Rice professor calls for ‘bridge’ to energy future at congressional subcommittee field hearing

Rice professor calls for ‘bridge’ to energy future at congressional subcommittee field hearing

BY FRANZ BROTZEN
Rice News Staff

Walter Chapman, director of Rice’s Energy and Environmental Systems Institute, urged a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee to assist with building a “bridge to a sustainable, affordable and secure energy future.”

Testifying before a field hearing of the Committee on Science and Technology ‘s Subcommittee on Energy and Environment Feb. 29, Chapman described “the imperative to span the technological, economic and political divide between the present and a sustainable future.”

The hearing, held at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, was titled “Energizing Houston: Sustainability, Technological Innovation and Growth in the Energy Capital of the World.” It was designed to investigate how the energy industry and cities like Houston are working to address energy challenges, such as energy independence, global climate change and economic growth.

Walter Chapman urged a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee to assist with building a “bridge to a sustainable, affordable and secure energy future.”

Subcommittee Chairman Nick Lampson, D-Texas, said he and committee members Ralph Hall, R-Texas; Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md.; and Gene Green, D-Texas, came to Houston because the best way to gauge the impact of policy is often by getting away from the capital. He added that he hoped to get fresh perspectives on the public record, and Houston is an obvious site to get such perspectives on energy.

In addition to Chapman, witnesses included Houston Mayor Bill White; John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Company; and Thomas Standish, president of regulated operations at CenterPoint Energy.

Hofmeister spoke about short-, medium- and long-term energy needs. He testified that the U.S. will remain a fossil-fuel economy for the immediate future. He called for increased access to untapped sources of fuel, including oil shale, and construction of infrastructure to allow for greater use of liquefied natural gas. Hofmeister said he expected alternative energy sources like biofuels and wind would play a larger role over the next 10-20 years. And new alternatives, such as hydrogen, are likely to join the mix later. He urged the congressmen to seek a “balance” between old and new energy sources.

Mayor White focused on the demand side in his testimony. He praised the new vehicle mileage standards set in the 2007 energy bill and called for increased efficiency standards for buildings.

Standish described an electrical energy grid that hasn’t undergone significant changes since the time of Edison. He pointed to a pilot program called “smart grid” that would allow customers to use meters in the home to monitor their own consumption in real time. He said the new technology would allow CenterPoint to deliver power more efficiently.

“Confronting and ultimately surmounting the energy challenge is not optional,” Chapman told the subcommittee. “It is necessary for survival.” But he emphasized that technology is only one part of the answer. Perhaps more important, he said, is the investment in human capital. “The United States must recommit itself to science and engineering education, and to funding scientists and engineers engaged in fundamental research, research that can produce innovations that will drive the economy and provide solutions to producing sustainable energy,” he said.

Among such research, Chapman cited efforts by Rice faculty members to develop “self-assembling smart fluids to better extract oil from the pores inside rocks and to expand the area swept in an oil field.” Those efforts could double the amount of oil produced from reservoirs, he said.

Chapman also mentioned the newly established Advanced Energy Consortium – a privately funded consortium of companies led by the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas in collaboration with Rice University – that is working on new applications of nanotechnology to existing exploration and production.

Chapman told the congressmen about new ways to improve existing technologies, including how nanotechnology can inhibit corrosion, increasing safety and lowering maintenance costs; how to create metabolically engineered bacteria and plants to convert biomass as well as waste from biodiesel production into fine chemicals and fuels; learning how to manipulate gold-coated nanoparticles to better harvest solar energy, which could lead to more efficient solar cells; how to employ in wind turbines new nanomaterials as blades that morph into the optimum shape in response to wind conditions and possibly also heal themselves if damaged; how to produce on a large scale a quantum wire to allow transmission of electricity around the globe with near-zero loss enabling, distributed energy generation on a worldwide electricity grid.

Finally, Chapman recommended two steps to assist institutions like Rice. First, he backed additional funding to advance fundamental research and to assimilate the next generation of students into the quest for solutions. Second, he proposed the the government, presumably the Department of Energy, make available on its Web site energy-related research findings from as many sources as possible.