Raymond L. Orbach
The Search for Breakthrough Technologies
June / July 2007
Volume 5 Number 3
Following are excerpts from the commencement address given by the Under Secretary for Science, Department of Energy, at Georgia Tech in May. Dr. Orbach points out the need for "fundamental breakthroughs" in basic science.
Not too many years ago, we seemed to be living in a world where energy was inexpensive, readily available and seemingly limitless in supply. That world, if indeed it ever really did exist, is clearly a thing of the past. Today our dependence on fossil fuels and imported oil poses a growing risk to our economy, our national security and the environment.
The problem is not just national but global. Global energy consumption is set to double by the end of the century. Some say it will triple. And if we attempt to supply that energy with fossil fuels, the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere will be enormous. For CO2 alone, the atmospheric concentration is approaching 400 ppm, 40 percent higher than when fossil fuels began to be burned, and may exceed 1,000 ppm by the end of this century if no limiting measures are taken.
We must find a way to meet the increasing demand for energy without adding catastrophically to atmospheric carbon dioxide. The world therefore has a two-fold problem: where will this new energy come from, and how can it be carbon-free? The most optimistic estimates of carbon-free renewable energy capability are a maximum of 17 percent of today's energy consumption. Even with this very optimistic estimate, where will the remaining 83 percent come from? Availability of sufficient environmentally friendly energy sources to meet the needs of a rapidly growing and developing world population is the most pressing problem our civilization has ever faced.
Here's my point: current technologies cannot meet this challenge, and incremental improvements in these technologies will not suffice. We need transformational discoveries, leading to what I call disruptive technologies—€”technologies that fundamentally change the rules of the game—€”and that means we need fundamental breakthroughs in basic science.
There are five major areas in which we in the Department of Energy's Office of Science are aggressively pursuing transformational breakthroughs in basic science that promise to have a major impact on our nation's energy future. These five areas are energy efficiency, wind and solar, bioenergy, nuclear energy and fusion.
Energy Efficiency
Today U.S. electricity production uses 40 percent of primary energy. Overall, it's estimated that about 60 percent of U.S. primary energy is lost in waste or rejected heat. This means that improved technologies to increase energy efficiency offer the potential of enormous energy savings.
Take lighting as just one example. About 20 percent of our electricity today goes for artificial lighting. But today's lighting is almost unbelievably inefficient. Your typical household incandescent bulb converts only about 5 percent of the energy it consumes into light (the rest is lost as heat).
Fluorescent lamps convert about 20 percent. Yet if we can manage to perfect solid-state lighting technology, which directly converts electricity to light with semiconductor materials, there is no known fundamental physical barrier to achieving efficiencies approaching 100 percent. Even if we got to 50 percent efficiency, we could reduce energy consumption in the U.S. by about 620 billion kilowatt-hours per year by the year 2025 and eliminate the need for about 70 nuclear plants, each generating a billion watts of power. So the savings that can be achieved through more efficient technologies are quite substantial—€¦.
Wind and Solar Technology
We now have 11,603 megawatts of wind generating capacity in this country, enough to power nearly 3 million homes. Solar power capacity is at 2,000 megawatts, enough to power about half a million homes. But to put these numbers in perspective, total electrical generating capacity in the United States in 2005 was about 1 million megawatts, so these forms of energy right now are contributing only at the margin.
To make wind and solar energy truly effective by integrating them into electricity base load, we need a major breakthrough in an entirely different area—€”that of electrical storage. The problem with wind and solar is that they are intermittent. The only way to get steady output from these sources is to be able to store energy when they are generating and retrieve it when they are not. But we are not terribly effective today at storing electricity. We recently brought together experts for a workshop to develop a scientific roadmap for transformational research on electrical storage. The workshop identified basic research needs and opportunities underlying batteries, supercapacitors and related technologies with a focus on emerging science challenges.
Biofuels
A third area where we believe that transformational breakthroughs could change the energy equation is biofuels. A study jointly sponsored by DOE and the Department of Agriculture has estimated that the United States could produce 1 billion tons of plant matter or "biomass" annually—€”enough for 60 billion gallons of ethanol, or 30 percent of today's annual transportation fuel consumption. And we could do so while continuing to meet food, feed and export demands. Much of this biomass would come from specialized feedstock crops, including such plants as switchgrass, miscanthus, willows and hybrid poplar.
A biofuels economy would have three major advantages. First, it obviously would enable us to cut down on oil imports. Second, it would substantially reduce net carbon dioxide emissions. The carbon dioxide that is emitted when biofuels are burned is reabsorbed by the next crop of plants that are grown to make fuel. So biofuels would be carbon-neutral and with certain energy crop perennials could even be carbon-negative. And biofuels burn more cleanly overall, so there's less pollution. Third, biofuel feedstocks would be a new "cash crop" for American farmers. And there's a lot of excitement in America's Southeast right now about the prospects.
But to make this all cost-effective and truly commercially viable, we need to have efficient means of converting cellulose, or plant fiber, to fuel. It's a tough problem. We do not yet know how to do this. However, nature does.
Termites, for example, are famously efficient at converting cellulose and hemicellulose to fuel. They eat wood, sometimes at a frightening rate, and convert these materials into energy. Inside the gut of the termite are some 200 different species of bacteria that help get this job done. Our DOE Joint Genome Institute is sequencing the genomes of these bacteria and has completed about half. These sequences will provide the foundation for efforts to understand in depth the metabolic pathways that the bacteria use to accomplish this job.
The Office of Science initiated the Human Genome Project back in 1986. Now we are applying biotech advances to the problem of biofuels. In the coming months, we will be launching three new bioenergy research centers, to be funded at $25 million per year each for five years, to pursue transformational solutions to the cost-effective production of cellulosic ethanol and other biofuels. This has been an open competition, in which universities, national laboratories, nonprofit organizations, and private firms have been invited to apply, singly or in partnerships—€¦.
There is no magic bullet to solve our energy challenge, no one technology to replace fossil fuels. To meet our nation's and the world's growing energy needs, we will be compelled to rely on a diversified portfolio of alternatives. Biofuels will have a place in that portfolio. So will nuclear energy.
Nuclear Energy
Today nuclear energy provides about 20 percent of the nation's electricity. It does so without using fossil fuels or emitting greenhouse gases or pollution. Nuclear energy use currently eliminates 700 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually, the equivalent of taking 58 million cars off the road.
Nuclear energy could provide much more carbon-free, pollution-free energy. A key challenge is solving the problem of spent nuclear fuel. Current "once through" nuclear reactor policy leaves spent fuel rods with long-term heat loads and radioactive decay. Transformational advances in basic science can provide a major reduction in spent fuel by "closing" the fuel cycle, recycling the spent fuel and burning it in new fast reactors, potentially reducing storage requirements by up to 90 percent.
Fusion
Finally, one of the most promising future energy solutions lies in fusion. Fusion is the energy that powers the sun and the stars. Fusion energy uses deuterium from water, and lithium to create tritium, fusing deuterium and tritium into helium and a fast (14 MeV) neutron. Deuterium and lithium are abundant and cheap, the helium will escape from the earth's gravity, and the energy of the neutron will generate electricity or produce hydrogen. Fusion has the potential to provide clean, carbon-free energy for the world's growing electricity needs, on an almost limitless scale. The key challenge is sustaining and containing the 100 million degree-plus fusion reaction on earth. Scientists have made progress containing fusion reactions using powerful magnetic fields.
In November 2006, the United States signed an agreement with six international partners. Scientists supported by the DOE Office of Science will be working side by side with counterparts from China, the European Union, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea and the Russian Federation to build and operate an experimental reactor that demonstrates the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion energy.
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