Rice benefits from the Houston Presidential Summit

Rice benefits from the Houston Presidential Summit

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News Staff   
 
Energy reporters from around the world were in town this week for the Houston Presidential Summit on energy security, and a handful of them visited Rice Wednesday to learn more about energy research at the university.

At the invitation of the Greater Houston Partnership, the Rice Alliance for Entrepreneurship and Technology lined up several Rice experts to discuss their work and field questions from reporters from Mexico City’s Reforma, Excelsior and Milenio newspapers, India’s The Telegraph, DowJones Newswires and BIC magazine. 

Brad Burke, managing director of the Rice Alliance, welcomed the journalists and explained the alliance’s mission to find commercial applications of technology developed at Rice, primarily through start-up companies.

Amy Myers Jaffe, the Wallace S. Wilson Fellow in Energy Studies at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy and associate director of the Rice Energy Program, shared recent studies on the changing role of national oil companies and on markets and security for natural gas in North America.

She also discussed California’s effort to lower the carbon fuel standard and the potential impact on Mexico’s Pemex, which exports crude oil to the U.S. “Mexico runs the risk that if it doesn’t have major reform in its energy sector, the country will become a net importer of oil,” she said.

Walter Chapman, professor and the William Akers Chair in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, gave an overview of energy-related technology at Rice.

He described the energy vision of Rice’s Energy and Environmental Systems Institute as “building the bridge to a sustainable, affordable and secure energy future.” He noted the near-term need to maximize availability and minimize the environmental impact derived from fossil fuels. Chapman also discussed enhanced recovery techniques developed at Rice and cited examples of ongoing initiatives, such as the Advanced Energy Consortium, which will use nanotechnology to develop new recovery methods.

Wade Adams, director of the Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology, educated the reporters about nanotechnology, especially its applications to the energy industry.

“By 2015, nanotechnology is expected to grow into an industry as big as today’s energy industry,” he said, adding that it will impact every industry on Earth. “You can use nanotechnology to make anything you can think of better,” he said, adding that some of those improvements are revolutionary changes.

Adams told the reporters that Rice’s nanotechnology program was the first organized nanotechnology center in the world and is “arguably the largest” among U.S. universities.

K.P. Nayar, the chief diplomatic editor for India’s English-language daily The Telegraph, said Rice’s efforts to advance nanotechnology were familiar to him. “I’ve been interested in what Rice has been doing with India for a long time,” he said. Nayar said the energy presentations were “very useful,” and he intends to  learn more about research collaborations in India.

Roberto Jimenez, an energy reporter for Excelsior — the second-oldest newspaper in Mexico, was grateful to hear Jaffe discuss the Mexican oil business “from the other side of the border.” “In my job, we usually explore the possibilities of Mexico and the U.S. working together in the oil business,” he said, “so it’s interesting to know these points of view from the academic sector.”