Steven Chu: ‘Coal is My Worst Nightmare’

[cali]

December 11, 2008, 3:18 pm
Posted by Keith Johnson
So Steven Chu, President-elect Obama’s likely choice to head the Department of Energy, is a proponent of energy efficiency and conservation as the first step in rejigging America’s energy mix. But since conservation alone won’t do it, what are his ideas about finding new supplies of energy?

Dr. Chu’s marquee work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is the Helios Project. That’s an effort to tackle what Dr. Chu sees as the biggest energy challenge facing the U.S.: transportation. That’s because it’s a huge drain on U.S. coffers and an environmental albatross, Dr. Chu says.

Helios has focused largely on biofuels—but not the bog-standard kind made from corn and sugar. The Energy Biosciences Institute, a joint effort funded by BP, is looking to make second-generation biofuels more viable. Among the approaches? Researching new ways to break down stubborn cellulosic feedstocks to improve the economics of next-generation biofuels, and finding new kinds of yeast to boost fermentation and make biofuels more plentiful while reducing their environmental impact.
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http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/12/11/steven-chu-coal-is-my-worst-nightmare/
What about other energy sources? Big Coal won’t be very happy if Dr. Chu gets confirmed as head of the DOE—he’s really, really not a big fan. “Coal is my worst nightmare,” he said repeatedly in a speech earlier this year outlining his lab’s alternative-energy approaches.

If coal is to stay part of the world’s energy mix, he says, clean-coal technologies must be developed. But he’s not very optimistic: “It’s not guaranteed we have a solution for coal,” he concluded, given the sheer scope of the challenge of economically storing billions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions underground.

[phantom power]

1. You shoud x-post in E/E

[rug]

2. This may turn out to be his single most significant appointment.

[ThomWV]

3. I want you to understand something about the Department of Energy

While we tend to think of DOE as the gatekeeper to all things energy related including its use in transportation in fact it might suprise you to learn how little of the work of DOE is concerned with fossil fuels, electrical power, batteries, vehicles, or any and all renewables put together. The DOE is the manufacturer, keeper, and ultimate destroyer of our nuclear weapons and provides the research for our military reactors. That is far and away where the greatest attention of the DOE is focused and where it will continue to be focused.

[TahitiNut]

5. About 95% of the DOE is outsourced. Contractors. "Science for hire."

It's a whorehouse. (I say this as a former "Senior Research Scientist" at a DOE National Laboratory.)

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

7. Tell me more, I'm interested.

[FSogol]

4. Yeast? Nooooooo. Won't someone think of beer prices?

:scared: :beer:

[niyad]

6. "positively green" , a fairly new magazine, has a most enlightening article on coal mining and the

entire industry--very disheartening, to say the least.

those "clean coal" ads make me ill, and the sad fact is, people will believe that crap.