BTUs and BLTs

Years ago, when I was a young engineer, the beginnings of energy deregulation were upon us. At the time, there were many meetings between my engineering colleagues and the financial community. It was our objective to help our clients raise financing for the projects we wanted to engineer and build. Back then, there were few in the financial community who knew much about energy. After one meeting, I turned to one of my colleagues and said, "He wouldn't know a Btu from a BLT."

Of course, the financial community today, thirty years later, is expert in all forms of energy and adept at financing projects of all kinds. However, the phrase that I coined so long ago has followed me, in a good way, all of this time. And according to the person I said it to, who has provided engineering consulting services around the globe and related it to his clients, says he has heard it translated into many languages, humorously.

I use it here because it is part of the light-hearted title of a book I'm writing about energy. As someone who has been associated with energy all of my career, I find that there is a lot of information and misinformation in the discourse about energy. My upcoming book and this blog, with constructive feedback and dialogue from those who visit here, will try to illuminate this subject so that we can all become more learned when it come to this most important resource and its impact on our economy and our lives.