Game Changers: Energy on the Move
()
About this ebook
It is becoming increasingly obvious that the United States needs reliable and inexpensive energy to propel our economy and protect our national security interests. Game Changers presents five research and development efforts from American universities that offer a cheaper, cleaner, and more secure national energy system. Drawing from the efforts of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) and other leading university research centers, the book describes some of the energy innovations that will transform our future: natural gas from shales, solar photovoltaics, grid-scale electricity storage, electric cars, and LED lighting. For each of these innovations, the authors detail what is available today, what is near at hand, and what is on the horizon. In addition, they show how extreme energy reliability and performance demands put the United States military at the leading edge of driving energy innovations, and survey potentially game-changing energy technologies currently being put into use by the U.S. Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force, on base and in forward deployment. The more choices our laboratories put on the table, the less constrained we are in using them to reach the things we really care about—health, family, business, culture, faith, and delight. This is what game changers are ultimately about.
Related to Game Changers
Related ebooks
Sustainable Shale Oil and Gas: Analytical Chemistry, Geochemistry, and Biochemistry Methods Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDictionary of Energy Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Topics in Multiphase Transport Phenomena Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGlobal hydrogen trade to meet the 1.5°C climate goal: Part III – Green hydrogen cost and potential Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Case for a Carbon Tax: Getting Past Our Hang-ups to Effective Climate Policy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Oil and Finance: The Epic Corruption Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMathematics And The World's Most Famous Maths Problem: The Riemann Hypothesis Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRural Electrification: Optimizing Economics, Planning and Policy in an Era of Climate Change and Energy Transition Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGeological Controls for Gas Hydrates and Unconventionals Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDictionary of Energy: Expanded Edition Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Switch: How solar, storage and new tech means cheap power for all Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSocio-Cultural Harmonic Human Settlements and Urbanization Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Future Supply of Nature-Made Petroleum and Gas: Technical Reports Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEnergy Transformation towards Sustainability Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCompanies on a Mission: Entrepreneurial Strategies for Growing Sustainably, Responsibly, and Profitably Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRenewable energy market analysis: Southeast Asia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA History of Inventions, Discoveries, and Origins Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWater Accounting for Water Governance and Sustainable Development: White Paper Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEmpty Tank Empty Wallet: For Those Who Don't Own an Oil Well Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsData Assimilation for the Geosciences: From Theory to Application Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDerivative with a New Parameter: Theory, Methods and Applications Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPOLITICS AND CLIMATE CHANGE: A HISTORY Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsElements of Petroleum Geology Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5GROKKING ALGORITHMS: Advanced Methods to Learn and Use Grokking Algorithms and Data Structures for Programming Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNanotechnology for CO2 Utilization in Oilfield Applications Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsExtreme Fundamentals of Energy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPhosphorus in Fresh Water and the Marine Environment: Progress in Water Technology Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsClimate Capitalism Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEducation and Training for the Oil and Gas Industry: Building A Technically Competent Workforce Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Public Policy For You
The Art of War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nolo's Guide to Social Security Disability: Getting & Keeping Your Benefits Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5No More Police: A Case for Abolition Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Slay In Your Lane: The Black Girl Bible Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care--and How to Fix It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Just Mercy: a story of justice and redemption Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated: The Collapse and Revival of American Community Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5On War: With linked Table of Contents Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDoughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works--and How It Fails Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Horsemen of the Apocalypse: The Men Who Are Destroying Life on Earth—And What It Means for Our Children Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Capital in the Twenty-First Century Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Chasing the Scream: The Inspiration for the Feature Film "The United States vs. Billie Holiday" Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dumbing Us Down - 25th Anniversary Edition: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How We Do Harm: A Doctor Breaks Ranks About Being Sick in America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Truth About COVID-19: Exposing The Great Reset, Lockdowns, Vaccine Passports, and the New Normal Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Game Changers
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Game Changers - Independent Publishers Group
GAME CHANGERS
www.energygamechangers.org
A production of the Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on Energy Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Energy Initiative.
Jeremy Carl
Research Fellow,
The Hoover Institution
Director of Research,
Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on Energy Policy
David Fedor
Research Analyst,
Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on Energy Policy,
The Hoover Institution
David Slayton
Research Fellow,
Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on Energy Policy,
The Hoover Institution
George P. Shultz
Chairman of the Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on Energy Policy and Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution
Robert C. Armstrong
Director of the MIT Energy Initiative and Chevron Professor of chemical engineering
Louis Carranza
Associate Director,
MIT Energy Initiative
Rebecca Marshall-Howarth
Director of Editorial Services and Publications,
MIT Energy Initiative
Francis O’Sullivan
Director of Research and Analysis, MIT Energy Initiative
Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management
Disclaimer: The researcher and expert quotations contained in this book were offered during open discussions as part of Energy Game Changers and Armed Forces workshops hosted by the Hoover Institution’s Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on Energy Policy at Stanford University or the MIT Energy Initiative. Throughout the book, instances marked with an asterisk (*) reflect only the speakers’ personal observations at that time and do not represent the views or policy of employers or political administrations past or present. Instances marked with a dagger (†) are quoted from remarks made at a December 2011 conference of senior Department of Defense leadership at the Hoover Institution.
Five R&D efforts from American universities
that are offering a cheaper, cleaner, and
more secure national energy system
Edited by George P. Shultz
and Robert C. Armstrong
HOOVER INSTITUTION PRESS
STANFORD UNIVERSITY STANFORD, CALIFORNIA
The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, founded at Stanford University in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, who went on to become the thirty-first president of the United States, is an interdisciplinary research center for advanced study on domestic and international affairs. The views expressed in its publications are entirely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff, officers, or Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution.
www.hoover.org
Hoover Institution Press Publication No. 656
Hoover Institution at Leland Stanford Junior University,
Stanford, California 94305-6010
Copyright © 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher and copyright holders.
For permission to reuse material from Game Changers: Energy on the Move, ISBN 978-0-8179-1825-5, please access www.copyright.com or contact the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400. CCC is a not-for-profit organization that provides licenses and registration for a variety of uses.
About the cover: Microsystem-enabled photovoltaics—or solar glitter
—developed at Sandia National Laboratories reduce crystalline silicon material needs by a factor of ten without sacrificing solar conversion efficiency. It joins other fruitful research efforts at universities and in industry from around the country in yielding new technological options for cheaper, more secure, and cleaner power generation.
For more on energy R&D from the lab, visit www.energygamechangers.org.
Efforts have been made to locate the original sources, determine the current rights holders, and, if needed, obtain reproduction permissions. On verification of any such claims to rights in the articles reproduced in this book, any required corrections or clarifications will be made in subsequent printings/editions.
First printing 2014
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 978-0-8179-1825-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN: 978-0-8179-1826-2 (epub)
ISBN: 978-0-8179-1827-9 (mobi)
ISBN: 978-0-8179-1828-6 (PDF)
CONTENTS
Abbreviations
Preface
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER 1 Natural Gas from Shales
AVAILABLE TODAY IT-enabled smart
oil fields now make mountains of computational data available in real time to project engineers in the field or at distant control centers.
NEAR AT HAND University of Texas’s downhole electromagnetic monitoring of frac proppants in a shale formation can greatly enhance fracture efficiency at low cost.
NEAR AT HAND A research team at the University of Texas has developed a novel hydrophobic membrane that resists clogging and enables fresh water savings of 50 percent during the fracing process.
NEAR AT HAND Stanford’s ambient seismic oilfield monitoring technology could help oil companies improve recovery techniques and let drillers more effectively monitor existing oil fields.
ON THE HORIZON MIT’s millimeter-wave rock-vaporizing directed energy beams could replace drill bits to access underground energy resources.
ON THE HORIZON University of Texas researchers have shown that hot brines saturated with dissolved methane in the Gulf of Mexico could be used to recover vast amounts of methane and geothermal energy, and also be a store of injected carbon dioxide.
CHAPTER 2 Solar Photovoltaics
AVAILABLE TODAY High-efficiency monocrystalline rear-junction silicon cells have over three decades grown from Stanford graduate student research into a multibillion-dollar business with dramatically reduced manufacturing costs.
NEAR AT HAND Stanford’s nanocrystalline-silicon shells improve thin solar panel light absorption, reducing materials usage and processing costs.
NEAR AT HAND MIT’s three-dimensional solar cell arrangements could reduce installation cost and increase power output per base area.
ON THE HORIZON MIT’s thin-film organic polymer flexible solar cells, created with moderate temperatures and no liquids, have been printed on tissue paper, textiles, and even plastic food wrap.
ON THE HORIZON University of Texas’s printable inorganic thin-film flexible solar cells have reached efficiencies of nearly 4 percent without the need for expensive high-temperature manufacturing processes.
ON THE HORIZON A University of Michigan team is analyzing the potential of photovoltaic technology based on semitransparent organic material that could be incorporated into conventional built environment surfaces.
CHAPTER 3 Grid-Scale Electricity Storage
AVAILABLE TODAY A new generation of research into compressed air energy storage technology reduces costs and improves efficiency by changing how these systems handle heat during compression and expansion.
AVAILABLE TODAY USC and Caltech’s direct methanol fuel cell technology has proven commercially useful for long-lasting, low-power electricity delivery in a wide variety of distributed power applications.
NEAR AT HAND MIT researchers have unraveled the properties of a superlattice
material structure that improves the reactivity of fuel cell electrodes.
NEAR AT HAND Research at Stanford on multiwalled carbon nanotubes and graphene has found a way to reduce the cost of fuel cells by replacing platinum catalysts.
ON THE HORIZON MIT’s liquid-metal batteries employ a novel reverse smelting
process to lower the costs and increase the longevity of large-scale energy storage.
ON THE HORIZON Stanford’s low-cost crystalline copper hexacyanoferrate large-scale battery electrode lasts for 40,000 cycles of charging and discharging.
ON THE HORIZON A Stanford research team’s simplified lithium polysulfide membrane-free flow battery performs well over more than 2,000 discharge cycles.
CHAPTER 4 Electric Cars
AVAILABLE TODAY MIT’s carbon nanotube enhanced ultracapacitor, now commercially available, stores twice as much energy as conventional alternatives and delivers seven to fifteen times more power.
AVAILABLE TODAY The origins of lithium-ion batteries, now ubiquitous in mobile electronics and increasingly so in electric vehicles, can be traced to university and industry research in the 1970s and 1980s.
NEAR AT HAND Stanford’s novel electrodes made of silicon nanoparticles and conducting polymer hydrogel dramatically improve the performance of lithium-ion batteries.
NEAR AT HAND UT Austin’s researchers have demonstrated a novel carbon paper
cell configuration that improves long-life, high-energy, and high-power lithium-sulfur batteries.
NEAR AT HAND MIT’s carbon nanofiber lithium-air battery demonstrates energy density significantly above today’s lithium-ion cells.
NEAR AT HAND UC Berkeley’s rechargeable, flexible zinc batteries aim to create a new class of lower-cost and safer energy-storage devices.
NEAR AT HAND University of Michigan’s vanadium nitride supercapacitors aim to double the energy density of the current generation of supercapacitors while dramatically reducing cost.
ON THE HORIZON Stanford’s improved highway magnetic induction system could potentially be used to wirelessly charge cars and trucks as they are driven.
ON THE HORIZON University of Michigan’s driverless vehicle research test bed will simulate public roads to examine the feasibility of connected vehicle automation.
CHAPTER 5 LED Lighting
AVAILABLE TODAY University of Michigan’s high-quality, LED-based drop-in bulbs can effectively replace the fluorescent tubes commonly used in commercial applications.
AVAILABLE TODAY A Stanford program in cross-disciplinary design thinking
has helped launch an affordable, solar-powered LED lantern for the developing world.
NEAR AT HAND MIT’s nanophosphor quantum dot
LEDs, now commercialized, affordably improve the color reproduction of highly energy-efficient LED bulbs and visual displays.
ON THE HORIZON Georgia Tech research into high-efficiency piezo-electric microwires improves the efficiency at which LEDs convert electricity to ultraviolet light by up to four times.
ON THE HORIZON An international research team has demonstrated a revolutionary electrically driven polariton laser that could significantly improve the efficiency of lasers.
ON THE HORIZON An interdisciplinary research team at Stanford has created a device that tames the flow of individual photons with synthetic magnetism.
LOOKING AHEAD Known Unknowns
Science and engineering advances often have crosscutting implications. A sampling of some that may particularly impact energy: thermoelectrics and thermionics, surfaces at the nanoscale, algorithms and software, and catalysts and computational chemistry.
GAME CHANGERS IN ACTION The US Military
Extreme energy reliability and performance demands put the US military at the leading edge of driving energy innovations. This section surveys potentially game-changing energy technologies being operationalized by the US Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force on base and in forward deployment.
CONCLUSION Energy Researchers as a Strategic Asset
About the Contributors
About the Hoover Institution’s Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on Energy Policy and the MIT Energy Initiative
Index
ABBREVIATIONS
ABE Acetone, Butanol, and Ethanol
CdTe Cadmium telluride
CDEW Counter-Directed Energy Weapon
CFL Compact Fluorescent Lamp
CIGS Copper Indium Gallium Diselenide
CO2 Carbon dioxide
CUBE Consolidated Utility Base Energy
CVD Chemical Vapor Deposition
DARPA Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
DETER Defense Technology Experimental Research
DoD Department of Defense
DOE Department of Energy
EM Electromagnetic
EOR Enhanced Oil Recovery
EPRI Electric Power Research Institute
ExFOB Experimental Forward Operating Base
FOB Forward Operating Base
GVL Gamma-Valerolactone
HCCI Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition
IED Improvised Explosive Device
IT Information Technology
HEL High-Energy Laser
JPL Jet Propulsion Laboratory
LED Light-Emitting Diode
LNG Liquefied Natural Gas
MITEI MIT Energy Initiative
MPPT Maximum Power Point Tracking
MTC Mobility Transformation Center
MTVR Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacement
oCVD oxidative Chemical Vapor Desposition
OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
OLED Organic Light-Emitting Diode
PETE Photon-Enhanced Thermionic