Transformational Science for Energy and the Environment
Remarks Prepared for
Dr. Raymond L. Orbach
Under Secretary for Science
U.S. Department of Energy
Summer Commencement
Iowa State University of Science and Technology
August 4, 2007

President Geoffroy, distinguished guests, graduates. It’s a pleasure and an honor to be here with you this morning at one of the nation’s great land-grant universities, celebrating the Cyclone experience, and congratulating you on your Sesquicentennial.

Iowa State University continues its founding tradition of higher education accessible to all, of a progressive and inventive spirit, and of becoming the best.  You should appreciate what you have here, for it is truly one of a kind. 

It is a privilege to have been invited to address you at a moment of profound personal achievement for each of you.  I hope my remarks will resonate with your own interests, concerns, and most of all opportunities.

Just as the founders of Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm were concerned about Iowa’s economic and intellectual health 150 years ago, so today we are concerned about America’s continued competitiveness in an increasingly challenging global economy.  Circumstances have changed greatly over the past hundred and fifty years.  But one thing has remained the same:  our ability to stay economically competitive as a nation will depend critically on an educated citizenry capable of innovation and creativity.  And that is also one reason why each and every one of you – all 837 of you – are really a precious national resource.   Our nation desperately needs individuals with your talents and training if we are to meet the challenges ahead.  

This morning I would like to say a word about one of the biggest challenges we face as Americans today and in the coming decades, that of energy security – and the vital role that research opportunities will play if we are to meet this challenge successfully.

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 every really did exist, is a clearly 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% 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?  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.

This morning I would like to tell you about five major areas which we at the Department of Energy are aggressively pursuing – transformational breakthroughs that promise to have a major impact on our nation’s energy supply, and are opportunities for you and your future.  These five areas are energy efficiency, electrical energy storage, biofuels, nuclear energy, and fusion.

I begin with energy efficiency.  Today U.S. electricity production uses 40% of primary energy.  Overall, it’s estimated that about 60% 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% 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% of the energy it consumes into light (the rest is lost as heat). Fluorescent lamps convert about 20%. 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%. Even if we got to 50% 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 substantial.

In a major workshop last May, we brought together a multidisciplinary group of leading scientists to chart an innovative roadmap aimed at transformational breakthroughs in solid state lighting – taking advantage of cutting-edge developments in inorganic and organic thin films for light-emitting diodes, novel discoveries in materials science, and the latest advances in nanotechnology.  And you can be part of that future.

There’s a lot of talk today about wind and solar technology.  These alternative energy sources are indeed growing rapidly.  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 the electricity base load, we need a major breakthrough in entirely different area – that of electrical energy 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 effective today at storing electrical energy.  Last April, we 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.  Another area for you to consider.

A third area where we believe that transformational breakthroughs could change the energy equation is biofuels.  A study jointly sponsored by the Department of Energy 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% 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.  We are talking here about producing fuels not just from plant starch, as we do with corn-based ethanol today, but also from the inedible fiber of plants, or cellulose.  The capability to tap into the energy contained in plant fiber or cellulose would give us the means to produce biofuels on a scale sufficient to create a nationwide biofuels economy.

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 as their roots store carbon.  And biofuels burn more cleanly overall, so there’s less pollution.  Third, biofuel feedstocks would be a new “cash crop” for America’s farmers.  There’s a lot of excitement in America’s Midwest right now about the prospects of a biofuels economy using corn as a source for starch that is fermented to ethanol.  However, we are currently using 17% of our entire corn crop to produce about 5 billion gallons annually of ethanol.  It seems unlikely that corn can displace much more than about 10 billion gallons of ethanol.  So we need another source of sugars if we are to generate the other 50 billion gallons of ethanol we would need annually to displace 30% of our current transportation fuels.  This is where cellulosic ethanol enters. 

Unfortunately, our current means of converting cellulose, or plant fiber, to fuel is not efficient, nor cost effective.  It’s a tough problem.  The plant cell walls contain a substance called lignin, which is so tightly woven with the cellulose that the enzymes currently available to us cannot easily penetrate to get at the cellulose and break it up into sugars, which is what we need to produce fuels.  However, Nature already knows how to solve this problem.  Termites, for example, are famously efficient at converting cellulose and hemicellulose to fuel.  They eat wood, at an alarming rate, and convert the interior cellulose 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.  These sequences will provide the foundation for efforts to understand in depth the metabolic pathways that the bacteria use to accomplish this job.

Last month, we launched 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.  We believe that these Centers can crack Nature’s code for cost-effective biofuel conversion.  We are now exploring the option of creating smaller, university-based centers that can assist in developing new genetically altered plants that are structured so as to allow enzymes to more easily evade the plant wall and break down the interior cellulose into sugars, that can grow in saline environments, and that are drought resistant.  This is a national challenge, and we intend to use all the resources at our disposal to optimize plant structures that will enable a biofuel economy.

There is no single 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.  But so also will nuclear energy. 

Today nuclear energy provides about 20% 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 current light water reactors, and in new fast reactors, reducing storage requirements by up to 90%.  This past summer the Office of Science held three workshops designed to provide a roadmap for the basic science needed to close the fuel cycle, including a workshop on materials under extreme conditions, chemistry under extreme conditions, actinide chemistry, and separations science; a second workshop in nuclear theory; and a third on computational modeling and simulation of reactor and recycling systems.  Another opportunity for you to consider.

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 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 an operate an experimental reactor that demonstrates the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion energy.  Yet another field for you to consider.

As you can see, the task of meeting our nation’s and the world’s energy challenge will require major effort on a broad range of fronts.  These are formidable problems, but they are also opportunities for you to use your talents, learning, and commitment – literally to save the world. Never before has the need been greater. You have been blessed with inquisitive and intelligent minds. Combined with the blessings bestowed upon you by this remarkable institution, you have been empowered to change the future of our world, for the better. The Department of Energy, your government, urges you to take up the challenge.

Congratulations, and God speed.