# Presentation: 680409

## Energy Dependence and CO2: Nearest-Term Opportunitiesfor a Dramatic Reduction

- Drs. Paul J. Werbos and James A. Momoh
- NSF, IEEE, ACUNU/MP, Howard U.
- -- presenting personal, not official, views
- 		PJW: 80’s: EIA/DOE lead analyst for
- 			long-term energy futures

- pwerbos@nsf.gov

**Notes:**
The previous speakers have done an excellent job of explaining why our growing dependency on the Middle East for energy imports is a major national problem. 
	We all  know that the present problems in the Middle East are a central challenge to the nation. They are extremely expensive and extremely dangerous. But if world dependency on that region continues to grow at the present rate, in 20-30 years the costs and the dangers could  grow to be ten times as large as they are now. Clearly we need to take very strong action, if we have any hope at all of changing these trends. It is a matter of life and death.
	Today I  will  talk about serious ways that we might change  these trends.
	I am employed by the National Science Foundation, and my co-author – Dr. James Momoh, also in the room – recently ran the Electric Power activity at NSF. But today, we will mainly give our personal views of what could be done to achieve a dramatic reduction in energy dependency in the  20-30 years we have left to do so. Our views on these issues have also been shaped heavily by what we have learned as active members of the IEEE – the world’s largest professional society, with about 300,000 members all over the world. We are the inheritors of Thomas Edison, and we remember how difficult the changes were –  both political and economic – which opened the door to a new technology, and eventually allowed Thomas Edison to “turn on the lights” in New York City. The challenge before us today is to open up  the door to turning on the lights again – this time all over the world.   
	Our views have also been shaped by other important sources of information, such as DOE, NASA, Howard University and the Millennium Project (MP) of the American Council for the United Nations. 

## National Science Foundation

- Engineering
- Directorate

- Computer & Info.
- Science Directorate

- ECS

- IIS

- Control,
- Networks and
- Computational
- Intelligence

- EPDT:
- Chips,
- Optics,
- Etc.

- Robotics

- AI

- Information Technology Research (ITR)

**Notes:**
Within NSF, Jim and I have worked together as two of the Program Directors responsible for an area called Control, Networks and Computational Intelligence (CNCI) within the Electrical and Communication Systems Division (ECS).  ECS  is basically  the  home at NSF for the kind of research that IEEE represents. For example, other parts of NSF fund research on traditional software to use the Internet or to procure computers, but ECS funds the advanced research on chips and optical devices needed  to create more advanced network systems. ECS is also the main  home in the US government  for the type of electric power grid  research  pursued in  the IEEE Power Engineering Society (PES). I myself handle the area of Computational Intelligence, and I am on the “AdCom” (governing board) of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society and Industrial Electronics Society. 
  ECS has also led a number of crossagency funding activities on PES-related research. For example, see www.pserc.cornell.edu or search on “EPNES” at www.nsf.gov.

## MegaChallenges for the 21st Century & ECS Role

- Key Challenges To Basic Scientific Understanding:
- How to build/understand real Intelligent Systems? (computational intelligence)
- How does the Universe work? (Quantum...)
- What is Life? (QSB quantitative biotechnology)
- Key Broader Challenges to Humanity:
- Sustainable growth on earth
- Cost-effective sustainable space settlement
- Human potential

**Notes:**
ECS has funded advanced breakthrough research related to most of the technologies I will  be talking about. You will see some examples in the “nuggets” we send to the budgeteers this year. But energy is only one part of what we try to address.  All six of the challenges above play an important role in what we do in CNCI.  They are related to the two standard criteria used in reviewing proposals all across NSF.

## Some budget numbers for Fiscal Years 2003, 2004

- Total Engineering Directorate:$540m, $565m
- Total Electrical and Communication Systems (ECS) : $73m, $75m
- Available for new awards in ECS core programs: $36m,  $35m
- Success rates for regular unsolicited proposals in ECS core programs:  24%, 11%

**Notes:**
Jim and I are certainly not suggesting that anyone start a multi-billion-dollar  new initiative here. The sums of money now being invested in most of these technologies are relatively small. Still, there are many unmet opportunities, as you will see.  Current conditions certainly do not allow us to fund everything that we think could have a large impact on the future of the world.

## www.stateofthefuture.org

- www.stateofthefuture.org

- CD-ROM
- Energy
- Paper

**Notes:**
Much of what I  will say is documented in my paper on the CD-ROM
(the main text) of the State of the Future 2004. The State of the Future, produced every year by the ACUNU Millennium Project, is one of the most widely used and authoritative reports on the future prospects of the human race. It is based on discussions between specialists in many fields, from at least half the nations on earth, connected by a global internet-based interaction system. 

## When Oil and Gas Get Too Costly, Economically or Politically...

- How do we keep our cars running?
- Where does the new fuel or electricity come from? Sources? Distribution?
- Rapid growth in imports of LNG
- Serious hope of avoiding a crisis of dependency in time but no guarantee

**Notes:**
Now back to the core question: what can we do to stop the trend of rising imports?
       Twenty  years ago, when I was at DOE, we had to explain that the world was not facing a crisis in ENERGY SUPPLY as such. We had plenty of domestic energy –  natural gas, coal and electricity. The challenge was how to address the first question: How do we keep our CARS running, when oil from the Middle East becomes too expensive or even cut off? How do we provide more security in case of a sudden cutoff?
	That question is still very important, and I will start out with it. But today, we cannot afford to stop with that question. We now  need to worry about our sources of electricity as well. As of now, we are also dependent on imports of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) to meet our demands for electricity. The dependency on LNG imports is small for now, but it could grow to be large over the next 20-30 years if we do not act  now to prevent that. Furthermore, some of the best ways to reduce oil consumption would increase the use of natural gas, and make the problem even worse. Unused supplies of conventional  natural gas are about the same as unused supplies of oil, and we need to have a strategy for keeping BOTH fuels in balance. Furthermore, we  need  to work harder and smarter  to upgrade the distribution systems – like electric power grid – which are needed to CONNECT new sources of energy  to  new  users.
	If we do it all right – there is a very serious opportunity, on the technical level, to reduce our dependency on the Middle East dramatically over the next 20-30 years while paying the world back for the entire cost of the effort and even clearing a profit in the end.  But still, it is only a hope,  not a guarantee. If we were venture capitalists, we would say that the new energy technologies are highly risky. But from a national or global viewpoint – the most serious risk is what happens if we do nothing.  We need to work harder in order to REDUCE the huge risks that we are already facing. 

## HOW MUCH TO REDUCE CO2,WHEN?

**HOW MUCH TO**** ****REDUCE CO****2,****WHEN?**

- 2004			2030		             2100

- Kyoto Approach:
*Too little*

- The Middle Way:
*6-fold goal 30 years*

- The Purist Way: *True H**2** , Too late*

- Carbon Dioxide Reduction

**Notes:**
The solution to energy dependency turns out to be almost the same as the solution to excess carbon dioxide emissions!
	Jim and I do not do research on the damage that CO2 could do to the environment. That’s a different part of NSF. But we have listened a bit to those other folks, and we do know a lot about what it would take to reduce those CO2 emissions a lot. This slide is taken from a presentation that Jim made (with me as coauthor) before a United Nations conference on climate change.
	Both for CO2 and for energy dependency, there are lots of laudable things that people can do here and now in the short-term to get useful results. These results are usually very large in dollar terms – but not so large as a share of the global energy system. These short-term things include things like the Kyoto Treaty, the drilling in Anwar, rooftop solar power, wind power, ethanol fuel for cars. Jim and I do not plan to pass judgment on all these things today – BUT WE DO NOTE  THAT they are NOT ENOUGH  by themselves, even  taken together as a group. For example, the Kyoto Treaty plan, based on aggressive goals for such near-term technologies, simply doesn’t do enough to change some of the dire outcomes people are worried about  for the coming century. Even when such  near-term opportunities are accounted for, oil dependency is projected to grow dangerously by 2030. 
	On the other hand,  the purist  vision of a “hydrogen economy” – zeroing out all CO2 emissions, and using cars with special tanks to hold gaseous hydrogen – is too late. Too late for CO2, and  too late to prevent catastrophes in the Middle East. Many serious energy analysts believe the the pure hydrogen economy will never  happen at all. I will explain that in a moment.  We are not aware of any really serious and honest energy economists who predict that half the cars on the road by 2030 could possibly be carrying cryogenic hydrogen tanks.
	But – there is a Middle Way between these extremes, where we don’t zero out CO2, but we cut it deeply enough to prevent what the environmentalists fear. We have a real hope – not a guarantee – of very deep cuts in CO2 emissions and oil dependency, soon enough to matter.  My goal today is to explain what this Middle Way opportunity is. (This plan would also help wind, etc.)

## TECHNICAL PILLARS OF THE MIDDLE WAY

**INDEPENDENT**
**SUSTAINABLE**
**CAR FUELS**

**TRULY **
**INTELLIGENT**
**POWER GRID**

**INDEPENDENT**
**SUSTAINABLE**
**ELECTRICITY**

- Flexible fuel (e.g. Stirling)
- Plug-in hybrid – step to electric
-  New type fuel cell cars
- Methanol production

-  Autonomous
-  Adaptive
-  Cyber Control
-  MEMS, GPS

-  Cleanest coal IGCC/sequest.
-  “Solar farms”
-   Space solar
-  Also Team B?

**Notes:**
There are three technical pillars of the Middle Way Strategy. This is a condensed summary of the entire vision we will lay out today.
	The middle pillar, holding it together, is the truly intelligent electric power grid, an area of enormous practical importance and interest to IEEE. But before we can explain why we need an intelligent power grid, we will need to discuss car fuel and energy sources.
	On the next few slides, we will talk about car fuel – starting with an explanation for WHY we don’t expect cars to carry hydrogen tanks in large numbers by 2030. And then we will discuss three alternative technologies – fuel cell cars with methanol in the tank, electric cars, and advanced Stirling.  We don’t know exactly what the future holds, of course, but we feel reasonably sure that one or more of these three technologies WILL turn out to give us the best hope for a sustainable world energy future.  These three winners are not exactly competitors; they have a lot in common, and we need to exploit the synergies here.
	Finally, we will need electricity sources LARGE ENOUGH to meet global needs, sustainable when oil and conventional gas become scarcer. Intelligent grids may be enough all by themselves to eliminate the need for LNG imports in the short-term, but if we look 20-30 years into the future, we need to pay more attention to what I view as the three “team A” long-term hopes: (1) ground-based solar, using MIRRORS, like the classic Sandia design using mirrors from SAIC and Stirling from Lennart Johansson; (2) space solar; and (3) “Cool Water” clean coal, as in technology recently sold by Texaco to GE, more amenable to carbon sequestration  than other fossil fuel technology. NSF has had a major recent collaboration with NASA in research on space solar power, and we are serious about viewing it as an important option.
	But – now let us get into car fuel, in some depth. In order to understand what it takes to become less dependent on gasoline, we really need to understand two very important pieces of technical jargon. These two key technical words are --

## The chicken and egg problem:which comes first? H2 fuel , H2 car?

- Would you buy a car that only runs on H2 before your local gas station carries H2? Are PR stations enough?
- Would you invest $trillion in gas stations and pipelines before people have H2 cars?
-  Technically: nonconvexity problem; also high costs

**Notes:**
CHICKEN AND EGG.
      Many of you have already seen these words in papers on energy economics. For those who haven’t – look closely at this cartoon. It represents the number one problem we face in making a transition to a new fuel.  
	Do you remember the old question “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Biologists now say that the egg came first, and creationists say that the chicken did, but that’s not the point here. Here we ask: if hydrogen gas is supposed to become a big fuel, stored in gas tanks of cars, who will shell the money out first? Will the car buyer buy a hydrogen car, before the local gas station carries hydrogen? Do YOU plan to do that, in your next car purchase? Is it good enough for YOU if one or two H2 gas stations have been set up for PR purposes somewhere downtown in your area? Or do you expect Exxon to embark upon a 20-year trillion dollar investment, in hopes of sales to start 20-some years in the future? People have tried to construct more plausible gradual strategies for introducing hydrogen – but it’s absolutely clear that they have to be VERY gradual, short of very draconian and implausible government action. (Some people call these strategies “the thousand-year egg.”)
	In fact, many of us doubt that it would work even in a hundred years. We already have an electric power infrastructure, which is mostly unused at night. Why spend so many billions in building hydrogen pipelines? Why accept the inefficiencies and high costs here? If there were no alternative, perhaps we would have to. But there are alternatives, as we will see.
	By the way, this “chicken-and-egg” issue is not just some aberration of irrational consumers. There are auto industry studies which quantify this effect. There is microeconomic theory which explains why it is very real and fundamental.
	So how can we get around this problem? The next slide will describe how.

## Long-Term Clean Alternatives to Carrying H2  in Your Car Tank

- Hydrogen Carriers – proven tested fuels that easily release hydrogen for use on-board a car
- Methanol, our best hope (next slide)
- Ammonia & other carbon-free fuels (but chicken&egg problem again)
- Electric Cars – Cleanest, most efficient, but needs R&D; can’t yet beat C; new batteries in lab exciting, but not yet... PLUG-IN HYBRIDS COULD GET US THERE.
- Thermal Batteries (Long-term option if Stirling grows)

**Notes:**
There are three main clean and sustainable alternatives to carrying hydrogen in your tank, to power your car. All three are very serious, and all three merit more active attention and support. 
	In the first alternative, we STILL use a hydrogen-based fuel cell to power our cars, exactly as the hydrogen economy people say to do. We still try to capture the high efficiency of the fuel-cell car. But instead of carrying hydrogen gas itself in the gas tank, we carry a hydrogen CARRIER – a chemical fuel which contains a lot of hydrogen, and releases it efficiently on-board a car. There is a lot of research on possible hydrogen carriers, but there are only two which have been well-tested over decades: methanol and ammonia. Ammonia is carbon-free, and would allow us to zero out CO2 emissions, but it has the same chicken and egg problem that pure hydrogen does. (Some people want to use it for dedicated truck fleets, which is OK.) But methanol offers us an IMMEDIATE transition path, a way to beat the chicken-and-egg problems. It doesn’t zero out CO2, but methanol fuel cell cars should emit four times less CO2 per mile than today’s cars – and thus they are a major part of the Middle Way strategy. Our challenge is how to get these cars onto the free market as soon as possible, without excessive costs of government intervention.
	Electric cars are supposedly well-known – but few people seem to appreciate just how promising they are. Around 1980, many people were turned off by the boxy little cars sold by enthusiastic and naïve new companies – but the electric car later introduced by GM had a longer range, good performance and generated consumer enthusiasm. It cost too much for GM to produce it back then  – but the push to hybrid cars has cut most of the costs. Hybrid car engineers do know how to add a “plug” so that owners can recharge the batteries at night, instead of using the onboard gasoline engine. This would allow them to get to work or to stores, based on electricity, even in the event of a sudden cutoff of gasoline. The benefit to national security would be huge, and it would be a step towards an electric future.
	Thermal batteries are yet another possibility. If fuel-flexible advanced Stirling cars should make it big in the market – with efficiency something like 50 percent instead of 60 percent for a good fuel cell system – then we will have the infrastructure to let us start thinking about a totally different way to carry energy in our cars, cheaper and with longer range than batteries allow, with zero CO2. R&D now could allow this by 2030.

## What IS Methanol?

- C

- H

- H

- H

- H

- C

- H

- H

- H

- O

- H

- C

- H

- H

- H

- O

- H

- C

- H

- H

- Methane
- Natural Gas
- Scarce as Oil
- Needs Special
- Tank

- Ethanol
- e.g From Corn
- Drinkable

- Methanol
- Good H Carrier
- Can Be Bioliquid
- Or From Coal, Gas

**Notes:**
In order to avoid gross mistakes in formulating policy here, it is essential to know about all three of the fuels depicted here – methane, methanol and ethanol. It’s very important to keep them straight. All three have important roles to play.
	Methane is a gas, but methanol and ethanol are liquids. Therefore, methane needs special tanks to hold it – but usually we only see it coming it out of a pipe, like the pipe going to our stoves. It’s basically the same as natural gas, and we need to be careful in using it.
	Methanol and ethanol are two different types of alcohol. Ethanol is not enough to meet more than 10 percent or so of our needs, but 10 percent is still a lot, and ethanol can be very useful when linked to methanol as part of a strategy for energy independence. Like methanol, it deserves the right to more of a level-playing field in the market for automotive fuel. It is said that a third to a half of all car fuel in Brazil is coming from ethanol (as part of a fuel mix). But methanol, unlike ethanol, is an excellent and proven hydrogen carrier. Unlike ethanol, it could solve our chicken-and-egg problem with fuel cell cars. Ethanol alone is not enough.
    	More precisely – if we create a market for methanol, by deploying conventional cars which are flexible enough to use gasoline, ethanol OR methanol, then the free market will have an incentive to build up supplies of BOTH alcohols. And then, after methanol is widely available, it will be possible to mass-market methanol fuel cell cars, without doing undue violence to the market. Some people would say:”This shows that the fastest path between two points is not always a straight line, when you’re trying to get through high mountains.”
	Methanol can be made from MANY sources. The potential supply really might be large enough to meet all of our needs. Fortunately, the government does not have to decide WHICH of these many sources the market will choose, IF the market for methanol is created.

## Best Hope for Fuel Cell Cars

- Carry methanol in the gas tank
- Small “steam reformers” (proven known technology) to convert methanol to hydrogen in car
- Carbon-tolerant alkaline fuel cell
- Unlike PEM fuel cell, no peroxide loss of energy and erosion; can be made cheaper
- Realistic hope of twice the miles/Btu of hybrids
- Recent proof of air-electrode carbon tolerance (ECS$)
- Plan for fuel side; can use carbon black electrodes and “Jiffy Lube” electrolyte refreshing
- Breakthru battery R&D needed for all hopes!

**Notes:**
Many people will tell you that fuel cells are impractical for use ON ANY FUEL, over the next 20-30 years. They have good reason to say so. Despite large investments in research, the popular Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) fuel cell system now looks as if it may never be able to compete with emerging technologies like advanced Stirling, being pursued by private industry. (Of course, industry has no incentive to correct competing researchers who are not doing as well with Stirling.) So far as I know, no one has developed a catalyst to prevent the formation of hydrogen peroxide, which drains energy and eats away at the very special costly membranes used in these fuel cells.
	On the other hand – this past month, a small research project funded by NSF has confirmed success with a new type of fuel cell design, which does seem to promise the high efficiency and long-lifetime which we all hoped for in the past with PEM. There are no known show-stoppers as yet, but the grant which funded the initial work has run out. There is a clear path for proving out the rest of the design, and it would not be so difficult to plug in a new kind of fuel cell into existing new car designs. This COULD be ready for mass production in plenty of time for the new market (methanol supply) we should be aiming at by 2015, if we try our hardest to get it moving as quickly as possible. But there are no guarantees, even then. Based on our past experience with PEM, we can see that dollars alone do not give us the fastest progress; thinking hard and being agile is even more important than working hard and spending money, though all these ingredients would be necessary.
	Another critical area for research, which would benefit hybrid cars and fuel-cell cars and electric cars, is advanced breakthrough-oriented battery research. Not only the chemistry aspects but the systems design and optimization aspects will be important to the rate of progress with all of these technologies. At present, China sells the best batteries, and there is little chance that more traditional technologies would allow the US to make a serious contribution. 

## GEM Flexibly Fuel Vehicles (FFV)One Tank To Hold Them All

- G: Gasoline

- E: Ethanol

- M: Methanol

- With an FFV, you choose each day which to buy
- At $100-200/car, a more open competition, level playing field,
-           better unleash the power of the free market
- 40% of new cars in Brazil GE flexible already

**Notes:**
The GEM flexibly fueled car is the key to the transition to sustainable car fuel, if we want to get to anything else but a pure electric car. (Even then, hybrid cars can be made flexible.)
	The key point is that GEM flexibility is HERE TODAY. It’s not mainly a subject for research. It’s ready for mass deployment. It is the one and only option we have at hand right now to break the chicken and egg cycle soon enough to deploy advanced independent cars before 2030 in large numbers.
	And – it’s not very expensive. If you compare the $100-200 per car to achieve “fuel insurance” for the life of a car, that’s a whole lot less than what we all pay every year for accident insurance. And maybe for most of us, the chances of a big accident in the next 20 years are less than the chances of some problems in the Middle East. Or, to put it another way, this flexibility would give the car buyer a chance to buy something else besides gasoline on days when the price of gasoline is too high. Many, many Brazilians have been grinning this year about how they didn’t have to buy gasoline when the price was rising so much all over the world.
 	To really accelerate the development of methanol and ethanol fuels, without creating subsidies, we could simply REQUIRE that new gasoline-carrying cars should have GEM flexibility. Yes, this would be a legal intervention – but it would actually STRENGTHEN market forces because it would open the door to more competition. In many ways, it would be like the imposition of common standards for communication interfaces and common carriers; they do require laws, but their EFFECT is to open up more competition. This is a case where more competition may be a life-or-death matter for national security, and we need it as fast as we can get it. GE flexible cars have been penetrating the markets without special laws in Brazil – but we need three-way flexibility, and we cannot afford to wait.

## GEM Flexibility Is Well-Established

- ALCOHOL FUELS
- "Detroit is ready now to -- make cars that would run on any combination of gasoline and alcohol -- either ethanol, made from corn or methanol, made from natural gas or coal or even wood. Cars produce less pollution on alcohol fuels, and they perform better, too. Let us turn away from our dependence on imported oil to domestic products -- corn, natural gas, and coal -- and look for energy not just from the Middle East but from the Middle West."

- Source: **George Bush 1988 Campaign Brochures  www.4president.org**

**Notes:**
This slide does not represent the official views of NSF any more than the next one does, but it certainly shows that we are not the only people who believe in fuel flexibility.
    The views of George Bush senior in 1988 were probably influenced a lot by analysis from Ford Motor Company, from the group run at the time by Roberta Nichols. See Roberta Nichols, The Methanol Story: A Sustainable Fuel for the Future, Journal of Scientific and Industrial Research, Vol. 26, Jan-Feb 2003, p.97-105.

## AREAS FOR NEEDED LEGAL REFORMS

- Ethanol+Methanol Fuel flexibility should be MANDATORY in new gasoline-using cars from 2006/7/8. Hybrids or advanced Stirling can also use GEM fuel tanks easily.
- Incentives and research opportunities  for bio-methanol should be the same as for bioethanol, biohydrogen or better
- Zoning rules discouraging Distributed Generation should be modified to simplify renewable or alcohol fuel use
- Grid regulation needs to be made to fit "intelligence“
- Leak proof tanks in gas stations for ALL fuels

**Notes:**
The recommendations on this slide are CERTAINLY personal views, and not the official views of NSF or any of its components!
	But we already discussed the first and most important recommendation with the previous two slides.
	The second recommendation is a matter of simple logic. There are benefits to national security in having a domestic source of fuel. Those benefits apply to ALL biofuels. Domestic agriculture should not be biased in favor of ethanol over methanol; they should be given equal incentives, and choose based on costs and other market conditions. If anything, the incentive should be greater with methanol, because of how it may pave the way to future sales of more efficient fuel cell vehicles.
	The remaining recommendations relate to some of the technical issues we need to remember. We need to encourage the new methanol suppliers to implement their sales in a way that is acceptable environmentally, and does not cause unnecessary difficulties when cars that use nearly pure methanol start to appear. And we should remember that advanced fuel cells and advanced Stirling will be deployed faster if we also open up the market for distributed electric power generation more quickly. 

## Short-Term Benefit of FFVsto US Oil/Gas Industry

- Outside US, cost of new methanol is $98/ton from remote gas (Google “Canaccord methanol”), much of which is now wasted (vented and flared).
- For oil companies, new remote methanol plant will be equivalent to new proved reserves! Free market will supply methanol if FFVS.
- Don’t burn CH4 to electricity! There are better new electricity sources!
- Near-Term R&D: CH4-to-Methanol: small $ to follow up Catalytica, could cut cost in half

**Notes:**
Up until now, I have mainly discussed policy issues from the viewpoint of the US as a whole. The US is an oil-consuming nation, so I have mainly taken the viewpoint of people who drive cars. 
	I would like to apologize at this point to the oil producers. Good economic policy should aim for what we call a “Pareto optimal solution” – a win, win style of innovation. We need to try to reduce the risks to energy producers as well as energy consumers, as much as possible, and my paper in the State of the Future discusses those aspects more than I have time for here today.
	This slide gives a few of the key points, from the producer’s point of view. The number one issue for most of the big oil companies today is how to maintain their inventory of proved reserves. The proved reserves are what give them the ability to supply fuel to gas stations all around the world. But the methanol-based strategy described here is relatively compatible with their liquid fuels skills and infrastructure. It sure beats running short of fuel. New methanol production capability in remote areas will be JUST AS VALUABLE as new proved reserves, if and when flexible cars start to appear in the market. In the immediate future, many of us expect that most of the new methanol will come from new methane-to-methanol plants, processing natural gas which is now being wasted because it is expensive to transport. There are also some very clear near-term unmet opportunities to double the efficiency of methane-to-methanol production.
	In the longer-term, when and if reserves of oil and methane both start to pinch, the oil industry infrastructure would still play a key role in distributing methanol from other sources – IF the methanol route is fully developed.

## MAIN Sustainable Paths as Oil/Gas Run Out (i.e. Cost More)

**Nuclear**

**Space **
**Solar**

**Earth **
**Solar**

**Coal**

**Electricity**

**Methanol**
**(CH4OH)**

**Motor**
**Vehicles**

**Industry**

**Buildings**

**?**

- Methane

**Notes:**
Now let’s shift attention to where the fuel for our cars – methanol or electricity – could actually come from. Import dependence and sustainability are a major challenge here as well.
	Notice that we will be using natural gas or even synthetic natural gas in private homes for a long time to come. We are not proposing that anyone try to stop that. If we can find cleaner and cheaper ways to generate electricity, using less natural gas, we will be able to supply our homes from domestic natural gas for a long time to come. But if natural gas becomes too expensive, the free market should bring more electricity to the home without much government intervention.

## Sources: Where Does the Electricity or Methanol Come From If Not Oil/Gas?

- Two scenarios: Base-Case-Present-Trends Versus Real-Hope-If-We-Act-More
- Base Case:
- Iran, China, eventually everyone builds fission as fast as they can. Bin Laden Construction Co. and its less savory competitors grow very rich, very fast. 4-8¢/kwh
- Little guys (wind, rooftop solar, Anwar, ethanol) make big $ but don’t plug half the supply-demand gap
- Supply-demand gap still widens. Old coal fills the gap, filling half the world with barely survivable air (worse than China’s cities today). Not so much methanol.
- “Santa Claus drowns” Arctic Ice Cap Double or Nothing

**Notes:**
There is no real guarantee that we will be able to supply all the electricity we need, all over the world, in the next 20-30 years, in a safe and clean way. New technology offers us a hope, not a guarantee. Meat axe strategies like massive carbon taxes are probably not a very efficient way to maximize what hopes we have. (In fact, I specified the first big carbon tax scenario that EIA/DOE ran years ago – and the results were not very encouraging for that kind of approach.)
	I can see two really plausible scenarios for how this might go in the future. The “base case” scenario – the scenario for what will happen if we do not really wake ourselves up and break out of existing trends – is not very encouraging. First, a combination of economic foresight and worries about the environment may encourage more and more nations to follow the lead of France, Iran and China, in going nuclear as fast as they can. But a DOE workshop on CO2 reduction in 2003 (Aspen Colorado) reported numbers like 8¢/kwh for nuclear technology under strict safety rules in the U.S., able to compete with old coal at about 4¢/kwh only if safety rules go away. In many nations the safety rules MAY go away, under economic pressure, if we don’t find alternatives. Not only environmental but national security issues could become many times larger than what we are worried about today. Even so, the rate at which nuclear plants can be expanded is very limited, because nuclear engineers, technology and equipment are limited. Under economic pressure, the old and dirtiest coal is poised to make a global comeback, unless we create alternatives before that pressure starts to bite. 
	We are not experts on the impacts of CO2. But in this scenario, with or without Kyoto treaties, we note that the Arctic Ice Cap is said to have shrunk in half in the past forty years. In another 40 years, if CO2 emissions increase their rate of growth, we would tend to expect serious possible consequences – not as serious as what new wars might generate, but serious enough. 

## Real Hope If We Work/Think Hard

- THREE TEAM A TECHNOLOGIES
- We know that all  three CAN WORK and CAN provide all the world’s energy needs cleanly
- “IGCC” (Cool Water/Texaco/Eastmann/GE) Clean Coal Technology, Good for carbon sequestration, efficiency, wants to produce electricity and methanol together
- “solar farms” on earth with mirror or lenses: but breakthru needed on cost, new workshops?
- Space solar power – new designs from NASA-NSF-EPRI
- Need better (agile, international?) funding vehicle for high risk breakthrough TEAM B hopes, like advanced large-scale biomethanol biotechnology.

**Notes:**
On the other hand, we have three TEAM A alternative technologies which really should be able to save us from the “base case” scenario, if we all work and think really hard. All three are proven to have a large enough potential output that they could meet ALL the world’s energy needs many times over. As of now, we do know that any one of the three could be made to work and be scaled up enough. The challenges before us involve cost reduction and overcoming the obstacles to market deployment.
	The most standard of the three is the more advanced type of Clean Coal technology. GE recently bought the main rights for this technology from Texaco, in hopes of selling it to the market in Wisconsin. But they couldn’t quite beat the competition yet, for some reason or another. Developers of the technology tell me that it COULD compete in the free market even now, **IF** they used it to produce electricity and methanol together, and if a market could be created allowing them to sell that methanol at price equivalence with gasoline. The FFV law we have proposed would meet that requirement. If they are right, that by itself would be enough to get it to the market. In addition, they claim that carbon sequestration is far cheaper here than with other fossil fuel technology (thanks to DOE R&D), and that this is also a pathway to zeroing out CO2. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has studied this claim, and encouraged more effort on these lines. In reality, of course, there are always risks in rapidly scaling up a complex technology, even a well-studied technology like this. The FFV law is an excellent start – but we need to keep our eyes on this.
	Ironically, earth-based solar – which SOUNDS like the most natural way to reduce CO2 – seems like the riskiest of the three, right at this moment. (We all have to be agile here, as new information keeps coming in – and I did not really appreciate the risks last year!) Still, it is a key option, and I will discuss it on the next slide. Space solar power is an area where the famous best designs from a couple of decades ago simply would not work at all, and I was part of the DOE team which was more pessimistic than NASA regarding their old reference design. But new interagency efforts have yielded new designs, and it now looks as if it really could compete with coal – IF we work at it. We also should be investing more in truly breakthrough radical large-potential “TEAM B” hopes.

## Some Issues Re Earth Solar

- DOE 10-year targets: 14¢/kwh PV, intermittent power, can’t compete with coal 4¢ baseload. Cost of “balance of system” is stubborn with solar farms. Even worse for low efficiency (now 3%) “nano-based” PVs this decade.
- Sandia has projected 6¢/kwh using mirrors and advanced Stirling to convert heat to electricity. But we don’t yet have the mirrors and improvements seem slow.
- Cost breakthrough in “mirrors” may be possible, e.g. as spinoff of NASA work on flexible self-assembling lenses to focus light for space use. But options have yet to be scoped out and explored systematically. Workshops?
- All DG (solar, biomass, wind...): Hayes says hookups are the real barrier. Solution: intelligent grid and zoning changes and improved advanced Stirling (industry)

**Notes:**
Unless you count rooftops (whose potential output is not enough for all our needs),  people have told  me that costs for large-area earth-based solar now look best for the following kind of scenario: in big cheap desert land, use Sandia-developed concepts for using big mirrors to focus light into Stirling-based heat-to-motion engines, and convert that motion to electricity. Reports from Sandia show a very interesting history, including a projection of 6¢/kwh for this kind of solar thermal energy.
	The costs of earth-based solar power using solar cells without concentrating light are not going down as quickly as we would like, for the Middle Way scenario. The problem is that all such systems include a “balance of system,” even if the solar cells themselves can be made cheaply. For a given area receiving sunlight, it would be hard to make solar cells and support structures cheaper than covering the same area with mirrors. Thus, in order to make earth-based solar farms compete with coal, our best hope lies in aggressively reducing the cost of concentrating light, either by lenses or by mirrors. There are high-risk high-potential ideas out there which might allow us a breakthrough in costs, much sooner than waiting 20 or 30 years for incremental improvements in today’s mirror technologies --  but there is an unmet need to scope out the out-of-the-box possibilities more effectively. (For example, a grant to ENTECH funded by the NASA-NSF-EPRI initiative has led to some new ideas.) Interagency workshops and small planning grants might be one venue for doing that. Advanced Stirling and concentrator solar cells both have plausible arguments that they could be used with new mirrors or lenses.
	Cost per kwh is not the only issue which affects the sales of earth-based solar energy. People trying to sell that technology on a free-market basis tell me that restrictive zoning laws and weaknesses in today’s grid control systems are the biggest barriers they face in practice today. This suggests that new national laws modifying the zoning, and a new push towards a more intelligent power grid, will be important to maximizing the benefits we get from earth-based solar energy.

## See NSF 02-098 at www.nsf.gov &URLs

- NSF-NASA Workshop on Learning/Robotics
- For Cheaper (Competitive) Solar Power

**Notes:**
In 2002, NASA, NSF and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI)  joined together to support a new research thrust related to Space Solar Power (SSP).For more information, see the NSF web page and the URLs which appear in publication NSF 02-098.
	At the time, I saw this as a very high-risk long-term option – but we need to explore many options.  This research thrust was an outcome of a joint workshop between NSF and NASA, aimed at evaluating whether computational intelligence could be useful in reducing the likely costs of building such large systems. 
	The world possesses enough unused desert land that earth-based solar farms OR SSP could meet all the world’s energy needs many times over, if costs could be made competitive. The price and supply of desert land is large enough that it is not a significant factor in cost per kwh. Unlike earth-based solar farms, SSP power receivers can be co-located with agriculture; in a survey by Patrick Collins of Japan, it was found that many developing nations have sites full of plant growth where they would be very happy to have access to this new source of electricity. 

## Some Outcomes

- 98 proposals, $21 million recommended after tough merit review, $3 million funded
- Previous NASA SERT program:  first well-validated designs but 17¢/kwh even assuming $200/lb earth-to-LEO (Low Earth Orbit)
- Now 4 designs may achieve cost breakthrus, merit follow-up. One – hybrid light-to-light laser with D-D inertial fusion and microwave beaming might get <1¢/kwh for kwh to receiver (rectenna).
- Little of Texas A&M claims he can demo ability to avoid communications interference.
- “Near-term vehicle” design 1st wi real hope <$200/lb

## Key Needs for Space Solar

- Partnership with NASA
- New Big Laser (2/4 cheap ways)
- Affordable launch (follow-on to ECS-funded plasma hypersonics)
- Improved Robotics – REQUIRES MORE USE OF COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE!!! (NSF/DARPA??)
- Cheaper rectennas – PES/MTT partnership

**Notes:**
When we started the initiative, NASA had already had some major new accomplishments related to space solar power (SSP).  They had tested and ruled out earlier theoretical design concepts. They had developed and validated some new systems concepts which really would work – but would not be cost-competitive.  In my view, the greatest accomplishment of our new solicitation (with projects just now winding down) was the development of four systems concepts which show real promise of becoming cost-competitive, IF WE FOLLOW UP. (We are not yet really doing so!). In my view, the development of large-scale new “exports”  from space to earth will be essential to achieving  real economic sustainability in space; this is one of our few serious hopes for doing so.
	My favorite systems concept for SSP right now happens to be one I devised myself (see the paper in State of the Future) – not because it was my idea, but because it has the greatest hope of lowest costs. The idea is to use light-to-light lasers floating in space (fed by lightweight mirrors or lenses) to generate intense bursts of light, which are then used to ignite deuterium-deuterium fusion in pellets designed by John Perkins of Lawrence Livermore. No steam engines or chemical reaction chambers needed; ninety percent of the energy comes out as electric currents directly, to beam to earth by microwave. I am not aware of any basic technical  reason why we could not have this working in 10 years – but there are important things which need testing, and huge political  barriers.
	This slide lists what I view as the key sub-challenges we would need  to confront to make this real. There are clear opportunities to move  forward in all five areas – but we are basically on square one, and need to move ahead in all five. For example, the Jet Propulsion Lab has looked at the laser specs, and has confidence they know exactly how to develop the laser – but they have a lot of work ahead of them, and the odds of success would be greater if we had a parallel wide-open research solicitation (like the NASA-NSF-EPRI solicitation but larger), to let creative university folks keep up and try out creative “team B” options, WORLDWIDE.   International would be best. Similar balances are required for all these items. 

## Human mentors robot and then robot improves skill 

- Learning allowed robot to
- quickly learn to imitate
- human, and then improve
- agile movements (tennis
- strokes). Learning many agile movements quickly will be crucial to enabling >80% robotic assembly in space.

- Schaal, Atkeson
- NSF ITR project

**Notes:**
This is an example of a successful project we funded, relevant to one of the key requirements for space solar power. Primary funding and management came from ECS, with co-funding from the robotics program in the Computer Science directorate of NSF (“CISE”). See the NSF “nuggets’ database for more information. This work was only a beginning,  but it achieved some real breakthroughs in performance.

## Distribution and Grids: Upgrading the Middle is As Important As Cars And Sources!

**Nuclear**

**Space **
**Solar**

**Earth **
**Solar**

**Coal**

**Electricity**

**Methanol**
**(CH4OH)**

**Motor**
**Vehicles**

**Industry**

**Buildings**

**Successful Transition Will Require An Intelligent Electric Power Grid**

**?**

**Notes:**
We have now discussed the sources on electricity and methanol, on the left-hand side of this chart, and we have discussed car fuel, on the right. But we have already begun to see that the Middle Way requires new aggressive and creative thinking to upgrade the technology that fits in the middle of this chart – above all, the intelligent electric power grid.

## Dynamic Stochastic Optimal Power Flow (DSOPF): How to Integrate the “Nervous System” of Electricity

- DSOPF02 started from EPRI     question:  can we optimally manage&plan the whole grid as one system, with foresight, etc.?
- Closest past precedent: Momoh’s OPF integrates &optimizes many grid functions – but deterministic and without foresight. UPGRADE!
- ADP math required to add          foresight and stochastics,                             critical to more complete integration.

**Notes:**
In 2002, NSF led a workshop in  Mexico, jointly sponsored by  the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), based on a request from EPRI. EPRI asked, in brief: “How can we get past the old paradigm of designing and controlling little pieces of the grid separately? How can we get to a new paradigm, where we optimize EVERYTHING in a unified way, as one big optimization problem, from operation to planning, so as to maximize global performance, measured by something like value added?” (I can still remember one conference where one engineer said “we don’t care about value-added,” and a major industry guy responded,”If you don’t, we won’t care about your work.”)
    Perhaps the closest thing to this vision NOW AVAILABLE is the Optimal Power Flow (OPF) package developed by Jim Momoh at Howard, which does integrate many functions together, and is very popular in real industry. Perhaps the most practical way to implement the new vision proposed by EPRI is to try to UPGRADE OPF systems to fully incorporate foresight and handle stochastic effects. This leads us to a more general mathematical challenge described in the next slide. We do have algorithmic tools now in operation which can handle a small number of generators or FACTS devices on an optimal (ADP) basis (see top picture); a special conference issue of the journal Neural Networks in 2003 included two papers showing how robustness to disturbance can be tripled in such systems by moving to new technology. But to handle entire grids, we face a larger challenge, to be described in the next slide. We do have concrete ideas, at least on paper, for how to rise to this challenge. There do exist the kernels of new teams willing and able to explore these radical new directions, of importance BOTH to general-purpose cyberinfrastructure science AND to the electric power infrastructure itself. It is a difficult high-risk area, and it will not easy to build up these new islands of creative thinking, surrounded by a more conservative narrowly-disciplinary environment. But it certainly is an excellent opportunity for NSF.  At present, Howard University and the University of Missouri-Rolla are the two places which  have really started to make this real – but the recent across the board budget cuts may make it difficult to sustain these efforts. 

## Beyond Bellman: Learning & Approximation for Optimal Management of Larger Complex Systems

- Basic thrust is scientific. Bellman gives exact optima for 1 or 2 continuous state vars. New work allows 50-100 (thousands sometimes). Goal is to scale up in space and time -- the math we need to know to know how brains do it. And unify the recent progress.
- Low lying fruit -- missile interception, vehicle/engine control, strategic games
- New book from ADP02 workshop in Mexico www.eas.asu.edu/~nsfadp (IEEE Press, 2004, Si et al eds)

**Notes:**
This slide summarizes some new unmet opportunities which we discussed at great length in another workshop in 2002, also held in Mexico.  This workshop addressed the general-purpose mathematical tools for optimization with foresight in the general case (where noise, nonlinearity and complexity appear).
     Thousands of learned commentators have talked about management of complex systems in recent years. Hundreds of technologists have begun to talk about it, and even try to make it real. But in the end, these thousands of angels are dancing on the head of a single pin – the Bellman equation. In mathematics, there is only one exact way to solve problems in optimization over time in the general case, and that is to solve the Bellman equation.
   Perhaps a decade ago, true general optimization – dynamic programming – really worked only on very special systems or systems with one or two state variables. But little-known subgroups of SEVERAL disciplines have developed new general ways to use learning and approximation to provide useful general-purpose optimizers. Our workshop was intended to bring these groups together, to learn from each other, and to chart the way to the two key opportunities: (1) greater understanding and dissemination of how to get up to 50 variables, in effect; (2) how to follow up on new ideas for how to scale up – all the way to systems as complex as small mammalian brains. 
  ECS has funded some work, but we believe that even an interagency initiative calling for more integration across disciplines, etc., could go further and faster, IF well-grounded in the kind of mathematical principles and issues which we have focused on. Actually, about half the effort should go into the “ADP” designs, half into critical subsystems like relevant pattern recognition, etc. Aliases for ADP: adaptive or approximate dynamic programming; reinforcement learning; adaptive critics; neurodynamic programming; HJB solvers.

## Emerging Ways to Get Closer to Brain-Like Systems

- IEEE Computational Intelligence (CI) Society, new to 2004, about 2000 people in meetings.
- Central goal: “end-to-end learning” from sensors to actuators to maximize performance of plant over future, with general-purpose learning ability.
- This is DARPA’s “new cogno” in the new nano-info-bio-cogno convergence
- This is end-to-end cyberinfrastructure
- See hot link at bottom of www.eng.nsf.gov/ecs
- What’s new is a path to make it real

**Notes:**
What do engineers have to do with building or understanding intelligence?
	In actuality –  the field of “computational intelligence” (CI) has become a major part of the electrical engineering profession. The new Computational Intelligence Society is already one of the larger and most prosperous societies within IEEE, and it has many close connections with other parts of IEEE. Among the key  themes in the society are neural  networks, fuzzy logic, evolutionary computing and intelligent reconfigurable computer chips (such as “cellular neural  network chips,” which have far more throughput than conventional chips, and on-chip learning systems.). 
	The neural network field exploded as a new area for research in 1987, when IEEE held its first international conference on that area. It is a truly cross-disciplinary field of research. The core goal of the field is to develop new mathematical models of distributed computing systems which can be used in TWO WAYS AT ONCE – as models of learning in the brain, and as designs for artificial systems.
	There has been enormous progress in parts of this field. Some of us think we can see a pathway now to really understanding how mammalian brains achieve that elusive quality we call “intelligence.” But there have also been enormous difficulties in sustaining collaboration across disciplines. In fact, there have been enormous challenges in trying to enhance collaboration between the different technology communities.  What sells in Washington and what answers the core research questions is not always the same. Also, just last year, funding for core crossdisciplinary work that could move us towards real understanding was cut by a factor of two or three. Funds for new work in core programs all across Engineering were cut to a level where only about 10 percent of proposals can be funded, and that only after deep budget cuts on the proposals.  Success rates are also low now in related Computer Science areas.
	Ironically, the folks who used to say that “nanotech, infotech and biotech” are the three pillars of future technology have now realized the need to add a fourth pillar, which they call “cognotech.” The essence of cognotech is the ability to do “end to end learning,”  the ability to learn the whole pathway from sensors to decisions in managing large complex systems. That is exactly what we have been making REAL in this quiet core research. 

## Intelligent Grid Requires Intelligence But Also Hardware

- Brain-like intelligence is embodied intelligence; sensors, actuators and feedback on performance are essential parts of the new designs.
- Reduce world CH4 to kwh:  sell and upgrade Brazil’s superior transmission technology (Pilotto, Watanabe: could save California billions quickly, allow cheap electricity from underused Utah coal plants)
- EPRI plan to add more communications, sensors, intelligent appliances (e.g. car chargers to turn on at quiet times at night, to exploit times of strong wind)
- Interface of intelligent grid with human users, markets and regulations. (www.pserc.cornell.edu; “EPNES” at www.nsf.gov.)