a state park that was almost destroyed is just starting to get back on its feet.

But the prospect that climate change will create another Ike looms, along with the greater risks that will come from a steadily rising sea level. Yet planning for the redevelopment of the Texas public beaches and towns that might take these facts into consideration is still spotty and years behind schedule.

"We could be much further along than we are right now, and we’re not," said Kelly de Schaun, executive director of the Galveston Island Park Board of Trustees. "We’re taking baby steps."

Debate continues among Texas and federal authorities over whether to build the "Ike Dike" and Dutch-style storm surge gates to protect the bays and the Port of Houston. A proposal by Texas A&M University at Galveston would see the protections of Galveston’s famous sea wall extended to protect the rest of the island and the Bolivar Peninsula, a system "using existing, proven technology such as the gates and barriers currently used in the Delta Works project located in the Netherlands," the university suggests.

But developers aren’t waiting for that or other ideas floated by the Army Corps of Engineers to become a reality. Thousands of new homes are being built up and down Bolivar to replace the estimated 3,000 that were destroyed or damaged beyond repair by Hurricane Ike.

Elsewhere in the country, there may be debate on whether development should even be allowed on storm-sensitive barrier islands such as those that line the entirety of Texas’ Gulf of Mexico coastline, from South Padre Island all the way to the Bolivar Peninsula and High Island. But in Texas, the debate is over, and the final word is "we will build."

Neil Spiller, a Realtor who markets properties on the Bolivar Peninsula for ReMax, has been active in the region before and after Hurricane Ike. He estimates that the area damaged the most by the storm is about halfway to complete recovery.

‘New town’ rises on stilts

"It’s like a new town really, and it’s really busy construction-wise as well as the resale market, and we’ve seen the prices reflect that," Spiller said. He guessed that nearly 2,000 permits to build new homes had been issued since the storm.

"There’s a large amount of new construction that’s come, and it’s still underway," he said.

Newer, tighter building codes have been issued, but whether they do a better job at protecting homes from the next storm won’t be known until it hits. Houses have been raised higher on stilts, but from the outside they look just as flimsy as the ones Ike washed out to sea in 2008.

Beach protection measures are moving forward, if fitfully. Galveston County has issued a comprehensive Erosion Response Plan to the Texas General Land Office, or GLO. It details the county’s thoughts on building and maintaining sand dunes that would act as storm buffers, all the while ensuring the public still has access to the beaches: the main draw for the region’s economy. Though its population is estimated at about 50,000, Galveston hosts approximately 6 million visitors every year.

Bulldozer
Replacing Galveston, Texas’ beach with new sand. | Photo by Nathanial Gronewold.

But the county is behind in other ways. For instance, floodplain regulations available for download on the county government’s website date back to 2002.

As for beach rebuilding and protection, some of the larger projects aimed at defending against the next hurricane have just barely begun. The beach in front of the Galveston sea wall was largely taken out by the storm but is now back. De Schaun said her community’s biggest problem with beach recovery, which is ongoing, is finding sand.

And work to maintain the beaches will never end, with or without hurricanes, she explained.

"The sediment that had traditionally nourished the Galveston coastline is the Brazos River and the Mississippi River, and as those river systems were diverted, closed up and jettied, the material that was previously produced out of that system is no longer produced," de Schaun said. "So our biggest problem in Galveston is sand sourcing."

Funding is more stable. Two separate revenue-generating mechanisms net the county nearly $6 million per year to purchase sand to fill in for what the sea had swept from the beaches.

Other coastal beach development is plodding along on the Texas shoreline.

Hauling in sand for new beach

Late last month, GLO announced the launch of a $2.3 million project to add sand to Surfside Beach. That work involves GLO placing "23,000 cubic yards of sand along 1,200 feet of beach, as well as repair a revetment credited with saving tens of millions of dollars’ worth of private and public property during hurricanes Ike and Dolly," the state agency said.

The county is funding major beach rebuilding initiatives along the north and south ends of Galveston in addition to the routine sand replenishment in front of the sea wall. Farther south, a heavily damaged state park is relying on nature to show the rest of the Texas coast how beach management should proceed in the face of sea-level rise and the threat of stronger storms.

Trey Goodman is superintendent at Galveston Island State Park. He contends that the best defense that could be encouraged along the otherwise unprotected shoreline is the building and maintenance of sand dunes that naturally form on Texas barrier islands.

With resources tight, Galveston Island State Park has taken a hands-off approach to beach restoration. One artificial dune put in place post-Ike has since grown to a large number of naturally occurring dunes that came right in after it. In the summertime, huge mats of seaweed can typically wash up along the coast. In Galveston, this material is raked away, but the state park personnel leaves its messy seaweed alone.

Visitors to Galveston from out of state complain vocally to Goodman about the unseemly sight and smell, but he tells them to forget about visions of Hawaii-style sugar sand beaches. This is what Texas beaches are supposed to look like, he argues: tidal flats facing a wall of thickly vegetated sand dunes, all of it littered by washed-up seaweed.

"We’ve made it a part of our educational program," Goodman explained. "It helps mat that sand down so it doesn’t blow away. Once sand is stabilized, plants start to grow, and it also acts as a fertilizer for the plants. And it’s made a huge difference for our park."

‘The ocean will always win’

Hurricane Ike destroyed pretty much all of the beach at this state park and took the number of useable camping sites down from 150 to just 33. The park headquarters building was destroyed, and staff members now conduct business out of a temporary trailer.

Rebuilding Bolivar
Life is a beach? Houses rise again on the Bolivar Peninsula. | Photo by Patrick Feller, courtesy of Flickr.

This April, design and survey work will begin on a master vision for rebuilding all of Galveston Island State Park. Goodman says he hopes the work will be completed by mid-2019. He repeatedly emphasized the importance of building large vegetated dunes as barriers for Texas’ barrier islands. His lesson might be sinking in: Dunes are growing on the Bolivar Peninsula, even if they obscure the view of the coastline somewhat, and a team in Galveston is experimenting with a dune-building method using artificially matted seaweed to speed up the process.

So far, the park’s beaches are not losing sand. Goodman acknowledges that sea-level rise could defeat some of his efforts, but he espoused confidence that the park’s newer, larger dunes will make his park more resilient to storms. He is skeptical of whether that’s the case for other infrastructure getting built along the shoreline.

"Mankind can go in there and do whatever changes they want to make, but the ocean will always win. Always," Goodman said. "The man-made stuff we can certainly design knowing what’s going to happen in the future, but I don’t know anything that we can totally do to stop it from happening in the future, except for to put it back the way it was."

It’s expensive, repetitive and often seems pointless, but the refurbishing and rebuilding of the Texas coast after every storm will continue regardless of what critics might think, de Schaun says. She points to Galveston itself; after a hurricane in the early 1900s destroyed the city and killed thousands, the community and governments responded by building the sea wall and raising the entire city, including every building and every street.

Galveston’s historic significance in Texas and U.S. history determined that outcome, she argued.

Elsewhere in Texas, it seems that no amount of storms, coastal erosion or sea-level rise will ever deter these communities and the state from building it back the way it was, only a bit stronger than before, all so generations of Texans can continue to enjoy the sunshine and ocean breezes.

"When we talk about coastal development and should we build or should we not build, that question was answered a long time ago," de Schaun said.

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