Congressional Testimony

Energy and Environment Subcommittee

Prof. Walter G. Chapman

W.W. Akers Professor

Rice University

February 29, 2008

Mr. Chairman and members of the Energy and Environment Subcommittee,
welcome to Rice University, a beautiful setting and one of the nation\'s
premier research universities. It is a great honor to address this
committee on an issue of such crucial importance to the United States
and the world. Before I start, I would like to acknowledge numerous
colleagues (including Amy Jaffe, Kenneth Cox, and Emil Peña) for
providing input to this testimony, but the opinions I express here today
are my own.

Mr. Chairman, it is fitting that you have come to Rice today because
Rice takes on big challenges. Almost 50 years ago, President Kennedy
came to this campus (***not far from where we are seated***) to
challenge our Country to land a man on the moon. The resulting
investment led to one of the United States\' greatest technological
achievements and to unprecedented economic growth and unparalleled
standing in the national community.

We have an even larger, equally important, challenge today. "Energy
is,\" as the late Richard Smalley, Nobel Prize winner and Rice
University Professor told the U.S. Senate in 2004, "the single most
important challenge facing humanity today." Confronting and ultimately
surmounting the energy challenge is not optional, it is necessary for
survival. Compared with the space race, this challenge will involve even
more advanced scientific and engineering feats, social change, and
government investment.

Rice University's Energy and Environmental Systems Institute envisions
the challenge as being one of Building the Bridge to a Sustainable,
Affordable, and Secure Energy Future. The image of the bridge symbolizes
the imperative to span the technological, economic, and political divide
between the present and a sustainable future. But there is more to the
symbolism. To me this bridge is not constructed solely from technology.
In fact, perhaps the most important component of the bridge is the
investment in human capital. The United States must re-commit itself to
science and engineering education and to funding scientists and
engineers engaged in fundamental research, research that can produce
innovations that will drive the economy and provide solutions to
producing sustainable energy.

As the U.S. government re-commits itself to the energy challenge, it is
important to recognize, as I believe this Committee does recognize, that
you cannot \"legislate\" an energy solution. Solutions many times come
from fundamental research in seemingly unrelated areas. I recommend
adopting the initiatives on education and research funding in the
National Academies report \"Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing
and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future,\" presented to
this committee in October, 2005. Among other guidelines, the report
recommended significant increases in funding of basic research to secure
our future.

Beyond supporting fundamental research, what else should we do?

Let me approach that question by exploring a series of other questions.
What do we know? What are we learning? How can we learn faster? How long
will it take?

What do we know? We know that a transition to greater use of renewable
energy sources is essential to sustainability. At the same time, as the
Department of Energy points out, even with the aggressive adoption of
alternative energy, the U.S. demand for hydrocarbon energy sources will
increase over the next two decades. Thus, the U.S. should invest more to
increase the supply of fossil fuels while it simultaneously invests in
replacing them. Mr. Chairman, I am very pleased that this "energy
portfolio" approach is embodied in your bill H.R. 5146.

At Rice we have learned many things. With respect to oil and gas,
familiar energy sources that have propelled the global economy for a
hundred years, we have learned that there is still much to learn. We
still do not know all we need to know about extracting these energy
sources. Roughly 70% of the oil discovered in the world cannot be
produced by conventional technologies. Faculty members at Rice
University have developed self-assembling fluids to better extract oil
from the pores inside rocks and to expand the area swept in an oil
field. Based on experiments and modeling studies, these technologies
could double the amount of oil produced from reservoirs.

In addition, I expect that applying nano-technology to existing
exploration and production will enhance supplies. The newly established
Advanced Energy Consortium -- a privately funded consortium of companies
led by the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas working
in conjunction with Rice University -- is working on that possibility.

Beyond traditional oil and gas, we are discovering new energy
opportunities, and new ways to improve existing technologies. For
example,

We are learning how to create metabolically engineered bacteria and
plants to convert biomass as well as waste from biodiesel production
into fine chemicals and fuels.

We are learning how to manipulate gold coated nano-particles to
efficiently harvest solar energy. This could lead to more efficient
solar cells. Interestingly, this same technology has shown effectiveness
in treating cancer using light energy.

We are learning how to employ in wind turbines new nano-materials as
blades that morph into the optimum shape in response to wind conditions
and possibly also heal themselves if damaged. In other activities, our
institute is helping the W.E.S.T. group to bring offshore wind to Texas
-- the first offshore wind project in the United States.

We are learning within the Rick Smalley Institute at Rice how to produce
on a large scale a quantum wire to allow transmission of electricity
around the globe with near zero loss enabling distributed energy
generation on a world wide electricity grid.

This is promising and exciting and research, but I have only highlighted
some of the research underway at Rice. Which brings me to the question:
How can we learn faster?

The answer to that is twofold.

First, as noted above, we need additional research funding to advance
fundamental research and to assimilate the next generation of students
into the quest for solutions.

Second, I would recommend that the government, presumably the DOE, make
available on its web site a moderated wiki of energy related research
findings from as many sources as possible. Information technology has
vastly reduced the cost of placing information in the public domain.
That cost, however, has been offset by the cost of tracking the sheer
volume of material available. One way to learn faster is to provide to
the research community, and the public at large, a compendium of energy
research. I acknowledge this is no small task. But it need not be done
perfectly to make a difference.

How long will we need? We need to acknowledge that the odds of finding a
single, quick solution to the energy challenge are infinitesimally
small.

At the same time, however, we have every reason to be optimistic because
progress toward a secure, affordable and sustainable energy future is a
certainty. It is happening now. It is not a matter of whether, but of
when. We are very fortunate, as I hope to have made clear, that there is
much that this Subcommittee can do to accelerate the pace toward a goal
upon which are very survival depends.