IPF 2011: Energy security and energy policy

‘Energy Frontiers’ is the title of the second of this year’s Industrial Physics Forums, which is being held in Nashville, Tennessee, in conjunction with the annual meeting of AVS: Science and Technology of Materials, Interfaces, and Processing.

The forum began with a session devoted to energy security and energy policy. In the first talk of the session, William Hogan of Harvard University surveyed the historical, economic, strategic, and environmental factors that continue to make energy policy so important.

Energy and security

From about 1880 to 1970, the real price of oil remained roughly constant . The oil embargo of 1973, the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and the Iran–Iraq War of 1980–88 quintupled the oil price. In response, Hogan observed, US presidents from Richard Nixon on have sought to make the US less dependent on foreign oil and less vulnerable to its fluctuating price.

Nixon’s Project Independence of 1974 aimed to make the US independent of oil exports by 1980, a goal deemed impractical even by the project’s director. Although energy independence continues to be sought by politicians and analysts, Hogan welcomed the newer, more realistic policy of regarding energy as a matter of national security, economic wellbeing, and technical infrastructure.

Hogan pointed out two characteristics of America’s energy economy; one good, the other bad. In recent years the real price of oil has matched or hovered not far below its former peak in the early 1980s. Even so, America’s total oil bill in terms of national GDP has halved from 8% to 4%. That’s the good news.

The bad news, according to Hogan, is that the price of fossil fuels paid by drivers, power plant owners, and other end users fails to cover the fuels’ costs to the environment and human health. Citing a recent attempt by Nicholas Muller, Robert Mendelsohn, and William Nordhaus to quantify those costs, Hogan closed his talk by advocating higher taxes to push the US toward an economically more balanced and environmentally more friendly energy future.

China’s skyrocketing demand for energy and energy technology

China, noted MIT’s Edward Steinfeld in his IPF talk, leads the world on several clean energy fronts. It’s building more new nuclear power stations—30—than any other country. It has the world’s longest network of high-voltage direct-current power lines. It manufactures and exports the most solar panels. How did China achieve such prominence in energy technology, and what does it mean for the rest of the world?

Steinfeld dispelled the view that China extorts or even steals Western technologies and, taking advantage of its vast market and lavish government funding, develops them for itself. The reality is more subtle and less threatening.

Because building a new power plant or other piece of energy infrastructure is so expensive and because that new piece must be integrated with other new and existing pieces, energy R&D does not proceed to commercial fruition in the same way as R&D in consumer electronics or other industrial sectors. Steinfeld identified four stages, which require increasingly higher levels of investment:

• 1. Creating options ($100 000 to $100 million).
• 2. Demonstrating feasibility ($10 million to $1 billion).
• 3. Early adoption ($10 billion)
• 4. Improvements in use ($100 billion)

The US, said Steinfeld, excels in the first stage of inventing new technologies. China wants to emulate America’s inventiveness, but until it does it is investing heavily in the other three stages. China imports energy technology to develop and use it. And in the process, Chinese companies are developing expertise in scaling up technologies and making them commercially viable.

Given that the US economy is 2.5 times larger than China’s, why doesn’t the US invest more heavily in developing and deploying new energy technologies? Steinfeld pointed out that much of China’s investment in energy comes from the central government, provincial governments, and private equity companies that are backed in part by pensions and other government-controlled sources of funds. China’s energy investments, which seem to be paying off, nevertheless jeopardize the savings of Chinese people.

The risk for the US of not investing in big new energy projects is different. According to Steinfeld, by not vigorously pursuing stages 2 through 4, the US could lose the know-how to scale up and deploy the technologies it invents.

Replacing fossil fuels, capturing and storing carbon

BP is the world’s third largest energy company. Its chief scientist, physicist Ellen Williams, devoted her talk to BP’s efforts to develop both new biofuels and methods to sequester the carbon dioxide produced when old biofuels—fossil fuels—are burned.

Biofuels are attractive for two reasons. First, because their energy resides in chemical bonds, biofuels are easily stored and transported. Second, because plants sequester carbon dioxide during photosynthesis, burning biofuels puts back into the atmosphere only the carbon dioxide that was consumed in growing them—provided the cultivation does not require additional energy.

To be an efficient combustible energy source, a biofuel should contain as much hydrogen and as little oxygen as possible. The plants used to make it should grow year round and require little fertilizer. Williams pointed out that ethanol derived from maize falls short on both counts. Woodier plants, such as sugar cane and switchgrass, are better prospects, but their energy content is harder to extract via fermentation. Researchers at BP and elsewhere are developing synthetic enzymes that can do the job.

If gas-, oil- and coal-burning power plants could capture and store the carbon dioxide they emit, anthropogenic global warming could be partly mitigated. Williams reported on BP’s promising efforts to store carbon dioxide securely underground.

The key to the BP technology is to take advantage of what oil companies already do. When an oil well is first tapped, the oil gushes up to the surface by itself. But when the well matures, oil companies have to pump a fluid—sometimes carbon dioxide—down into the well to provide an additional source of pressure. That same technique can be used to sequester carbon dioxide from power plants.

Liquifying the carbon dioxide before pumping it underground greatly reduces the volume needed to store it. At depths of 1 km or more, the ambient pressure is high enough to keep the carbon dioxide in a liquid state. Making sure that the liquid doesn’t seep upward, vaporize, and escape depends on finding suitable sites.

The best sites consist of porous rock overlain by nonporous rock. Potentially, they could contain all the world’s carbon emissions until 2050—by which time, said Williams optimistically, ‘we’ll have found alternatives to fossil fuel.’

Synthetic biology for energy and the environment

How the tools and techniques of genetic engineering might yield new and clean sources of energy was the topic of the IPF talk by Aristides Patrinos of Synthetic Genomics .

In principle, you could mutate this or that base pair in the genome of a photosynthesizing bacterium in the hope that the bacterium would become more efficient. Synthetic Genomics and other companies and labs are pursuing a more sweeping approach.

Five years ago, scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute succeeded in assembling the genome of Mycoplasma genitalium, a parasitic bacterium that lives in our respiratory tracts. The Venter team then brought their synthetic genome to life. Not counting viruses, M. genitalium has the shortest known genome. It might be possible, Patrinos said, to treat the M. genitalium genome like a car’s chassis onto which new energy-producing machinery could be bolted. The bug that rolls off the synthetic genomic production line could be far better at making energy than its natural counterparts.

Although no one has assembled such a superbug, Synthetic Genomics and its partner ExxonMobil have built a pilot plant for harvesting the chemical energy produced by algae. Conceivably, synthetic algae could be engineered not only to become more efficient energy producers, but also to thrive in dirty, salty environments that are useless for producing food for humans.

Manufacturing innovations for a sustainable energy future

Electrical energy, whether it’s produced by a nuclear power station, an offshore wind farm, or a lithium-ion battery, is ultimately used in lights, computers, and other devices. In his IPF talk, Omkaram Nalamasu of Applied Materials described how his company is developing technologies that make devices more energy-efficient.

Applied Materials’ core expertise, Nalamasu said, lies in engineering thin films with atomic precision. Those films are ubiquitous. Among other things, they can be found in computer chips, photovoltaic panels, TV screens, mobile phone displays, and batteries.

According to Gordon Moore’s famous law, the number of transistors that can be fitted onto a chip doubles every two years. Nalamasu showed his audience a plot that embodied another, parallel law: For the past few decades, the computational power of chips per kilowatt hour has doubled every 1.57 years. In the future, those gains in efficiency will be increasingly driven by mobile devices. A smart phone whose smarts drain its battery after an hour is not attractive to consumers.

Ninety percent of new TVs have liquid crystal displays, which, as is the case with all LCDs, require a source of backlight. Although energy-efficient LEDs are now being used as backlights, the next generation of TV displays will be based on active-matrix organic LEDs.

In an AMOLED display, each pixel corresponds to a tiny patch of organic material that glows red, green, or blue. A transistor attached to the material controls the light level. Because AMOLEDs are their own source of light, they use less energy. Many smart phones already use AMOLEDs. Adapting them for TVs will require meeting two technical challenges, Nalamasu said: reliably producing large-area displays and extending the lifetime of blue AMOLEDs.

Lighting consumes 22% of the electricity produced in the US. Applied Materials and other companies are working to make LEDs cheap enough to replace incandescent lights, which are energy-efficient, and compact fluorescent bulbs, which contain toxic mercury vapor. Worldwide production of LEDs currently stands at 50 billion. China and Taiwan lead the world in both manufacture and deployment of LEDs.

Nalamasu ended his talk on a retro note. The manufacturing process for batteries, even the lithium-ion batteries in a Toyota Prius or Telsa Roadster, has barely changed for a century. Applied Materials is developing a new, cheaper process that cuts the traditional 14 stages of production down to three.

Charles Day