What should we be doing today
to enhance world energy security, in order to reach a sustainable global energy
system?
This web page begins
with recent journal-style papers and public talks which try to answer that
question, or part of that question. It then gives you links to primary sources
on specific technologies which provide some of the key opportunities, and one
of my earlier journal papers on econometric modeling for energy. I have also
posted some commentaries on energy discussions of the time, such as some
discussions in the offices of the US Congress. Just click on the titles to see
them. Among my activities have been talks in North and South America and
March 2010: Yes we can – the technology is here which
would allow complete OECD independence of oil imports from OPEC, in about 20-25
years. Click here to see the slides for a talk showing
how we can and why you should believe this. The talk was given at the Herzliya conference, a very
high-level international policy conference. However – if we only do the kinds
of things we are doing now, and pass the kind of climate/energy bill which passed
the House of Representatives in 2009, EPA and DOE predict that the US will be
using just as much petroleum in 2050 as we do now! (See the official
predictions.) Of course, we would also be emitting the same CO2 from that
sector as we do now.
November 6, 2009: Climate
Change Legislation: Job Creator or Job Killer? The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI), working with the American
Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, held a major briefing in the Capitol
Building on “Can Addressing
Climate Change Provide Economic Benefits?” Included on that web page are my
three slides on that subject, and an MP3 transcript of the entire session. (My
own comments begin at minute 35.)
September
27, 2009: How We Could
Change the Energy Game With NEW R&D (i.e. what
it takes, concretely, to capture unmet opportunities for major near-term
breakthroughs that could change the world energy picture). (With
links to APRA-E “request for information” and my detailed response to the
same.)
August 2009: How to break our
addiction to imported oil (a comprehensive 19 page proposed bill in proper
legislative language, two-page bulleted summary, slides
on the overall strategy and the links to specific technologies and intelligent
systems, and discussion of the important role this could play in addressing
current economic problems.)
August 19,
2009: Updated view of our best hope
to make it through the political morass of cap and trade, based on lots and
lots of direct inputs from how the process is actually working…
March 4,
2009: one-page outline of what I
personally would propose for an optimal cap-and trade law for the
February,
2009: Putting More Brain-Like
Intelligence into the Electric Power Grid: What We Need and How to Do It,
in Proc. of the International Joint
Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN09), IEEE, 2009. (click
here for slides without text, 1 meg.)
October
28, 2008: Getting to >500 Miles Per Gallon
of Gasoline––How to Achieve Total Independence from Gasoline At the Soonest
Possible Time. (Updated 15-minute talk – 3 pages worth of words, with the
17 slides I used in the 15 minutes, given at the Energy Summit in
(Comprehensive strategy -- complete text with citations and URLs. This link goes to a brief citeable file maintained by Nature magazine, giving you a choice of Word or pdf, only 228K.)
April 16,
2008: Click here to see slides (200K,
pdf) on “who will win the race to control the new automobile industry,” with
discussion of
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
2004: Global Energy Sustainability, a comprehensive text paper, 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. It may be cited as “in Chapter 1 (Energy Challenge section) of the CD ROM of State of the Future 2008.”
The attached powerpoint
presentation is more detailed and up-to-date than the 2003 paper, from the
viewpoint of policy. (4 megabyte file,
last updated 2/23/06. Unfortunately, the powerpoint
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
2006: a condensed two-page
summary of what actually needs to be done, most urgently, in the
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
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 sustainability,
efficiency and profitability of biofuel production. Attached is an initial email which the author at
USDA gave me permission to post in 2006. 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,
low or zero CO2 liquid fuels would start to penetrate the market, 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
Ford sold thousands of GEM-flexible cars 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 Techniques:
Theory Versus Practice, Energy: The
International Journal, 15 (3/4),
1990, p.213-236