energy research program reaches milestone

This article originally appeared in the Lamp, 2008 — Number 2

Anniversaries celebrate fond memories and often elicit hopes for the future. The Global Climate and Energy Project, an ambitious research program initiated and co-sponsored by ExxonMobil, recently celebrated its fifth anniversary of scientific research that could have important consequences for the environment and future energy use.

The Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) at Stanford University seeks new solutions to one of the most daunting problems of this century — supplying energy for a growing world population while protecting the environment.

Launched in December 2002, GCEP performs fundamental scientific research to establish a foundation for new technologies. In the decades ahead, scientists and companies will use the project’s findings to develop global energy systems with significantly lower greenhouse-gas emissions.

Long-term support

Four international companies support GCEP’s efforts: ExxonMobil, General Electric, Schlumberger and Toyota. Over the course of a decade, these sponsors will invest $225 million at Stanford and other leading institutions around the world to build a wide-ranging portfolio of research.

The goal of GCEP isn’t to create commercial technologies directly. Rather, GCEP strives to develop leads, frameworks and new science from which new technologies can be created. The focus is on a portfolio of research aimed at supplying energy for electric power and transport with dramatically lower greenhouse-gas emissions.

“The fundamental challenge – minimizing greenhouse-gas emissions on a global scale — is going to require breakthroughs in technology,” says Dr. Brian Flannery, science, strategy and programs manager at ExxonMobil. “We believe these breakthroughs will come from leads generated by the type of fundamental science that GCEP is performing. Our hope is to mobilize a significant academic effort based on science and engineering.”

It takes a potent research organization to generate such an effort. Five years into the project, GCEP involves 24 institutions, 17 departments at Stanford, 70 investigators and more than 300 graduate students and post-doctoral fellows to conduct 44 full-term research projects and 11 exploratory activities.

The program consistently shares research results with a wide audience, including the science and engineering community, media, business, governments and potential end-users.

Daunting challenges

Working toward these achievements isn’t easy. GCEP seeks potentially “game-changing,” breakthrough science and encourages innovative research involving high risks that could deliver high rewards. For GCEP portfolio managers at Stanford — senior scientists in the program — convincing academic scientists to take bold risks with their work can be challenging. More traditional research funding sources typically encourage proposals with higher confidence in success.

In addition to managing people, the complex, far-flung GCEP activities — 30 percent of the work is being done at a variety of institutions in several countries — require much face-to-face communication, which can be difficult to orchestrate with a research team scattered around the globe.

“Pulling together and managing all of these people while maintaining a clear sense of direction has been a challenge, requiring major effort by he leadership, and the program has handled that well,” says Flannery. “After five years, GCEP has established programs involving great institutions, respected faculty members and talented students. This has created new research capacity and capabilities. GCEP is training a new generation of scientists and engineers who are thinking about these issues and can contribute.”

Weathering the scientific and logistical challenges, GCEP has been a resounding success. “In the more developed areas, the researchers have done a great job of identifying where the challenges and opportunities are. For example, in the areas of solar energy and carbon capture and storage, they’ve created a comprehensive set of programs that is establishing the fundamentals across a broad framework of research,” says Flannery.

GCEP researchers are also working on these vital projects:

• Studies of fuel cells and bioelectric conversion of energy
• Increasing the energy capacity of lithium batteries for applications in vehicles
• Thermodynamic principles for designing engines that produce higher efficiency and lower emissions
• Pathways to produce biodiesel fuel from bacteria to achieve a 20-fold increase in energy yield
• Increasing knowledge of hydrogen bonding to create new strategies for using hydrogen to power vehicles

“Achieving these long-term goals is a titanic challenge that won’t be met by academia alone,” says Sherri Stuewer, corporate vice president of Safety, Health and Environment. “It will have to be met by industry and government institutions as well. We hoped that GCEP would be a catalyst to encourage scientists to think more broadly about these issues, and we are seeing that happen. A number of other outstanding universities have cited GCEP as a model as they seek to develop energy research aimed at meeting global challenges. We’ve made achievements beyond what we had hoped for when we started the program five years ago.”