good morning everyone and welcome to today's hearing we've just received information that we expect a whole series of votes in about fifteen minutes and there are here thirty thirteen that's good thirteen votes which will take a long  time courting the what i'm going to do is dispense with any opening comments except to thank our witnesses for their presence today for their expertise and for their input on an important topic i will introduce you briefly we'll have five minutes for opening comments from each of the witnesses with luck alacrity being the order of the day it's my privilege to introduce our witnesses quickly dr christina johnson is the undersecretary of energy of the u s department of energy ms anu mittal of the property pronounced as the director of natural resource and environment of the u s government accountability office dr brian hannigan is vice president of the environmental generation for the electric power research institute mr terry murphy is the president of solar which served all proper solar reserve i knew i was missing something  please thank you mr chairman and members of the committee i definitely appreciate the opportunity to be here to provide testimony on programs for developing water efficient and environmentally sustainable energy technologies  e words about my background to demonstrate my particular and passionate interest in this area third generation engineer my grandfather worked with george westinghouse at the first turn of the last century  helping electrify the country my father then worked for thirty seven years with westinghouse started his career and hydro electricity and ended it nuclear i was inspired by their example of using energy and technology to better their communities and therefore it's a privilege to be here to serve the country in this position i also understand the purpose of this hearing is to talk about the relationship between energy and water resources and to explore the ways that we work across not only the departments programs within has also been a problem and what approach do most people don't know our goal is to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts and so in thinking about these issues i was particularly pleased to be here because i personally had not explored in depth the relationship between energy and water and have to preparing for this hearing quite an interesting story so without further ado let me continue thinking about the energy water nexus it's important to step back in my view and think about climate climate affects water water effects energy the way we use energy affects climate and the critical time right now for our country and our planet change is real and it's happening and that was important message from the u s global climate change research program that released a report three weeks ago report showed that there have been significant impact already occurring including changes in precipitation across the us more rainfall in the northwest in the southeast the oceans are becoming more acidic and studies have shown in fact a statement released by the sciences of seventy countries including the united states said that at the current emission rates of greenhouse gases the coral reefs and the polar ecosystems will be severely affected by two thousand and fifty if not earlier marna food supplies are likely to be reduced with significant implications for food production and security in regions penned on protein for human health and wellbeing and finally acidification is irreversible on timescales of tens of thousands of years so i'm thinking about energy and water we also have to think about climate and we must address global climate change now or we are in danger of losing the coral reef the amazon the arctic caps so how does climate specifically affect water and energy resources professor ronnie avatar from duke university models have shown that the deforestation the amazon resulted in  contributed greatly to the droughts that we experienced in the mid part of this decade in the west and if we think of a graphic for a moment water about ninety percent of our electricity is derived from thermal electric generation so in the first graphic here i just want to show that where the drought have occurred we also see that conventional power a tremendous decrease of about thirty five ninety percent of our electricity requires water to cool the thermal generation of electricity and so we have droughts we don't have the water generates electricity and the drought in the southeast in two thousand and seven in august fifty our nuclear plants that area had a reduction of fifty percent of electrical generation so there is an intimate relationship between climate water and energy so i want to talk a little bit about what we're doing the department of energy to address this issue with our r and advances in coal fired plants and gas plants integrated gasification combined cycle plants and natural gas can bind cycle plants are about twenty percent more efficient than the older plants and they consume forty to sixty percent less water that's the good news the other news is that eighty percent of those plants are older than thirty years so a big consideration moving forward is infrastructure that we have we have to be ready when they are that is older and aging can be turned over we have to have that more efficient technology ready to deploy the more efficient power plants the less water so this is one of the areas where we're working so first let me just summarize in that our approach has been three pronged first is energy efficiency we use less energy we need less water the energy that we generate let's make it more efficient third renewables less water for example and hydroelectric we could be as high as ten percent by reducing the electric generation thermoelectric to these other renewables we can actually reduce the amount of water we need possibly a third or more  first it's important to look at energy conservation and efficiency i'd like to just mention that energy efficiency in our buildings and in transportation presents a tremendous opportunity to reduce our energy use and over the last forty years our energy  one hundred million gallons fresh water a day several programs that directly cut water use including the energy star labels an appliance standards that cover washers washers and lighting in our research to improve the efficiency of power plants also reduce water consumption as i mentioned third the renewables including thermal power and geothermal power require they do require water for cooling however we are looking at ways of doing dry cooling in that area fourth or renewable power plants such as wind and solar p v do not require water for cooling and can sharply reduce our power consumption and the one thing i want to point out here in these graphics is that the midwest in the west  finally applauding the house for passing the american clean energy and security act of two thousand and nine we believe will help the u s to be a leader in the green economy and we're committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and our dependence on foreign oil while investing in the and d so we can be leaders of the new energy technologies future chairman baird and members of the subcommittee i'd like to thank you for the opportunity to provide this testimony honest important topic and to discuss with you the activities of the department in plans for developing even participate in your hearing on r and d needs for the energy water nexus at the request of this committee currently underway related to three aspects of the energy water nexus these include reviews of the water used to produce biofuels water used to produce electricity and water used to extract oil from shale we expect to release reports on each of these studies later this year or early next year for each study to pay particular attention to the technologies that could help reduce the amount of water needed to produce energy from these sources my testimony today will discuss our key seems that we have identified to date from our biofuels and electricity works because these reviews are the furthest along our work on oil shale is in its very preliminary stages and we will have more information to share with the committee later this year our ongoing work on biofuels and electricity provide two excellent studies that highlights the types of our indy and data collection activities that the federal government can focus on to help address energy water nexus issues specifically has identified a variety of data and technology areas where more research is needed and our electricity work has identified areas of data collection can improve i will briefly describe our preliminary observations and each of these areas with regards to biofuels our work has identified a number of research needs at all stages of the come conversion to distribution and storage in the area of cultivation some examples of the research needs that we have identified include the following the need for information on impacts of fee production for water supplies the need to develop additional to drought tolerant crop varieties the need for research on how the production of cellulosic and algae can be scaled up in a sustainable way and the need for research to determine the maximum amount of agricultural residues that can be removed while maintaining soil and water quality in the area of conversion of feedstocks into biofuel we have found that while much is known about the water  needed to convert corn into ethanol more research is needed on how to reduce the water needs of bio refineries that you sell your last six and there is need for research on technologies that can effectively extract oil from algae in the area of stories and distribution of biofuels we have identified still other research needs because ethanol is highly corrosive and poses a risk of damage to pipelines and storage tanks it could therefore lead to groundwater contamination to overcome potential compatibility issues experts have told us that further research is needed on conversion technologies that can produce renewable fuels that are compatible with the existing infrastructure shifting to our work on electricity we have found that the use of advanced cooling technologies such as air cooling or hybrid cooling can reduce the amount of fresh water needed by thermoelectric powerplant but d o d s current data collection efforts may not fully capture this the extent to which the industry is moving in this direction moreover higher costs associated with using these technologies may cause power plant developers to reject these options and research that can help reduce the cost of these technologies can help make their use more widespread similarly the use of alternative water sources such as effluent from sewage treatment plants brackish water or seawater can also reduce fresh water use by power plants but data collection efforts also are not systematically capturing this trend in the industry water experts and federal agencies we spoke to told us that not having data on the extent to which advanced cooling technologies or alternative water sources are being used by the industry limits in limits the ability of industry analysts to assess the extent to which these technologies have reduced fresh water you lack of such information also impacts the ability of federal decision makers to target research effort most appropriately according to officials the agency is currently redesigning the process to collect data on advanced cooling technologies and will implement this new process in twenty eleven in conclusion mr chairman both of our reviews have identified a number of our in the efforts that are being supported by other federal agencies however our work is also identified a number of are in the areas that still need to receive attention in the future e electric power research institute founded in one thousand nine hundred seventy three is an independent nonprofit center for collaborative research regarding energy and environment shoes in the public interest key key element of apres mission is informing the public policy process and we're very thrilled to be here today to have this opportunity one of the key points i'd like to make in my testimony this morning is that water is a finite resource with multiple uses and when you look at the totality of both water demand and water supply going forward it's increasingly obvious in the electric sector not only are we looking at a carbon constrained world we're also looking at a water constrained world when you think about the competing uses from population growth from agriculture from climate variability and change affecting both the timing and the magnitude of water availability think about the demand for water increasing over time as a result of economic growth and increasing electrification the shift to low carbon technologies some of which are more water intensive as the undersecretary alluded to in her comments particularly on c o two capture and storage work that we've been doing identifies t c s technologies at present will roughly double the water demand in a conventional coal or a natural gas fired unit there's tremendous opportunities there to improve water availability as my colleague mr mittal from g a o just mentioned a moment ago advance cooling technologies do exist they offer a lot of promise but at present their costs their performance are not where we want them to be for widespread commercial application and so as you look to future research needs in this area not only the whole notion of water resource management and understanding the supply of water but also moderating and mitigating the demand of water from the electric power sector through advanced cooling technologies is going to be a key effort going forward to expound upon these key points which are described in detail in my testimony just show you a couple of graphics this is from a now dated u s g s assessment of water use on the left hand side you see water withdrawals thermal electric power and particularly cooling a significant withdrawal of water but one of the key elements i want to stress is that the electric power industry needs access to water but doesn't necessarily consume if you look on the right hand side as a part fraction of consumption electric power utilities only consume three percent it's really a question for us of access it's also a question of returning that water back to the environment in the state that can be used and so it's mitigating the impact of taking that water in where fish protection and other aquatic organisms are concerned and also bring that water back with minimal or no affluence that cause environmental degradation as well and i think that's a key point to make when you look at the water use by power plant type nuclear fossil but even solar thermal and bio fuel are big consumers of water from a cooling standpoint and even simple gas combine combustion turbines use a lot of water for fuel injection and as we change this generation mix we're going to be changing the water demand to drive that home one of the ways in which we're looking at the transition to a low carbon economy in the electric sector is to bring on as shown here in this chart increasing amounts of renewables increasing amounts of nuclear energy increasing amounts of c o two capture and storage for both existing and new units this shift is going to change the way we use water in this important segment of society so we have existing technologies that are on the board right now once through cooling and what cooling towers roughly about half and half with existing plants in the application there are a lot of advanced technolog as drier hybrid cooling approaches recycling the water within the plant using grey waters or increasing the thermal efficiency of plant are all going to be important the challenge with dry cooling as the undersecretary mentioned is that these things are emerging technologies there's a lot of work to be done here and at present if you look at the left hand side of this chart it's a significant increase cost both from capital as well as operations and reducing the power output even things like noise and the size of the units that you need for a typical five hundred megawatt plant are things that are of concern we talked about the impact here in the united states it's also worth reflecting on the heat wave in france in two thousand and three was an impact not just on the availability of water for cooling but in fact the generation capacity and the resulting changes in the market that lead to more spot market purchases of electricity higher prices ultimately to consumers and large scale load shedding and other mechanisms to maintain the reliability of the system so it's really at the heart of maintaining a reliable and low cost electrical system so to sum up we've worked with the department of energy and sandia national labs through the energy water nexus program to outline about a forty million dollars ten year research program that would be focused around these five areas both understanding the financial and operating impacts of cooling technologies as miss mittal suggested there's a big gap there that can be addressed in the near term working on the technologies particularly dry and hybrid cooling approaches using degraded waters one of the issues with carbon capture and storage is the potential production of sailing waters from the sailing offers that were injecting c o two and if there was a way to treat that sailing water to use that for thermal electric plant cooling you're solving multiple problems with one approach and finally getting our arms around how climate interacts with water and how water interacts with climate both in the production of renewable energy but just in the availability of the resource that's improving decision support developing better climate modeling tools that allow us to get a handle around the hydro hydro electric cycle there's a lot of work that executive responsibilities at rocketdyne covered a wide range of advanced power systems for both space and terrestrial applications we generated over forty patents that leveraged aerospace technologies into clean renewable terrestrial energy projects i appreciate the opportunity to give my perspective the important issue as the other members of the already said power plant cooling systems currently account for roughly a third of our fresh water withdrawals this a particular problem in the southwest was there is already a scarcity of water resources and where solar thermal plants things that i'm working on spec to flourish solar based electricity will be a key  and achieving our renewable energy goals water is also a key ingredient for electrical power generation and we've got to look at that with a total approach c s p power plants concentrated solar power capture them to go through the transients that you see in photovoltaics and other types of things so they have a thermal capability right through and the utilities like it because it matches the common stock the rolling stock that they currently have within their inventory our technology as solar reserve takes all that to the next level and that we actually run the ball and so instead of just trying to take the thermal energy and converted to steam we actually put the energy into molten salt which can retain that heat and then operate these systems on demand and so now you have a power plant that operates like a combined cycle plants that are predictable have zero price  cost and can provide reasonable power for generation as discussed all conventional steam turbans can be dry cool and we've already talked that most of our wet cold and you've already heard people talking about the water consumption what cool turbans unfortunately the air cooled performance gets hit when it's needed the most and so when you go into an air cooled system you're on the hottest days when you're really seeing the performance degradation and so you can you can see up to thirty or forty percent of degradation when you need the power the most so we need to be very cautious about when we're moving forward how we how we put water in the water allocation into these plants there's an interesting technology called hybrid technology which is a combination of wet and dry cool systems and may be the best alternative for reducing water plant consumption hybrid systems operate without water when the ambient air temperature allows them to and then if it gets really high only then do they start consuming water and if you do that you can  plant that without being regulated would go to dry cooling and so it really becomes a question of how much is going to cost and the ability to have the ratepayers pay for that i mean if we got to look at water that way that's where we have to approach it there are a lot of things i can talk about through questions and answers in advance technologies on close to brighten cycles but it's a little bit of intuitively backwards but the hotter you go the easier it is  technologies that push temperature are a good thing for us because the rejection temperature i'd also like to mention there's a system on the future gen vance coal system and there's a maybe an opportunity for the committee to think about looking at a future gen and solar plant where i really believe we have the technology to build the ideal power plant and maybe we can replicate something that's going on on the coal coal side so concentrated solar power is not going to solve all of our energy problems but they do represent the best utility scale system for the american southwest we can run large steam turbines and when you start looking many are being permitted right now you're looking at about five hundred jobs per year in construction for each one of those plants i look forward to answering your questions a snortin hope that brief exchange for ideas that we can try and put a little bit chairman for given the opportunity to brag on general electric and rick stanley we have fifteen hundred engineers and fifteen hundred production people in the g e facility in greenville and rick stanley is a guy in charge of all those engineers my bachelor's degree holder then worked for g e aircraft got a masters degree in aerospace engineering at the university of cincinnati had lots of promotions with the company and then in two thousand  came to his current post which is vice president and general manager of engineering division for g e energy and it is particularly exciting to have him here because he's working on power generation gas turbine steam turbine gasification controls generators wind aero derivatives nuclear solar and services segments of general electric that's quite a portfolio he holds five patents himself and we're very happy to have him in greenville and very excited about having general electric in greenville making wind turbines and gas turbines and figured out ways to reap our lives certainly thank you mr inglis before you begin your test but let me just share with my colleagues about twelve minutes left on this vote will have time for mr stanley's testimony then my friends we're going to have to recess probably for at least forty five minutes possibly longer we had some nightmarish week days while back and i apologize for that bestie within five minutes and then we'll decide where to go from there thank you will do it thank you very much congressman mr chairman manners members of the subcommittee i appreciate the opportunity to testify to the unequivocal link between energy and water i have four recommendations for public private partnerships to address this linkage first greater investments in water use technologies to facilities and pilot new technologies second federal support for research development and demonstration of high efficiency natural gas turbine technology as in vision h r three zero two nine third increase research and system integration of desalination processes and finally additional research on large scale demonstration of organic rank in cycle technology for wa recovery energy and water are codependent and in its simplest terms energy is required for producing water and water is required for the production of energy in the united states demand for water related to electricity production are expected to nearly triple from  hundred five consumption levels significant quantities of water are used throughout the power generation cycle and boilers cooling towers and fuel gas emissions treatments with water treatment are really important reductions can be made in the amount of water consumed in power generation g e is working to develop high efficiency membrane materials that will allow for throughput that increase water flow by a factor of ten plus and further reduce energy costs achieving these results requires advances in manufacturing technologies materials and processes as well as the establishment of facilities to pilot new technologies we can accomplish this most effectively through joint government industry and university initiatives wider deployment of less water and sense of power generation technologies in improving the efficiency of these technologies represents another important opportunity to reduce water consumption and power generation currently natural gas combined cycle power plants represent about twenty percent of the country's electric megawatt basis natural gas combined cycle plants utilize less than fifty percent of the water used by our pulverized coal plants which comprise the largest percentage of u s power innovation capability today today's most advanced gas turbines are capable of reaching up to sixty percent efficiency aggressive technology advancement can lead to sixty five percent efficiency now this is a stretch goal but one hundred one it's worth aiming for because a one percentage point improvement in efficiency applied to gee's existing f class fleet in the united states would result in c o two emissions reductions of four point four million tons per year while providing savings of more than a billion dollars per year in fuel costs all while using far less water than alternative technologies but gee energy has invested over one billion dollars into gas turbine technology during the past three years but more work is needed the department of energy can partner with us private industry to reduce the inherent risk in the required research and development efforts h r three zero two nine introduced by representative paul tomko and referred to referred to this committee provides the basis for such a partnership g commends representative taco and applauds the house of representatives for including this proposal and the recently passed american clean energy and security act for desalination applications g s l m s one hundred aero derivative gas turbine rejection that can ideally be integrated with the desalination process to produce clean water as well as power while achieving substantial savings in total power usage further research is needed in system integration to achieve these benefits at a low cost the organic rank in cycle offers the opportunity to reduce dramatically the need for water in energy production this technology utilizes an organic solvent as a working fluid to extract power from low grade waste in a gas turbine the key advantage is that it is a closed cycle and it does not utilize water g is working to evaluate this technology however there are significant needs for development and demonstration on a large scale before this opportunity can become a reality so in summary mr chairman the nexus between power generation and water usage is one of the world's most complex and critical public policy challenges g e believes that the congress complain important role in bringing focus and facilitating partnerships between the u s department of energy and the private sector in areas including water use gas turb n we have seven minutes left to go out of respect for the witnesses i'm going to stay here and mister suffer the consequences of the motion to adjourn book but i recognize my colleagues may wish to make this vote if they want my understanding is the next vote will likely be a fifteen minute vote so by my choice here by sticking i get twenty minutes with the witnesses mr inglis is going to go do this with his consent will just continue my colleagues want to go that's fine we will then  up i'll see over there but i will proceed with the questioning at this point again thanks to all the witnesses for your outstanding comments let me introduce another variable hasn't i don't think been mentioned to a great degree and i'm very curious about it my memory if memory serves me correctly the recent census data suggests that population growth in the next forty years as u s population growth projected at around one hundred thirty nine million that is an enormous addition in terms of demand on every a portion of our infrastructure and yet i almost never hear it factored into to energy and in this case energy flash water calculations and this seems to me that the combination of just consumption for housing for hydration to for irrigation and then in this point here the nexus between energy and water to what extent is this projected population growth being factored into our energy projections and or our energy water consumption projections and availability projection chairman thank you for that question it's really at the heart of the challenge when we look at water stain ability one of my comments and my testimony was that at a fundamental level the amount of water used by the population themselves by the energy production that's demanded in the in the baseline that puts forth a project an increase in generation that has to be met by an increasingly cleaner mix of resources many of those including central station solar nuclear coal the carbon capture and storage biofuels both for transport and power we're talking about some fairly thirsty applications and so i think one of the challenges to the power sector is we recognize that people need water we recognize  agriculture and food production needs water power generation tends to come at the end of the line and so it really places an imperative on the need to get advanced cooling and water less cooling technologies right for cooling power plants and i think that adds urgency to this issue and the need to get the research and development going at a much faster rate than it is today would it be fair to also suggest that the increase in human direct demand and indirect or agriculture for water would produce an additional incentive for less water intensive energy generation absolutely i think if you look at what's going on in the colorado river basin out in the southwest you see that happening today we saw that in the southeast during the during the difficulty the droughts in two thousand and six and we see it anywhere in the world that water resources are placed under pressure it's generally the energy production that has to adjust if you look at the power plants in south africa where water is at a premium nearly all of them operated by ask  operate on dry cooling technologies but at a much higher cost and that obviously impacts job creation economic development and availability of power for people to live their lives  issue it's not really as much of a technical issue as it is how do new facilities get permits and how do those additional cost as a power developer how does that get factored fourth recess focus predominantly on on carbon there is obviously offered by testimony today to the degree that the new energy bill incentivize renewable do something which we're taking the first step with the bill in terms of carbon emissions and impact the climate change tremendously as well i think in your second question think about how we might do that some of the recent appliance standards with regard to dishwashers and washing machines have both energy and water use in them and i think that's important i think the biggest thing is figuring out how we can change behavior in terms of capturing the waste amount of water that we toilets to running toothbrushes and it's a significant amount of water that we waste in significant amount of lighting and electricity that we waste that's not needed and i think that that is the low hanging fruit that we have got way to get after and i think standards building standards that affect as well as water use are important and we're moving in that direction trying to establish the standards but that would be very helpful to have policies in that direction thank you mr chairman related to that there's an awful lot of inefficiency with water use in today's existing plants as my colleague mr murphy is has put forward a lot of these existing plants are also going to be looking at new pollution controls to meet more stringent air quality standards if there are changes in the way they were dealing with coal combustion products as a result of recent incidents that also is going to be an opportunity modify those facilities are going to a number of different things that are going to be happening con currently we hope but maybe separately on different time scales it's worth thinking about how do we treat those existing units as we move from where we are today to the low carbon future we all want to get to and in the future and whether there's an opportunity to look at the sort of an integrated redo some of these existing units we're looking at bringing solar concentrated solar right on to an existing facility is a way of kind of hybridizing that power plant well while you're making that modification you might want to do something to improve your water use efficiency and the technologies that are on the shelf today that we can do and there are tests of technologies that are right at the cusp of being commercialized of all that we can do as well so i think you have an opportunity i know senator bingaman and the energy committee staff on the senate side have energy and water related provisions in the bills that they've been working on and so there may be an opportunity when you ideally get to conference to have a good conversation about how you put all the other than our work on an electricity basically tell us that there are three choices three tradeoffs that you're making this is a three dimensional equation you've got energy trade you've got water tradeoffs and you've got carbon tradeoffs and the choices that you're either going to be positive on one negative on another there is no perfect equation because in each choice that you make you're either positive on one front and negative on another so those are the types of things that our work is showing that you do have to factor water and one of the things that we're looking at in our thermoelectric work is that states that have primary responsibility for siting power plants are starting to take more harder look at the water impact especially in those states where there are long term water shortages where they are dealing with wire constraints whereas other states where they have not had that history of water shortages they don't have a more detailed process to look at the water impact the power plant so it's again as water supplies become more constrained we think people are going to become more aware of how important it is to look at all of those three aspects and mr just one last comment on that i think at the highest level having a national water reuse initiative would be something worth considering other countries have done this i think believe israel's got seventy percent goal for water use singapore just passed an initiative for thirty percent of their goal for water use having a national goal for water so whatever level it is i think we're at six percent today as a country would drive more technology towards water reuse it would accelerate technologies i think in a water reuse in a study of how we do waste water and how we can bring some of that back but i do think it's a worthy discussion and a worthy goal that ought to be to be addressed i appreciate that  there is this relationship between what i refer to as lethal overheating of the planet said many times in this committee that global warming sounds like a nice thing lethal overheating sounds like a bad thing and acidification of our oceans as dr johnson is also a bad thing specially when one considers that the oceans provide fifty percent of our oxygen left anybody think this climate change thing in significant ask yourself how you would like to do without fifty percent of your oxygen and it's not a good but one of the impacts is clearly available of water as we see and we move through this committee  legislation to establish a national climate service the idea being we would use our best available knowledge to try to make predictions about climactic events and how they would impact various aspects of our lives and our economy and it seems that energy particularly in light of this hearing is critically impacted by that you and your testimony several of you offered images where water levels in the lakes or rivers etc had declined and hence the available energy production which is water dependent also declined how is that being factored in as as we look at you know we're trying to reduce those impacts but how is that being factored in to what actually i'm going to ask you to hold that question and i'm going to to how we can embrace innovation as we move forward in each of these areas and to look at the importance of water and a part of the country that i represent and what we can do to help accelerate this one question that i have dr johnson is having had a chance to visit with secretary chu and understand the importance of moving forward centers of excellence and really embracing the technology the breakthroughs that are taking place at our national laboratories collaboration has taken place at sandia national laboratories already but some of the exploration is taking place up in whether we're looking to see what we can do to be able to recycle water through exploration for oil and gas some of the breakthroughs associated with storage and to truly understand what mr murphy has been done with storage capabilities and how that can break through but if you could tell me dr johnson is there any thoughts to how we could move forward without the existing requirements of the private match twenty percent match that's required from the public private partnership to support the laboratories research in many of these areas understanding these breakthroughs will begin training for everyone is there any thought to how we might be able to program or modify it so that we can encourage some of the partnerships in the event that we don't have the ability for some of those collaboration thank you very much for that for the question first of all i firmly believe that these problems are so complex that we need to bring together the best and brightest from the labs from the private sector from the university and we need to encourage them as much as possible the work going on in the labs is not subject to the twenty percent match the universities would be in industry would be as well so it's not an issue for the labs per se but in terms of bringing together these teams and partners sometimes it can be an issue and we will be looking at what's appropriate to encourage these kind of relationships as we move forward one of the ways that we're trying to bring together all the best and brightest in one one place to address these very complicated issues through the  energy innovation hubs that have been proposed and i think that is that will certainly help move some of these issues forward because it's critically important we get industry the universities the labs together to try and solve these critical issues whether it's you know johnson and mr murphy mr stanley in the area of what you've been able to see and prove from every increase of percentage in energy efficiency and even the importance of storage and your thoughts on how we can accelerate that going back to two thousand seven some of the legislation apps that were moved forward by the congress to encourage more storage exploration and how that will decrease our the amount of water that's needed to be able to move to the  energy or to make sure that it's really dispatchable on and the impact on energy as a whole and those areas that's a great point i mean when you look at the real demand as we move forward if we can get the power plants to be much more coincident with the demand and so what you're looking at with some of the power plants baseload particularly for example on a coal plant it might be running all night long and using these valuable resources and there may be a demand that's necessarily justifying that so the idea of having storage and it is a discussion about you have to trade water versus carbon dioxide versus energy i think you can get all three and i think we we there are systems out there that we can that exist today that we can achieve reductions and all of those but it comes at a price so that's the other dimension that  technology as we move forward having optimized it part of even in these areas that need electricity but they don't need it at nighttime where storage is one option another option is also just reduce the amount of fuel that's required for these parts load  periods during the day when a gas turbine for example still can be run or run very efficiently right now and some of the older technologies in our fleet of turbans that are out there are not very efficient during it during night time they were designed that way they were designed to run at full speed full load during the day at peak load and some of the new technologies which are actually being translated from the aviation world down into land based gas turbines actually address those issues including the different temperatures during the day a hot day is a very hard on the efficiency of a turban versus a cold day so just looking at the design of the machinery itself and advancing that technology can have a big impact on reducing fuel and water use on these systems even in water in the cycle as opposed to taking it into the plant using it and it's just charging it away from the plant it's a way to use the water and what we call a closed circuit so that we're not taking as much water from the stream but keeping it inside the plant many nuclear plants today use water if they use in our closest and they they lose a lot of it to evaporation during evaporation process and so they do consume a lot of water heavy amount of water and this would help reduce bout using sea water basically in that process got a lot more that when we do freshwater we've got a lot of population close to the shoreline in the united states he said that make that attractive or is  that i think it is now i do believe it's possible it's still early and in the stage of system integration and cost in the trick is getting the cost down to do that and the cost of the systems it takes to do use that type of water clean it activities the challenge associated with the impact on marine organisms on fish larvae another species of concern and one of the things that we're working on it every are protective measures and alternative ways of getting the water into the into the plants that don't have as much impact on the on the marine environment that's a big concern for e p a currently in the rule making around the phase two rule the three sixteen b provisions in the clean water act we've done a lot of work looking at screens and intake mechanisms and different conduits to get the water into the plant so that's one thing to keep in mind when you're thinking about sea water as an intake particularly in the coastal zone it has the potential for some significant impacts if you  a large amount of water i guess you don't raise the temperature as much is that another strategy is to cycle through a great deal of water and then that's in fact where nuclear plants take in a considerable amount of seawater that is the goal is to reuse and recycle within that plant through a number of different cooling cycles each of course is progressively less efficient because of the difference in the temperatures that you can extract as much heat each time through as the water gradually warms and warms and warms and then you exhaust it to a cooling pond if you will where the water can then equilibrate with the atmosphere before being discharged back in the ocean three sixteen a of the clean water act actually puts limits on the thermal differences in the water that you  charge back into the environment whether it's a lake or or an ocean body having thermal shock can be just as impactful on organisms as the physical shock of going through the system so we have to work on getting as much cooling value out of that water but ultimately discharging it back into the environment in largely the same state in which we took it and it's a matter of cause in many cases it's a matter of performance of the unit as you use more and more of the water you leave behind more and more of the stuff that was in the water and so it can cause scaling and falling and different impacts on the plant itself which are an issue of operations and maintenance there are no easy solutions sadly otherwise we may not be having this hearing mr mr murphy mr stanley if you could just recapture that for me some of the benefits associated with the fishes you practices and i guess in your instance that evasions you practice is that investor owned utilities are generation transmission companies are adopting  and even with help from the utility commissions around the country are being with adopting those practices into future generation and the possible benefits associated with utilities moving forward with more  efficient approaches with consumption the waters are generating power right thank you congress and that's a very important issue for siting a new generation of plant you're coming up more and more with utility commissions and even local communities when you look at new generation in your backyard one of the impacts in addition to the myriad others that are of concern is the water consumption and where is that going to come from i think this is an opportunity for looking at co benefits as i mentioned these plants are also looking at a bunch of other different obligations in terms of their environmental footprint and there are a number of technologies that can be employed in the new plant which give you multiple benefits reducing your air pollution improving your efficiency of the thermal plant as far as greenhouse gas emissions is concerned and then water consumption as well even as i mentioned before if you've got a fossil unit with c o two capture and storage or if you've got nearby oil and gas operations that are creating produced water there's a possibility for new technologies to be involved there through some of the work mr stanley is working on with the sound is a should be quite possible to use as produced water or to use degraded sewage from the nearby community the palo verde nuclear plant in arizona does just that it runs entirely off of the treated sewage water is coming from the nearby communities so i think there are a lot of opportunities sometimes a challenge those commissions as mr murphy indicated look at it strictly through the lens of lowest cost power and they're not looking perhaps  npredictable amount of time without talk to us a little bit about what the likely water demands would be if we had widespread coal carbon sequestration and help us understand the distinction between use and loss of water in that process take that one mr chairman the bill likely impact if you add in c o two capture technologies on today's power plants you're looking at about a thirty percent reduction in  power production and the thermal efficiency of that unit and so as a result you have to combust more color more natural gas to create the same amount of power output that means you're pushing more heat overall through the system which results in a greater use of water for cooling when you then talk about the compression cleanup of the gas on the back and all of the other things that you have to do to get the c o two that's been captured ready for pipeline quality specifications for transport and ultimately the kinds of specifications we're looking at in the underground injection program for disposal in the geologic reservoir you're looking at about a doubling of current water use throughout that process now much of that water goes through the normal cooling cycle so it is ultimately recoverable and if you're condensing out the evaporated water and reusing that in the plan at the the consumption doesn't go up nearly as much it's not a one to one relationship but certainly the widespread adoption of c o two capture and storage which we think is a key part of any climate mitigation program is going to lead to increased demand by the electric sector for water in the decades ahead some of that can be mitigated through the new technologies that we've been talking about but there again it's the matter of getting those cooling technologies integrated with the new technologies we're employing for pollution control the new technologies or employing on the turbans themselves in the balance of plant i mean we have a lot of things that work separately but it's really the integration challenge that i think would be a center a center pole to add to any aggressive research program going forward we've outlined in an aberrated documents which i'm happy to provide for the record you know a fairly modest if you look at other research activities going on presently throughout the federal government a fairly modest forty million dollars program that would get us started on those things and we think that that would be a good investment i will personally look into that given the importance of the issue before us today and the relative amount of forty million dollars versus next gen and it sounds like the jail report confirms that huge water consumption issues to grow the crops and given the graph these are earlier but the amount of water that goes to air again that's not going to be reduced if we put ethanol from corn base i may switch grass as secretary mentioned but i also think we've staked off a lot on coal and coal carbon sequestration i personally think too much and i will point for the record that we had just one in our own here in our committee suggesting that likely commercial feasibility was not going to happen for twenty five years and that a much more optimistic scenario was banked on a predicate for the energy bill we passed and i have quite a bit of concern  and then when you add this water notion fifty percent increase that i get that in some cases there's a chart in my written testimony that is a result of some work that we've done with the national energy technology lab in some cases particularly for an ultra super suppose attach a price to carbon because i think what i'm gathering is you've got a lot of products that you could sell but the economics don't work because if you can belt burn for free why pay for them or machinery right so i g c c for example why pay for that if you can get a freebie in the air and there's no accountability for the emissions then belts and burn  but i guess that's more of a statement in a question in that i gave you an opportunity to say that yeah we got products that we could sell the mix work but you got attach a price to carbon in order to make the economics work and that's a conservative concept seems to me because what you're saying is no we're not going to allow people to have a free good in the air because a market distortion if you insist on accountability and saying this and we be accountable this is a conservative concept  then what you have is the economics change and we sell a lot of product i think from greenville to be exciting we do congressman and that's and you're right it's the theory i think that you're talking  buying carbon much as you have to buy fuel if you have a power plant to produce electricity and if that becomes the case where there's a carbon cap or or other means if there is a value with producing carbon dioxide that we want to reduce we have a broad range of products that make that a better situation economic situation i g c c certainly one of those it's a way to use our vast resources of coal and still be able to use that resource you know less water intensive next generation of solar which we haven't talked about today but thin film solar which is coming in will be as my belief is pervasive as flat panel t v s that you see today in the store is coming that technology is coming and that's again as the cost come down with scale will be affordable and carbon policy will drive that even more rapidly so we are absolutely in favor of some type of value for carbon a great thing mr inglis we're down about are there repl effects that you can imagine in those technologies that will come even beyond those first plans that you have for efficiency with the natural gas turbines the ripple effects and many of the technologies there's we as we develop new materials such as carbon matrix composite is a new material that we can use in the turbans is as was mentioned earlier today turbans become more efficient the hotter that they operate and so the higher we can operate driven in temperature the more efficient it becomes now give you an example today's turbans the metal inside the turban bucket of current generation service operates in a exhaust gas that's five hundred degrees hotter than the melting point of the metal itself so he transfer technology vitally important just to make today's turban survive we want to push that temperature even higher five hundred six hundred seven hundred degrees higher than it is today new materials like ceramic matrix composites will be the way they're now today they're very expensive to hard to make to hard to develop we know very little about them really but if that technology succeeds and it will fully fully believe that it will that's not only good for land based gas turbines but it has direct application to aircraft urban inner craft around the world higher temperatures better efficiency for aircraft as well as for land based power plant and thank you what i'm hearing here is that this may be a down payment for a lot of the lucrative investments that can be made for efficiency say or for development of emerging technologies that can be applied to the term and this bro turbinate environment that's correct it many other ripple effects it will help to the united states to maintain our leadership in high temperature gas turbine design and aircraft urban design jobs jobs are  created we have a estimate every job that we create in gas turbine technology manufacturing leads to five more jobs in our suppliers and contract engineering and other places in the economy so that it's a very powerful ripple effect not just economically but also with jobs and pretty well the energy self sufficiency and job is what's driving this great legislation and i'm just happy to hear the feedback from the industry and from those who will help lead us in this effort so thank you so much thank you all we've got two minutes to go we're going to have to hurry i want to thank our witnesses for outstanding input today the record will remain open for two weeks for additional statements for the members and for answers to any follow up questions to the subcommittee mask of the witnesses i thank you for your testimony and for your indulgence as we were interrupted by votes appreciate very much your expertise and insights thank you and with that the hearing stands adjourned no