Cross-posted from WattHead – Energy News and Commentary
Barack Obama made public yesterday his intentions to appoint Dr. Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as Secretary of Energy.
Dr. Chu, a Nobel laureate clean energy expert, is well known for turning the Berkeley Lab into a center of clean energy and efficiency innovation, forging the Berkeley Lab-British Petroleum partnership, sitting on the Copenhagen Climate Council, and winning a Nobel Prize in physics in 1997. His appointment is probably most notable for the sharp contrast between the capable, knowledgeable academic and the past military officers, oil industry consultants and utilities executives who have served in the position.
Last year, Chu was the co-chair of an InterAcademic Council Paper entitled Lighting the Way: Toward a Sustainable Energy Future. The report proposes “best practices for a global transition to a clean, affordable and sustainable energy supply in both developing and developed countries,” focusing on policies to support the development and deployment of technologies “that can transform the landscape of energy supply and demand around the globe.” If Lighting the Way is reflective of Chu’s understanding of the energy challenge, he clearly sees it as a technology-driven global development challenge, a good sign that Chu is the right pick to head up DOE and it’s many energy RD&D programs.
Speaking at this summer’s National Clean Energy Summit convened by Senator Harry Reid, Dr. Chu also evidences a keen understanding of the potentials of energy efficiency and the need for breakthrough renewable energy technologies. “Another myth is [that] we have all the technologies we need to solve the energy challenge. It’s only a matter of political will,” he says. “I think political will is absolutely necessary… but we need new technologies to transform the [energy] landscape.” He then goes on to discuss the work on breakthrough solar and biomass technologies pursued under his leadership by LBNL’s new Helios Project.
Coming, as he does, from within the National Labs system itself, it will be interesting to see if Chu will advocate the sweeping reforms to America’s energy technology innovation system we need. It’s also unclear if Chu’s academic acumen will translate well to a more political stage. But what does seem to be clear is that in Dr. Chu, Obama has found an able technologist with a keen grasp on both the technical and political challenges of creating a new global energy economy.
Obama has also announced intentions to name Carol Browner, former EPA Administrator and current transition team adviser for energy and environment, as the administration’s new “Energy and Climate Czar,” and former New Jersey Environmental Commissioner Lisa Jackson to run the Environmental Protection Agency.
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Could you perhaps explain a little why you feel that forging a partnership with BP to promote biofuels turned Berkeley Lab into a center for “clean energy and efficiency innovation”? My understanding is that in terms of climate biofuels almost never, especially at an industrial scale, reduce emissions. I suppose that given enough research that might one day change, but considering the urgency of the climate crisis, don’t you think real “clean energy and efficiency innovation” might better be grounded in cleaner and less problematic alternatives?
Well, let me start by saying I’m not intimately familiar with the Berkeley-BP partnership, and I have friends (students at Berkeley) who personally protested the partnership, so it’s not all good. I personally would prefer R&D of such importance as energy innovation was funded with public money and the results made available in the public, not corporate, interest. I’ve also been a clear critic of ethanol and food-based biofuels (see this post for example).
All that being said, as I understand it, the Berkeley-BP lab is researching ways to make next generation biofuels that do not rely on foodstuffs as feedstocks. The lab is also funding critical social science and other research that’s actually driven much of the increasing understanding of the risks and tradeoffs/costs of biofuel production – that is, BP is funding the very research that is finding plenty of reasons to be critical of biofuels. So it’s certainly not all bad, and in the absence of a major federal commitment to clean energy innovation, I’d rather have BP spending $500 million on it than no one at all.
Finally, it’s not just the Berkeley-BP deal that confirms Steven Chu’s clean energy chops. In fact, it’s probably the least important. More important is that Chu has helped transition LBNL as a whole into a center for clean energy technology innovation and climate science, including the establishment of the Helios Program at LBNL which is doing breakthrough research on solar power, advanced biofuels and more.
The scale and the urgency of the climate challenge demands that we spread our bets around and work to develop a variety of different options to sustainably power our planet and the nine million human inhabitants we can expect by 2050. Chu keenly understands that it seems, and I don’t think we have any reason to assume otherwise.
I’m not trying to dismiss Chu on a wholesale basis, but just rather to point out that the BP-Berkeley partnership is not a good example of his clean energy credentials.
According to the lab the BP-funded research will focus on “on three critical areas for the conversion of biomass into biofuels. First will be the development of plant feedstocks that are better-suited for biofuel production than the conversion of corn into ethanol that is being practiced today. Next will be the development of new techniques for breaking down plant material into its sugar building blocks. And finally, there will be a search for new ways to ferment sugars into ethanol or other forms of biofuel such as butanol, which has the potential to be used in today’s cars without any change to the engine.”
(http://www.lbl.gov/Publications/Currents/Archive/Feb-16-2007.html)
Although I agree that it would be great to see BP funding good research on alternative fuels, but this seems to be to be what I’d call “more of the same” rather than any sort of real innovation in terms of addressing carbon or climate generally.
How is this “more of the same?” Seems to me like it’s actually a pretty real effort to develop technical solutions to the ineffectiveness of today’s biofuels technologies (which incidentally implies an awareness on BP’s part that today’s technologies for biofuels just don’t cut it, an opinion I think we’d share).
It’s more of the same in terms of climate and carbon emissions as far as I can tell. I don’t see any sort of focus on efforts to reduce overall emissions when using biofuel. It seems like all of the points they describe are about reducing the costs associated with producing and using biofuels (like making fuels that can be used in today’s engines) rather than mitigating the environmental consequences of producing and burning biofuels.
Developing non-food feedstocks – including perennial native grasses, algaes and others – and the ability to break down cellulosic biomass into ethanol would enable a SIGNIFICANT improvement in the carbon mitigation ability of biofuels – and the BP partnership is working on both of those challenges. With corn ethanol, you get a 10-20% reduction in emissions per vehicle mile traveled (relative to gasoline), assuming no land use changes which can wipe out those meager benefits. With cellulosic ethanol from something like switchgrass, you get more like a 75% reduction in emissions per vehicle mile traveled, and you don’t have to use a food crop to produce it. Algae-based biofuels could be even better (and is one of the few promising alternatives to replace jet fuel). The whole point here is to develop more sustainable biofuels that have significant greenhouse gas reduction potential.
For a lot more on the GHG mitigation potential (and oil and fossil energy mitigation potential) of various biofuels and other alternative transportation options, see here and here.