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4.1 Powering the Planet
Dr. Nathan Lewis
It is great to be giving you this talk by carbon-neutral methods
(i.e., video teleconference) in lieu of actually traveling to your location. I will talk to you about energy because most people who
look at this issue think, like Professor Richard E. Smalley testified
in Congress, that it is the most important problem facing humanity today. Those are fighting words, so now we have to defend
them. [1]
To do that, we will look at three aspects of the problem. First,
we will talk about the scale of the challenge because you cannot
solve a problem if you do not know the scale of the problem you
are trying to solve. On the back end, we will talk about another
aspect of the problem: namely, that we have run out of air to store
the emissions from all the stuff we have burned. In between, we
Dr. Nathan Lewis has been on the faculty at the California Institute of
Technology since 1988 as the George L. Argyros Professor of Chemistry,
and he has served as Professor since 1991. In addition to his faculty
appointment, he serves as the Principal Investigator of the Beckman
Institute Molecular Materials Resource Center and is the Editor-in-Chief
of Energy & Environmental Science, a Royal Society of Chemistry journal. Dr. Lewis holds a Ph.D. in chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. He has been an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, a Camille and
Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar, and a Presidential Young Investigator.
Dr. Lewis has received numerous awards for his work, including the
Fresenius Award in 1990, the American Chemical Society Award in
Pure Chemistry in 1991, the Orton Memorial Lecture Award in 2003,
the Princeton Environmental Award in 2003, and the Michael Faraday
Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry Electrochemistry Group in
2008. He has published more than 300 papers and has supervised approximately 60 graduate students and postdoctoral associates. His research interests include artificial photosynthesis and electronic noses.
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will talk about what the laws of physics and chemistry, not the laws
of politics, tell us we can do about this problem because, unlike
the laws of politics, the laws of physics cannot be repealed. If you
want to hear the longer version of this talk, you can go to my website: http://nsl.caltech.edu/.
So, let’s begin with what I call the terawatt challenge. A laptop
is an average load of about a few watts; a toaster is a kilowatt. A
thousand toasters is a megawatt. A small jet engine is a thousand
megawatts. The output of the typically rated nuclear power plant
is a gigawatt. A thousand of those is a terawatt; that is the world’s
average electricity load. You cannot solve the energy problem
without thinking about terawatts. But the situation is even more
extreme than that because electricity is only a small fraction of
total consumed energy. If you add up all the energy, the heat content of all the joules consumed in a year, divide by the number of
seconds in a year, you get the average thermal burn rate of energy
consumption in terawatts.
As it turns out, that number was about 13.5 TW in 2001
(Figure 1); it is pushing 15 TW right now. That is the scale of the
problem with which we have to deal. Roughly 85% of that total is
made up of approximately equal parts of the fossil energies—oil,
Figure 1. 2001 Global Energy Consumption
Broken Down by Resource
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gas, and coal. A little bit is hydro; nuclear power produces 0.9 TW,
but the astute amongst you will know that we produce only 0.3 TW
of electricity because 0.9 TW is the primary heat content of all
the fission in nuclear reactors in the same way that 3 TW is the
primary heat content of all the coal consumed. Conversion losses
account for the difference between the heat content and the electrical energy actually produced.
So that is the scale of the energy issue right now. You may
think that this will naturally change because of market forces, and
therefore we can just wait until the price goes up and let supply
and demand drive us to a different mix, so no action needs to be
taken before then.
Figure 2 shows the peer-reviewed numbers of all of the most
conventional and unconventional globally proven reserves at the
number the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lets
a company or a country book as having in the ground with 90%
confidence. The resource base is more important because that is
what the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimates is available to
be recovered by humans on our planet.
Figure 2. Fossil Fuel Energy Reserves and Resources
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The proven reserve is divided by the consumption rate in
a recent year, so we have between 40 and 80 years’ worth of
oil, between 60 and 160 years’ worth of natural gas, and almost
200+ years’ worth of coal. Furthermore, the countries that have
large demands also tend to have large coal reserves. Now some
people look at this and say, “That means we’re going to run out of
oil in 40 years”; nothing could be further from the truth. The ratio
of proven reserves to consumption of oil has been 40 years for
the past 100 years, since the day after oil was discovered. This is
because discovery never stops. We know exactly where two-thirds
of the oil that has been discovered is—it is in the ground where we
have left it because it was uneconomical to recover it at $8 a barrel
when Saudi oil production now costs only $4 a barrel.
But we could go get all of that at $20 or $30 a barrel if we
wanted to. What matters more is the resource base; the USGS
and agencies such as the International Energy Agency (IEA) and
the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) say that we have,
globally, between 50 and 150 years’ worth of oil, between 200
and 600 years’ worth of natural gas, and almost 2000 years’ worth
of coal. Furthermore, when oil eventually peaks, which it will
because it is finite, we already know how to make coal into liquid
hydrocarbons. Germany did that on a dime in World War II when
denied oil by the Allies. South Africa also did that when denied oil
from the apartheid boycotts. Moreover, these projections do not
count the amount of methane clathrates present over the continental shelves, which is estimated to be more than all of the oil, coal,
and gas on our planet combined.
So message number one here is that the Stone Age did not
end because we ran out of stones, and the Fossil Energy Age is not
going to end within our lifetimes because we are going to run out
of cheap fossil energy. So do not wait for that to happen.
It seems that I have just told you there is no problem; however,
when I began, I told you this was the biggest problem. So now we
have to see why those two statements are still true. We need to
summarize what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) in 1992 projected, not about climate, but about energy in
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what is called the “business-as-usual” scenario, but it is hardly
business by anybody’s usual standard.
My favorite out-year to consider is 2050 because I teach college freshman, and they will turn my age in 2050. In addition, 2050
is important because the built-infrastructure turnover lifetime of the
capital deployed in energy is about 40 years. You do not turn over
a nuclear power plant like selling a used car, and you do not do the
same thing with a solar farm or with a wind farm. When you build
something, it must pay itself back over a 40-year lifetime, so we
are building the 2050 infrastructure within the next 10 years. Now,
you can figure out human energy demand by knowing first how
many humans will be demanding energy. The IPCC said we are at
6 billion now, and we will grow to 9 or 10 billion, so let’s stick to
9 billion, although it does not really matter.
Now we would not consume much energy if we did not do
anything, so we have to understand gross domestic product (GDP)
growth per capita because energy tracks GDP growth—it always
has. After all, if we did not make any products and we did not go to
work and I did not turn on a computer while giving this presentation, we would not consume much energy. As it turns out, globally
averaged per-capita GDP has historically grown at 1.6% per year.
So the IPCC said that, in the business-as-usual scenario, the next
50 years will bring what the last century brought. No one could
have foreseen the unforeseeable at the time: sustained double-digit
economic growth in China and India. But developed countries
believe 3% or 4% growth is sustainable.
As we painfully see today, no country has a policy against economic growth, so it is unlikely that this number is going to go negative, and 1.6% is now viewed as a near-recession level. But we will
assume that business as usual will continue and that GDP growth
compounded with population growth would, if unmitigated, lead
by 2050, through the magic of compounding, to a tripling of energy
demand from 2000 levels, or to some 47 TW. On the other hand,
energy consumption has been declining per unit of GDP because
energy does cost money and we are using it more efficiently. It
has been used more efficiently per unit of GDP at rates of 1%
per year historically.
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Now the United States is saving at twice the world’s rate, that
is because (1) we are so wasteful that it is easier for us to save
and (2) when you have only one candle at night, like the 2 billion people who are not blessed with any modern electricity, how
much can you actually save anyway? So, because the developing
countries are not saving and the developed ones are saving about
twice that rate, the world average is about half. But whether or not
it is 1% or 2%, again, will not make any difference, so we will go
with 1% here. Now this will not be easy, but, again, due to the
magic of compound interest, we can determine that by the year
2050, the average energy demand per capita will be a total load of
2 kW thermal per person.
Let’s compare that number to historical data for the average
energy demand for people in different countries. That is five times
less than the current per-capita U.S. energy consumption—not
50%; it is five times less. If you drove your car half an hour today,
under this scenario, that is all the energy you would get—none to
eat, none to heat, none to make electricity; that would be it. This is
two and a half times better than the most advanced industrialized
societies, the European Union (EU), Switzerland, and Japan. China
is already above this level; India has a government policy to get
above this level within 10 years as it brings another 700 million of
its citizens out of extreme poverty (Figure 3).
If you can hold energy consumption at 2 kW per person, even
if you did better than that by a factor of two, nothing I will tell you
about will change. Now let me also tell you what 2 kW per person
means. A 2000-food-calorie/day diet, divided by the number of
seconds in a day, is 100 W. So humans are 100-W lightbulbs just
to eat. That does not sound so bad because this is a 2-kW budget
per person. But the energy embedded in food—the energy needed
to grow the food, harvest the food, get it to the supermarket, and
have you go get it, process it, and cook it—is between 10 and 25
times the energy in the food itself.
If you can hold it to 10, then a 100-W person burdens the
system with 1 kW, and I am going to give you 2. So we will assume
that we save energy down to twice the level it takes to eat, within
our lifetimes, starting today. If we did twice as well as that, nothing
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Figure 3. Energy Consumption vs. GDP per Capita
[Measured in Thousands of 1997 U.S. Dollars and Adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP)]
I will tell you about will change. If we could do that, that would
mitigate demand so that it only grows to double, 28 TW. Even if we
saved so much energy that we kept energy demand flat, something
the world has never done for a 4-year period in human history,
nothing I will tell you about will change. This is because we have
plenty of fossil energy.
We are using coal to meet this increased level of demand, both
regionally and globally, like it is not going out of style because it
is not. So what is the problem? We need one more fact. This is
the carbon intensity, the average amount of carbon emitted to the
atmosphere as CO2 when averaged over the energy mix. Figure 4
shows historical data. We started out at that top horizontal line
because we were bad engineers when we were cavemen. The
worst way to make energy useful? You heat a lot of wood, most of
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Figure 4. Carbon Intensity [Carbon-to-Energy Emissions
(C/E)] of the Energy Mix of Fossil Fuels [2]
the heat makes CO2 that goes into the air, and hardly any heat is
delivered to the caveman. Then we got to be bad chemists because
we burned coal to power our locomotives, and coal by mass is
all carbon, so when you make it, you burn all of the carbon to
make all CO2. Natural gas is better because its chemical formula is
CH4; so for every molecule of CH4 that you burn in air, you make
one molecule of CO2 but two molecules of water, H2O. More of
the heat goes off as water, less goes off as CO2, so it is lighter in
CO2 emission per units of energy produced than is coal; oil is inbetween because its chemical formula is in-between. Those three
things you can do nothing about because they are properties of the
fundamental heats of combustion and the molecular geometries of
oil, coal, and gas.
We were about average between them (coal, oil, and gas)
in 1990 (see the open circle in Figure 4), and the IPCC, in the
business-as-usual scenario, projected that the next 50 years would
continue the decline in carbon intensity of the last 100 years. If we
continue on that path, you will realize that it brings you down to
an average carbon intensity by 2050, lower than that of the least
carbon-intensive fossil energy source. Now the only way you can
get the average down below any of the individual values is to have
a zero somewhere in the arithmetic. Furthermore, to the extent
that we do not kick the habit starting tomorrow and we still burn
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roughly equal parts of oil, coal, and gas, you need even more
zeroes to get this arithmetic to work out.
But we will assume we do that too. So in addition to saving
energy down to twice the level it takes to eat, we will assume
that, starting today, we follow this business-as-usual scenario,
hardly business by anybody’s usual, and decarbonize the energy
mix down to a level that is better than a pure natural-gas economy within our lifetimes. Well if we know the amount of energy
demanded in each year and we know the amount of carbon emitted per unit of energy demanded in each year, it is just arithmetic
to multiply those two numbers together to get, with no assumptions, the amount of CO2 that will absolutely go into our air if we
adopt that trajectory.
The significance of that brings us onto the top curve of Figure 5.
Even the scenario that I showed you is not close to what would be
needed to stabilize the concentrations of CO2 in our atmosphere
at levels given by these numbers, in parts per million (ppm). The
pre-epigenetic of CO2 was stable for 10,000 years at 280 ppm.
If you wanted to hold it to 350 ppm, you would have to follow
that bottom curve because you could never burn a molecule of
oil, coal, or gas on our planet again within our lifetimes. If you
wanted to hold it to 550 ppm, double what any human would have
Figure 5. CO2 Emission vs. CO2 in the Atmosphere
Projected Through 2100
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otherwise experienced, you still have to do better than the scenario
that I just showed you.
Now outside of a climate model, nobody knows which levels
of CO2 are or are not “safe.” This is absolutely not about sound science; this is absolutely all about risk management. If we wait until
we can predict the climate in 2050, I will tell you the scientifically
accurate day this will occur: New Year’s Day, January 1st, 2050,
when we look outside. Now we know a little bit more than that.
We know that CO2 levels have never exceeded 300 ppm for the
last 470,000 years. In fact, we can extend that with new data to
670,000 straight years.
We know that swings of CO2 of 100 ppm have been seen seven
times and repeatedly correlated with, but not necessarily proven to
be the cause of, temperatures that have repeatedly sent us into and
out of planetary ice ages. We do not know with absolute certainty
what 550 ppm or higher would bring. We do know that no human
has experienced this, nor would it have been in the record of our
planet for more than modern human history. We know that we see
ice melting. Our inability to predict cuts both ways. In Figure 6,
you can see the predicted spread of the rates of ice melting and
that the actual satellite data show that it is melting more rapidly
than the most pessimistic predictions.
No matter what you think about the radiative effects of adding
absorbing gas to the atmosphere, anybody who has ever opened
a can of soda knows that when you add CO2 to water you make
it acidic. The pH of the oceans is now lower than it has been in
4 million years and probably in the last 20 million years. Twenty
percent of the coral is already bleached. Most, but not all, climate
models say that between half and all of it will be bleached within
our lifetimes. Even these so-called linear effects are not potentially
the big game changers. The permafrost is clearly melting; isotopic
dating tells us it is melting in areas that have not melted in at least
40,000 years.
As it melts, the white ice that would have reflected light now
turns into dark, absorbing matter that then absorbs more light and
warms further and releases the trapped methane in permafrost.
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Figure 6. Predicted and Actual Percentage Change (Melting)
in the Greenland Ice Sheet
If this continues to melt, CO2 levels will not go up by a factor of 2,
but could go up by as much as a factor of 10. We know this happened at least once before, 230 million years ago, when there was
an isotopically light, rapid release of CO2 thought to be permafrost
melting. We know temperatures spiked by 6°C on average, and we
know from the fossil record that 90% of the species then on Earth
could not adapt and went extinct.
We absolutely do not know that this would happen again. We
absolutely do know that there is only one way to find out. Another
important consideration is the lifetime of CO2 in our atmosphere.
There is no natural destruction mechanism for it because CO2 is
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the most oxidized form of carbon in the oxidizing atmosphere in
which we live. Our best scientific knowledge says that, if we get to
550 ppm—and we are on a path to do more than that pretty fast—
and then we kick the habit in the delta function and stop the next
day, three-quarters of the CO2 that is already there would decay in
300 or 400 years, and the last quarter would take 10,000 years on
the weathering cycle to decay, for an average recovery time of the
planet to the one we know today of 3000 years.
So we are going to simply do an experiment that is going to
persist for a timescale comparable to that of modern human history. If you want to avoid that experiment, you can talk all you
want about global warming solution acts, but the Earth balances
its books every single day. On the business-as-usual trajectory, just
to keep that average mix down, assuming we save energy down to
twice the level it takes to eat, the arithmetic showed that you had
to bring on almost 10 trillion W of carbon-free power by 2050.
If you wanted to hold CO2 levels to double, you had to bring on
more than that.
If you did not save as much energy, you would have to bring
on even more than that; by any measure, you have to bring on
as much carbon-neutral or carbon-free power by 2050 as all the
oil, coal, gas, and nuclear power on our planet combined, starting
today. If you wait 40 years to do this, you will have 40 more years
of emissions under your belt that simply do not go away; that is why
this is a problem. If you believe that this is a risk that you do not
want to take, then we need to start addressing the problem today.
So the question then is where in the world are we going to
get 15 or so trillion W of carbon-free power within our lifetimes?
The cruel arithmetic of energy says that if you do what we heard
in the presidential campaign, build 46 new nuclear power plants,
that is not even a tiny drop in the bucket of what is needed to solve
this problem. Well, let’s look at what the laws of physics say the
allowed solutions can actually come from.
The only proven technology that we have that can scale to
these levels is nuclear power. Although I am not personally against
nuclear power, others are. Nevertheless, it is hard to see how you
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can get from here to there without a significant contribution from
nuclear power to the energy mix (Figure 7).
On the other hand, we need to understand what we are voting
for because if we do nothing else, this will be the only card we
have to play. I already told you that, in that scale of things, the
output of a typical nuclear power plant—built to scale, to safely
confine with known materials, the heat flux and neutron flux in
the core—is a billion watts, a gigawatt. I told you at minimum we
need 10 trillion W. So, you will see that we do not need 46 nuclear
power plants; we need over 10,000 nuclear power plants.
You need to build a new nuclear reactor now, every single
day, for the next 40 straight years if you want to hold CO2 levels to
double, assuming you save energy down to twice the level it takes
to eat, starting today. There are a few other small facts, one being
that there is not enough terrestrial uranium to do this at this level
for more than 10 years. You could get it from seawater if you want
to build the equivalent of 300 Niagara Falls, mining all the oceans
of the world to get out the 3 parts per billion of the needed uranium. You could also build these at $5 a peak watt, a conservative
Figure 7. Sources of Carbon-Free Power
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estimate if you only had $50 trillion to spend, which used to sound
like a lot of money.
Now if you build only one nuclear power plant a week, starting today, every week, somewhere in the world for the next 40
straight years—and because they last only 40 or 50 years, that
means building one basically forever—you still leave 90% of the
problem on the table. So where else can you turn? Well we can
take all the fossil energy and bury the CO2 somewhere (Figure 8);
you could put it in the oceans, but we are already adding too much
acidity to the oceans. You could put it in the oil and gas fields, but
there is not capacity to do it there for more than 30 years globally.
So the favorite technical idea is to put in the underground aquifers
in the brine, where the good news is that the CO2 will dissolve
in the water and make Perrier, which costs more than a gallon of
gasoline, and we could export it to fix our balance of trade with
the French.
The news is that CO2 is buoyant, and when you are burying
billions of tons of this stuff, it will migrate and move, and nobody
knows where it will go and, more importantly, whether or not it
might leak. If 1% of it leaks after 100 years, then the net flux is the
same as what you tried to mitigate in the first place. So technically,
Figure 8. Carbon Sequestration
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clean coal does not exist yet; it does exist in advertising slogans
on TV. It exists only if we can technically prove that we can bury
billions of tons in underground aquifers and know that it will not
move on a multi-scale and multi-time and multi-live modeling
effort at 0.1% per year for something like 1000 years with less than
10 years’ worth of data.
Moreover, every site is different, so even if you prove it at one
site, that is no guarantee at all about the other thousands of sites
at which you would have to practice this. Now again, I think we
should be doing everything we can to see if this works technically because if you tie the second hand behind your back, you
do not have many cards left to play. But do not think that this will
get you from here to there by itself, even in your most optimistic,
wildest dreams.
Well, if you cannot get it all from fossil energy and you do not
build more than one nuclear power plant a week, where are you
going to get 10 TW? I can tell you where you are not going to get
it. You are not going to get it from all the hydroelectric flows on
our planet using every river, lake, and stream; there are not nearly
enough. You are not going to get it from sustainable geothermal
energy—when you know the temperature of the core of Earth and
the surface of the Earth, when you know the heat flux. If you have
100% of this in heat engines over all land on Earth, you can get
only 12 TW. You are not going to get it from the tides; you are not
going to get it from the wind. You might get a few terawatts from
biomass—that is important.
So, let’s see where we are. You can get about a terawatt in
all the hydroelectric flows, and you can get about 12 TW in all
the geothermal and all the land on Earth with 100% efficient heat
engines, of which there is no such thing. You get about 2 TW in
all the tides of all the ocean currents on our planet combined.
You have about 2 to 3 extractable TW in all the high-wind-speed
areas on land. You can get a few out of biomass, which brings us
to 5–7 TW gross, but that is for all land not used to grow food currently. But you cannot do that because when somebody converts
land that is now growing crops into crops for fuel, you till the soil.
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When you till the soil, you release soil carbons, and the amount
of carbon trapped in the soil is almost twice as much as all the
carbon in the air in the entire vertical atmospheric column above
the same square meter. And you have just released all that into the
air, which is what we are trying to prevent. You can pay back that
carbon debt, but it takes between 40 and 400 years to pay it back,
depending on the crop. So, you were better off leaving it alone and
burning gasoline than making biofuels on that land for the next 40
to 400 years. You can really do this only on land that is now out of
commission, that is not used for anything, and optimists estimate
you might get a terawatt.
Now that is an important terawatt because it provides liquid
transportation fuels, and 40% of current global transportation is in
heavy-duty trucks, ships, and airplanes. We are going to need those
liquid biofuels—not for light-duty vehicles when there are other
modes of moving us around and it is silly to use them there. We are
going to need them for ships, aircraft, and heavy-duty trucks, for
which there is no credible substitute because nobody has yet, to
my knowledge, invented a plug-in hybrid airplane. But even if you
have a terawatt of biofuels, you are still about 8 or 10 TW short.
The only other big number left is the champion of all energy
sources. The Sun provides us with 105 TW and we need 10. If
you had 10% solar, on something that would be meadowland you
would have to cover, you would use 0.18% of the land on Earth to
provide 20 TW. Now this is not a small area because solar energy
is more diffuse than fossil energy. But it is either that or build
20,000 plutonium-containing nuclear power cycles somewhere in
the world (because we do not have enough natural uranium to do
it), and that means that we have to close the fuel cycle in every
country that wants clean energy.
So the bottom line is, despite playing the nuclear card, as much
as you feel comfortable, even if you build 1000 of them, one a
week, you are 9000 short. You play the fossil card with a little bit
of wind and a little bit of biofuels, and you are still short. The biggest energy source we have is the Sun; more energy from the Sun
hits the Earth in 1 hour than all of the energy consumed on our
planet in an entire year. Nothing else comes close, so it is pretty
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obvious that the third big card that we have, should we chose to
play it, is to tap that resource.
Figure 9 gives you a feeling for the United States, of a 10%
efficiency at a representative mid-latitude of how much area you
would have to cover; you would never do it all this way, but it gives
you a feeling for the amount of land needed. It is not small; it is the
equivalent of the nation’s numbered highway systems. It is also the
equivalent of adding a million solar roofs every single day for the
next 40 straight years. It is either this or build 3000 nuclear power
plants or some combination thereof; this is what the arithmetic of
energy turns out to be.
I argue that we cannot do that with any known technology
today because it would take more than the army of installers who
currently install glass panels. We have to get this into a form that
can be painted on a roof by a person or rolled out like a carpet;
there are nanotechnology approaches to making thin, flexible films
that can be reasonably efficient and are good enough to mitigate
this issue of installing them everywhere. And I think that, if we
Figure 9. Solar Land Area Requirements
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use the technology that we have today—you hear we have all the
technology we need—we just need the political will, but that is
only half true.
We need the political will and we absolutely need to get going,
but we do not have all the technology we need to get from here to
there at the rate that is needed to declare victory. There is one little
problem, though. The Sun has this nasty little habit of going out
locally every single night, and humans do not. “Thee that cannot
store, shall not have power after four.” So, we need to find a way to
make stored energy, which photosynthesis does, which solar cells
do not do; they make the wrong product.
There is no proven way to store massive quantities of electricity. If you have one, you will be able to buy electricity every night
at a nickel a kilowatt hour and sell it to your friends and neighbors
for 25 cents the next day and laugh all the way to the bank. You
can do this by pumping water uphill; if you want to pump a lot of
water, there is not enough water to buffer the day/night cycle of the
United States every day and every night. To store the energy in 1
gallon of gasoline, you have to pump 55,000 gallons of water up
the height of Hoover Dam.
The most energy-dense ways we have are either in the nucleus
or in chemical bonds. Nothing else comes close. So you cannot
exploit this intermittent resource unless, at scale, you store its
energy in chemical bonds. You could do that today with solar thermal troughs, provided you wanted to build one of these troughs
that would focus on this dual-access parabolic dish, the sunlight
onto that external sterling engine, it would put it into this electrolysis unit on the lower right, probably at the half the world’s supply
of platinum just there. Every day that dish plus that unit would fill
up that little tank with hydrogen.
You would have to build one of these every second for the next
50 straight years to meet our energy demand. This is just not a scalable technology. We need to get rid of the platinum; we need to
re-engineer these systems. When the amount of platinum in a fuel
cell to power a school bus costs $0.5 million, like it does today,
we are going to have a vigorous hydrogen economy consisting of
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stolen school buses. However, we know that nature knows how to
do this. It turns out that green algae (Chlamydomonas moewusii)
that produce hydrogen can be used as a clean biological energy
source. Best of all, they do so without using platinum. Instead, the
algae use iron, and they are not poisoned by carbon monoxide or
sulfur but actually make use of those materials in the process of
making hydrogen.
We know that nature does not use an expensive and rare metal
such as rubidium to make oxygen like fuel cells do; it uses manganese, a cheap metal. So we have to fish out these compounds and
make our own systems like nature does, to convert electrons into
chemical bonds and back again, so we can actually store sunlight
and chemical bond energy where we can deliver it as a fuel whenever people need it, wherever they want and need it. Otherwise,
we will not have much out of that intermittent resource.
So in conclusion, it is eminently clear that the world needs a
lot of energy and probably more and more every day. It is not that
we are going to run out of fossil fuels, it is going to be that we have
already run out of air in which we can put those fossil fuel products. The case for daunting amounts of carbon-free power is either
plausible or imperative, depending how well you feel about rolling
the dice once with our planet. How have we done? We talked all
about Kyoto, and CO2 emissions grew at 1.1% per year. Then we
tightened our belt and showed the world what we could do and
you know what we did, we tripled it. Now we are emitting even
faster than even the worst scenario thought possible.
We are emitting at 3.1 growth rate per year, and even that business-as-usual scenario I showed you is in our rear-view mirrors.
So, it will be harder than that to make that arithmetic come true.
That being said, I have told you only about hard scientific facts—
not opinions or policy. And I will not go there except to say that
no sound energy policy would start with energy deficiency. It is
cheaper to save energy than it is to make energy, and every joule
you save, saves having to make more joules up front. It is also good
for energy security as well as our environmental security.
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If you do not save energy like our lives depend on it, you turn
an improbable solution into an impossible one. That being said, do
not be fooled because no amount of saving energy ever turned on
a lightbulb, no amount of saving energy ever put food on somebody’s table, and no amount of saving energy ever got an aircraft
carrier in or out of port or moved an airplane from point A to point
B. You still have to make tremendous amounts of clean energy
within our lifetimes. The only three big cards that we have are coal,
if we can sequester all of that CO2; nuclear power, if we go to fuller
burns and/or complete fuel cycles and/or in some combination; or,
the biggest energy source that we have, the Sun.
But we better make it really cheap, and we better find a way
to store it or we will not have much. I am not going to give you a
policy recommendation. I am just going to pose the two extremes
that are the dominant extremes into which this is cast in the
public debate. One says this is something that we cannot afford
to do because it will cost money. Of course it will cost money.
You cannot switch from 100-year-old energy technology without
spending some money. So by that metric, it is true that we cannot
afford to do it.
The flip side is that this is something that cannot fail because
we get to do, or not do, this experiment exactly once. The choice
of which path our planet takes rests with no generation other than
ours; we are uniquely in a position to decide on which path we
are going to put our planet. If we wait 40 years to decide, then
nature will have decided for us what it wants to do. You cannot do
a cost–benefit analysis of this because we do not know the costs
and we do not know the benefits. I never said I knew whether this
would be good or bad or in-between. I just told you what science
allows us to say about where we are going if we stay on the path
we are on.
So the question is, do we actually have the energy needed, the
human energy, to do the research and development as well as the
deployment starting today—to do the things that we know how to
do as well as the things that we do not yet know how to do, but
do know where the answers lie to get them done in time to get
from here to there? I think we could do it, but we would have to
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be really serious about doing it, treating it as if our lives depended
on it. Because you know what? They just might. With that, thanks
very much for listening, and I would be happy to answer questions.
References
1. Oversight hearing on sustainable, low emission, electricity
generation, Testimony of Dr. Richard E. Smalley before the
U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources,
Oversight Hearing on Sustainable, Low Emission, Electricity
Generation, 27 Apr 2004, http://energy.senate.gov/hearings/
testimony.cfm?id=1129&wit_id=3343.
2. Martin I. Hoffert, Ken Caldeira, Atul K. Jain, Erik F. Haites,
L. D. Danny Harvey, Seth D. Potter, Michael E. Schlesinger,
Stephen H. Schneider, Robert G. Watts, Tom M. L. Wigley,
and Donald J. Wuebbles, “Energy implications of future
stabilization of atmospheric CO2 content,“ Nature 395: 881–
884 (29 Oct 1998), doi: 10.1038/27638.
Q&
A
with Dr. Nathan Lewis
I am wondering if anyone has looked at how would nature
Q: Sir,
solve this problem for us?
Dr. Nathan Lewis : There are two different interpretations of
that. One is what would be the natural restoration time of CO2
levels, and that, I told you, would be about 3000 years. The second is how would nature solve the problems, in other words, what
would be the reaction of the ecosystems and human systems on
the planet if we let the trajectory continue? The answer to that is,
we do not really know. Most of the predictions, for whatever they
are worth, are on the bad side of things, but not all of them. So
some places could be better or worse. There will be winners and
losers; it will be different.
In some cases, it is predicted to be very different. Many people
believe that there is no steady-state ice in the Northern Hemisphere
at 375 ppm of CO2. The consensus predictions now state there is
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no ice in the Northern Hemisphere at all. That does not mean
everybody believes that; it means that there is some sound, scientific basis to expect that might be possible. We do not really know
for sure. So we just know that the historical data show the Earth
was a very, very different place when CO2 excursions of these
magnitudes were there, and they were imposed on a much slower
time scale than the ones with which humans are now perturbing
the system.
you address any of the potential geoengineering
Q: Could
approaches to reducing the temperatures?
Dr. Nathan Lewis : That question comes up more and more
now as the time clocks tick closer and closer to the point of apparent no return. There is one geoengineering approach that involves
launching aerosols into the stratosphere. First, we need to realize
that we have a nonlinear system that we admit we do not understand, and we will be trying to exert single-point, open-loop control over that, which sounds pretty dicey to me. Moreover, if a
hurricane hits shortly after you have done that, they are going to
want to blame you.
What are you going to do? Other than those issues, the bigger
issue is that even those things do not affect the ocean acidity issues
because they would affect the rate of transporting air but not the
thermal warming of the oceans or its acidity as it affects the ecosystem. So it is a method of potentially two wrongs possibly getting
lucky to make a right, but you would have to be pretty good and
pretty lucky to get it to work out.
find that in terms of public opinion, we almost seem to be
Q: Igoing
backward. When one of your undergraduates tells you
that he/she is very skeptical and does not believe in some of the things
you laid out, what is your reaction to that? Why do we seem to be going
backward on this?
Dr. Nathan Lewis : Well you know, just because you advertise clean coal on TV does not mean it exists. Now I never
said the public is “skeptical” about the affects of CO2 or global
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warming. I never mentioned the words. I never even told you I
thought it necessarily would be bad from a scientific perspective.
So when you say the public is skeptical, there is nothing in what
I told you that one could possibly be skeptical about because my
presentation was based on proven, undisputed scientific facts.
Maybe it will not be bad. On the other hand, maybe it will be
pretty bad. The real issue is, you get to roll the dice here just once.
How lucky do we feel?
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4.2 Navy Task Force Energy
Rear Admiral Philip H. Cullom
Before I get into my remarks, let me briefly recap a couple of
questions that were apparent in the presentations and discussions
that have already taken place.
Rear Admiral Philip H. Cullom graduated with distinction from the
U.S. Naval Academy with a bachelor’s degree in physics. He also holds
a master’s degree in business administration with distinction from
Harvard Business School. At sea, he has served in various operational
and engineering billets aboard USS Truxtun (CGN 35), USS Jesse L.
Brown (FF 1089), USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69), and USS
Mobile Bay (CG 53), participating in numerous exercises and counternarcotics patrols as well as Operations Desert Storm and Southern
Watch. From 1998 to 1999, he commanded USS Mitscher (DDG 57),
deploying to the Mediterranean, Adriatic, and North Seas during the
Kosovo crisis. As Commander, Amphibious Squadron 3, he served as
sea combat commander for the 1st Expeditionary Strike Group (ESG-1) in support of Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom (2003–
2004). From June 2007 to August 2008, he commanded the Eisenhower
and George Washington Strike Groups, as Commander, Carrier Strike
Group 8. Ashore, he has served in various staff, policy, strategy, and
technical positions. Joint assignments have included defense resource
manager within the J-8 Directorate of the Joint Staff, White House
Fellow to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and
Director for Defense Policy and Arms Control at the National Security
Council. He also served as the head of Officer Programs and Placement
(PERS 424/41N) for all surface nuclear trained officers from late
2001 until 2003. In September 2008, he assumed his present duties
as Director, Fleet Readiness Division of the Navy staff. Rear Admiral
Cullom’s personal awards include the Defense Superior Service Medal
(two awards), Legion of Merit (five awards), Defense Meritorious
Service Medal, Navy Meritorious Service Medal (two awards), Navy
and Marine Corps Commendation Medal (three awards), Joint Service
Achievement Medal, and Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal.
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One of the questions that came up was, if we go this route
toward energy efficiency and we are using less, are not we less
capable as a force? I hope that at the end of this symposium, we
will walk away with a really good feeling that that is exactly not
true. I intend to show that by going the route of efficiencies, we
really will get more combat capability. In fact, we are currently trying to keep that focus on every single investment that the Navy has
already made on the tactical side as well as on the force side. We
are trying to get greater combat capability for the forces we support, as well as for the forces that are about to deploy.
The second question that came up was, what do you pursue
first? Do you go the route of alternative fuels or do you go the route
of efficiency? Which is more important? And I think Professor
Lewis spoke very eloquently about the fact that efficiency really is
the right path to go down because the carbon that you do not produce—the barrel of fuel that you do not burn—is the barrel that
you never have to draw. That is important from the standpoint that,
if you can gain that amount of money back, you can go on to other
things that are probably a lot more important in the big scheme of
things. So hopefully that lays a good context for my presentation.
What I would like to do first is describe briefly how we got to
where we are in terms of energy. As it turns out, the Navy started
to think seriously about how it uses energy approximately 5 years
ago. As we have been looking at this issue, as we developed the
new maritime strategy, we were struck by the fact that almost 80%
of the world’s fuel travels by the ocean. In the end, there is an
awful lot of ocean out there, and there is not nearly as much land
in comparison. The Navy’s role really is to protect those lifelines.
Well, how important is that today? How important is it going to be
in the future?
The upper panel of Figure 1 shows the world at night today as
you would see if you could see the night 24/7 all the way around
the world. This image gives you a pretty good idea of some of the
aspects of the energy usage that occurs. Now that panel, in context
with the lower panel, which is where it is going to be in 2030, gives
you a little bit of feel for how much it may change, how much it
is very likely to change. These are, I think, pretty good predictions
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Figure 1. The Projected Growth of Global
Energy Consumption
that we have from industry and, I would say, from global international concerns that have contributed to produce this. But take a
look at where it grows—China, India, South America, South Africa,
Australia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. Look, too, at how
little the United States grows.
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So most of that growth is not going to occur where we are,
and I think that is going to have some important ramifications and
implications for us as a nation, for us as a military, and for us as a
navy. How does that really affect us? Hopefully, Figure 2, a kind
of quick around-the-world quad chart, will bring some of that to
bear. The upper left panel shows the flows of oil—where it has to
go through and the choke points involved in it. As you see, there
is an awful lot coming this way. There is obviously very little that
goes in the other direction. But, as you can see, very little of the oil
that America consumes comes from the Middle East.
You need to remember, though, that oil is a global commodity. For us, an awful lot of it comes from other places. The ones
labeled “Not U.S. Friendly” do not necessarily want to sell it to us
all the time—certainly not at the price we might necessarily want
to pay—or they may want to try to, as part of Organization of
the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), drive the price in one
direction or another. So this figure shows you a little bit of the fragility of some of that supply. It also shows the choke points through
which that 80% has to go day to day.
Figure 2. Global Energy Drivers
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Let’s go back to the quad again. So that is kind of the political
side of the house; let’s talk a look at the economic side. The economic side is pretty much any time the supply and demand get a
little off whack for one reason or another, whether it is by control
of Middle Eastern countries or by the fact that the refineries are
cranking out too much, and the next thing you know, they have a
little bit of a glut on the market. Then what you end up seeing is the
impact on the price of a barrel of oil. That value decreased from
$75 in just a few years down pretty low to $55. Between 2007 and
2008, we saw a pretty dramatic change.
That change, in fact, was one of the great precipitants for the
Navy to get its act together on energy because we went from needing to spend $1.2 billion for our fuel in 2007, when the price was
$33 per barrel, to $5.1 billion in 2008, when the price rose to
more than $140 per barrel. When that happened, the Navy had
to find almost $4 billion from its Total Obligated Authority (TOA)
to pay for more fuel. Although we did get some adjustment
from Congress, at the end of the day, the money had to come
from somewhere.
A large share of it came from the other things that the Navy
was planning to do. Some came from current readiness, some
came from not buying as many planes or ships or other systems as
we had originally intended to buy. There is a ramification for it. So
that large swing was one of the things that drove us to getting our
act together. As part of my job at Fleet Readiness (N43), I pay that
bill, so I really feel it when it changes by $4 billion in 1 year, probably the natural reason that I ended up inheriting the Task Force
Energy hat.
But that is not the only thing. We also have to look at the growth
of carbon emissions that is occurring and where that is likely to go.
We have heard about the Executive Order issued by the President.
During this symposium, we heard Rear Admiral Dave Titley talk
about his look at climate change. He mentioned that his Task Force
Climate Change is integrally linked with my Task Force Energy. In
fact, I sit on his Executive Committee (EXCOM) and he sits on
mine. As a result, we are continually sharing information, recognizing that the two issues are absolutely linked. That is one of the
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reasons that we have been driving down some of the specific paths
that we have chosen.
Another thing that we have looked at from a purely Navy perspective is what is really happening in terms of our energy usage.
Unfortunately, the things that we oftentimes buy tend to use more
energy, not less, because we want to do more and get more capability, and, generally speaking, that requires more energy. Future
weapons systems tend to use more energy than the systems that
they will be replacing. We need to start turning that trend around.
So, here is the profile for Navy energy use (Figure 3). As you can
see, 75% of our actual energy consumption occurs during tactical
operations, and only 25% is consumed by our shore-based installations and operations.
In terms of where we get our energy, the vast majority of it
comes from petroleum. Most, but not all, of the remainder comes
from electricity. We also rely on nuclear energy to power all of our
aircraft carriers and submarines. The Navy’s use of renewables currently stands at only 1%, but it is growing significantly each year.
This is where we fit within the larger scheme of things, and you will
Figure 3. Navy Energy Profile
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no doubt hear a number of presentations during this symposium
talk about the fact that the Navy uses a lot of fuel. Between the Air
Force and the Navy, we use an awful lot of petroleum fuel. At the
end of the day, however, the U.S. government uses only 2% of the
overall energy used in the country.
By the way, roughly 70 of every 100 barrels of fuel that we
use come from overseas. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD)
uses 93% of the fuel purchased by the government, and the Navy
uses roughly a quarter of DoD’s share. That amount is pretty
much evenly split between the ship and aviation sides; use by our
shore installations accounts for the remainder. Our expeditionary forces—the Naval Expeditionary Combat Command, which
includes the Seabees and riverine forces—account for roughly 1%.
We actually have had a lot of success; thus far, however, most
of that has been on the shore side rather than on the tactical side,
where, as I noted, we use 75% of the energy that the Navy buys.
If we are going to truly get our act together, it has to be on tactical
side. That is really hard because many of our warfighters come in
with the view that if I focus on saving energy, I am going to be less
capable. If that is truly the case, then why would I do it?
So, it is essential that we be able to find ways to actually get
more capability. In essence, we need to be able to do a 21st century
version of the Doolittle Raid and get more by lightening our load
so as to get more range. We need to show that efficiency will give
us more combat capability.
On the shore side of the house, since the 1980s we have been
relying on geothermal energy to provide 270 MW of power at
China Lake. We have a wind farm at Guantanamo Bay that provides
3.8 MW, which is important because that base is isolated, and we
would otherwise have to rely on tankers to deliver fuel. We also
have photovoltaic systems set up in places such as San Diego, and
we are pushing those out to other places that make sense. On the
aviation side, we are looking at increased use of training simulators.
However, we are not ready to require their use as part of the training and readiness (T&R) matrix that our pilots must execute before
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they are certified for deployment. In the future, though, we expect
that simulators will become part of that.
The Navy has had the Energy Conservation (ENCON) Program
for incentivizing energy conservation for a long period of time. As
a commanding officer on a ship back in the 1990s, I actually set
winning that award as a goal for my ship and worked very hard to
achieve it. But such things can only go so far. You need to be able
to change behavior in order to make a large difference. If you can
do that, you can actually save a lot of fuel. So the end result of the
Navy’s fuel cost rising from $1.2 billion up to $5 billion was for the
Chief of Naval Operations to turn to my boss and ultimately to me
and say, “Phil, get hot. You have to have an energy plan. You’ve
got a few months.”
So we set to work on creating a Task Force Energy that has a
number of working groups (Figure 4). We have functional working
groups and supporting working groups that are led by either flag
officers up to the three-star level or a senior executive. We are collaborating with the other services as well as other agencies. There
are a lot of people working on this stuff, and the more we can try
to find synergies in these efforts, the more progress we ultimately
are going to make.
The Secretary of the Navy has set some goals that will help us
gain energy security, and hopefully national security in the process, by having us help lead the way (Figure 5). We are going to try
to sail the great green fleet. We will have testing and certification
protocols done for all of our engines around the Navy by 2012, and
we will exercise them in local operations by 2016. Our great green
fleet will include an aircraft carrier that is nuclear powered, it will
be loaded with aircraft that will be flown on biofuel, and it will
be escorted by surface ships that will also be powered by biofuel.
So basically everything that goes into those prime movers, those
muscle movers, will be powered by biofuel—actually a 50/50
blend of biofuel and fuel oil.
On the nontactical side, by 2015, the Navy’s commercial fleet
will get 50% of its energy from biofuel. We also intend to change
the way we buy stuff. That is probably the hardest thing, but it is
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Figure 4. Navy Task Force Energy
Figure 5. Secretary of the Navy (SECNAV) Energy Goals
also one of the most important things for where we are going to
ultimately end up in the 2020 or 2040 timeframe. The Secretariat
is hard at work on making sure we can do that.
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I am hoping that Amory Lovin’s way of reverse engineering the
process will become part of the way we do that, but that is just my
personal opinion. I think that could make a huge difference in how
much we actually end up using so that we do not end up having
that curve of consumption continue to go up, but instead get it to
level off or actually decrease it. We also have tried to translate this
for warriors, because if it does not make sense for a warrior to do
this, why are we doing it? We have a mission set and we have to
understand that that mission set has to go accomplish things.
Among the ways we are considering to ensure mobility is
through reliance on alternative fuels. Such fuels will allow us to
move away from volatilely priced petroleum; they will give us that
off-ramp to petroleum at a price at which we do not get held hostage (Figure 6). We also want to ensure that we can protect critical
infrastructure and have grid security and backup power for our
critical assets. Alternative fuels can play an important role here as
well. So even though some alternatives may not make economic
sense today, they may be useful from the perspective of protecting critical infrastructure, whether from a national perspective,
from the combatant commander’s perspective, or from a service-
specific perspective.
We are also trying to expand our tactical reach—the 21st century equivalent of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo. If we can save 4%
of fuel used by an F/A-18, we will need to spend less time underneath another F/A-18 getting refueled, which is about the highest
cost of fuel that the Navy has—when you account for all the costs,
fuel provided by a refueling aircraft comes in at over $100 per
gallon. Think of that the next time you buy gas for your car.
When we account for the cost of putting another F/A-18 into
the air, the amount of fuel it expends, the amount of time it takes to
hook up, the amount of fuel you actually get, it is a lot better to get
it from a KC-10 tanker if we can get it that way. Unfortunately, you
cannot always get it that way. So, if we can stay airborne for 4%
more time by improving efficiency, we can enhance our overall
capability. A nugget pilot who has already boltered several times
because he missed the wire can get one more pass around the carrier before he has to go to a divert field—pretty important stuff for
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Figure 6. SECNAV Goals and Energy Security
a warrior at the pointy end of the spear. Or, we can use that fuel to
fly 3% or 4% farther to execute the mission.
In conjunction with our efforts to lighten the load, we are
working very hard with the Air Force to take advantage of their
leading-edge efforts in composites and in trying to lighten the load
of the ordinance that we drop. If you can move away from steel
casings, you can build lighter bombs that allow you to fly farther.
If they are properly designed, you can get more combat capability
and you can deliver that capability farther. That is just one example
of how the services can work together.
Finally, we are greening our footprint. If we do it right, it will
not only reduce carbon emissions and provoke good stewardship,
but also give us some resilience against the fragility of the grid. We
were also provided America Recovery Act (ARA) funds that we put
to good use on the research and development side as well as on the
shore side. We spent some of that money for Military Construction
(MilCon) and for specific Operations and Maintenance (OMN)
items such as smart metering (Figure 7).
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As of about a year and a half ago, many of our bases had only
one electrical meter at the point where power came into the base.
What incentive was there to conserve energy? No one could even
tell how much energy they were really burning in a building other
than by looking to see whether all the lights were on. Nor did you
have a way, when an aircraft carrier pulled into port, to measure
how much energy it was using while it was pier-side. We simply
had no way to tally up energy use by the subcomponents as a
basis for incentivizing energy conservation. So a lot of the initial
ARA money has been used to move us along the path toward that
capability. Smart metering will not only help us conserve, it will
also provide some resiliency to the grid if it is properly protected.
We are also looking at ocean thermal energy conversion and
wave action energy generators. Ocean thermal energy conversion is something that we would see being ideal for places such as
Diego Garcia, Guam, and Hawaii, where the price of fuel is very
high because it has to be delivered by a freighter or tanker. It may
be possible to use the differential temperature between deep in
Figure 7. Current Navy Energy Initiatives
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the ocean and at the surface, particularly at the Equator. That delta
in temperature gives you an engine and you can use it to produce
power and fresh water.
A lot of things are being done on the expeditionary side.
We are deploying onboard vehicle power generation so that our
ground forces are able to shoot and operate their computers on the
move. They do not have to tow a generator behind, they do not
have to stop, and they do not have to power it up. As a result, they
are less vulnerable and more capable. So, as you can see, many
of the things that conserve energy can actually enhance combat
capability if we do it right.
On the maritime side, we are looking at stern flaps and hull
coatings and things like that, many of which have been pioneered
in the private sector. Of course, some of these are better than
others. We are installing and operationally testing the best ones and
obtaining fairly significant savings as a result. We are also making
sure that fleet scheduling does a better job of avoiding areas where
there are heavy storms. We have done that for years, but we have
not always done it with the aim of saving energy. Now we are.
We are also trying take advantage of ocean currents by adjusting our routes and dropping down a couple of degrees in latitude
to follow the ocean current rather than just sailing a great circle
route, which may seem shorter but ends up using more fuel. We
are working on an onboard computer that shows you how much
fuel your ship is actually using as you steam along.
On the aviation side, a new efficient F-414 engine can get you
that extra 4%. There are actually other engines down the line that
would be better replacements for our F/A-18 fighters. Many of
these changes could also be incorporated into the F-35 Joint Strike
Fighter so that our sister services and some of our allies would
also benefit. We are also starting an energy conservation (ENCON)
program on the aviation side to replicate what we have done for
the past decade and a half on the surface ship side of the house.
Alternative fuels are key in that the Secretary wants us to move
toward 50% use of such fuels. In that regards there are a lot of different possibilities (Figure 8). There are also multiple challenges.
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Let me say that both the Navy and the Air Force have been working with the Defense Supply Center (DSC) on a number of different
alternatives. Two of the most promising are camelina and algae.
Either will give you roughly the same amount of energy. Moreover,
fuel from these sources has a much higher energy than is the case
for fuel from corn. In fact, their energy density is almost equivalent
to petroleum, not quite the same, but within 90%.
The real difference among all of these things is how much
energy you have to put in to be able to get energy out. That is
where these start to become a reasonable replacement for petroleum at a reasonable cost. To do that, we need processes that
are not only scalable, but also repeatable. It may be necessary to
modify some of these plants genetically so that you get out more
oil. That is one approach; there are other approaches.
In a couple of weeks we are going to be flying an F-18 called
the Green Hornet on camelina-based biofuel. We have already
tested a Hornet engine in afterburner using the fuel in conjunction
with the testing and certification protocols that have been going on
for the past 6 months, so we know it will work. The test program
will continue for another couple of weeks, culminating in the flight
test of the Green Hornet. Assuming that effort is successful, we
Figure 8. Alternate Fuel Initiatives
Chapter 4 Energy Imperatives: Part II
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should be on track to meet our 2010 goal and ultimately the 2016
deployment of the Green Strike Group.
At the end of the day, toward what is this directed? It is directed
toward our 2020 goal of 50% use of alternative fuel, which is going
to require us to be able to consistently buy 8 million barrels of
biofuel every single year. So if industry representatives are here,
please listen up. The Navy plans to buy 8 million barrels of biofuel
per year. Importantly, that is after we have done all of the efficiency
reductions that we are embarked on already. We want that 8 million barrels to be a consistent demand signal from 2020 on. If we
can build up to that sooner, we would love to do so. Because at
the end of the day, what does it do? It saves carbon from being
produced, it gets us moving toward that off-ramp from petroleum,
and it gives us the capability to be resilient in the face of an uncertain future.
Before I close, I want to make an analogy based on the
Navy’s experience with one of its most famous ships—the USS
Constitution. Among the little-known facts about that ship is that
for its day—and that was some 200 years ago—it was the most
revolutionary platform on the high seas. It could sail 2 knots faster
than any other ship of the day. It attained that speed advantage by
having a nonstandard length-to-width ratio. American ship builders had done the necessary experiments and shown that, with the
right hull form, they could get a faster ship. That was important
back then because faster speed translated directly into combat
capability. It allowed you to cross the T and by so doing, it made
it possible for your entire line of ships to direct its fire on the lead
elements of the enemy formation as you sailed past along the top
of the T.
Another important fact about “Old Ironsides”—as the USS
Constitution was also known—is that it was built differently than
standard naval vessels. It had ribbing in different places than was
conventional in the Royal Navy at the time. The ship was built
using wood from the live oaks grown in Georgia in place of the
oak from the forests of New England as was the standard at the
time. The wood from the live oak tree is much denser, it actually
sinks when you put it in the water; it does not float. Live oak is so
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dense, in fact, that when the cannonballs hit, they bounced off, so
it gave you a much more resilient warship. Now that is American
ingenuity, right?
We still have that today. How much do we need to, and how
willing are we to, apply that initiative so as to be competitive in
the energy arena, not only in the DoD energy arena, but in the
national and international energy arenas, and then hold that competitiveness for the long haul? That is the question I pose to you.
The other question I pose to you is what generation do we really
want to end up being? As I look around the room, I would guess
that most of our parents were the Greatest Generation; they really
did save the world from tyrants. For the most part, we are Baby
Boomers, although there are a few younger people here. What
have we been for the most part of our lives? The short answer
is consumers, consumers of everything—of energy, of consumer
goods, of everything. After 9/11, what did we do? We went out
and spent money at the mall, right? That is how we contributed. Is that the way we want to go down in history or do we
want to be part of a different generation that is a regeneration
generation? I really think the decision is up to us—including
the military. I think we can play a part in leading the way into a
regeneration generation.
Q&
A
with Rear Admir al
Philip H. Cullom
have the Navy or DoD done in terms of assessing their
Q: What
energy vulnerabilities to help prioritize their actions? Has
anyone looked at the issues of what that does for us, what it needs to do,
where we need to place emphasis?
Rear Admiral Philip H. Cullom : There are several things that I
can tell you about what the Navy has done. On the shore side of
the house—the infrastructure side—I cannot really get into a very
detailed discussion because it gets classified very quickly for very
obvious reasons associated with the grid. But I can say that one
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of the things that we have done in the Navy is to include energy
considerations in our annual war game. We have made energy a
strategic resource that an adversary could try to exploit in much
the same way that we see in the conflict in which we are currently
engaged. We look at the vulnerabilities in our lines of resupply.
Although specific details are classified, I will say that it has proved
the importance of logistics in the big scheme of things in any campaign plan, which oftentimes get overlooked. It has also proved
how important fuel- or energy-efficient platforms are to whether
or not we are going to be able to protect our centers of gravity and
whether we are going to win in a potential conflict.
We have also run an energy futures war game. As part of that,
we have developed a series of energy futures based on different
projections. Although picking any one of them as the likely future is
almost certain to be proven wrong, we can benefit by understanding the trends and uncertainties that come from the entire collection. When you mix the different scenarios, you can see how those
trends and uncertainties play. And that gives you a pretty good idea
as to whether or not some of the initiatives we are considering will
help solve a problem or whether they have little or no value in
terms of altering the military’s outcome or the Navy’s outcome in
the various energy futures. So, that is one of the things that we are
taking into consideration when we look at what we should invest in.
of our analysts has done some research into worldwide
Q: One
use of biofuels. If I remember his research correctly, there were
problems with adopting biofuels and green propulsion because of issues
like corrosion and clogging and that type of thing. I think the Royal Navy
has done some experiments with it and had some negative results, and
I think the U.S. Navy was aware of those; maybe they experimented as
well and had some negative issues there, too. I just wondered what comments you might have on the technological hurdles and expenses associated with biofuels.
Rear Admiral Philip H. Cullom : That is a great question
because there is certainly a lot of literature out there that talks
about the potential difficulties with using biofuels in a marine environment. But what I would say as a caveat is that most of what
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has been published deals with first-generation biofuels—biodiesels
and things like that. Biodiesels, by the way, have been used pretty
effectively by cruise liners, but cruise liners do not have compensated fuel tanks. On Navy ships, we fill our fuel tanks with water
as the fuel is drawn down so as to compensate for the change in
ship moments. Because the fuel is lighter than water, it floats on
top. Biodiesels did not work well in that environment.
The second- and third-generation biofuels, which is the direction that the military is going, are much different. They do not have
the same issues and problems; you do not end up with sludging,
you do not end up with marine growth, and you do not end up
with green goopy stuff that grows in your fuel tanks or, worse yet,
goes into the engine and clogs it up, burns it up, and destroys it.
That is why we are pursuing second- and third-generation biofuels. These fuels are long-chain carbon-type fuels that can be used
as drop-in replacements for petroleum-based fuels. That is a very
important point. We do not want to end up using a fuel that has to
be segregated from the other fuels we use.
In fact, we mix our new biofuel 50/50 with petroleum. When
we first started using petroleum fuels, we discovered that those
fuels include compounds that lubricate the engine as you are running it. It turns out that the second- and third-generation biofuels do not include those particular carbon chains. So, to ensure
that we are not degrading performance, we have decided to use a
50/50 mix of biofuel and petroleum-based fuel.
As a result of using the mixed fuel, the ship can fill up with the
50/50 fuel and then, several days later, pull up alongside an oiler
and refill with petroleum if that is all that is available. And then the
next time you refuel, you can go back to biofuel. That allows you
to have a truly flexible fuel fleet without ever having to redesign
any engine to be able to do it. All you have to do is complete the
necessary testing and certification protocols.
Of course, what we really hope to do is make the engines that
much more efficient, so that instead of refueling a destroyer every
4 days, you stretch that out to every 8 days or every 10 days. That
is the type of enhanced combat capability that we want to get first
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and foremost while we enhance resiliency by not always having to
buy petroleum.
mentioned use of renewable energy sources and the difQ: You
ferent ones that you have looked at and how, in the tactical
forces, it is a little bit lacking as of yet. Have you considered using seawater air conditioning (SWAC) to cool your engine rooms and other warm
places inside your ships? And, have you considered using co-generation
capability on land and in your engine rooms, which can give you an efficiency of about 80%?
Rear Admiral Philip H. Cullom : Those are two excellent possibilities that we can pursue. In fact, seawater air conditioning is
one of the things that we have been looking at. We often overlook
our heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems and
how you can make them more efficient. That was actually one of
the things that Amory Lovens found when he did his study on the
USS Princeton. As it turns out, there are a lot of simple things that
we can do. Those are the things that we are pursuing first and foremost because we can gain significant benefits with a pretty small
investment; in many cases, you are able to pay back that investment in as little as a year.
As for co-generation, now you are talking about cutting out an
engine room, putting in a whole new engineering plant, or mixing what you already have with something else, doing a pretty
significant redesign. That is a lot of expense. It will take a lot longer for that to pay back. In fact, even the hydroelectric drive that
we can either build in from the start—as on USS Makin Island—
or can backfit into ships—as we are planning on doing with our
destroyers—is a fairly costly endeavor compared to some of these
easy things.
As I stated previously, the first thing we need to do is pursue
behavioral changes. The cheapest thing is putting this box on a
bridge, if you will, that can tell you whether or not you are stepping
on the pedal too much or whether you have lit off too many fire
pumps or that you have too many HVAC systems up for what you
really need. When you see the light go from green to yellow, you
can change your behavior day to day. We need to be able to make
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people energy aware and energy conscious and to fundamentally
change how they do business. That will net us the most savings.
But at some point it is asymptotic. You get down to a level that
is all you are going to get by changing the way you are doing business; that is when you start to need technology to get you down to
the next level. So to start, we have decided to go after the things
that are the easiest to implement and that entail minimal investment while pursuing biofuels for the future.
The Navy and the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD)
Q: have
various campaign models that represent warfighting
effectiveness and support different studies such as the operational availability studies that OSD and the Joint Staff do every year. As a rule, those
models are generally weak in integrating logistics and warfighting capability. Are there initiatives to quantitatively represent energy efficiency in
our logistics processes and then in warfighting capabilities into some of
the models that we use to buttress our decisions?
Rear Admiral Philip H. Cullom : Absolutely. OSD has been
working for some time now on what is called the fully burdened
cost of fuel. We participated in a study with them to take a look
at one of our ship classes, the frigates, and figure out how, by
changing its efficiency, we could affect total ownership cost of that
platform. The results of that assessment will be coming out soon.
I think that is going to help add to what OSD is trying to develop,
which is a metric ability to be able to look at the fully burdened
cost of fuel.
Remember what I said about using an F/A-18 to refuel another
F/A-18? The fully burdened cost of fuel is pretty high for that particular evolution. On the other end, when one of our combatants
comes alongside an oiler that just came out of port and picked
up its load and you are the first customer—well, that is a pretty
low fully burdened cost of fuel. We want to be able to assess the
effects of changing the efficiencies on various classes of ships, different platforms, different model series of aircraft. Developing a
fully burdened cost of fuel will allow us to do that. We can see
how changes in efficiency would affect life-cycle costs and total
ownership costs, as well as allow us to make better decisions
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about future weapon systems and platforms or regarding future
efficiency initiatives.
energy considerations change the makeup of a battle
Q: Could
group, for example, as we move forward?
Rear Admiral Philip H. Cullom : Yes, absolutely. It could have
some impact on how we operate or how we task organize, perhaps.
wanted to ask about the figure that depicts the Earth at night
Q: Itoday
and in 2030. If we look at that figure from an efficiency
perspective, 100% of that image is wasted energy because we are not trying to light space. One of the advances with light-emitting diode (LED)
lights is streetlights. One of the benefits and savings is it is directional
with less light going into space. So that is perhaps a point to be making
when you use that image.
Rear Admiral Philip H. Cullom : You have hit the nail on the
head. Wasted energy is wasted energy. If we do not have to waste
it, think about how much different our overall energy demand
would be worldwide and how that would profoundly change what
the cost is to every consumer around the world, whether you are
putting gas into your Nano in India or into your hybrid vehicle here
in the States or elsewhere.