Energy Experts Urge Transition to New Energy-Fuel Sources

Viterbi School faculty confronted the nation’s energy problems in two high-profile, day-long energy symposia held last summer on the USC campus and this fall in the state capitol of Sacramento.

Dean Yannis C. Yortsos opened the June 15 USC event, The National Energy Symposium: Confronting Costs To New Technologies, which included presentations by Viterbi faculty from the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, the Department of Electrical Engineering, and the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science.

Experts predict that over the next 20 years, global energy demand will increase by 40 percent. Currently, the U.S. consumes one-fourth of the world’s energy, more than the energy consumed by the 2.9 billion people living in five other nations: China, India, Germany, Japan and Bangladesh. Climate changes and environmental concerns, such as the prospect of intense hurricanes, storms and drought-sparked forest fires, melting glaciers and rising sea levels, contribute to global energy problems.

Researchers agree that no single alternative – wind, photovoltaic, solar thermal, solar electric, biomass, hydroelectric or geothermal — will be the “silver bullet,” but that diversification could stave off a potentially impending crisis.

“We need to enlarge our vision and go beyond the next five or 10 years,” said Anupam Madhukar, the Kenneth T. Norris Professor of Engineering in the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. “All of our energy sources — petroleum, gas, coal, biomass and others — have to be pushed to their limits.”

A proponent of solar power, Madhukar said that only the sun’s energy would be able to supply the difference between about 28 terawatts of energy — the amount that would be needed to support the needs of a global population of 10 billion to 11 billion people in the next three decades — and the 18 terawatts of energy estimated to be available from all sources, other than nuclear and solar power. That difference is the amount of energy produced by roughly 10,000 nuclear power plants

Energy consumers will need to change their ways, according to T.C. Cheng, a professor of electrical engineering/electrophysics at USC and holder of the Lloyd F. Hunt Chair in Electrical Power Engineering. He said consumers waste 30-to-40 percent of the electricity that is generated in the U.S. by leaving lights on in their homes.

"If we could capture even 20 percent of all wasted electricity, that would go a long way toward saving energy," he said.

Iraj Ershaghi, the Omar B. Milligan Professor and director of the Petroleum Engineering Program in USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering, stressed that there is still plenty of oil to be recovered in the near term, but that better methods of recovery are needed. He said the current oil recovery rate is insufficient with two-thirds of petroleum left in the ground, a fact he attributed to insufficient use of technology and inadequate research expenditures to develop smart technologies to tap stranded and residual oil.

“Over the last century, we have produced about 180 billion barrels of oil from the oilfields in the U S., but that’s only 33 percent of what is in the ground,” Ershaghi told the audience.

“The mistake we make is abandoning oil fields, closing them down and making them inaccessible to future generations when there is plenty of oil still in the ground. It’s just getting harder to find new oil and, therefore, more expensive to recover the remaining oil in place,” he said

Paul Ronney, a professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at USC and a former NASA astronaut, said just driving smaller, lighter cars could have a significant impact on energy conservation.

"Sure, hybrids will save some money, but you have to weigh that against the extra cost of going to hybrids, the costs of replacing batteries, all those other costs," he said.

The National Energy Conference was held shortly after USC announced the formation of a new cross-disciplinary research program called the USC Future Fuels and Energy Initiative (FFEI), which is aimed at managing the transition to a more secure and sustainable energy future. The FFEI research program will both advance the science of alternative fuels and energy conversions and address the economic, social, environmental and policy issues associated with the transition to a new energy-fuel paradigm.