What should we be doing today to enhance world energy security, in order to reach a sustainable global energy system?

The papers and slides included here range from comprehensive strategy, through to current activities to follow through on that strategy. Among the activities have been talks in North and South America and Asia and several global discussion groups, including discussions with players in industry and universities as well as government.

April 16, 2008: Click here to see slides (200K, pdf) on “who will win the race to control the new automobile industry”. I gave this talk at Rayburn 2218, the hearing room of the Science Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, under the invitation of the House Oil and National Security Caucus and the Set America Free coalition. At the same event was an important talk by Greg Dolan of the Methanol Institute, and an important dialogue among high-ranking players in the room; click here for some highlights.

August 5, 2007: History in the balance: a report on energy bills passed yesterday by the House, what they mean, and what comes next.

May 2007: 20 slide updated strategy: immediate actions needed to slash US oil dependency as deeply as possible by 2025, and zero out net CO2; click here for interactive slide presentation, or here for (300K) color-printable version with text and sources. July 2007: IEEE/ASME/IAGS invited me to give another Congressional presentation in the Rayburn Building giving more details on the part of the strategy which involves plug-in hybrid cars; click here to see the slides. (IEEE-USA reported over 100 attendees, from House and Senate side both.)

The attached paper in Word, on Global Energy Sustainability, was written for the CD ROM of the State of the Future 2003, and slightly updated. It asked questions about the long-term goal of true sustainability, which remains important to this day. It includes discussion of how to achieve “win-win” balance between oil producers and oil consumers.

The attached powerpoint presentation is more detailed and up-to-date that the 2003 paper, from the viewpoint of policy. (4 megabyte file, last updated 2/23/06. Unfortunately, the text shows up in Explorer but not in Firefox.). It is an expanded and updated version of a talk I was invited to give for Congressional staffers, at the Rayburn House Office Building, on January 25, 2006, arranged by the office of one of the top Congressmen in the House leadership, based in part on prior efforts by IAGS, by IEEE and myself. It includes slides from three other talks given on the Hill within the past year. An updated version of the 2003 strategy, formulated more explicitly in terms of optimal rational decision theory, is in press, in a new book planned for about January 2009, edited by Korin and Luft. It is interesting how mathematical concepts from computational intelligence can provide guidance on how to formulate a rational strategy, while also providing technology tools needed to implement it.

Attached is a condensed two-page summary of what actually needs to be done, most urgently, in the US, in order to act on this bigger picture, and move the entire human species onto a more sustainable, secure pathway. In addition to those personal, unofficial views here are some additional important pieces of information:

1. New in July 2006: a simple two-page overview of a major potential breakthrough in efficiency for cars and solar energy, and an updated slide show on the global situation reflecting this and other new information. (No text yet for the new slides.) At this writing, NSF has announced a small new award to support this technology.

Note: solar farms for electricity utilities are the only form of earth-based renewable energy which definitely has the capacity to meet all the world’s needs for daytime electricity. But the best-known and most popular forms of solar power simply can’t compete in the utilities market today because they cost too much, per kwh. Cost is everything, for a “fungible” commodity. The one exception is solar thermal energy based on Stirling engines, which is now the cheapest reliable source. See Stirling Energy Systems and a recent news report on their progress. But the new technology here (JTEC, item 1) and more advanced Stirling (item 5, below) should allow even lower costs, by a large factor, and faster scale-up of generation capacity.

2. September 2006: a one-page response to the question: “What are the real facts about hybrid cars and what they mean for US energy security?”

3. A review of the movie Who Killed the Electric Car? – including an email response at the end from a guy who (at GM) once said “It was me.”

4. My personal response to the question: “How much would we cut CO₂ emissions by shifting to fuel-flexible plug-in hybrids cars?” (A factor of 4 or more, but only if we do things right.)

5. The latest personal unofficial views (April 2006) of Al Cavallo of the Department of Homeland Security on the “peak oil” issue, summarizing a recent workshop at the National Academy of Sciences on that issue, posted with his permission. Some of his earlier papers and my current views are in the presentation linked to above.

6. A paper/prospectus on the possibilities for next generation Stirling engines, written by the Sobey/Johansson team. Joahnsson is essentially the one inventor who succeeded in developing a workable, mass-producible Stirling engine, when many others with big teams and deep pockets were not creative enough to do the same. Johansson has a plan to raise the eficiency to 40% and then 55% -- which is highly credible, and would allow earth-based solar systems to beat electricity from natural gas on price, and would provide a highly credible, cheaper and far more flexible alternative to fuel cell cars for a sustainable world energy systsem. (See my slides for the strategic importance of this. Also, here is a brief summary of why this technology is one of the really crucial unmet opportunities both for short-term energy security and long-term sustainability.)

For material on the space solar power option, go to my space page.

One key point: if we work hard and immediately to increase fuel flexibility in cars, not just to ethanol but also to the full range I call “GEM,” we substantially increase the amount of fuel we can get from biofuels (and other secure sources), and also increase the sustianability, efficiency and profitability of biofuel production. Attached is an initial email which the author at USDA has given me permission to post, pending the availability of more extensive material. I would predict that strong incentives for a properly defined version of GEM flexible cars would initially lead to huge expansion in sales of ethanol and methanol both (methanol mainly from remote natural gas); after a few years, all the ethanol that people can produce would still be sold, but there would be a huge increase in the sales of “Fischer-Tropsch” liquids from gasified coal and biomass; and then, with time,

nitrogen-based liquid fuels would start to penetrate the marketm, and reduce CO2 even more. Dupont sells the stronger gaskets and hoses, which are the main (inexpensive) upgrade needed to provide the full GEM flexibility, once G/E gasoline/ethanol flexibility is achieved. (Most new cars sold in Brazil already have G/E flexibility.)

Ford sold thousands of GEM-flexible cars in California in the 1980’s, at no extra cost for the flexibility. Ford’s experience was summarized in:

Roberta Nichols, The Methanol Story: A Sustainable Fuel for the Future, Journal of Scientific & Industrial Research, Vol. 62, January-February 2003, p. 97-105. (Almost one meg, posted with permission of the journal JSIR.) Nichols, on behalf of Ford, estimated $300 per car as the real cost of the full GEM flexibility, but technology has improved substantially since then – and I plan to post more technical details on that soon.

I would also like to give special thanks to all those members of the Planning Committee for the global State of the Future effort, and IEEE members, who have arranged for me to give versions of this talk in other nations, and for me to learn about the diverse needs and viewpoints which exist on these matters all over the world. There are many others as well to whom I owe special thanks, but perhaps this is not the place for a long condensed list…

In the future, I also plan to post some of my papers on energy-economic models, which range from systems tools to substantive findings. Just for starters, I can now post one of my old papers on energy modeling and econometrics – explaining how some very sophisticated-looking formal models can turn out to be a case of “garbage in, garbage out,” and giving some simple-sounding rules to overcome the pitfalls:

P.Werbos, Econometric Techinques: Theory Versus Practice, Energy: The International Journal, 15 (3/4), 1990, p.213-236