Remarks Prepared for Delivery by
Dr. Raymond L. Orbach
Under Secretary for Science
U.S. Department of Energy
Ph.D. Commencement
Georgia Institute of Technology
May 3, 2007

President Clough, distinguished guests, graduates: It’s a pleasure and an honor to be here with you this evening at one of the nation’s great research universities. 

Georgia Tech is unique among the nation’s first-rank universities in that you were founded with a strategic purpose in mind.  When the Georgia School of Technology opened its doors to students back in 1888, it was to help pave the way for the industrialization of the American South. 

We could say, using present-day language, that Georgia Tech was founded to help strengthen the South’s “competitiveness.”  Those who had the strategic goal of transforming the American South into an industrial power began the process by founding an educational institution.  It was a very wise way to proceed.  Learning, research, and innovation in science and technology are the very wellsprings of modern industrial and economic power. 

Just as the founders of Georgia Tech were concerned about the South’s competitiveness more than a century ago, so we are concerned today about America’s continued competitiveness in an increasingly challenging global economy.  Circumstances have changed greatly over the past hundred-plus years.  But one thing has remained the same:  our ability to stay economically competitive as a nation will depend critically on our continued leadership in science and technology.  We need advanced scientific facilities, cutting-edge research, and the skilled scientific and technological workforce to produce the discovery and innovation that are the lifeblood of contemporary economic life.  That is why President Bush has asked Congress to double federal funding for basic research in the physical sciences over the next ten years, including funding for the Department of Energy Office of Science, the largest federal supporter of physical science basic research.

And that is also one reason why each and every one of you — all 142 doctoral graduates — is a precious national resource.   Our nation needs individuals with your talents and training if we are to meet the challenges ahead.   

This evening I would like to say a word about one of those challenges, perhaps the biggest, that we face as Americans today and in the coming decades: energy security — and the vital role that basic science will have to play if we are to meet this challenge successfully.

Not so many years ago, we seemed to be living in a world where energy was inexpensive, readily available, and seemingly limitless.  That world, if indeed it every 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 global.  World 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 solely with fossil fuels, the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere would be enormous.  For CO2 alone, the atmospheric concentration is approaching 400 ppm, 40% higher than before the industrial revolution, and could well 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% of today’s energy consumption. Even with this very optimistic estimate, where will the remaining 83% 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.

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.

This evening I would like to tell you about 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, and in which you can make a major contribution.  These are energy efficiency, wind and solar, bioenergy, nuclear energy, and fusion.

Beginning with energy efficiency, 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.  U.S. electricity production uses 40% of primary energy.  And about 20% of that electricity goes for artificial lighting.  But today’s lighting is 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%.  If we can manage to perfect solid-state white-light technology, which directly converts electricity to light with semiconductor junctions, 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, equivalent to about 70 gigawatt nuclear power plants.  The savings that can be achieved through more efficient lighting 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.  You can be part of that community.

There’s a lot of talk today about wind and solar technology, and they are 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 best a few percent.

To make wind and solar energy effective by integrating them into the electrical base load, we need a technological breakthrough in electrical energy storage.  The problem with wind and solar is that they are intermittent.  The only way to integrate them into a base load source is to be able to store energy when the wind blows and the sun shines, and retrieve it when they do not.  But we are not terribly effective today at storing electricity.  We can pump water up a hill, and retrieve that energy when it flows back down, but you need water and a hill!  Last month, we brought experts together for a workshop to develop a scientific roadmap for transformational research on electrical energy storage.  The workshop identified basic research needs and opportunities underlying batteries, supercapacitors, and related technologies with a focus on emerging science opportunities — such as multi-electron transfer, the way nature does it in photosynthesis.  This too is an opportunity for you to contribute.

Another area where you could achieve a transformational breakthrough is biofuels.  A study jointly sponsored by the Department of Energy and the Department of Agriculture 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, 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.  Areas such as the southeastern United States could create biomass “plantations” with genetically modified trees and plants surrounding a modest biomass-to-fuel refinery.

A biofuels economy has three major advantages.  First, it reduces oil imports.  Second, it substantially reduces 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.  Biofuels would be carbon-neutral, and certain energy crop perennials are even carbon-negative because of root storage.  Biofuels burn more cleanly overall, so there’s less pollution.  Third, biofuel feedstocks would create a new “cash crop” for American farmers.  There’s a lot of excitement in America’s Southeast right now about the prospects of a biofuels economy, and you are in it.

To make biofuels cost-effective and commercially viable, we need to have efficient means of penetrating plant cell walls and converting cellulose, or plant fiber, to fuel.  We do not know how to do this efficiently yet.  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 hind gut of the termite are some 200 different species of bacteria that 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 discovery of the metabolic pathways that these bacteria use to transform biomass to energy.

For the last twenty years, the Department of Energy has been spearheading many of the advances in the biotechnology revolution, supporting the development of many of the advanced tools that accelerate discovery in this field.  The Office of Science in the Department of Energy actually 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, 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.  We believe that these Centers will bring together some of the nation’s very best engineers and scientists in an urgent quest to crack Nature’s code for cost-effective biofuel conversion.  Yet another role for you to consider.

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.  So 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 generates spent fuel with long-term heat loads and radioactive decay, and a good deal of latent energy.  Transformational advances in basic science can “close” the fuel cycle – recycling the spent fuel and burning it in new fast-spectrum reactors, recovering the energy in the spent fuel and reducing storage requirements by more than 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, and transuranic separations chemistry, a second in nuclear cross sections, and a third on computational modeling and simulation of nuclear reactor design and operations.  This field is ripe for discovery and development.

Finally, the most promising future energy solution lies in the processes that power the sun and the stars: fusion energy.  On earth, using deuterium from sea water, and lithium to create tritium, fusion produces only 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 can 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 challenge is sustaining and containing the fusion reaction plasma at more than 200 million degrees, here on earth.  Our present approach confines this plasma in a “tokamak” using powerful magnetic fields.  In November 2006, the United States signed an agreement with six international partners to create ITER, a half-gigawatt reactor to study a burning plasma under conditions approaching a fusion power plant.  Scientists supported by the U.S. 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, representing more than half of the world’s population, to demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion energy.

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.