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It is a great honor to be named the first L.M.K. Boelter Distinguished Lecturer, and to be given the opportunity to address the UCLA Engineering Technology Forum.  The name Boelter is associated with UCLA since 1944, to his retirement in 1965.  By the 1930s he had created a new American school of heat-transfer analysis.  He received the highest award bestowed by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the ASME medal, in 1957, joining the likes of R.A. Millikan, Charles F. Kettering, Theodore von Karman.  Not bad for a kid raised on a Minnesota farm! 

Knowledge was the great equalizer for Boelter.  He and the people around him used last names, no titles.  The unanswered question was the only master.  His most familiar saying was: “Engineers participate in the activities which make the resources of nature available in a form beneficial to man and provide systems which will perform optimally and economically.”

If there is ever a time when the resources of nature, beneficial to man, are required, it is now.

Not too many years ago, we seemed to be living in a world where energy was inexpensive, readily available, and seemingly limitless in supply.  That world, if it every really existed, is now clearly a thing of the past.  Today most people recognize that our dependence on fossil fuels and imported oil poses a growing risk to our economy, our national security, and the environment. 

Global energy consumption is set to double by the end of the century. Some say it will triple. And if we attempt to supply that energy with fossil fuels, the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere will be enormous.  We must find a way to meet the increasing demand for energy without adding catastrophically to greenhouse gases. 

Those are the two questions that loom over humanity today:  how will we supply all this needed new energy, and how can we do so without adding dangerously to atmospheric greenhouse gases?

The energy and environmental challenge confronting us in the century ahead is truly monumental.  It may be one of the biggest challenges humanity has ever faced.

Incremental improvements in our current technologies will not be enough to meet this challenge.  To provide an answer to these two great questions, we will need transformational breakthroughs in basic science that provide the foundation for truly disruptive technologies that fundamentally change the rules of the game.

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The good news today is that we may be on the threshold of scientific and technological breakthroughs in the 21st century every bit as profound as those which transformed human life forever in the 19th.  The scientific world today is changing and advancing with almost dizzying rapidity.  Every year our capability to direct and control matter down to the molecular, atomic, and quantum levels is growing. This increasing ability to control the fundamental, nanoscale building blocks of both biological and non-biological matter holds out the promise of eventually forever transforming the way we generate, store, transmit, and use energy.

One of the chief missions of the DOE Office of Science has been to nurture and accelerate the development of this new fundamental science and these cutting-edge capabilities, capabilities that may transform our energy economy and ultimately provide answers to the great challenges we face in both energy and the environment.

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Over the course of this decade, our Office of Basic Energy Sciences in the DOE Office of Science has held a dozen major “Basic Research Needs” workshops to assess basic research needs for energy technologies. These workshops have brought together scientific and technical experts from universities, National Laboratories, industry, and government, from both here and abroad, to identify scientific roadblocks and determine research priorities.   Each workshop has issued a major report.  Together these reports define a bold and comprehensive research agenda. 

Time and again we see the same recurring themes: new materials design, development, and fabrication, especially materials that perform well under extreme conditions; control of photon, electron, spin, phonon, and ion transport in materials; science at the nanoscale and femtosecond; designer catalysts; structure-function relationships; bio-materials and bio-interfaces, and so on.

Now, I don’t want to imply for a minute that the scientific problems entailed here are anything but challenging and difficult.  That is why we refer to the problems we tackle in the Basic Energy Sciences program as “Grand Challenges.”

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Late last year our Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee issued a report titled Directing Matter and Energy: Five Challenges for Science and the Imagination.  The report summarized the work of the Basic Research Needs workshops by setting forth five grand challenges, as follows.

• Controlling materials processes at the level of quantum behavior of electrons
• Atom- and energy-efficient synthesis of new forms of matter with tailored properties
• Emergent properties from complex correlations of atomic and electronic constituents
• Man-made nanoscale objects with capabilities rivaling those of living things; and
• Controlling matter very far from equilibrium.

These grand challenges, spanning the Office of Science portfolio, define the tasks before us today and in the years ahead.

I’d like to talk in a little more detail our grand challenges in the field of energy--not just the barriers we face, but the opportunities before us.  These opportunities provide more than hope for our energy future; they provide sustenance for human imagination.

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Solar Energy.  Let’s begin with solar energy.  More energy from sunlight strikes the Earth in one hour than all the energy consumed by human activity on the planet in a year.  This is abundant, carbon-free energy.  Yet solar power today provides less than one tenth of one percent of the world’s primary energy.  There are big challenges here, but also big opportunities.

Silicon-based single crystal solar cells have reached efficiencies of 18%. Triple-junction cells with Fresnel lens concentrator technology are approaching efficiencies of 40%.

Imagine if we could develop solar photovoltaics that exceed thermodynamic efficiency limits.

Imagine, even more boldly, if we could borrow nature’s design for capturing sunlight—photosynthesis—and convert directly sunlight to chemical fuels.

There are three ways we can use solar energy--by converting it electricity, to fuels, or to heat.  We are particularly interested in the first two, electricity and fuels.  In both cases, there are three steps: capture, conversion, and storage. The challenge: reducing the costs and increasing the capacity of conversion of sunlight both into electricity and into fuels that can be stored or transported.

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The DOE Office of Science is pursing basic research in solar utilization to try to reach these goals.  We are investigating new concepts for capturing energy from sunlight while avoiding thermalization, or heating, of carriers, such as multiple-exciton generation from a single photon. We are exploring “plastic” solar cells from molecular, polymeric, or nanoparticle-based structures that can provide flexible, inexpensive, conformal electricity systems. And we are trying to better understand defect formation in photovoltaic materials and self-repair mechanisms in photosynthesis, with the aim of developing defect tolerance and active self-repair in solar energy conversion devices that would extend their lives.

We are also delving into artificial photosynthesis. We are working on the design and development of light-harvesting, photoconversion, and catalytic modules—bio-inspired molecular assemblies—capable of self-ordering and self-assembling into integrated functional units that can lead to efficient artificial photosynthetic system for solar fuels.  The photosynthetic reaction centers of plants are remarkably efficient, but we still have a lot to learn about their detailed reaction mechanisms. We are also just beginning to discover the number and variety of light-harvesting molecules in Nature. Craig Venter’s analysis of seawater samples taken from the Sargasso Sea identified 782 new rhodopsin-like photoreceptors, where only 70 were known before. [Rhodopsin is the photoreceptor/chromophore in the mammalian eye] There is great potential in this area for direct production of fuels from sunlight.

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Electrical Energy Storage.  Then there is the related and vital area of electrical energy storage.  To make an intermittent energy source such as solar effective for base load electrical supply, major breakthroughs are required in electrical energy storage.  This is a much-overlooked requirement for a range of renewable energy sources, including wind energy. 

Also, electrical energy storage devices with substantially higher energy and power densities and faster charge times are required if all-electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles are to be market attractive.

Imagine solar and wind providing over 30% of electricity consumed in the United States or roads where the number of all-electric/plug-in hybrid vehicles exceed those running on gasoline.

Electrical energy storage devices such as batteries store energy in chemical reactants capable of generating charge. Storage devices such as electrochemical capacitors store energy directly as charge.  Fundamental gaps exist in understanding the atomic-and molecular-level processes that govern operation, performance limitations, and failure of these devices.

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Knowledge gained from basic research in the chemical and materials sciences is needed to surmount the significant challenges of creating radical improvements for electrical energy storage devices for transportation use, and to take advantage of large but transient energy sources like solar and wind.

In pursuit of this knowledge, the DOE Office of Science is supporting research in areas such as  nanostructured electrodes with tailored architectures. For example, fundamental studies of the electronic conductivity of lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4­­) led to the discovery of doping-induced conductivity increases of eight orders of magnitude. This discovery led to the development of high power-density Li-ion batteries which power electric vehicles such as the Chevy Volt. We are also looking at conversion reactions for batteries that yield more than one electron per redox center. New research on conversion reactions is looking at advanced materials that yield up to six electrons per redox center, allowing a large increase in power density. We are also investing in research on ultracapacitors, which complement battery power by allowing rapid charge and discharge cycles.

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Bioenergy.  A third area where we believe that fundamental scientific breakthroughs can change the energy equation is biofuels.  The development of biofuels—especially biofuels made from plant fiber, or lignocellulose, such as cellulosic ethanol and other fuels—represents a major scientific opportunity that can strengthen U.S. energy security while protecting the global environment.

Imagine a sustainable, carbon-neutral biofuels economy capable of meeting a third of U.S. transportation fuel needs without competing with fuel, feed and export demands.

The capability to tap into the energy contained in plant fiber or cellulose would give us the means to produce biofuels on a scale sufficient to create such a nationwide biofuels economy. Unfortunately, our current means of converting cellulose, or plant fiber, to fuel is not efficient or cost effective.  It’s a tough problem.  Plant fiber has evolved over the millennia to be extremely resistant to breakdown by biological or natural forces. The plant cell walls contain a substance called lignin, which is tightly woven with the cellulose—and gives it its incredible strength—“flexible concrete”.  The enzymes currently available to us cannot easily penetrate to get at the cellulose and break it up into sugars or other metabolites that can be used to produce fuels.

This “recalcitrance” of plant fiber forms the major cost barrier to making biofuels from plant fiber economically viable.
However, Nature has evolved solutions to this problem.  Termites, for example, are frighteningly efficient at converting cellulose and hemicellulose to fuel.  They eat wood, at an alarming rate, and convert the interior cellulose into energy. Using a systems biology approach, and developing the understanding of the principles underlying the structure and functional design of living systems, the basic research supported by the Office of Science is focused on developing the capabilities to model, predict, and engineer optimized enzymes, microorganisms, and plants for bioenergy and environmental applications. A series of workshops led by the DOE Office of Biological and Environmental Research identified the basic research needs for such an approach.

The emerging tools of systems biology are being used to help overcome current obstacles to bioprocessing cellulosic feedstocks to ethanol and other biofuels – research tools such as metagenomics, synthetic biology, high-throughput screening, advanced imaging, and high-end computational modeling.

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In 2007, we launched three new DOE Bioenergy Research Centers, funded at $25 million per year each for five years, to pursue these research directions--the BioEnergy Science Center, led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory; the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison in partnership with Michigan State University; and the Joint BioEnergy Institute, led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  We believe that these Centers can crack Nature’s code for cost-effective biofuel conversion. 

One of the DOE Bioenergy Research Centers is focused on the fermentation route to biofuels.  Of course, mankind has known how to make ethanol by fermentation for some time.  Lignocellulose presents special challenges.  First, the degradation process--the process of breaking through recalcitrance--typically produces chemicals that inhibit or endanger the microbes used for fermentation.  Second, typically you get two types of sugar monomers, some with 6 and other with 5 carbon atoms.  The 5-carbon sugars are more difficult to ferment.

But once you’ve figured out how to degrade the lignocellulose and recover sugar monomers from it, there’s another route to making fuel:  chemical catalysis.  The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center is devoting some resources to this alternative path.  The major funder of this catalytic work within the DOE Office of Science is our Office of Basic Energy Sciences, which has stewardship within the federal government for catalysis.

Catalysis offers several advantages over fermentation.  First, researchers have shown that catalytic processes can be used to turn sugar into hydrocarbon fuels, fuels more like gasoline.  Ethanol has certain disadvantages.  It only has about 70 percent of the energy content per gallon as gasoline.  It’s also water-soluble, which introduces problems of corrosion if you try to pipeline it or store it.  Vehicles today need to be built differently to use high concentration ethanol blends, such as E85, and flex fuel vehicles cost a bit more than ordinary gas-powered vehicles. 

Catalysis may be able to yield biofuel that is essentially indistinguishable from gasoline, conventional diesel, even jet fuel. (You may also be able to produce such hydrocarbon fuels via fermentation, by re-engineering microbes to produce them, and our DOE Bioenergy Research Centers are working on this.)   If we could produce gasoline from plant fiber--so-called “green gasoline”--we could move to a greener fuel supply without any major infrastructure changes.  Our new Energy Frontier Research Centers initiative, which I’ll talk about in a moment, will provide new funding opportunities for this important work in catalytical production of biofuels.

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Nuclear Energy.  Today nuclear energy provides about 20% of the nation’s electricity.  It does so without using fossil fuels or emitting greenhouse gases or pollution. Nuclear energy could provide much more carbon-free, pollution-free energy.  A key challenge is solving the problem of spent nuclear fuel.  Current “once through” nuclear reactor policy leaves spent fuel rods with long-term heat loads and radioactive decay, and a significant fission fuel content.  

Imagine if we could close the fuel cycle.

Imagine abundant fossil-free power with zero greenhouse gas emissions.

Advances in basic science leading to new recycling technologies could in fact provide a major reduction in spent fuel—recycling the spent fuel and burning it in fission reactors, reducing storage requirements by up to 90%.

Performance of materials and chemical processes under extreme conditions is a limiting factor in all areas of advanced nuclear energy systems. The challenge is understanding and controlling chemical and physical phenomena in complex systems from femto-seconds to millennia, at temperatures to 1,000 degrees Celsius, and for radiation doses leading to hundreds of displacements per atom.

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In 2006 and 2007, the Office of Science held three workshops designed to identify the basic science needed for the development of advanced nuclear energy systems and to close the fuel cycle. In addition to the Basic Research Need workshops, two additional workshops were held in the area of nuclear physics and advanced scientific computing. Research areas identified in those workshops include: materials and chemistry under extreme conditions; actinide chemistry; separations science; nuclear theory; developing and scaling next-generation multiscale and multiphysics codes; and computational modeling and simulation of reactor and recycling systems. 

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Hydrogen.  Most observers agree that there will be no “silver bullet” to solve our energy dilemmas.  As we attempt to meet the energy and environmental needs of the twenty-first century, we will increasingly rely on a portfolio of different energy sources.  Hydrogen as fuel is a somewhat longer-term possibility, but it is a very attractive one.

Hydrogen has the highest energy content per unit of weight of any known fuel. When burned in an engine, hydrogen produces effectively zero emissions; when powering a fuel cell, its only waste is water. Hydrogen can be produced from abundant domestic resources including natural gas, coal, biomass, and even water. 

Imagine an emissions-free energy future.

Combined with other technologies such as carbon capture and storage, renewable energy and fusion energy, hydrogen fuel cells could make an emissions-free energy future possible.

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But this is an area that clearly requires some very fundamental research.  Of particular importance is the need to understand the atomic and molecular processes that occur at the interface of hydrogen with materials in order to develop new materials suitable for use in a hydrogen economy. New materials are needed for membranes, catalysts, and fuel cell assemblies that perform at much higher levels, at much lower cost, and with much longer lifetimes. Such breakthroughs will require revolutionary, not evolutionary, advances. Discovery of new materials, new chemical processes, and new synthesis techniques that leapfrog technical barriers is required. This kind of progress can be achieved only with highly innovative, basic research.

Our Basic Energy Sciences program has supported research in five technical focus areas:  novel materials for hydrogen storage; membranes for separation, purification, and ion transport; design of catalysts at the nanoscale; solar hydrogen production; and bio-inspired materials and processes.

The funding within BES has enabled major advances in gaining a fundamental understanding in hydrogen-matter interactions.  Recent key accomplishments within BES include:  discovering atomic scale mechanisms in the reversible hydrogen storage within complex metal hydrides; developing novel micro- and nano-patterning syntheses for a new generation of fuel cell membranes with superior power output; theoretically predicting and experimentally validating new architectures and compositions of catalyst alloys for efficient hydrogen production from fossil fuels or biomass; synthesizing mixed metal oxide photoelectrodes for solar hydrogen production; and providing new insights into the development of oxygen-tolerance enzymes for bio-inspired hydrogen production.

Such fundamental science accomplishments have significantly advanced our understanding of the behavior of hydrogen at the atomic level.  They have also contributed significantly in shortening the knowledge gap between present-day hydrogen technology and commercial viability. 

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Fusion.  Finally, one of the most promising future energy solutions lies in fusion.  Fusion is the energy that powers the sun and the stars.  Fusion energy on earth will use deuterium from water, and lithium to create tritium, fusing deuterium and tritium into helium and a fast (14 MeV) neutron. Deuterium and lithium are abundant and cheap, the helium will escape from the earth’s gravity, and the energy of the neutron can be captured to generate electricity or produce hydrogen. Fusion has the potential to provide clean, carbon-free energy for the world’s growing electricity needs, on an almost limitless scale. The key challenge is sustaining and containing the 100 million degree-plus fusion reaction on earth.  Scientists have made progress containing fusion reactions using powerful magnetic fields for confinement. 

Imagine a future of truly unlimited, emissions-free energy for humanity.  Imagine a future where humanity ceases to struggle with the challenge of providing abundant energy without damaging our earthly environment.

The basic science needs to enable this technology include: fundamental understanding of plasma science; materials for the extreme thermochemical environments and high neutron flux conditions of a fusion reactor; and predictive capability of plasma confinement and stability for optimum experimental fusion power plant design.

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In November 2006, the United States signed an agreement with six international partners to build and operate an experimental fusion reactor, ITER, that will demonstrate the technical and scientific feasibility of a sustained fusion burning plasma.  Scientists supported by the DOE Office of Science will be working side by side with counterparts from China, the European Union, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea and the Russian Federation. 

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In order to engage the Nation’s intellectual and creative talent to tackle the scientific grand challenges associated with transformation energy research, the Office of Science announced the Energy Frontier Research Centers initiative last month in its FY 2009 budget request to Congress, and the funding opportunity announcement was posted on our website on April 4, 2008. These Centers are intended to conduct innovative basic research for accelerating scientific breakthroughs needed to create advanced energy technologies for the 21st Century.  One hundred million dollars will be set aside for these Centers each year, and each will be funded between $2 to 5 million per year for five years. Universities, national laboratories, industry, non-profits, and partnerships among those groups are eligible to apply. The basic research areas will be along the lines of those identified in the Basic Research Needs workshops. 

Our goal is to bring together the United State’s best minds to tackle these formidable problems iun groups large enough to make a difference.

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I conclude with a statement made by the President in his State of the Union Address this year.  This was a personal statement of the confidence and trust he has in you.  He said “To keep America competitive into the future, we must trust the skill of our scientists and engineers and empower them to pursue the breakthroughs of tomorrow.”

Our Nation’s future depends on the scientific, innovative, and creative talent of our citizens...the only truly unlimited national resource we have is our ideas.  I urge you to join us in our pursuit of the energy challenge, to “make the resources of nature available in a form beneficial to man.”  No one could have said it better than L.M.K. Boelter.