Name: Steven Chu
Title: U.S. Secretary of Energy
Location: Washington, D.C.

Is domestic energy indepen­dence a useful goal?
It’s certainly a useful goal to strive toward energy indepen­dence. The good news is that three and a half years ago we were importing about 60 percent of our oil, and now it’s around 45 percent. We see the trend going for­ward, decreasing even more. We are already largely energy-independent in terms of electricity generation, although some electricity comes from Canada.

We also see a flattening, perhaps even a decrease, in the use of transportation fuels as we go to more efficient automobiles. We see more diversification of transportation energy. Liquefied natural gas for long-haul trucks has already been shown to make sense. Private companies are investing hundreds of millions of dollars to build natural gas infrastructure. If you build it every 200 miles on the highway, you can capture a significant market, perhaps even half the market, and heavy trucks consume 20 percent of our transportation energy.

Does that mean we’ve given up on combating climate change?
No, absolutely not. This is all very consistent with climate change. Natural gas as a transition fuel is great. It’s half the [carbon dioxide of burning coal]. We still need to figure out how to capture its carbon, which we need by midcentury no matter what the large source is [whether it is coal, oil or natural gas].

Renewable energy is getting cheaper and cheaper. Perhaps within this decade wind and solar will be as inexpensive as any form of new energy. Solar has already come down threefold in the past four years, and we believe it will come down twofold in the next decade.

In transportation, there will be a mix of electrification and next-generation biofuels and efficiency. If we get breakthroughs, it can be game-changing.

Where do you think such break­throughs might come from?
Breakthroughs on the physics side will be in materials. The battery manufacturer Envia [Systems] announced a 400-watt-hour-per-kilogram battery. That’s at least a factor of two more than the previous best. It still has to go through some more stages of testing. We are investi­ng in other battery companies that will go another factor of two beyond that.

Biofuels are a little bit further out only because your competition is oil. Early-stage research sponsored by the Depart­ment of Energy has microbes you can feed simple sugars and out pops diesel fuel. Another company is using photo­synthetic bacteria and swapping whole genomes and metabolic pathways. [The microbe] generates long alkane chains that are the immediate precursors to diesel fuel. It’s 5 to 10 percent energy-efficient, whereas a typical plant is only 1 percent efficient. This is a little weird bacterium or yeast. In the past 15 years or so I’ve gotten into biology like this. I follow it with avid interest. It’s really almost science fiction.

What have you learned about how the government should fund new energy companies?
In areas of rapidly moving technology, you have to be increasingly careful when assisting in deployment. Some things happened so rapidly that nobody anticipated them. For example, the price of photovoltaics dropped 80 percent in [recent years] and 40 percent in another year. Those prices have now stabilized.

It’s very important that the U.S. remain a player in this technology [photovoltaics]. We invented a lot of this stuff [such as modern solar cells]—you name it. We still have the capability of outcompeting.

I knew full well coming in that unex­pected things can happen. [Tech­nology] leads can be lost. It’s a very competitive world out there. For example, we invented the airplane, lost the lead, then came back.

3 Comments

1. 1. MensaProfEngr 09:17 AM 4/22/12

   I laud Dr. Chu's reassertion that the US should regain energy independence following the US DOE’s original remit. We need to end funding of those who hate America for our beliefs and continuing scientific and economic excellence, and improve our balance of energy international trade.
   I apologize I must have missed the results of the incontrovertible, non-partisan scientific test of CO2 in isolation as a significant 'greenhouse gas', which Dr. Chu’s interview includes by implication.
   We do have coincidental observations that Venus is hotter than Mercury and has more CO2 at its' surface (~1,300 moles of CO2/m3 on Venus), but also that Mars has more CO2 than Earth (2.0 moles/m3 and 0.02 moles/m3, respectively), and that Mars has no more 'global warming' than our Moon, which has virtually no atmosphere. And, there is not presently in our lexicon any scientific 'unified theory' condemning or supporting a Human climatic effect on Earth.
   We do have extensive testing by Columbia and Princeton Universities and NOAA, that North America is stealing atmospheric CO2 from other countries through biomass increase, as an unintentional investment in our future Fossil Fuel reserves.
   The US has an excellent record of advancements in pure Science through government funded Basic Research (integrated circuits, Hubble Telescope, etc.) where private investment has not been warranted, but have always depended on private investment for rational implementation of responsible, sustainable technologies.
   The NASA program sponsored initial basic research for PV technology for space machinery power, but it is up to private industry to take the risk of implementation in our society as a whole.
   For other energy technologies, such as the highly successful ‘hybrid’ technology of the Toyota Corp’s Prius® program, we need to be cognizant that these lighter weight, more efficient vehicles are less damaging to our highways system, and do not warrant greater ‘highway taxes’ than their fuel consumption currently includes. ‘Plug in’ vehicles can of course pay an equivalent amount of highway taxes through their point of charging.
   I await the day we again respect Real Science, devoid of political influence.
   

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2. 2. MensaProfEngr 10:05 AM 4/22/12

   The conundrum from using Earth's changing atmospheric level of CO2 and attempting to correlate it to Earth's climate through proxy data is the relative rarity of this gas. In a dried, filtered sample of Earth's air, the gaseous components are 99.96% NOT CO2. We cannot subtract from the total of Global Temperature the overwhelming effects on climate of the 'thermal flywheel', water vapor other gases, and changing of atmosperic dust as those things vary widely over geologic time, so we cannot scientifically prove Human effects.
   Even CO2 in air bubbles in ancient ice core samples diffuses through ice from one proxy time to another, unlike radioactive dusts indicative of the start of the nuclear age, which are literally frozen in time.
   So, we need to test CO2 independently, (approx 20 mile long opaque, insulated, evacuated tube with a partial pressure gradient of only CO2, mimicking a vertical core of Earth's atmosphere, in which we shine lights in one end, and measure what happens at the other. Or, we can seriously investigate CO2 contribution to temperature on Mars, the best candidate for this research. Venus has far too many obfuscating factors, such as Sulfuric Acid clouds and an opacifying level of dust, and the NASA radar imaging proof that Venus is the most volcanically active planet not only in our Solar System, but the most volcanically active planet known to Humankind.
   

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3. 3. Vane Lashua 09:46 PM 4/29/12

   <<<<
   Is domestic energy indepen­dence a useful goal?
   WHAT?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
   Does that mean we’ve given up on combating climate change?
   No, absolutely not. This is all very consistent with climate change. Natural gas as a transition fuel is great. It’s half the [carbon dioxide of burning coal]. We still need to figure out how to capture its carbon, which we need by midcentury no matter what the large source is [whether it is coal, oil or natural gas].
   WHAT???!!!!
   >>>
   Boiling water to create steam to spin a turbine is the most common way to generate electricity for distribution to the grid. Deep Geo generates electricity more economically and with virtually no direct environmental impacts compared with burning of wood, bio, coal, gas or oil or fissing nuclear fuel. And it has none of the negative "supply chain" impacts: mining, drilling*, refining, packaging, shipping, storing, burning and/or waste removal -- all of which contribute to significant negative impacts on our health and that of our planet.
   
   Unfortunately drilling and mining technology is so advanced that the richest and most affluent people on earth depend on it to compound their wealth. A focus on commodities trading, the political influence that comes with it, control of the media that promotes it and the ill-perceived demand for the commodities and their supply chain -- rather than objective energy policy and production analysis, engineering and science -- has inhibited the development of practical, universal access to the unlimited energy resource -- pure heat -- that lies beneath our feet. Geothermal heat does not vary with time of day, is not on the other side of the earth half the time, is not behind clouds, is not subject to minimum velocity, ,is never out of sync with demand and produces NO waste.
   
   We continue to enrich the few while wasting our resources and polluting our environment. There is an unlimited and constant supply of energy less than 10 miles from everywhere on earth. We asked Apollo to take us to the moon. Let's ask Pluto to give us back our earth.
   
   
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   Vane Lashua, PO Box 65, Beacon, NY 12508
   845-337-9435 | http://thnktnk.net |
   
   
   
   
   

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