Stanford Program Seeks Energy Crisis Solution
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During the third week of September, the Stanford Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) held its second research symposium, marking over three years of work in a decade-long program to find a solution to the world’s energy woes.
GCEP—founded in December 2002 with $225 million in funding from ExxonMobil, General Electric, Schlumberger, and Toyota—aims to develop energy systems for the future with reduced greenhouse gas emissions. The program utilizes Stanford faculty and students from a variety of technical disciplines. It also finances outside research that lies within the scope of GCEP’s mission to find an energy solution that emits less greenhouse gases than current fossil fuel energy technologies.
Unusually high oil prices have given GCEP special relevance lately. As GCEP Project Director Franklin Orr noted during an interview with The Review, “as a result of high oil prices, people are paying attention [to our work].” The enhanced costs of using oil as an energy source makes alternative solutions more economic. Likewise, the increased profit margins of companies in the oil industry, like GCEP sponsors ExxonMobil and Schlumberger, also provide for more capital to invest in identifying alternative energy sources.
Society’s renewed interest in finding alternatives to fossil fuel use also prompted Stanford’s former Department of Petroleum Engineering to broaden its focus from hydrocarbon recovery to other areas. The department, renamed to the “Department of Energy Resources Engineering (ERE)” for this fall quarter, now plans to offer courses and research in nontraditional energy-related areas. Current ERE Department Chair Lou Durlofsky listed geothermal engineering, carbon sequestration, in-situ processing, and energy system optimization as areas encompassed in the new ERE curriculum.
ERE hopes to attract more student interest in result of its name change. The former Department of Petroleum Engineering, which greatly struggled with recruitment of undergraduate students, “sounded overly limiting in terms of technical focus and career options,” according to Durlofsky.
Indeed, just the word “petroleum” proved inhibiting for the department. Former Chair of the Department of Petroleum Engineering, Roland Horne, described the name of the department as a “barrier” to enticing interest from Stanford students with an interest in energy. Horne has already observed the decision to change the name as a success, being “surprised by the positiveness of people’s reactions—which have changed from grimaces to warmth.”
The new ERE department, coupled with Stanford’s GCEP, is representative of a worldwide revival of interest in cleaner energy technologies. President George W. Bush, in his State of the Union address earlier this year, announced a 22 percent increase in federal funding for clean energy research. Bush’s plan, The Advanced Energy Initiative, strives to reduce imports of oil from the Middle East by 75 percent before 2025 while developing ethanol, nuclear, wind, and solar energy technologies. Meanwhile, power companies plan to draw government-guaranteed loans to build as many as 30 nuclear reactors before a 2008 deadline. Before recently, prohibitive capital costs and government regulation have discouraged the development of nuclear power. The last construction permit for a nuclear power plant in the United States was issued in 1979.
In Britain, the Chancellor is laying the groundwork for a £500 million institute to develop low-carbon energy technologies in partnership with major energy companies—including Shell and British Petroleum. Similarly, India and China announced ambitions to increase their utilization of renewable energy sources in late September, especially wind power. According to a recent Reuter’s news release, China plans on renewables providing 15 percent of its energy needs by 2020. India plans to reach the same figure by 2032. Germany, Spain, and many other countries in Europe (and elsewhere) are also devoting capital towards finding a low-carbon source of energy.
Despite all of the hype around finding a single clean energy solution, Orr emphasized during his interview that there is no “silver bullet” among the various options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. GCEP has recognized that a realistic and effective solution will involve a variety of technologies, what Orr refers to as a “portfolio of options.” GCEP’s broad approach to the energy problem also provides some leeway in the likely case that important circumstances change in the future. As Orr noted during his interview, “if we guess right now, we’re guaranteed to get it wrong.”
Certainly, Orr’s “portfolio” approach to seeking a low-carbon energy solution for the future is reflected in the diversity of GCEP’s research projects. GCEP is currently working on advanced coal technologies, hydrogen usage, wind, biomass, and solar energy. GCEP also plans to investigate advanced nuclear energy, and energy distribution, storage and infrastructure in the near future.
One of the most frequently discussed research areas of GCEP involves carbon capture and storage technology (CCS). CSS is a system which captures excess carbon dioxide from the combustion of fossil fuels and sequesters it away from the atmosphere. According to Orr, CSS is only an “interim solution.” Although CSS would mitigate some of fossil fuels’ impact on global warming, the volumes of carbon dioxide that would need to be sequestered to achieve the necessary carbon dioxide reductions to stop global warming are unreasonably large.
Nevertheless, Orr and the ERE department see CSS playing an important role as society transitions to a carbon-free energy resource. Orr acknowledged that “You can’t imagine replacing all the power plants on the same day. The use of fossil fuels will decrease over time.” During this period, CSS would be necessary to curtail emissions from remaining hydrocarbon energy resources.
Most of the Stanford research concerning CSS focuses on the storage of the carbon dioxide after it is captured. Stanford faculty, all from the School of Earth Sciences, are currently looking at using depleted petroleum reservoirs, aquifers, and coal beds to store the carbon dioxide. One research program, run from within Stanford’s ERE department, is looking at the use of numerical simulations to design and optimize carbon sequestration in geological formations. Although GCEP also funds several projects researching the capture—rather than storage—of carbon dioxide, those programs are not conducted at Stanford.
A recurrent criticism of GCEP’s research on CSS is that it is motivated by its sponsors’ interest in reducing the environmental impact of fossil fuels. Just this past summer, a columnist for The Stanford Daily complained that “the majority of the projects support technologies that need, or could need, petroleum in the future.” Orr, however, argues that any fossil fuel research at GCEP is conducted with the intention of easing the transition to a carbon-free energy solution—which is the main focus of the program.
According to Orr, energy efficiency is one of GCEP’s research areas with the greatest potential. There are many areas, both in the internal combustion engines and in power distribution, that can be significantly optimized. “We can do much better on energy efficiency at low or negative cost,” said Orr. “It’s a place we can jump in right now.”
As research at GCEP progresses, the program will serve an important role in filling the gap between short-term research at many businesses and more forward-looking discoveries at research institutions. “We focus more on energy solutions in the 10-50 year timeframe,” said Orr. “Our Department of Energy and commercial enterprises focus more on the near term. The National Science Foundation and research institutions are better at fundamental research that is not necessarily tied to applications. We’re in between.”
