Transcript: Can Algae Replace Petroleum as a Clean, Low Carbon, Homegrown Fuel for our Military and More?

NPS CEBROWSKI INSTITUTE

Can Algae Replace Petroleum as a Clean, Low Carbon, Homegrown Fuel for our Military and More?

WELCOME:
MITZI WERTHEIM,
FOUNDER AND DIRECTOR,
THE ENERGY CONVERSATION

MODERATOR:
ADAM SIEGEL,
BOARD MEMBER,
THE ENERGY CONVERSATION

SPEAKERS:
Jonathan Trent,
Senior Scientist,
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Chris Tindal,
Deputy Director for Renewable Energy,
Naval Energy Office, U.S. Navy

Roy Minson,
Vice President, SAIC

William Harrison,
Acting Deputy Director,
Air Force Energy Policy, U.S. Air Force

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2009
5:30 P.M.
WASHINGTON, D.C.


Transcript by
Federal News Service
Washington, D.C.




MITZI WERTHEIM:  Good evening, everyone.  I’m so glad to see you here.  For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Mitzi Wertheim, the director of the Energy Conversation, but let me assure you, the Energy Conversation only exists because we’ve had so many wonderful people helping from the very beginning and we could never have done it without all of their help.

We’re starting this evening because we have a very full schedule, and Adam Siegel is going to be the moderator this evening but I’m going to kick it off by making the awards.  Bear with me while I read this.

On behalf of the Naval Post-Graduate School and the Energy Conversation, we would like to recognize the achievements of Dr. Alex Zhivov, a mechanical engineer in the energy branch of CERL, the Army Construction, Engineering Research Laboratory. 

In recent years, he has developed and led a number of Army, DOD and national initiatives, developing and implementing new energy technologies and promoting underutilized energy conservation technologies in new construction and facility retrofits, truly helping, and truly helping DOD meet its energy goals.

Unfortunately, he is unable to be here this evening and – Dave King (sp), where are you – (chuckles) – is here to accept the award, which is – it’s really a rather wonderful globe.  (Applause.) 

(Cross talk.)

DAVE KING:  I’ll make sure he gets it.  Thank you.

MS. WERTHEIM:  Now, our second awardee this evening is a team, and it’s a team from the Department of Agriculture because they’ve done something that I think is really forward thinking.  They have created an agriculture energy matrix, which is online.  And the program was designed to assist farmers, rural residents and the nation to respond to the energy-related challenges and opportunities. 

Its creation of the Energy Matrix, a navigational aid to work through many USDA agencies and mission areas to find alternatives and affordable energy solutions, funding for projects, available programs and information, or research and development; it really is a standout.  I will tell you, it’s not perfect but, by god, it is a beginning.  They were the first ones to get out there and start.  And if you don’t get something started, you don’t know how to figure out how to make it better. 

And here to receive the award is Bill Hagee (sp), who is the deputy administrator in business programs in the Office of the Undersecretary of the Department of Agriculture.  Bill?  (Applause.)  If you want to say something, you can.  I’m not going to take it out but I’m going to let him say a few words.

BILL HAGEE:  Well, thank you.  This is quite an honor.  And it’s quite a challenge.  The department is so large and there are so many and diverse programs within the department that support renewable energy development. 

About two-and-a-half years ago we decided to try to do something about that so there would be better collaboration, coordination within our department with regards to renewable energy, and the Matrix was a result of that.  And it is a navigational tool that the public can go in, if they’re interested in finding out what the USDA can do to support biodiesel development. 

They go in and type in “biodiesel” and it navigates them to all the various research programs we have – programs that support demonstration or commercialization of that and other renewable industries.

So it is a work in progress.  It does need some improvements.  And we are looking at possibly expanding and offering to expand the Matrix to other departments, where eventually, hopefully sometime down the road, we could have one single source where a person from the public could go in and type in a very simple biodiesel something and be navigated to all the resources within the federal government that could help support that industry.

So again, thank you for the award.  (Applause.) 

ADAM SIEGEL:  This evening we’re going to be talking about algae from a number of different perspectives.  Our first three speakers – I’d appreciate it if the speakers do come up.  Our first three speakers will be looking at this from the perspective of three different perspectives of what’s going on inside the Department of Defense. 

We, in this order, Chris Tindal will be speaking about what Navy programs, Navy activities.  Bill Harrison will be providing us perspective from the United States Air Force.  And Roy Minson, who is at SAIC but also supporting DARFA, will be speaking about it.

All four of these people – and Jonathan will be following that – all four of these people I have great respect for.  Your bios are there.  Let’s let them speak.  I will be interrupting and taking sort of a moderator’s prerogative to speak for a few minutes before Jonathan speaks.

Chris, you ready to go?

CHRIS TINDAL:  Thanks, Adam. 

MR. SIEGEL:  One thing is we did of course entitle this slightly wrong.  The title is “Can Algae Replace Petroleum as Clean, Low-Carbon, Homegrown Fuel for our Military and More?”  There is sort of this very difficult additional set, which is, at an affordable cost?  (Laughter.) 

MR. TINDAL:  Now that you said “at an affordable cost,” I’m done with mine.  Thank you.  (Laughter.) 

Okay, I know we’re working a couple of technical things back there.  I had an encryption thing on my jump drive and we’re just hooking up the other drive now.  So I guess that’s when I need to tell a joke about biofuels, but it’s so new I don’t know any jokes, so – (laughter).  We set?  Okay, good.  That’s me, and we’re going to discuss biofuels, obviously.  Next slide.

Okay, I wanted to basically give you a little bit of a snapshot of why we need to worry about biofuels.  In the overall Navy energy profile – and I must say that this is just the Navy; it is not actually the Marine Corps, but the Marine Corps are very, very close to this profile.  The big thing is that 75 percent of the Navy’s energy – Department of Navy’s energy – is in operational aspect; 25 percent is on the shore side. 

When you break it down further, over on the right side – upper right side there – 57 percent is actually in petroleum.  Then we have electricity, nuclear, and then of course our renewables as well too, with our solar and our wind.

So if you can see there, this is quite a huge amount of petroleum that we use.  When you look at the overall U.S. petroleum consumption down there in the bottom left, just 2 percent is U.S. government.  Department of Defense is 93 percent of the total U.S. government, and the Navy is 26 percent of DOD.  And then we split it up – and this is just on the blue Navy side – we split it up between maritime of 52 percent, aviation 41, and shore 6 percent. 

Now, on the Marine Corps side, it may be a little bit different than that because they technically use the Navy’s ships so they don’t have any craft there other than small (rowboats ?) and those kinds of things – things I can’t tell you about.  (Laughter.) 

But if you look at the bottom right corner there, total in FY’08 we used – the blue Navy used 29 million barrels of fuel.  So that is definitely a reason to be using biofuels, and we need to use as many different sources as possible.  Next slide, please.

So if you look at our secnav energy goals that our secretary of the Navy came out with back in the 14th of October at our Naval Energy Forum, those goals are very, very large, and those goals, if you look down at the second major bullet, “sailing the great green fleet,” in that we want to sail a green strike group in local operations by 2012 and then sail and deploy the “great green fleet” by 2016. 

And that will be made up mainly of nuclear ships, surface combatants that use hybrid electric along with biofuels.  And then we’re going to ensure that we’re flying our aircraft on biofuels as well too.  And this is – when we were setting the metrics for that, a lot of people have said, well, what if we just start out and as we go over the horizon we’re using biofuels, and then when they don’t see us anymore we just switch back to conventional?  (Laughter.)  That’s really not the intent at all.  When we say “deploy,” we mainly talk about 90 days or more of a deployment.

So we need to make sure we have plenty of biofuels by 2012 and then of course by 2016 as well too.  So you can see why we need such a small – such a large amount of biofuels because we need to be cutting back on our petroleum use. 

If you also look down at the third major bullet there, and that is reducing petroleum in non-tactical vehicles, flex-fuel vehicles is included in there as well too.  So that’s another area on the shore side where we need to make sure we’re using biofuels. 

And then, overall, on the very last bullet, the secretary of the Navy came out with a huge goal:  increasing alternative energy use Navy-wide.  By 2020, 50 percent of total DON energy consumption will come from alternative sources.  Those alternative sources, obviously the renewable aspect – solar, wind, geothermal – but then we also look at alternative fuels running our generators too.  So we want to make sure we’re using that as much as we possibly can.  Next slide, please. 

So if you see our progress to date right now, we have just recently done – did a static test on a Hornet engine back on the 13th of October, the day before the Naval Energy Forum.  I was down there for that, down in Pax River.  It was really a fantastic thing to witness, seeing an engine sitting there in the test cell and then actually having it go in an afterburner too, knowing that that’s on camelina-based.

And from what we could gather, Admiral, I think that the major thing was that we – it was a first test of an afterburner using biofuels, and that was – I think that was a historic moment.  So that was pretty cool.

Now, on the algae-based biofuels, we currently have five gallons in our inventory.  (Laughter.)  You know, you’ve got to start somewhere.  So it was hard for us to get a vial to show you because, you know, it’s such a small amount that we have, and so we hold every ounce precious.  Mitzi, don’t choke on your food; it’s okay.  (Laughter.) 

All right, so we are going to be testing that for shipboard use here in the coming months and testing it on a gas turbine 501-K Rolls Royce engine, and we will be getting 50 gallons – that’s 10 times the amount we have now – in December and then getting another 5,000 gallons in the spring as well too.

But they are planning on starting testing on this for jet fuel – use as a jet fuel as well in the springtime.  So that’s certainly a good thing.  And some of the pros and cons that I got from Rick Kamin, our major fuel test guy down at NAVAIR, is that you can grow more algae-based than you can camelina-based per acre.  And that’s certainly a good aspect of that, and I’m sure our illustrious speaker will go into that as well too.

And then some of the cons:  obviously limited production.  I’m not sure if we have half of the total production in our hands right now with five gallons but hopefully we have more than that that’s out there, and of course the cost per gallon is quite a bit up there.

And, quite honestly, we need to do it.  It’s a bold move that the secretary of the Navy put out there.  And if we don’t, then we do have other means that we can go through.  We have other types of renewable energy that we can go through.  And if we need to, we will go to that and – next slide, please – you see we’ll have to go to that forward-thinking wind energy.  (Laughter.) 

Thank you again, Admiral, for letting me borrow the slide.  I think you and I have been sharing this slide quite a bit.  But, yes, we do have an actual 100-percent renewable platform in our fleet.  The USS Constitution is still a commissioned vessel.  We have not put any surface-to-surface missiles on it yet but I’m sure that’s coming.

Anyway, next slide?  That’s all that I have and I’m sure that I’m looking forward to having your questions during the panel session as well too.  Thank you very much.  (Applause.) 

WILLIAM HARRISON:  Well, I appreciate the opportunity to talk a little bit about what’s going on in the Air Force.  Do you have my first slide? 

MR.    :  Hang on.

MR. HARRISON:  Well, while he is doing that, what I hope to tell you a little bit about is where we started with alternative fuels, under the direction of Secretary Wynne, and started looking at a variety of feedstocks and how that has really leveraged our processes to qualify and certify fuels and how that has led to collaborative programs with the commercial sector, which has led us into the hydro-treated renewable jets, of which algae is one that offers a lot of promise.

But then towards the end of my presentation I’m actually going to ask this group, so that it’s a learning experience, to help us think through the issues of lifecycle greenhouse gas, because what sounds very good on the surface and is probably the absolute right thing to do may be a challenge when you work the numbers.  So hopefully we’ll get some discussion in that space as well.  Next slide. 

Secretary Wynne led us in the Air Force towards some broad goals –

MS. WERTHEIM:  (Off mike.)

MR. HARRISON:  Yes, right over there.  And he said – asked us to test an alternative fuel in a manned aircraft, and we did that in 2007 in a B-52, and I had the privilege of being part of that team.  And then he set some other bold goals to certify our entire fleet by 2011 and to put us in a position to acquire 50 percent of our fuel from a greener source by 2016.  And we’re working down the path towards hopefully meeting that goal, and there are some challenges to do that. 

A couple of things along the way.  One of the things that he fostered in the Air Force was to develop a standardized process, and we did that by developing a mil handbook – Mil Handbook 510 – which looks at the entire Air Force enterprise, looks at the issues related to how do you certify that, and led a pathway. 

I think, to his credit, in pushing us to do that, it’s one of the few programs that’s ahead of schedule and under budget.  And by teaming with the commercial side, we’ve picked up 19 platforms that are FAA-certified when they finish their certification in August of this year.  So there’s a lot of great stuff happening in that space.  Next slide.

We started with Fischer-Tropsch fuels.  Fischer-Tropsch is a technology that is being employed around the world but not in the U.S. at the moment.  You can make the fuels from natural gas and, in fact, most of the flight tests we did were on fuels made from natural gas.  You can use coal.  In fact, if you fly into Johannesburg, all the aircraft in and out of Johannesburg will get about a 30-percent coal-derived fuel.

If you start to look at the lifecycle issue, there’s a lot of work being done in the Department of Energy where you fire coal with biomass and you can get to very environmentally friendly footprints.  And, clearly, if you can get the cost issues down and some of the technical issues – Hunter-Basun (ph) cellulosic biomass to Fischer-Tropsch shows the lowest carbon footprint of the fuels we’ve seen so far. 

So again, a lot of potential in this.  And it turned out – the next slide – we learned a lot about the fuels along the way.  And what we learned is you can make a very energy – or, excuse me, environmentally friendly-looking fuel when you just look at the fuel itself to the tailpipe of the engine.  Since these fuels are all hydrocarbons, they have a higher hydrogen content than typical petroleum fuels, they inherently per gallon have a lower CO2 footprint, about 3 percent – 3.5 percent.

The very chemical nature also reduces the amount of particulates, or the black soot coming out of jet engines.  And we’ve had a lot of measurements and actual engines running the fuels.  And also, the fuel has zero sulfur, so we reduce SOx emissions. 

So we have a fuel that the very nature of which kind of raises the bar to where we need to go environmentally with fuels.  And as you’ll see in a moment, the hydro-treated renewable jets are falling right in this pathway and we’re going to make, again, the same kind of progress. 

The challenge was actually what was not in the fuel, and what was not in the fuel are things like aromatics, and that’s created some potential issues with shrinkage of elastomers and leakage.  And the other thing is the density is a bit lower than the fuels we use today, so we compromised to get to a drop-in, something we could use right away, with a 50-50 blend.

And if you look at, statistically, any of these fuels blended with any Jet A or JP-8, or, notionally, JP-5, you would be in the range of what JP-8 looks like, be a direct drop-in, and that’s the way we’re proceeding.  Next slide, please.

We’ve gotten very interested in the last year or so with the biomass-derived jet fuels, basically where you take any feedstock that has triglycerides – be it from an animal fat or a variety of feedstocks, seeds and oils, saltwater plants like halophytes and algae – and we’ve actually, in our lab – I think the last count at AFRL we had looked it over 800 samples.

DARPA really paved the way to get us some big samples of hydro-treated renewable jets and get us into testing, including into hardware, but a lot of people have jumped in, from academia and industry, and we have a tremendous collaboration.

And actually what we’re seeing now is the beginning of the third wave of biomass-derived fuels, and those folks that are directly converting sugars and cellulosic material into fuel, and there is some exciting technologies that maybe in a year or so at one of these meetings we can talk about those, things like direct fermentation to alkane.  So there’s great stuff happening. 

We’ve also, again, worked very closely with the commercial sector through a group called CAAFI, which is the Commercial Aviation Alternative Fuels Initiative.  CAAFI brings together the entire aerospace enterprise for the commercial sector. 

It includes groups like the ATA.  And by leveraging our technical abilities in the Air Force and our processes for certification that has led to streamlined processes for certification in the FAA, and where we’re sharing data from, for example, the commercial test flights that have been going on such as the Japanese airlines and the Continental and others that you’ve read about in the paper. 

Actually, we’ve been working and we’ve followed the work that Shell recently did where they flew a 50/50 percent Fischer-Tropsch fuel to Doha to London, the first commercially paying passenger flight of using the 50/50 Fischer-Tropsch.  So again, we’re involved in looking at this and then sharing as much data as we can.  Only the things that are very specific to the military that we can’t share do we hold back.  Next slide.

As a fuels researcher, I’ve always got to share one technical chart – walk away with one thing.  What makes algae, what makes all these hydro-treated renewable jets look exciting is they look chemically just like Fischer-Tropsch fuels and they look just like JP-8, and that makes it a lot easier to make these drop-ins and move right into the aircraft.  Next slide.

Now, the challenge was laid down to us by Congress by Section 526 of the Energy and Security Act of 2007, and basically it says that we in defense cannot buy alternative fuel unless it has a greenhouse gas footprint equal to or less than petroleum.  Now, that sounds easy on the surface – next slide – next slide – but what it turned out is, when we dug into this deeper and deeper, was there was no standardized framework for doing these calculations. 

There is standardized frameworks that have been developed by groups like the Department of Energy for transportation fuels but not one for aviation.  And we wanted a document that was consistent with all the various life cycle groups that are out there, from the IPCC work, the ISO groups, even the California low-carbon standard. 

And I had the honor of chairing a team that was an interagency working group that included the Department of Energy, EPA, Defense Energy Support Center, FAA, as well as several key universities, such as MIT, University of Texas at Austin, Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech, and the University of Washington.

And we’ve developed this framework document, peer-reviewed it, and actually the only thing that’s holding us back is the Air Force system stamping the final Air Force number on the report.  (Chuckles.)  So once the bureaucracy grinds it out, which I hope is any day, we’ll put this out.

This document has been recognized by the FAA as a great way forward potentially for a national standard, and we anticipate that once that Air Force stamp is on it, they will actually try to elevate this to the national standard of how you do the calculations. 

Now, that sounds great, but there is lot of latitude in how you do these calculations, even following all the rules and framework.  Next slide.  You have to define the system boundaries.  What are the ins and outs that go into this?  The second is, how do you allocate emissions, especially if you have multiple co-products?

And then, finally, data uncertainty.  One of the things we find challenging with the hydro-treated renewable jets over the fossil sources is there just is not a lot of good tech data, and you need very good data to look at things such as process efficiencies.  For example, with algae, if you’re moving algae through raceways, how much energy does that take and what’s the footprint of that?  If you have to dry the algae, how much energy does that take?  And if you extract the algae, what is the footprint there?

So we’re very keen on working with the producers of algae to get a better handle and get better certainty in that type of data.  So data uncertainty is one of the limitations right now for us figuring out how green algae really is in terms of life cycle.  Next slide, please.

And I wanted to show you, because this is sort of the perplexing challenge that has come up.  If you just look at the value chain across algae and you look at the bottom of the chart, and you say – you start with an algae pond and you extract – collect and extract the algae and you make an algae extract that’s then trucked to a refinery of some sort or an upgrading facility. 

We have the technology in hand to hydro-process that into the jet, and we can calculate those emissions and then we can calculate the transportation the jet and we can measure the emissions from the jet.  You get one footprint number. 

The challenge with that number – again, where there is uncertainty – is you have to account for the direct and indirect land use change of building the algae ponds.  And you get a wide variety of inputs from – say, for example, if you’re in open algae ponds, today’s technology, feeding a 6,000-barrel-a-day plant – that’s about 40,000 acres of algae, quickly shrinks in size if you have bioreactors, quickly shrinks in size if you do genetic modifications – some very promising technology.

But how do we account for the direct and indirect land-use change?  And we know, and we’re working with EPA, aviation isn’t directly part of the renewable fuel standards – that’s transportation fuels – but we’re trying to be consistent and we’ve got to do that accounting.  So again, people that have suggestions on how we do that I think is important.

Then the next step is – and this is where it gets very challenging – is what makes sense environmentally is to take CO2 from, for example, a coal-fired power plant and use that to grow the algae.  Now, when I go back and now start to do the calculation, I have to include the entire life cycle of that coal-fired power plant.  When I get to the allocations piece, how do I allocate the CO2 to the electricity part versus the fuel? 

If you’re on the electricity side, zero carbon went there.  It all went to the algae.  Okay, now, if we’re on the fuel end of this, all that CO2 went to the algae, and oh, by the way, they may be venting it at night because the algae aren’t using it.  So now suddenly we’ve gone from what looks like a great fuel that would meet 526 to one that may, in a worst case, have 10 times the footprint of petroleum. 

So again, I kind of ask the group, as we go through this – in my life-cycle working group we’re struggling through this and trying to establish best practices – is the more feedback I can get on various process efficiencies, the land-use change issue, and if you include a coal-fired power plant, how that’s accounted for, and have we shot ourselves in the foot by trying to get green and have an accounting that says we’re not?

So good questions that I throw out to the group and it’s clearly a work in progress of what sounds like exactly the right thing to do, and it is the right thing to do, but the challenge is of when you account for it.  Next slide.

So kind of in summary, we are moving very fast in the Air Force with an efficient certification process.  We started with the Fischer-Tropsch at a 50/50 blend.  As I’ve showed you in the hydro-treated renewable jets, including algae derived, look just like Fischer-Tropsch, look like petroleum.  We’re moving to a 50/50 blend and probably by about 2012 we’ll be fully certified with those in our fleet.

Section 526 is going to be then the next challenge.  It’s going to be very site-specific to be compliant with the law, but it’s hard for us at this point to get our arms around that, so I’m looking for help. 

And I think one of the things too, as people demonstrate these technologies, the way you close the gap, both on having sufficient fuel for production and us for testing and using, as well as to getting very accurate numbers on a carbon footprint.  So we need some commercial demonstration plants where we can really get the numbers and see how they work.

So with that I thank you for your time.  (Applause.) 

ROY MINSON:  Good evening.  My name is Roy Minson with SAIC.  Fortunately, or unfortunately, we won one of the DARPA contracts that actually demonstrate the fact of cost-effective algae production, if you will.  And so we’ll talk later on that five gallons and see how much you’re willing to sell it for.  We’re a little late on deliveries.

With that, can we bring up the slides or do I have the control here?  As he’s bringing up the slides, one thing we have found, the engineering and being able to make jet fuel or biodiesel fuel from algae is easy.  Doing it cost-effective is the trick. 

And so one thing we’re off looking at is what we call the integrated sustainability solutions.  And what that’s really about is looking at the pre-products, your post products, and any gains you can actually have in actually producing the jet fuel.  Next chart, please.  Go ahead and give me one click, and one more, I think.                                                                 

And really what we’re trying to do here is balance the demands – if you look at it from a global standpoint, one thing we don’t want to do is end up where we started with and are today with corn, fighting with food.  We need the energy.  We definitely know we need the energy.  We want to improve the environment.

And at the same time, anytime we talk about algae, you have to talk about water.  There is a ton of water when you’re handling algae.  So looking at the water, looking at the food byproducts and such are really key in this demand.  Next chart.

So what we’re off doing today, we approach this from two different perspectives.  Our job was to look at CONUS and Hawaii and try to look at how we’re going to produce renewable fuels and specifically jet fuels for Hawaii and on the United States mainland.

What we’re doing today is we’re taking this from two different perspectives.  We’re taking a water remediation.  Today we’re pumping seven-and-a-half million gallons of water a day, producing about two metric tons of algae out of a, if you will, dirty lake of a lake that’s impaired, which we would call pollution, most of us. 

And we’re actually taking that and processing that and delivering clean water, if you will.  You can see in the picture the second diagram.  The first diagram is actually the water out of a lake in the Florida area.  Our partners asked us to keep the lake, if you will, sensitive at this point in time.  And then we could actually clean the water. 

If you look at the water when it goes back into the lake, it’s virtually bottle-ready.  It’s bottled water – a little bacteria still left in it, but all the particulates are out of it.  And then what we’re doing is we’re taking that algae and actually processing that algae over into biofuels.  Next chart?  Oh, I’m sorry.  You can leave it there.                                                                          

The other part we’re doing is we’re in Hawaii, right next to PMRF in Kawai, and what we’re doing in the shrimp farms over there – actually have converted a shrimp pond – seven-tenths of an acre shrimp pond, over in Kawai and actually have that pond up and running. 

In Hawaii, of course, you don’t have the impaired lakes.  It’s a beautiful place.  I think Mitzi is going – anybody that wants to go to tomorrow morning, Mitzi covers it, 8:00, downstairs.  We’ll all go to Kawai to look at this.  (Laughter.) 

But what we’re able to do in that one there is actually being able to grow the algae, and what we’re looking for there is actually some of the – as you were just speaking about, we’re actually looking at growing sorghum and other plants to actually be more integral as a pre-product to the algal ponds, and being able to feed some of the CO2 and the refineries together.

Then as we start to look at this, really what you’re looking at is there is a lot of opportunity to trade space, as you start looking at this from a business model standpoint.  Oil and gas, what they’re doing currently, we’re finding out, is they’re pumping a lot of water in to move and extract the oil and gas.  And in doing so, you end up with pollution problems.  Well, the reality is algae is a great cleaner upper, if you will.  It likes to get in there and eat up all those materials. 

And then what we’re doing is looking at harvesting the algae and cleaning the water.  So again, from an integrated sustainability standpoint, we’re using the environment in the correct manner.

The other things we’re looking at is, from renewables, some of the oil we’re taking out at the lakes, or the biomass, is actually a good byproduct to actually burn and generate as co-generation.  Agriculture – pre and post products.  Peanuts we’re looking at in Hawaii as well as sorghum and sugar cane, and actually taking some of the sugars and converting them over to heavy fuels. 

And the teammate we’re working with today we think in the next decade or so we can be up to about 400 million gallons of biofuel a year in the state of Hawaii as well as thousands of gigawatts of electricity, burning the byproducts.

And, again, one of the key things we’re looking at in Hawaii is being able to – one issue they have today – it’s actually very interesting.  Today if a calf is born, they put it on a flight and they ship it back to California; they fatten it up; they actually put it back on the plane, take it back to Hawaii to slaughter, because the cost of the feed is so high they could no longer sustain an agriculture business and a livestock dairy and everything else.  So there is a real need in a sustainability model to have feed, to have fuel, and actually clean up the water as you’re doing that.

The last one is of course everybody is looking at CO2 use – important, key issue there.  You need to actually integrate that into your whole process.  Next chart?  

So there is potentially our jet fuel for the 21st century.  You can see there, top left-hand picture is actually in China.  The Gulf of Mexico, you can see.  We’ve created some great algae ponds.  We’re trying to dig them up and actually grow it.  The reality is nature and humans have taken care of this problem for us. 

So we’re looking at trying to clean up some of the disasters that we have in our lands today, as well as produce some of the products that we have and need.  In the right-hand corner is actually the Chesapeake Bay.  It’s actually interesting to look at these on the NOAA sites, and all around the world you can see where population is.  We have great algal ponds. 

Anyways, I look forward to your questions.  Thank you very much.  (Applause.) 

MR. SIEGEL:  And if you could bring up my slides.  I want to take an opportunity – this has worked very well, the essence of moving up to scale, because as Roy has started to talk about sustainability and integrating a system and systems, our next speaker, Jonathan Trent from NASA, really does take a very holistic look at the world and at the challenges we face.  Are you going to bring up my slides?  Oh, there we go.

Now, this, by the way, is a test.  We have too many people in this room who should recognize this button.  If you don’t, it’s with inflation now.  But anyways, what Jonathan does is he takes a look at the multitude of challenges that we face.  And then also, we’re a couple slides in.  Go back one slide, at least. 

And he looks to figuring out how we can get winds against the multitude of challenges, of how can we support our energy independence, creating jobs, fostering that economic activity at a cost-effective price, which is a long-term economic strengthening of the nation and the globe, addressing negative environmental impacts that don’t necessarily have to do with climate change, but oh, by the way, helping to address climate change as well.  Next slide.

There are actually quite a few examples, if we think about this.  Energy efficiency.  We’ve had one of the great speakers of “negawatts” – the creator of “negawatts,” I think, Amory Lovins, who has spoken here before. 

Greening public schools – the most cost-effective way to improve public education.  We can improve performance significantly while cutting energy use, improving the environment, improving student health and, again, saving money.

Net-zero buildings.  A large-scale program was proposed early this year, trying to get into the stimulus package.  It would have only created about 10 million jobs, probably at a net-zero cost for the federal government.  Electrifying rail, plug-in hybrid electric school busses, desert tech – I’ll be glad to speak, as people know, for hours on any of these. 

Desert tech – next slide, please.  Desert tech some of you might have heard about.  This is a concept for linking renewables from literally Iceland through Saudi Arabia – solar, wind, hydro.  Nuclear power is, well, using hydropower in Europe as storage for the intermittency of solar and wind. 

But if you really start to push this, when you’re in North Africa or you’re in the Middle East by Israel and the Palestinian areas, the waste product of the preferred concentrated solar power happens to be water that can be used – desalinated water that can be used for agriculture, that agriculture can actually be supporting biochar to enrich the soil, creating a lot of jobs while sequestering carbon and reclaiming – greening the desert.

This sort of “win six,” whipping inflation now, six different paths, is the type of – is really – when I had the chance to hear Jonathan, it was really quite exciting because he thinks at a very, very high level.  And behind his back I went and checked with some of his colleagues who really are very impressed with him at very, very detailed scientific levels. 

And the ability of someone to think at this complex nature from the very highest levels of policy and our challenges down to holding real competency in very specific domains is something that I have great deal of respect for.  And I hope that all of you find the same respect for Jonathan that I already have.  (Applause.) 

JONATHAN TRENT:  With regard to the context, I think I won’t let you down, Adam.  If we can get my slides up. 

MR.    :  Anytime you’re ready.

MR. TRENT:  I’m ready.  So when Mitzi and Adam invited me to come to this meeting, I felt a very special circumstance here because, really, we stand at a very important time in history.  And I thought when I was getting ready to give this presentation, what should I and what could I tell this audience in particular of the position we’re in right now?

And I felt like, how can I give you the grandest possible perspective?  And to do that, and being from NASA, I thought – I went to some cosmology friends of mine and – can we dim the lights a little bit – and I show you here a  model of what it looks like to have a star forming anywhere in the galaxies of the universe. 

And from there we scan out and we can look at this perfectly good model done by Sandy Faber at UC Santa Cruz of our solar system formation, where you see what’s called the disc – the solar disc, and how the planets are formed from the dust that is in the solar system that formed the star.

And from there we zoom in to look at where our sun is and where we are in relation to the 99.8 percent of the total mass, which is in the sun – hydrogen 74 percent, helium 24 percent, and 1 percent of all the other elements.  And now we can zoom in even farther and see where we are relative to the so-called gas giants, the icy – like Jupiter and Saturn, the icy planets of Uranus and Neptune, and then the solid-earth planets like the Earth, Venus, Mars and Mercury.

And what we realize when we look at these planets is we realize that our planet is very, very special, partly because it has water.  Now, all of these planets had water in the early formation of our solar system.  Water was delivered to the planets, most likely, in some out-gassing, but mostly was delivered by various impact events.

But our planet, unlike Venus and unlike Mars, hasn’t lost its water, and that’s crucial to understand that the biology has, to a very, very large extent, been responsible for keeping the water on our planet.

But more important really is to understand the timeline.  Where are we in this process, the process of the formation of our solar system and where we now are in time?  And it’s very difficult to try to convey the meaning of time without using some spatial metaphors.

And so I thought, let’s map the length of the Earth onto a football field.  So the Earth’s history goes back 4.5 billion years.  And so we’re going to put 4.5 billion years mapped onto a hundred yards.

So the Earth, which cooled fairly quickly and became a solid sphere at about 4.5 billion years, and then the bombardment period where all that dust and the clouds starts to accumulate ended about 3.8 billion years. 

And so let’s superimpose on this now where things stand.  Life arose already on about the 20-yard line; 3.4 billion years we had good evidence of life.  There must have been something on the planet before that.  You can see the tiny dots.  These are microscopic organisms. 

And we know these organisms are there before we have fossil evidence of them.  And we can see these similar types of organisms called sciaena bacteria that formed these things called stromatolites, which are rock-like structures.  And we have good fossil evidence for these.

So these sciaena bacteria, which accumulated way back here on the 20-yard line, used the carbon dioxide which was in the atmosphere – and the atmosphere only had a small amount of oxygen back then, about 2 percent – used the carbon dioxide sunlight and water to make more sciaena bacteria, and produced the oxygen that accumulated in the atmosphere.

And if you then plot what’s going on on the Earth in terms of the atmosphere, you realize that there’s been about three major atmospheres.  The early one was mostly CO2 and methane with some ammonia gas, and nitrogen. 

And so, you see the accumulation of oxygen so that 2.2 billion years ago, at about the 50-yard line, the amount of oxygen accumulated to a point where the iron in the ocean rusted and we have evidence for this in the deep-sea sediments.  And then at about 1.6 billion years ago we see the oxygen reach levels that are almost similar to where we are today. 

The other thing that’s interesting to remember is that the distribution of land on the planet has been very different during the course of history, and this image here shows what’s called Gondwanaland, where all the continents on the Earth were more or less together.  They were in this large super-continent around Antarctica, and that’s already only on the 13-yard line.  Thirteen yards from the goal there was the Earth’s distribution – the land distribution was all around Antarctica, and about four yards from the goal it started to break up to form where we are today. 

So what about the organisms?  I’ve told you the bacteria and bacteria-like organisms called archaea have dominated the planet for this entire period of time.  And don’t get me wrong; they still dominate the planet.  There are 10 times more bacterial cells on our bodies than there are human cells.  The bacteria are here to stay.  I study bacteria that live in boiling sulfuric acid.  They live everywhere on the planet.

But what’s interesting to realize is that multicellular organisms didn’t really show up until about the 20-yard line.  I mean, there were some multicellular organisms about 1.4 billion years ago, but at the 20-yard line we start to see real multicellularism.

The first complex organisms – this all happened in the last 13 yards – it’s called the Cambrian explosion – 580 million years.  And here are the jellyfish and the plants on about the 10-yard line and the nine-yard line.  The fish and the amphibians and the insects show up at the eight-yard line.  The dinosaurs get here on the six-yard line and they disappear on the one-yard line. 

The first flowers aren’t here until about the two-yard line.  Before that there were no flowers on the planet.  The mammals were around about the same time as the dinosaurs but they really became dominant when the dinosaurs disappeared, and the dinosaurs disappeared because of a major impact, we think, about 65 million years ago.

But what about humans?  We’ve been talking about all these animals, which really represent just the last 10 yards.  Humans are between 3 and 4 million years, a human-like primate.  Three or 4 million years maps on this chart at somewhere between 2.5 and 3 inches from the goal.  And, by the way, the grass that’s on this field, our football field, doesn’t show up until about one inch from the goal.  

Well, okay, so here we are, Homo sapiens – .2 inches from the goal, two-tenths of an inch from the goal.  That’s where we are right now.  So how does that compare to what’s going on?  If we map the last 12,000 years, and we realize that up to this time there have been very few people on the planet until we see that in about 1830, over a course of about 10,000 years, we had this very low number of people on the planet.  It took us that much time to reach 1 billion people; it took us that much time to get 5 billion more people on the planet.

In fact, it’s a really interesting plot to start at the 1,000 A.D. at the time of the Vikings and to look at what the Earth was like in terms of what we estimate the populations to be where each of these white dots represents a million people, or what we think was a million people.

So you’ll see China and India at the time of the Crusades was heavily populated.  The Central American, the Mayans, and then the Mongols came to China and you see the dots disappearing – (laughter) – as the Mongols wiped out millions of people.

And after the Mongols did their population control, the Black Plague came to Europe and killed half of all the people living in Western Europe.  Half of all the people disappeared.  You see the dots disappearing in the graphic here. 

And so, in the 14th century, the population was disappearing in Europe, but China and India were recovering very quickly.  And the time that the Europeans were going off to find a trade route across the ocean to find India and China – the population in China and India is growing very quickly – the European population is growing and the population of natives in the North American continent, once the settlers got there and brought tuberculosis, got really wiped out very quickly.  Influenza, tuberculosis killed them very effectively.

But look at China and India already at this time, heavily populated parts of the world, living a completely agrarian existence, not very mechanistic, living very close to the land in the agricultural world.  And then in the 19th century we have the industrial age.  Already these parts of the world are heavily populated.

But now, in about the middle of the 19th century, we start exploiting oil.  We start to remove oil from the soil.  And the World Wars come along at a time in the 20th century where the population had already reached such a large number it doesn’t have a big impact.  And then we get to the 21st century and now we see what is predicted to be a population of maybe as many as 9 billion people. 

So what we just looked at is called exponential growth.  And what I plot here is here is the Vikings, Genghis Khan and Black Plague.  These were population control systems.  And here is Christopher Columbus.  He also controlled the population in North America.  Elizabeth.  And here is Newton and Franklin and Edison.

And here you see this incredible population growth and this huge spurt of technology in the last 200 years.  If we plot on this same plot, the measured and predicted and inferred values for CO2 in our atmosphere, during this same period of time the plot looks like this.  I know there are people who don’t believe this is anthropogenic, but let’s just say there is a remarkable correlation.  (Laughter.) 

And you can plot the temperature anomaly, which is just the temperature difference, and you can see in a blue line here is measured – inferred based on isotopic measurements, and the red lines are actual measurements of the temperature anomaly. 

So here we are in the 21st century.  The population, we’re now talking about sustainability and the population – the world population has increased at a rate that I just showed you.  This is rather unprecedented.  We reached a billion in 1830.  A hundred years later we were at 2 billion.  In 1960 – most of the people in this room were born around 1960 or certainly before that – the population was only half of what it is now – less than half of what it is now.

The predictions from the United Nations are that we will get to somewhere around 9 or 10 billion people by 2050 – by 2050.  So this is where we are, and the real question when we talk about sustainability – are we trying to sustain what, the population, the growth of the population?  How many people can the Earth sustain?  This is really the crux of the problem. 

Now, it is true that fertility on the planet is decreasing, and as people become more affluent, like in Europe and in the United States, their rate of reproduction goes down.  That’s not the issue here.  The issue is, what is the trajectory?  We don’t know.  But if, as some people predict, it’s going to be that we need to get down to 4 billion people – I won’t even read you the statistics in the number of people we have to lose.

But this is only part of the problem.  The other part of the problem is that we in the United States are at about .3 billion.  In fact, if you look at the population density, just as I showed you in the little video, China and India continue to be very heavily populated parts of the world. 

The red dots here indicate the areas of highest density of people.  You see it in Indonesia and China and India.  You see it in Europe, parts that are very highly populated here.  You can see London and parts of Great Britain.  And the United States is fairly sparsely populated, relatively speaking – .3 billion people compared to India, which is 1.2 billion, and China, which is 1.34 billion.

The problem is we represent less than 5 percent of the world’s population, but if you look at energy use on the globe by looking at the night sky image, that I’m sure many of you are familiar with, you realize that we’re using over 25 percent of the resources. 

This is not fundamentally bad and I’m not making a value judgment about this, but what I’m telling you is if China and India decide they need to live like we do, we’re going to need five Planet Earth’s to sustain that lifestyle.  We know we don’t have five Planet Earths, so we need to come up with some alternatives here.

And those alternatives have to be sustainable in the face of resource limitations, because that population growth that we just saw is combined with the fact that we’re running out of resources.  I mean, if you think about the finite nature of the planet, we have to start going away from being hunters and gatherers to being more in line with this concept that we’re going to use and reuse resources sustainably.

No matter how you cut it with regard to petroleum products, we’re probably close to peaks.  And, indeed, if you look at this plot, which shows the growing gap between production and discovery of conventional oil, you realize – the green bars are showing past discoveries, the blue is predicted future discoveries, and the red is the production – has exceeded discoveries since 1984. 

The fact is that even if we could find more oil, even if we do start using the Canadian tar sand, even if we do continue to find oil offshore of Brazil, we’re going to run into a continued aggravation of the amount of carbon dioxide we’re putting into the planet. 

Well, we can say, well, look, it’s worth keeping our lifestyle the way it is, but that’s really not the fundamental question.  The fundamental question is, are we going to be responsible for the consequences of continuing to live the way we do?  So we’re really asking the question, what’s going on in the future?  What will be our legacy? 

So I’ve taken some data from Terry Root at Stanford, who is a member of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, and they’ve made some predictions.  This is over a thousand scientists somehow agreeing – which is amazing to me, as you know scientists – that there are going to be changes that are going to be occurring as we go on in history.

And they suggest that we’ve already seen a seven-tenth of a degree temperature change.  This is impacting the amount of fresh water.  There are droughts and fires and floods and storms.  And the predictions are by 2030 we’re going to see 20 to 30 percent of all species that we know about disappear from the planet.

The CO2 in the atmosphere is partly problematic because it warms the surface, but it’s really problematic because it acidifies the oceans.  This has happened before.  It happened 250 million years ago.  On those graphs I would have shown you, that was sort of about the time just before the dinosaurs really took off, about the six-yard line.  It was called the Permian extinction. 

Ninety-five percent of all the species on the Earth disappeared.  And we think it’s because there was massive volcanism over a few hundred years’ period as the continent started to break up in an area that is now Siberia, and that put a load of CO2 into the atmosphere and it acidified the oceans and warmed the planet in a way that stratified the oceans and caused the oceans to essentially become stable so they no longer turned over and there was no longer primary productivity. 

It led to a very significant change in the atmosphere, even a change in the amount of oxygen.  It maybe dropped to as low as 15 percent.  And this caused the acidification of the ocean and the huge die-off of species.

The IPCC is predicting that the ecosystems are going to continue to be stressed through 2050.  By the 2080s they’re talking about all the global wetlands being flooded and then as much as 40 percent of the known species disappearing by the end of the century.

Now, if you think about what’s happening and the rate that it’s occurring compared to that chart that I showed you before, the distance on my plot is .00004 inches, right.  I mean, a hundred years on that plot scale is tiny. 

So what are we really talking about?  And I don’t really want to depress you.  I mean, the whole point is that we’re trying to figure out solutions, right?  We’re talking about sustainability.  It’s become a buzzword.  But the reason I wanted to talk to you is because we recognize the population is large.  I mean, we’re incredibly well-adapted for reproducing, but more importantly, we’ve developed an amazing lifestyle.

I mean, if you think about it, it’s a fantastic way that we are now able to live.  We’re starting to worry – I mean, we’re even conscious about other species.  We’re worried about other species on the planet, which I think is wonderful, and the technology that has made this all possible is also part of the problem.  And the issue now is, particularly people in this audience, can we be clever enough to anticipate the problems that seem to be coming up, and can we use technology to help us get around this problem?

Now, I’m from NASA so I can show you technologies that are pretty impressive.  We invest a lot of money in things like – we did a recent launch of Aries.  I think it was about $1.2 billion for about a 20-minute flight, or it was maybe a 14-minute flight, just to test the engines.

We’re investing heavily in technology.  We have the space station, which is floating in space.  We probably shouldn’t talk about how much that costs.  (Laughter.)  And we are able to keep people alive in space.  Exposed in the space environment, an astronaut will live about 8 seconds.  In other words, we’ve created an environment like Earth in a little suit around that person to keep that person alive.

I mean, all of these things are remarkable and they become even more remarkable when you think about what it would mean to try to keep someone alive on the moon.  So we talk about what it would take, and just the mental exercise is so important in thinking, how would we keep somebody alive on the moon?  We would have to create every quality that we have and take for granted on the Earth.  Even in the room now we’re breathing, and the food we’re eating, and the water we’re drinking and so on. 

So I want to talk to you about biofuels but I want to take you sort of through where we are with biofuels and where we need to be with biofuels.  And so the title of the presentation I should give you is “beyond biofuels.” 

And the reason we have to go beyond biofuels is because all that stuff about population – we can’t use agricultural land and we cannot use fresh water nor fertilizer.  And it has to be feasible, affordable, scalable, sustainable.  And, by the way, we should have it done now.  We should have done it yesterday.  We should have done it quite a time ago, probably not as far back as Malthus (ph) but certainly we should have thought about it a lot longer. 

And, by the way, the picture in the background here is a picture of the Earth from Mars taken by Spirit.  It’s wandering around on Mars – one of our amazing technological feats – and you can’t hardly see the Earth, but it’s about the size of the pointer right there, next to the pointer, that’s the view of the Earth from Mars.

So by the way, it’s very obvious that we cannot compete for food.  It just makes us look bad.  But really, seriously, in 2007, 75 million more people were predicted by the Food and Agricultural Organization to have gone into the undernourished category because of biofuels.  That brings the number to 923 million people that are undernourished because of the redirecting of food towards biofuels. 

But let me tell you about how green some of these biofuels are.  And I’m going to show you some data.  And the data is going to include where are the greenhouse gas outputs for corn, sugarcane, switchgrass, how much water they use, how much fertilizer, what kind of pesticide requirements, how much energy is required, and how much land of our crop land would be required to produce enough of these crops to produce just half of our fuel requirements. 

We all know that corn is not a good plan.  And the reason is that if you look at the greenhouse gas output in kilograms of CO2 produced per megajoule of energy – that’s all the different components:  growing, harvesting, refining and burning the fuel – gas is a number of 94 kilograms per megajoule and corn is not so much better.  Besides, it uses a load of water, fertilizer, pesticide and high energy.  You don’t really get very much energy back for the amount of energy invested.  It may be as high as 1.7 above the energy input; it may be as low as 0.7 depending on how you calculate it. 

Sugarcane is a bit better in terms of the amount of land you need.  You see, in corn, you need 200 percent of the land and area in the United States just to be able to grow enough corn to get half of our needs, so we’d obviously have to import a lot of this.  Sugarcane, we’d only have to use about half of our land, but it takes a lot of water and fertilizer and et cetera. 

Switchgrass is much better.  At least is has a negative CO2 – that is, it takes up more CO2 than you need to produce in terms of megajoules.  It uses a medium to large amount of water.  In fact, it may be a lot of fertilizer depending on how tall the plants you want to grow and then pesticides may be required and so on. 

But let’s address this issue with water because this is actually in some ways in my mind this kills our interest, or should kill our interest in biofuels.  And I’m taking these data from some Dutch colleagues who published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences just recently a paper in which they looked at the whole water footprint.  And what that means is they looked at how much water does the plant transpire – that is, how much water does the plant actually exude in order to grow, and how much water gets polluted in processing, in growing the water.  And this is water that’s irrigation and rainwater and all other components.

So for corn, we can ask the question how much water does it take to grow enough corn to produce one liter of ethanol?  And the answer they came up with was about 2,130 liters.  So let’s ask the same question about soybean:  How much water would it take to grow enough soybean to get one liter of oil?  And the number they came up with was 14,000 liters of water. 

So the other problem with soybean is if we’re going to be importing our biofuels from – because we’re not going to be able to grow enough soybean in the United States then we’re talking about Brazil and destroying the rainforests to be able to do this. 

Well, rapeseed is what they use in Europe and the number there isn’t much better.  Jatropha, which is an arid plant and grows in what seem to be very low water conditions, actually uses a lot of water when you take everything into consideration.  So I don’t really want to belabor this point here.  Soy, we already talked about the high water.  You also need huge amount of our crop land, 200 percent to grow half of our needs.

But the reason people before me in this panel have talked about algae is because algae looks good on the face of it.  It’s a good green.  It takes a lot of negative greenhouse.  It grows very fast.  It’s a small plant.  It’s been around for a long time.  It doesn’t use very much fertilizer, potentially.  It has low pesticide, potentially.  It can be high energy.  It may or may not be low in water.  I have question marks in all of these. 

But the amount of area is very low.  And the reason the amount of area is very low is if you look at the gallons per acre per year of biodiesel produced, or biofuels produced from soy, it’s about 50 gallons per acre per year.  If you compare that to sunflower, it’s about 100 gallons per acre per year.  Canola or rapeseed is about 160.  Jatropha, which is an oily seed, is about 200.  Palm oil is the best at about 600 gallons per acre per year. 

Now, algae in comparison is between 2,000 and 5,000 gallons per acre per year.  So it’s much better in terms of its potential productivity.  And what is that all about?  Well, there are algae species like Botryococcus braunii, which is a colony of individual algae cells that actually secretes oil, diesel, kerosene and gasoline.  It secretes hydrocarbons.  We don’t completely understand why it’s secreting hydrocarbons.  Most algaes store hydrocarbons in a form of a usable triglyceride.  It’s just like we store fat.  They store oils and they usually store them inside their cells.  Botryococcus secretes these oils.

This is interesting because if you compare the area of land that you’d have to cultivate in soy to be able to grow enough soy to produce our aviation fuel needs of about 21 billion gallons a year, the plot looks like this.  And if you look at how much algal area you’d need to plot or you’d need to grow on land, it would be about like that.  In other words, this is still 10.5 million acres – an area 128 miles by 128 miles – but it’s a hell of a lot less than we need in soy.  And the data look even worse for corn.

But if you look at where we’re getting our biodiesel you realize, well, even though we don’t get very much oil back from soy, we get many barrels of that compared to what we get from algae.  Algae data are low.  Is that because we don’t know how to get the algae oil out?  And the answer is no.  We already have species that are good producers of oil. 

We know how to cultivate algae.  We do know how to harvest and extracts the oil.  And as we heard from the previous panel members, we know how to separate it, process it, purify it, make it into a biofuel.  I’m not saying we do this economically but we can in fact go this pathway and UOP and others have made this pathway work.

So what’s the problem with algae?  So part of the problem is that when we go to try to grow algae, we have two dominant methods that everybody is talking about.  We’re either talking about growing them in open circulating ponds or closed bioreactors.  Open circulating pounds have been around for about 50 years.  It’s a great idea.  It’s very inexpensive.  You just – you dig a fairly shallow trench.  You line it or you don’t line it depending on the soil.  You get appropriate water running in this system.  You have a paddle wheel to stir them, and you see the green color, the algae, are growing pretty well.

And there’s lots of examples of people who are successfully growing algae this way.  Here are some aerial photos of Cyanotech in Hawaii.  They grow an algae that you see this bright red color.  It’s called Haematococcus and it produces a red pigment that’s a carotenoid.  It’s an antioxidant.  It’s used to stain those farm-raised salmon so they don’t look a putrid brown when you buy them.  They in fact look like they’re supposed to.  They’ve kind of bright orange.  Anyway, this pigment sells for about $5,000 to $7,000 a kilogram. 

The other people – like in Japan, they grow lots of algae for food.  They’re also growing algae in Australia.  This is a company in Israel growing an organism that grows in salt water.  And they sell the product of that organism for about $4,000 a kilogram.  If we wanted to scale this to be able to do biofuels, first we want to do it in a place where we’re not going to compete for agricultural land, so we should do it in the desert.  And this is kind of an artist conception from the National Renewable Energy Labs.  This was supposed to be – this is a very old picture.

But you can ask – when you look at this picture – what’s wrong with it?  And the answer, of course – at least the first thing that comes to mind – is water.  Well, you could say, oh, but we’re going to fill these with seawater.  And, yes, we could fill them with seawater.  But then you have to worry about evaporation because the algae can only cope with salt in certain concentrations.  So we have to replenish the water and that still uses a lot of water.  There’s other problems, like how do you get the nutrients there?  How do you get the algae out of there?  What do you deal with weed species, and so and so on?  There’s lots of problems.

Well, the solution to those problems, at least some of those problems, is to do everything in a closed photobioreactor.  This is a much higher-tech way of doing it.  You can run these systems with computers.  They’re sealed systems.  They have filters and pumps and so on.  And there’s lots of examples of these types of closed bioreactors around the world.  Here are some in Germany, in England.  And these things – another one in Germany – they have all different shapes and sizes.  We have great ingenuity for growing algae in such a way. 

But to grow algae for fuels is not a $5,000 to $2,000 or $3,000 enterprise per kilogram of algae.  We’re talking about 10 cents a kilogram to be able to make it into a fuel.  So we can ask, if we’re going to scale this up to be able to do it as a fuel, we want to do in the desert, but what’s wrong with this picture? 

Other than infrastructure and the cost of building these things in this environment is very high, the other problem is that these are solar thermal collectors.  You have to cool them because they’re standing in the desert.  So you’d have to cool them.  So how could you cool them?  Well, you would cool them by running fresh water over the surface of them and the evaporated cooling will do the trick but then you have a water problem again.  So the other energetic ways to cool them are really going to be too expensive. 

In other words, there are serious challenges with the existing methods that we’ve been trying to use to grow algae and that’s why there are successful algae companies but they’re growing high-value products.  They’re growing food.  They’re growing nutraceuticals.  They’re growing pharmaceuticals or they’re growing cosmetic products. 

So what about the oceans?   Algae grow in the ocean.  They’re dominant in the ocean.  Why don’t we just go into the ocean and collect the algae that are existing in the ocean?  In fact, one of the previous speakers suggested that might be a really good thing to do.  Now, there’s a problem with this and I could tell you this from firsthand because I have Ph.D. in oceanography and I spent nine years of my life going around the world diving in the open ocean. 

So we go out in these big ships across the oceans between Woods Hole down at the Cape and Scotland or between San Francisco and Hawaii and Tahiti and New Zealand.  And we would launch ourselves in these little boats and we would dangle the line down to about 20 meters underwater, just about 60 feet, and we would dive out there until the sharks chased us away.  We always had a shark watch. 

But what I can tell you is that most of the time, the water in the open ocean is very clear.  The organisms that live there are dealing with a completely desert-like environment.  And this is a typical inhabitant of that environment, probably not something many people in the room are familiar with.  It’s a thing called a salp.  It’s a pelagic tunicate.  It’s made mostly of water, like most of the rest of these organisms living in this environment.

But if you notice in this picture, you see these tiny dots in the environment.  Well, that’s sort of the distribution of things.  These organisms are exquisitely adapted to live in this environment.  They can filter particles out that are one micron and they’re 94 percent water and 3 percent salt.  I mean they’re only a little bit of biology there that goes along with the lifestyle that is adapted to living in a water environment.

You occasionally see an algae bloom.  These happen.  You see these big blooms of algae.  And what happens is – they’re rare but when you do see them in certain locations, they’re very common, especially when there’s been human pollution involved.  But still, even where there’s high pollution, for the most part these places are too dilute; they’re spatially and temporally dispersed and most important, the species composition doesn’t necessarily include species that have high amounts of oil. 

Okay.  So now I’m going to tell the solutions that I’ve come up with, which I think is really kind of cool and then we can spend some time afterward talking about it.  And that is, can we move from being hunters and gatherers to being farmers of the ocean – but not just a typical aquaculture – but can we grow algae in the ocean? 

And I want to tell you about a pet project then that I call Offshore Membrane Enclosures for Growing Algae, or OMEGA.  So the OMEGA concept takes advantage of the fact that the United States is dumping somewhere between 35 and 40 billion gallons of wastewater into the ocean every day.  So that’s 35 to 40 billion gallons a day of wastewater that looks sort of like this in some places.  And so this is wastewater for us but very high nutrients for growing algae. 

So here’s the plan.  So we take wastewater which is treated enough to be dumped into the ocean but still causes algae blooms, which is what we heard from previous speakers being a valuable thing, and we fill plastic enclosures.  And these plastic enclosures float at the surface and they’re filled with fresh water.  They’re filled with wastewater.  It’s fresh water.  And they’re floating in an ocean of 3.5 percent salt. 

That is to say if these leak – which the engineering being what it is, they may leak occasionally – the algae that are inside here can’t grow in the ocean.  They’re freshwater algae.  They cannot live in the ocean and the water that would leak out is the treated wastewater, which we’re currently dumping in the ocean.  The algae would grow on the nutrients.  We would harvest those algae and make biofuels and bring fertilizer back to land and make biochar.  And because it’s 3.5 percent salt, we can actually dewater the algae by osmosis.  I’ll tell you more about that. 

Here’s the plan:  We franchise this out to the fishermen because they don’t have anything to do anyway pretty soon – (laughter) – and so they launch these things in what used to be big shrimp boats or big long-line boats.  They already have their ships more or less set up, or the military could do this, to try to meet their green needs for the green fleet.  And here’s how it works.

These things floating at the surface, they’ve been filled near one of these wastewater things.  They collect solar energy.  They actually treat the wastewater and the nutrients and CO2 – we can talk about where the CO2 comes from.  And they’re exchanging oxygen to the – they’re releasing oxygen into the atmosphere as they pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. 

They’re mixed by wave energy because they’re just made of lightweight plastic.  Unlike the bioreactors on land, which have to hold water inside and have air outside, these have water inside and water outside so they don’t have to be so robust.  And the temperature’s controlled by the surrounding ocean.  And we do osmosis for dewatering. 

Let me tell you a little bit about what this means.  So here’s what the bag looks like with algae growing in it.  Osmosis is an interesting process.  We’re not talking about reverse osmosis, which is a very energetic process.  We’re talking about forward osmosis.  This is free to us.  In fact, it’s energetically very favored.  So this is a culture.  These two plastic bags, little mini-OMEGAs, had the same amount of fluid in them and three days later, this one has got forward osmosis membranes; this one does not.  Three days later, the algae are concentrated.  But it’s better than that. 

Not only are the algae being concentrated because the water is going out through the – because these things are floating in salt water – but also the nutrients that are inside the wastewater, which is put in both of these bags, are concentrated because the nutrients can’t get through the forward osmosis membranes.  This is really good.  The algae are growing 20 to 30 percent faster. 

So would this really work in the ocean?  Well, so we had a small grant to do this from Google so we had almost no money to do this.  So we went out to the local pier.  This is Capitola Pier, near where I live.  We set something up on an existing mooring.  We took some water from a creek that was running into the bay right there so nobody would complain that we were going to contaminate the ocean with fresh water.  And we did a high-tech sampling you can see here. 

And we built the cheapest possible plastic enclosure we could make out of a construction-grade polyurethane and we filled it with fresh water floating on the surface.  And ultimately, we would build something that would be much more sort of consistent with sort of a bio-inspired system.  And the trick here was just, would this thing survive and how would it work?  Would it mix?  Would it be able to withstand the ocean conditions just hanging off a buoy?  And the prospects are looking pretty good. 

So here’s the concept.  We float these things in the surface and we’re really not growing algae.  We’re doing that, but we’re really processing wastewater.  I mean, right now we’re dumping a whole lot of wastewater into the ocean and that wastewater is losing the nutrients.  And it’s secondary treated, but if we do what I just described, we’re doing tertiary treatment. 

Why is that good?  Because it prevents those big algae blooms from occurring in the natural weed species and we have the algae bloom happening in a container so that we don’t cause what are called dead zones.  I can give you a whole lecture about dead zones.  I won’t do that.  Most importantly, we’re going to reclaim the nutrients that are in the wastewater and bring them back on land as fertilizer. 

So far the economics of the OMEGA system are wastewater treatment and nutrient reclamation and environmental remediation; nothing about algae yet.  There’s some CO2 sequestration because we’ve measured the amount of carbon dioxide we’re sequestering.  And there’s some algae products adding to the overall economics model.

What are the challenges?  Well, there’re some biology challenges.  There’re some engineering challenges.  There’re some economic challenges and, of course, there’s not only the environmental challenges that are the obvious ones, but also policy and political challenges we have to overcome. 

I want to take the last few minutes and tell you then about the logistics because I want to give you some feeling for how reasonable this is.  First of all, you have to understand that the infrastructure already exists.  The city of Los Angeles, for example, has a pipe that goes five miles offshore and pumps 350 million gallons a day into the Santa Monica Bay.  The infrastructure is already there.  It’s a 12-foot diameter pipe.  And so, that part of it is sort of already done. 

So here’s just an artist conception based on my rambling.  We have a ship which deploys these plastic enclosures and we build a manifold so this is instead of coming out of the end of a pipe we have this thing that is a manifold.  We have lift bags which give us sort of a free transport of our OMEGA system down to dock with this source of wastewater.  It then fills and as it fills it becomes buoyant because it’s filling fresh water into a plastic enclosure.  The buoyancy of a quarter acre of this would be about five tons.  It would then be towed off.  And the system would then be incubated in a site nearby, but it would allow us to have sort of a field of these continuously being made. 

There could be a source of CO2 down deep.  And the CO2 would diffuse into the culture through a gas-permeable membrane and the culture would grow on the surface.  Now, everybody’s always thinking, ah, yes, but the ocean is so rough.  How would you ever be able to survive?  And I agree.  The question is, are we up to the engineering challenge of putting something like this in the ocean? 

Let me submit to you that if we want to deal with the ocean, we do things like build these small platforms that stand in 2,000 feet of water that drag offshore.  They cost about $1 billion to $2 billion each.  And they have these telescopic legs that go down and pick themselves up off the bottom. 

We built some pretty impressive things.  In fact, if you have unlimited amount of money – (laughter) – from some revenue that I’m not sure where it comes from, you actually build islands like the ones off here, which is a little community that’s artificially built called The World for some strange reason.  And in The World for $500 million, you can buy your own island and then put a tent on it or something. 

But we can also build islands like the Palm Islands.  I mean, we’re pretty good engineers.  We build windmills in the Baltic that have blades that are 100 meters long.  And the question is, how would we deal with a problem of trying to make us fuel out of algae without using agricultural land, without using fertilizer, without using fresh water?  And how are we going to make this survive in the ocean? 

Well, one possibility is just that these things be pulled under water so the amount of energy they would have to deal with when they’re pulled under water would be much less.  So I just submit this to you as a possible scenario.  But there are other good things about having these things in the ocean and that is we could also use them to generate electricity from wave power, and there’s a bunch of different scenarios we could think about if we were really putting our minds to being ingenious in this regard, and they could then generate light using their local energy power from waves or from solar and that would increase their productivity by having their own source of light. 

So I asked some very creative architecture friends of mine to think about how they would envision what I showed you as very simplistic ribbons.  And they came up with a whole variety of interesting schemes about how we would do this thing.  And so let me just share with you some of their concepts. 

This is a system that they envisioned for near-sheltered waters where they wouldn’t use bags but would use these huge sort of tubes that would stand on the surface and they would be fed by zeppelins with CO2.  Or there are some very interesting amorphous structures they envisioned that look a bit like icebergs that would be filled with algae, again, in coastal regions.  And in open ocean, they conceived of a system that is rather remarkable where the system would – when it gets into rough water, would roll itself up and submerge.

So, finally, let me summarize what I was just telling you and I don’t know yet what the structure should look like.  But the system that I’m envisioning called OMEGA, offshore membrane enclosures for growing algae is a way to treat wastewater and gather the nutrients that are now being wasted in the ocean, bring them into algae that we bring back on shore and dewater these algae which is one of the most expensive things we need to do to harvest the algae by a process called forward osmosis where the ocean is the beneficiary because clean water will be released into the ocean.

So if you think back at how we started this journey that I’ve just taken you on starting at the earliest times in our Earth’s history, even before the Earth was the Earth but our solar system was just forming, then you realize we really truly have come to a position in the Earth’s history now where we have to ask ourselves very seriously about this question of sustainability. 

It’s really not a joke anymore.  It’s really not – it’s not a question of whether or not we should be doing this.  The Earth is about to go through a transition because of the number of people on the planet and the amount of resources available.  And it’s not just a matter of national security.  It’s a matter of what the future’s going to be like for our children and our children’s children, but not just our children.  It’s the children of every species that’s alive on the planet that we’re sharing this planet with and have for a long period of time. 

Remember, we are only two-tenths of an inch from the goal post.  But we have this population issue and an affluence – that we are very, very proud and blessed by having this affluence that we’re living with.  And we have also responsibility to the species we share this planet with.  And we have the capacity technically to do what we need to do. 

But on the other hand, this is the past.  What we really, really need to think about is the future.  And we can think back and think, well, we came from here when we were first developing tools.  And in terms of aeronautics we went from 1903 until 1961 we were already in space.  And remember this famous speech from Kennedy when he was talking at Houston when he was first presenting at Rice University this idea.  And I think it’s a very inspiring speech and it’s still very germane right now. 

And he said that, “We choose to go to the moon” and do other things “not because they are easy but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone and one which we intend to win.”  Well, Kennedy didn’t live to see the result of his plan to get to the moon in 10 years but indeed we got to the moon in 10 years and we brought people back alive.  And now we’re planning trips to Mars where it’s the most inhospitable place you can imagine. 

And yet, we have visions about how we would keep people alive there.  We have visions about what it would mean to create a colony there where people would be living in an atmosphere that was just the size of their coats, the atmosphere which dragged around with them.  The water, the food, everything that they would need to be able to survive unlike our very hospitable Earth would need to be created.  And thinking about that gives us the power to understand how we’re going to deal with these problems.

So there’s a quote that I’d like to use.  It’s a quote from one of the founders of OPEC, Sheikh Ahmed Yamani.  He was asked, what’s going to happen when we run out of oil?  And he answered that, “The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones.”  It’s an interesting idea, right?  The Stone Age ended because we found better technology.  We found technology that made the stones obsolete. 

The fossil fuel age is not going to end unless we figure out a technology that’s going to make it unnecessary for us to continue to burn fossil oil.  And we’re going to create enough oil that will be recyclable oil from some source, like algae or something similar that will allow us to continue to develop the affluence that people on the Earth deserve without mining and degrading the planet.

Finally, there’s a second quote that I think is very important for us to keep in mind in a time of change that we’re now soon going to be confronting if we’re not already into this time of change but denying its presence.  And it’s a quote from Truman who said, “There is no limit to what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.” 

So I submit to you a challenge, a challenge and a call to action to think about problems such as we’re confronting and all of us, particularly the people in this room, who have various levels of responsibility to society in ways that are significant, have children or know people who have children who are going to have to live with the legacy of our lifestyle, a legacy that in a very short period of time has used up this enormous reserve of energy that has been stored in the Earth for 50 million years at least.  The coal is probably closer to 100 million years. 
 
And I submit to you that maybe OMEGA is the fuel of the future, although I can’t guarantee that.  It seems to be something that at least has some of the right qualities that we can discuss during the panel session.  And, finally, I’ll remind you of this picture, which is kind of the ultimate image of the ugly American in some way.  But the other thing to keep in mind is that when we did Apollo and we came to the problems that we were confronting in Apollo 13, mission control’s theme was failure is not an option with regard to the astronauts.  I’ll stop here.  (Applause.) 

MR. SIEGEL:  So everyone in the room can be shocked; when Jonathan finishes I’m usually left worthless.  If anyone has questions, the mikes should be around.  We’re all set – mikes coming.  I see one arm out here.  Please say who you are when you answer a question.  And, by the way, I’ll take a quick moment for administrative – at the end, please make sure to leave your nametags on the table and there are forms, please sign who you are at the table.  Thanks.  And we have a question. 

Q:  Hello, my name is Sophia Clellan (sp).  I’m actually a graduate student at George Washington University in immunology, of all things.  But I’m interested in whether or not you’ve actually thought of actually collecting the water from these systems at all and developed anything like that. 

MR. TRENT:  You’re asking – is this on?  You’re asking about the OMEGA system? 

Q:  Yes. 

MR. TRENT:  And did we collect –

Q:  Collecting the fresh water that comes out of it.

MR. TRENT:  Yes, yes. 

Q:  – instead of just releasing it into the ocean.

MR. TRENT:  Yes, but it was sort of – I thought my lecture was getting long and we have a whole system for collecting the fresh water, which I’d be happy to share with you afterwards. 

Q:  You say you’re at peak oil.  My name is B.K. Lundy (sp).  You say you’re at peak oil now and NASA and other companies have done a great job of sending up communication satellites, which are broadcasting “Desperate Housewives,” convincing women they don’t need six children, only about two. 

So maybe the population will go down and surely the energy use will go down, since we’re at peak oil.  So is there a prediction that this might be a trenchant (sic) right now in the Earth and – so that there’ll be an upper limit to the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the temperature excursions? 

MR. TRENT:  So the question is, do I think the population is not going to reach 10 to 9 billion or –

Q:  No, what will – it seems like this is an excursion for the Earth.  There’ll be an upper limit to the, say, temperature excursion and also population excursion that we see right now.  And this might be even self-correcting. 

MR. TRENT:  Oh, it will be self-correcting.  There’s no doubt about that.  (Laughter.)  The Earth has been much warmer and it’s had much more CO2 in historical times if we go way back into the time of the dinosaurs and such.  There were very different conditions on the planet.  So it’s not a question of whether or not the amount of CO2 that we’re releasing from fossil sources could exist on the Earth. 

It can; we’d just have to cope with the rise in sea level and the large numbers of people that will be displaced and all the consequences of our continued use of fossil fuel if we don’t come up with an alternative.  But the population – there’s already a shift towards lower fecundity globally although the United Nations is still predicting that we will reach somewhere, by 2050, close to 9 billion people.  We’re at 6.8 billion right now. 

So, yes, it’s hard to know exactly how it’s going to turn around, but my feeling is – and I think we should all share this feeling – is that, right now in the – as long as the economics continue to support us being environmentally friendly – because once it really gets sort of ugly and things get really difficult and food and water become fairly scarce and there’s more of a demand, then the environment and the commons are the first to be triaged. 

And if we can act now and find good alternatives, then we can move beyond the Stone Age, I think, and beyond the fossil fuel age in appropriate ways as opposed to waiting until it’s too late and then behaving in inappropriate ways.  So it is a transient – I agree, it’s going to come down.  It always does, yes.  Thanks. 

Q:  For anybody on the panel, but pragmatically in algae, without the restrictions of 526, what are the technology breakthroughs to make it economic that you see because in order to – as you all pointed out, coming down from $4,000 a kilogram down to 10 cents is not an easy trick? 

MR. SIEGEL:  A quick interruption – for those who are unaware, that’s Secretary Wynne.

MR. HARRISON:  Well, a couple of things that I see.  One, the energy use in moving large amounts of algae all around, depending on the designs I’ve seen, that can be a huge issue in terms of cost and energy. 

The second is processes are using algae that do not have to be dried, again, another huge piece of the cost.  And also clearly, if you can shrink the size of the fields, if you’re doing open ponds, if you can get them down, which will take engineering.  So I see a lot of engineering challenges that are energy intensive and also cost intensive. 

MR. TRENT:  With regard to the moving of algae, this is probably one of the most expensive parts of it.  ExxonMobil just invested $600 million in trying to get algal strains – well, $300 million to synthetic genomics – to try to get algal strains that will actually secrete the oil and produce more oil.  This would be a solution, but still we need to come up with some solution that’s not going to compete for agricultural land and all the rest of it.  So my feeling is that if we can figure out to do it in the ocean, it creates all kinds of new problems, but at least we’re clearly not going be confronting the land-based problems anymore. 

Q:  Zachary Pogue, I have worked with the campus neutrality team, American University, about 60,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas.  We’re working to get to zero, better.  And my question to you is I’ve seen a lot of technology now that’s talking about water harvesting from the vapor in the atmosphere.  And there seems to be a lot of upside on that and a lot of companies are touting that.  I’m just wondering if you can speak to any downside to harvesting.  They claim up to a trillion particulates in the air.  And they have a fairly cost-effective measure to do this, but in terms of fresh water production, have you heard of this or what are your thoughts about that? 

MR. MINSON:  I’ll go ahead and try to take that one.  Harvesting is – in a lot of these, from a cost position, you have to be looking at what approach are you taking.  In the case of water remediation, these guys have figured out how to harvest.  As I showed you before, we’re harvesting about 60 milligrams of algae per liter of water.  So we’re harvesting at a fairly efficient rate, pretty much pulling out all the algae.  So it’s really just the cost, an economical issue of trying to put this all together. 

Q:  I’m Ivy Main.  I’m with the Sierra Club and I’m on a taskforce that is looking at producing guidelines for offshore renewable energy projects.  And this – Jonathan, your OMEGA project is very elegant and exciting and sounds like it might be a great way forward.  The one thing that the marine biologists on my taskforce have sensitized me to is the issues that the ocean isn’t vacant land. 

And it looks – when I’m looking at what you’re doing, it looks like it’s going to take up a lot of surface area.  And I see all those – the tubes going down and I’m immediately thinking that you’ve got issues with marine mammals passing through.  And I wondered if you have looked at what kinds of environmental impacts you might be looking at and how you would deal with those. 

MR. TRENT:  Yes, thanks.  I stressed the fact that we’d be growing freshwater algae in these, though, if they leak, they would release algae that couldn’t compete in the environment.  The other thing to keep in mind is that the ocean represents 140 million square miles and we’re talking about an area that would be 128 miles by 128 miles, and it wouldn’t be in one place because it would be distributed where the wastewater facilities – where the effluent from the cities.  So it wouldn’t be a localized phenomenon. 

Marine mammals are a real issue, although most marine mammals we deal with are swimming under ice, and so I don’t think we’d have drowning some marine mammals.  We may have problems with marine mammals falling out on these structures.  We’re working with the Cal. Fish and Game because the sea birds are another issue.  They have to access the subsurface. 

I think these are really important considerations, although, once again we have to sort of think in terms of where we are in the overall scheme of things so that we don’t curtail the development of a technology because we’re concerned about one aspect of it, where later on we’re going to triage the environment in ways that we’ll be regretting that we didn’t do something earlier on.  But it’s very important now that we’re very aware of those things.  And I agree with you.  We need to think about them hard.  But I think the marine mammals can cope with this kind of thing if we get it right. 

Q:  Hi, my name is Kip Davis.  I’m from the Department of Energy.  My question is about halophytes – salt-loving plants.  There’re several thousands of them that grow well in salty environments.  Is there a possibility that we could grow halophytes for biomass and for food and other things in the desert areas of the world using salt water or saline aquifers? 

MR. TRENT:  Yes, I can comment a little bit about that.  I think we need a lot of solutions.  I don’t think we should say one thing is better than the other.  I think the halophytes do represents a solution, particularly as sea level rises and we start flooding coastal regions.  There might be a lot of good places to do halophyte growth. 

We’ve looked at Salicornia and it doesn’t produce very much oil.  It’s a good biomass, but it’s not very fast growing.  Most of the halophytes, these are salt-tolerant plants that can be watered with sea water instead of fresh water.  Most of the halophytes are actually fairly stressed by the salt. 

So they have mechanisms for removing the salts, but they grow in a whole wide range of different salt conditions.  I think it’s a good thing for us to be growing halophytes.  I don’t think that we would be able to use them as an exclusive way to produce the fuel needs that we have, but certainly should be one of a portfolio of possibilities.  We don’t compete for fresh water, thank goodness. 

Q:  Good evening.  My name is Oliver Fritz.  I’m from the U.S. Air Force.  And as I listen to this discussion about biofuels and the cost tradeoffs, the environmental tradeoffs, I think of operations overseas right now.  One of the biggest challenges we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan is getting the fuel to the fight, whatever kind of liquid fuel it is, whether it’s diesel, normal JP8, anything.  What is the panel’s sense of how this biofuel source could be distributed locally?  The scale we’ve seen of some of the generations games seemed quite large.  And I’m wondering what is the panel’s perspective on that.  Thank you.

MR. TINDAL:  I know from the Navy’s viewpoint, especially when you’re talking about the Marine Corps, you do have so many convoys that are mainly taking water and fuel.  And those convoys are obviously susceptible to IEDs.  And that’s where the majority of the IED hits are coming, is at the fuel and the water convoys.  So obviously, if we can do something that’s at the pointy end of the spear, literally, in the forward-operating bases, that’s where we would need to do that.  So, yes, if we can do that in those scenarios, by all means we should be developing those kinds of things. 

Some of the things that we have been working on are, especially for the Marines, they carry around 30 pounds of batteries because it’s a very electronic force we have out there.  And so one way to get around that is maybe they only carry one battery, but then we have a rollout solar panel that they use for recharging that battery. 

So those are the kinds of technologies that we’re trying to do to limit the amount of fuel that we have to put out there in the forward operating base because that way then, you’re using less fuel for the generator that’s going to power up the batteries anyway.  So, yes, from the Navy perspective, that would be ideal to do that. 

MR. TRENT:  Could I just add that we’re talking about a liquid fuel – so the difference would be that currently we’re buying those liquid fuels from exactly where the theater is of war.  And we’re importing them to process them and sending them back.  In this case, what we would be doing is growing home-grown versions of these fuels that we would still be exporting.  I don’t remember the number, but it was like $400 a gallon by the time it gets to the field.  And we can almost do that with algae already.  That’s not very good, I admit, but still. 

Q:  (Off mike.) 

MR. TRENT:  Yes, I know.  No, but I don’t think – the kind of processes we’re talking about would not be something that you could mobilize and put into a place, although they are the kinds of processes that could be developed globally. 

MR. MINSON:  Just to add a little bit, again, I think you have to look – I think the new market we’re really looking at is a very distributed type of market and how we’re going to do things in the future is not going to be one big oil field.  It’s going to be distributed.  In that case, I think as we get better at it, I think we’ll be enabled.  Again, you have to look at what resources do you have.  The reality is we saw waste water and those types of things are (nutrients ?).  Do you have the water?  Where are you at in location? 

So I think a lot of these are going to be variables.  We have to be flexible.  It’s not going to be – there’s not a silver bullet out there.  So we’re going to have to do everything we can do to solve this problem. 

Q:  Don Aerbach (ph), U.S. Department of Agriculture, retired.  There have certainly been a lot of alternative energy options proposed and certainly OMEGA is one with some interesting potential.  But it seems like we’re always running for the challenge of being economically competitive.  And it seems like as long as we have gas, coal, and oil, and as long as we have a situation we’re in that that isn’t going to happen until we get to the point of really getting serious.  So my question is, what do you think has to happen in the way of policy changes that will actually get us off the rock and commercialize some of these potential alternatives? 

MR. TRENT:  I’d like to have a shot at that.  I always get in trouble saying this, but I’m going to say it anyway.  We actually don’t ever calculate the real cost of our fossil fuels.  If you really did an all-in calculation based on the subsidies that we give to our oil companies, the military support we give to support places around the world where we’re protecting our oil interests, the cost of oil, not only in terms of actual cost, but also in terms of our future with regard to greenhouse gas and all the impact that that’s going to have as sea level rises and we get all these refugees from coastal regions, the cost, the real cost of continuing on the trajectory we’re on now is very, very high.  And so the alternatives don’t really look that bad if we start to do an all-in calculation, although nobody’s really willing to do that at this point.  I think this issue that you brought up about when are we going to get serious is exactly the point I was trying to make with my whole presentation. 

We don’t have much more time to continue on the, “gee, it can’t happen here” or the denial, the sadness or the disbelief that we’re going through.  We have to get to the acceptance stage here.  We’re still trying to bargain with our transition. 

MR. MINSON:  If I could maybe from – the real issue is the infrastructure we’re living off today; a lot of it’s been fully capitalized, so cost of capital.  So I would put on the table is going to be guaranteed loans, those types of issues out in the future.  And the reality is you’re going to need some type of price support, near term with longer term guarantees.  The reality is we’re asking, if you will, not the government, but private industry to go off and finance these deals.  We’re still at a risk state, but the reality is if we did nothing, we’re at a huge risk.  And so again, loan guarantees and some pricing support in the early days, with a decelerating value on the future. 

MR. SIEGEL:  We’re coming close to the witching hour.  I’m going to take the moderator’s privilege for the last question and then introduce the head of the Energy Task Force, Adm. Cullom. 

This is somewhat putting Chris and Bill on the spot, which is Jonathan’s able from NASA to go out and get this Google grant, not a huge amount of money, quarter million dollars.  He’s able to think big.  He’s able to play with this very big and try to do a total cost of full system, total benefits.  Working within the departments, trying to effect change for renewable fuels, how broadly are you able to be trying to look at the costs and benefits in this very large sort of way?  Are you able to take the conversation that far in a fruitful path, or is it really you are working on renewable fuels and you need to meet the costs for renewable fuels? 

MR. TINDAL:  I know for sure that when you look at the Navy’s strategy, our major three themes – energy efficiency, energy security, environmental stewardship – renewables are definitely – look at two of those aspects:  the energy security piece and then the environmental stewardship piece.  And both of those are very critical.  We actually have a study going on now to try to find a value or a worth in energy security because it is – there is a cost there.  So even though – and you certainly looked at it very, very closely and highlighted the fact that, yes, we are doing a lot of security for all those tankers.  We’re making sure that we have our handle on the oil that’s over there.  If we didn’t have to worry about that because we had other sources of fuel, then maybe we wouldn’t need to be where we are now in protecting our assets over there in the Middle East. 

Yes, we certainly do rely a lot on petroleum, especially when it comes to transportation within the United States.  So we have to look at that mobility aspect.  So I guess, in summary, energy security does have a worth.  We haven’t necessarily put a price on that.  But we know that within the Navy, we would rather pay the same for green power as we do for brown power.  But if we had to pay a little bit more, then it may be worth at because we’re – number one, we’re saving the planet and it’s the right thing to do. 

MR. HARRISON:  Well, I think a couple of ways to look at this.  I know we have a lot of internal discussions on the whole value chain and how do you get there, but I think where the Air Force has gone is where can we make positive direction?  And one is you’ve got to be able to use the fuels in your equipment and it’s got to be a drop in.  And you’ve got to have ownership of all the players – the OEMs that make the equipment, the operators, the entire enterprise.  So I think the investment we’ve made there has enabled us to move forward to be ready, and in doing that, it’s brought the commercial sector into it and that’s a huge leveraging from market, which eventually has some impact on cost because people are saying, hey, this is now a viable market potentially.

I think some of the other cost issues you’ve got to work through – and RAND has suggested this – is you’ve got to build a few plants.  First plants are one of a kind.  They won’t operate exactly as you think they will.  And if you look at any set of technologies, you’ve got to start with the first ones and they get better and better and better. 

Think electronics – if this was the 1960s and we’re talking about computers that would fill the size of this room, who would think a BlackBerry would exist?  And I think in some of these energy spaces that’s the same thing.  You’ve got to build the first plants.  You’ve got to get the engineering out there to say, hey, there is a potential to do this, and then potentially a place where you can plan on the military being a first adopter.  So that’s another way to address cost. 

MR. TRENT:  Bill, could I respond to that?  I just want to ask a question.  And that is, the attitude that we seem to be having is very much sort of the business as usual kind of evolution that we think if we can get this sort of out there and the commercial sector picks it up, it’s going to evolve and improve in the way capitalism always works and it works very efficiently.  But do you think that in the military and particularly in the government – the world is about to meet in Copenhagen to have one of – the 15th climate summit, Earth summit.  There is a growing concern.  Many countries are stepping up and saying, look, we recognize the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is a problem.  We have to do something.  We have to be setting guidelines, as you have, as the Navy and Air Force have. 

Is it possible to envision that at some point we’re going to come up and realize that we need a Manhattan Project?  We need an Apollo Project.  We need a much more focused attempt, rather than saying, well, let’s let the marketplace sort this out.  But rather, is it imaginable that the military would take ownership of this kind of problem and set that kind of example that they did during the Manhattan Project or an Apollo-like program?  Is that sort of within the purview of any discussions? 

MR. HARRISON:  I don’t know if I have a good answer.  I don’t know – Adm. Cullom –

MR. SIEGEL:  Well, I think the secretary of the Navy just gave a speech like that.  And Secretary Wynne was driving that way when he was secretary of the Air Force. 

ADM. PHILIP CULLOM:  It is interesting because you would think that the military would be the last to the pas.  And, instead, as the Air Force and the Navy are showing, we’re trying to push the nation into a certain direction.  I could tell you that it is really some reticence in the Congress and, by the way, the fact that we have the infrastructure we have right now that is holding us back from really the breakthrough.  But your military, in a very strange way, is actually pushing the process.  And the fact that we’ve gotten the commercial people to actually play with us is quite remarkable.

MR. SIEGEL:  On that, I’d like to very much thank the panel and I’m asking of one of the pushers to come up to the podium, Adm. Cullom.  And, yet again, name tags please here; it’s part of the recycle –

ADM. CULLOM:  Well, that was a pretty fantastic topic tonight, wasn’t it?  Let’s give a hand to everybody.  (Applause.)  Jonathan, thank you very much for having me, once again – very, very thought provoking and so I’m kind of offering up the – I guess you would call it the PBS moment here.  Throughout this past year, the Navy has been the sponsor for the Energy Conversation through the vision of Adm. Burke – I think he may have been a little earlier – who ponied up for this thing to ensure that we got this conversation continuing this past year. 

But this is the last conversation this year.  I hope that one thing you take away from this is this is not the last conversation.  But to be able to make that happen, people have to be able to pony up the money.  And at the end of the day, we’ve committed that the Navy will continue to try to pony up what it can, but we need help.  So that’s why I say this is the PBS moment, if you will.

And if we’re really going to make sure that people really take this from an – I’ll kind of leverage off something that Jonathan was saying – that we talk about a greatest generation and what the greatest generation did for the world.  Well, we had another generation and, frankly, I’m a part of that generation, which some people are starting to call “the grasshopper generation.”  The grasshoppers go through the field and they eat all the seed corn and everything.  What we really need out here is that all of us who may have been part of the grasshopper generation to become the next regeneration generation. 

That’s the sustainability that I think we need to be pushing for.  But if the conversation does not continue then we won’t be able to reach a tipping point throughout all of federal government. 

Now, I did a quick look of all the folks that were represented, sitting out here tonight.  All the services were here – Air Force, Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard.  A lot of agencies were here – Department of Energy, Commerce, State, Homeland Security, EPA, FAA, NASA, USDA, DIA, DSC, FERC.  Now, I need some help and I need some other people to come up and see me after this is over with if you want the conversation to continue. 

I would hate for it to stop here because we do need this to continue and I think all of us, within our departments and our agencies, all know that if we don’t keep this talk going and share the information back and forth that we had been throughout this past year that we will not be able to get to these great new ideas that are out there that will put us into the regeneration generation.  So please – I’m going to stick around here a little bit afterwards so don’t all just kind of fade away because otherwise this may be the last time we all come together. 

So please come up and see me and see what your agency or department can help us out with.  Thank you.  (Applause.) 
 
(END)

File Attachment: 

111609 transcript.pdf