• Cockrell Investment in Excellence Honored in School's Name
• Star Engineers Start in High School
• Arriving at Energy Future Requires All Able Hands and Minds
• Engineers Shed Light on Biotechnology

• Dean's Message
• Department News
• Alumni Notes
• A Half-Century of Focus

By Pam Losefsky

Oil, gas or coal. Wind, sun or water. Whether tomorrow’s energy comes from more efficient recovery and usage of the earth’s remaining fossil fuels or from new technologies that make renewable energy sources a viable enterprise—or all of the above—one fact is clear. Energy production and distribution will be one of this century’s greatest challenges.

The world’s population is expected to reach 8 billion over the next 25 years, and the global economy is expected to double in size over the same time frame. With worldwide demand for oil already chugging along at a 2.5 million gallon-a-minute clip, industry and government studies show that energy demand is likely to grow by about 40 percent over this period. Coming up with ways to supply the energy—in all possible forms—that will support this growth is an around-the-clock mission that no one in the industry or in an energy-related academic field is taking lightly.

“We are looking for new resources absolutely everywhere in the world where we are allowed access by governments,” says Rex Tillerson (BSCE 72), chief executive officer of ExxonMobil. The company invests around $20 billion a year in new exploration and production, another $1 billion in internal research and development and hundreds of millions more in various university-related initiatives that focus on everything from K-12 science education to as-yet-unimagined solutions to the energy challenge.

Today, industry, academia and government are all working together to explore every avenue leading to energy sustainability.

Building Better Brains

First and foremost, the United States needs smart people to populate energy-related fields. A recent report from the National Petroleum Council (NPC), “Facing the Hard Truths about Energy,” declares: “The U.S. energy industry faces a dramatic human resource shortage that could undermine the future development of technological advances needed to meet the demand for increasingly diversified energy sources.” Echoing a report issued earlier in the year by the National Academy of Sciences (“Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future”), the NPC believes that without a renewed focus—beginning in grade school—on math, science and engineering, we simply won’t have the technical know-how to resolve our largest challenges.

As this impending brainpower shortage has become better understood, industry, academia, and state and federal governments have begun to put in place a variety of initiatives to turn it around (see “Star Engineers Start in High School”, page 8). From state legislation that funds scholarships and summer science camps, to industry-academia collaborations like the Texas Engineering and Technical Consortium (TETC), to private industry grants for national programs, resources are pouring into schools to improve science and math teaching and to encourage students to consider technical fields.

Echoing other industry leaders, Tillerson says that brainpower is the bottom line. “The biggest challenge that stands in front of us is having enough qualified scientists and engineers. We need to go all the way back to elementary school to turn this around,” Tillerson says. “It’s critical to the future competitiveness of the United States.”

Finding Strength in Diversity

All parties to the energy conundrum also agree there will be no single solution. The answer will involve a host of approaches working in tandem, including the development of multiple new sources of energy, innovative ways of reaching hard-to-get-at oil and gas deposits and major improvements in the way industry and individuals efficiently consume energy. As the NPC report states, “Expansion of all economic energy sources will be required to meet demand reliably, including coal, nuclear, renewables, and unconventional oil and gas.”

Today, oil and gas are the most significant contributors to the energy needs of the United States and to the rest of the developed world. Worldwide, petroleum products serve around 60 percent of energy needs. Oil and gas have played this role since the beginning of the last century when an oil well nicknamed Spindletop in Southeast Texas hit black gold and propelled the country into the age of petroleum.

As the petroleum industry pioneer, the United States’ economic development was powered by the reliable and affordable energy provided by fossil fuels. “We had what appeared to be limitless supplies of both oil and gas at low prices,” says Henry Groppe (BSCE ’46) of Groppe, Long & Littell, a Houston energy forecasting firm with a 50-year history of accuracy. “We had much lower prices than everyone else in the world, and that enabled us to achieve a level of dominance. Militarily, it would have been much more difficult had we not had these supplies.”

Henry Groppe (BSCE ’49), an energy prognosticator for more than 50 years, leads Groppe, Long & Littell.

But Groppe says we now find ourselves in a total reversal, where we are importing increasing volumes to make up for our decline in production. “In many cases the U.S. is farther from the largest new sources than the rest of the world,” Groppe points out. “We now import more than 60 percent of our total requirements, and we spend $300 billion a year.” U.S. spending on oil and gas accounts for 40 percent of our total trade imbalance.

What’s more, we use essentially what we produce each day. “Our rate of consumption is so large that we don’t store much of it,” says Groppe. The world uses approximately 80 million barrels of crude oil a day—that’s up to 29 billion barrels a year, while total storage of crude oil all over the world, including the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve, is about 5.5 billion barrels. Groppe puts it plainly: “Essentially, we’re hand to mouth, and we always will be.”

“The demand is so enormous that people have a hard time grasping it,” Tillerson adds. “And almost every forecast says that 25 years from now, the total energy demand, all types combined, will have grown to the equivalent of 325 million barrels of oil a day.”

But how to meet this ever-growing demand? The answer lies in diversification. Both private enterprise and the government have been investing heavily in research and development of more efficient ways to find, develop and produce a wide range of energy sources.

The Department of Energy (DOE) is the primary source of federal funding for research in new energy technologies and processes. In 2004 alone, DOE awarded $506 million in research grants to educational and research entities exploring a vast array of potential solutions. Under study are technologies for deep water drilling; releasing methane molecules from hydrates; using carbon dioxide, steam or chemicals to enhance oil recovery; developing cleaner coal-fired power plants; and developing more practical and affordable fuel cells. DOE research dollars are spent on bioenergy technologies that use renewable biomass resources; more advanced combustion turbines; the development of hydrogen-based fuel systems; and more advanced nuclear, geothermal and hydropower systems.

It seems that no stone is being left unturned.

And The University of Texas at Austin is one place where researchers are looking under a lot of stones. As a major U.S. research university, the university receives about $50 million a year in federal, state and private grants campus-wide to study energy-related issues, and much of that goes to the Cockrell School of Engineering, where the work spans various departments—petroleum, civil, chemical, electrical and mechanical. (See page 18.) At some point, hopefully soon, one or some of those rocks will yield commercially viable solutions.

Encouraging Energy Efficiency

“The cheapest barrel of oil is the one we don’t use,” quips ExxonMobil’s Tillerson. And therein lies another pillar in the U.S. energy strategy: conservation.

Any discussion about energy efficiency necessarily begins with the automobile industry. Nearly half of the 21 million barrels of oil products that the United States consumes each day is in the form of gasoline used for cars and light trucks. Consequently, the NPC recommends a doubling of fuel economy in new cars and light trucks by the year 2030, and a decrease in sales of light trucks—whose lower fuel efficiency pulls down the overall average. The NPC report acknowledges that while cars and trucks sold today are “more technically efficient than those sold two decades ago…the fuel economy improvements that could have been gained from existing technology…have been used to increase vehicle weight, horsepower and to add amenities.”

Likewise, there have already been many efficiency advances in the residential and commercial building sectors in terms of materials, heating and cooling, lighting systems and appliances, but these improvements have been partially offset by increased home and building sizes and the use of larger and more appliances. The NPC found that, “if applied, currently available efficiency technology would reduce energy use by 15-20 percent.”

Why aren’t all the latest technological advances being applied already? Since buildings stand for 50 to 100 years and more, technologies are slow to penetrate the market. Thus, implementing policies early and investing in building code enforcement and compliance will be key to realizing the promise of already known and future efficiency technologies. “Further, energy efficiency standards do not apply to many increasingly common products, including those based on expanded digital technologies,” the authors of the NPC report point out. Thus, the continual evaluation and updating of product codes is essential.

On the industry side, where about one-third of U.S. energy is consumed, companies need to be proactive in increasing efficiency. The NPC estimates that across the industrial sector, there are opportunities to increase energy efficiency by about 15 percent and urges a permanent federal research and development tax credit that will encourage private investment.

Changing Human Nature

Finally, individual consumer behavior has a role to play. Americans need to make wise choices about what cars we drive, how we maintain our vehicles and homes, and where we live.

“People will simply have to do things very differently,” says Groppe. “Today it’s common to see huge houses being built by people with one or two children—that will change over time.” And we all know that the vast majority of cars on freeways during rush hour in any major U.S. city have one person in them. “Each of us is sitting in 5,000 pounds of steel—each of which took an enormous amount of energy to build, and we all live way out in the suburbs where we use a lot more energy to get around than we would if we lived in a city center,” says Groppe. Over time, he predicts, all this will change.

But it won’t come easily or without sacrifice. Groppe recognizes that human nature is difficult to change. “It’s just a fact that it’s hard to get people to do something today because there’s going to be a problem tomorrow. No one is going to do anything until he is totally immersed in the problem.”

Educating more scientists and engineers, diversifying our energy supply, increasing energy efficiency and changing consumer behavior—these are all major challenges. The question is, can we meet them and take the world successfully into the age of energy sustainability?

Henry Groppe is not optimistic. That is to say, he once considered himself an optimist, but changed his mind because it implied that he had blind cheerfulness about the future. No, Groppe now simply says he’s hopeful. “We live in extraordinary times. Man’s history is one of recognizing and understanding problems and then using all of the knowledge available to find the best possible solutions. When I say I am hopeful, what I mean is that I believe we will do the right things to solve the problems—we’ll find better ways of doing things.”

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