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Please motivate in a few words why you should be admitted to a KIC InnoEnergy programme.

*250 Upon successful completion of the KIC IE MSc programme, where do you see yourself at an entrylevel career-wise? *250 Taking leverage of my experience and the dual degree I will be obtaining, I see myself placed in a techno-commercial role in a research and development department of a energy related MNC Where do you see yourself, career-wise, 5 years after graduation? *150 I see myself as a What is your main ONE personal driver for working really hard and accomplishing something dayto-day? *150 Please give a brief account on the most prioritized energy challenge in the world. *500 Our Stressed-Out Transmission Network According to IEA the Consumption of energy has increased 39 percent since 1990 and 300 percent since 1975, primarily due to the proliferation of power-hungry consumer products and computers. As the grid gets pushed harder than ever, managers increase wheeling of electricity across great distances. But, meanwhile, long-term growth of transmission capacity has dramatically failed to keep pace with the growth of peak demand. If current trends continue, forecasters predict there will be less than a one percent increase in total miles of transmission cables by 2012. So-called transmission loading relief (TLR) procedures are one means of heading off excessive congestion by grid reliability coordinators. When crisis hits, the great strength of the grids interconnectedness becomes a great weakness. As the 2003 blackout in America showed, localized events (caused by accidents, equipment failure or a terrorist attack) can rapidly cascade into large-scale outages. As one might expect given the above facts, power outages and interruptions, which cost the world bout 200 billion euros per year, have been on the rise. One response to our stressed-out grid would be to build a lot of new long-distance transmission lines. Some, like financier T. Boone Pickens, envision a super grid linking new wind and solar farms to distant population centres. But resistance to this approach is bound to be significant given most peoples reluctance to welcome new transmission lines in their backyards. Every mile of proposed transmission represents a potential lawsuit from aggrieved landowners and environmental groups. Our needs march on, however. Economic and population growth demand more energy. And our electronic lifestyles demand not just more, but purer electricity. Power quality incidents before the Digital Age were difficult to diagnose due to short interruption periods. In the old days, a partial restoration of power (or brownout) resulted in light bulbs being half lit. Now the digital revolution has increased the stakes. A partial restoration of power wont run appliances like computers or routers, so the increase in power sensitive appliances and digital load requirements has forced us to more narrowly define power quality. For example, ten years ago voltage sags might be classified by the utility as drops of 40 percent or more for 60 cycles. Today a 15 percent drop for five cycles constitutes a voltage sag. Further complicating matters, due to inefficiencies even developed countries like United States loses in excess of 1.65 trillion kilowatt hours (kWh) per year1 trillion in long-distance transmission and 650 billion throughout the distribution system and the scenario in developing countries are much worse. The dissipation of this energy has serious consequences. It leads to wasted electricity, unnecessary power generation, lost money, and millions of tons of unnecessary CO2 being spewed into the

atmosphere. If adopted with decisiveness, efficiency technologies hold out the hope of mitigating these challenges in a major way over the next decade. According to electrical component giant ABB, just a ten percent improvement in the efficiency of the distribution grid would save almost 4.5 billion euros and reduce carbon emissions by 42 million tons.

Please share some of your innovative intentions for the energy field. *500 The below mentioned are some from my thought process and that I have come across. I would not claim that all the ideas are original as some of them would already be in a research stage. But almost all of these are the ones I have given a thought about and read about: (i) This is something I got inspired from seeing something in two three villages of western India in the states of Gujarat and Rajasthan. Some irrigation pumps were solar-powered without using any electrical components. Small collectors concentrated sunlight sufficiently to produce steam of high enough temperature and pressure to operate water pumps. (The motivation was that pilferage of electrical components, even copper wire, was then a problem in the outlying areas where the apparatus was often located.) This idea is one of the elements in the proposal. Based on this couple of my friends (not me) has worked on a solar cooker in my college. This was able to cook rice which is a staple food in my region (southern state of Kerala). The intension is to collect

------------------------------------------------------------The American electric grid should be counted among the wonders of the modern world. As related in Jason Makansis insightful book Lights Out, our electricity system can be considered one huge machine.18 Measured by route miles and physical footprint, the North American electric grid is the second largest network on the planet, after our roads and highways.19 Following the path of least resistance, electricity zips along the transmission and distribution (T&D) network, often traveling hundreds of miles and crossing multiple state lines on its journey. In 2003, the National Academy of Engineering ranked the top 20 engineering achievements of the twentieth century. Automobiles, airplanes, computers, and many other marvels made the list, but electrification came out on top.20 Perhaps a rare few Americans paid attention to these rankings, however. The rest of us went about our daily business, as aware of electricity as we are of the oxygen that we breathe. Ironically, 2003 was also the year of the Northeast Blackout, which affected roughly 50 million people. That event cost the economy between $4 and $10 billion.21 In some areas of the U.S., power remained out for four days, surprising millions who had come to depend upon the reliability of the electric grid. But what surprises many experts on that subject is not the fact that the whole Northeast lost power in one fell swoop on a hot summer day. Rather, they wonder why we havent had many more such widespread disruptions. From 1960 to 1980, the United States experienced a major building boom of electrical infrastructure. During this period electric rates increased dramatically across the country. But in the past 40 years we have substantially de-capitalized the grid. As a result, we now have the lowest inflation-adjusted cost of electricity in 50

years, along with a grid thats falling apart. This is about to change. Eric Eggers, Energy Analyst for Credit Suisse, in a recent presentation to the Aspen Institute projected that U.S. utilities must spend $1 trillion in the next 20 years to meet renewable portfolio standards, build new transmission capacity, and replace aging fossil fuel plants.22 To pay for these essential upgrades, our electric bills will have to double from todays level unless we can figure out another solution. Right now our grid is mostly old-tech or, if you will, pretty dumb. In fact, when you consider that the North American electric grid is the biggest, most complicated networked machine in the world, its dumbness is amazing. The grid is essentially still an analog system feeding power to our digital world. A 2009 Department of Energy (DOE) survey found that only 28 percent of electric-grid substations were automated and only 46 percent had any form of outage detection. The same study determined that 80 percent of relays were electromechanical, while only 20 percent were digital.23 This lack of intelligence is why you have to call the utility when your power goes out. IBM recently published a smart grid report calling attention to the monitoring gap that exists between transmission lines and commercial and residential electric meters. How does the average utility calculate how much capacity they have available? They work off of historical models and the nameplate capacity of transformers and overhead lines. In other words, they read their old records, read the labels on their equipment, and make their best guess. To compensate for lack of knowledge they have to build in a reserve margin of safety that is typically 1820 percent of the nameplate capacity. But their lack of situational awareness isnt so easily overcome. It leads to even bigger inefficiencies. For example, ambient heat stresses electrical grid components and reduces their real capacity, while breezes or cold temperatures increases their capacity; but the dumb grid has no way to adjust itself to these changes. Real-time monitoring of transformers and overhead lines would enable central station electric grid operators to increase the throughput of the grid and reduce its reserve margin by up to halfto 910 percent. Thats equivalent to over $100 billion of avoided capacity cost and unnecessary transmission and generation. From an environmental perspective, it would provide the means to grow the grid by 10 percent without adding a molecule of additional carbon to the air.24 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------During the past decade, an extraordinary number of events and circumstances have put energy-related issues more than ever front and center in our public debates, business decisions, and consumptive behaviours. While Tsunami in Japan, Indonesia and India and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita ravaged the coasts of different part of the world, the climate change debate gained momentum and personal opinions on global warming impacted voting behaviour in political races. Whereas sport-utility vehicles were hot commodities at the turn of the millennium, dramatic changes in taste left the United States auto industry in the hands of the government. The world has been witnessing extreme volatility in energy prices. Amid this high degree of uncertainty on both the demand and supply sides, the issue of securing the energy infrastructure looms large. When will the first rolling brownouts or blackouts occur? Are the right investments being made to maintain our aged electrical grid? What if a terrorist attack on an important oil terminal succeeds, such as the one on the worlds largest oil-processing facility in eastern Saudi Arabia in February 2006? What happens if the major trunk carriers for refined

product went dry due to a prolonged flooding of the refinery infrastructure on the Gulf Coast? It is no wonder that the stakes in energy are higher than ever before with uncertainty abounding and vast amounts of primary resources being drained out. So stop for a moment and consider: What will help us transition through the current situation into a more secure energy future? Isn't it high time we human race learn that resources of the nature are to be utilized, not exhausted by exploiting them Modern societies require affordable and plentiful energy. Where energy supplies are unreliable, such as in much of Africa and the Middle East, economic development slows. Where they are stable, such as in the United States, Europe, Brazil and Taiwan, standards of living improve. Its no coincidence that China, the worlds fastest-growing big economy, opens a new power plant every week. Coal is so central to the economic development of China that they refer to it as country blood. In the West we have long taken energy for granted. Most of us think about electricity only on those rarethough increasingly frequentoccasions when the lights go out. And 55 percent of Americans were not even alive to experience the Arab oil embargo of 1973. For them, gas station lines remain an abstraction. But times are changing. In the past few years, a number of factors (fuel price spikes, the Iraq War, the BP Gulf oil spill and prominent global warming summits, to name a few) have led consumers, businesspeople and citizens to devote greater attention to our energy future. From the White House to the coffee shop, the debate often simmers and sometimes rages. Do we cut consumption or increase production to advance our economic and environmental goals? Should we shift most transportation from one fuel to another? Is energy independence a reasonable expectation or a pipedream? This national discussion is well meaning but too often misinformed. For example, theres a great deal of talk these days about solar and wind power, strategies that are destined to have negligible impact on our energy challenges for at least two decades. Yet existing technologies that can make the electric grid more efficient and reliable within the next two years sit gathering dust. Why is this so? Partly because our energy infrastructure is vast, multifaceted and, to some extent, Balkanized; partly because those who go to work for oil and gas companies, utilities, and coal miners are engineering types who usually prefer doing to talking. Theyre in the game, but others are setting the rules. We cant afford to go on this way. Humanity stands today at an inflection point. For example, Americans dream of energy independence. With this goal in mind, can we ignore the fact that wind turbines and hybrid cars require rare earth minerals, a market that is 95 percent controlled by China? Meanwhile, a worldwide consensus is forming (like it or not) around the idea that we must reduce carbon dioxide output, with wind energy touted among the answers. Are we to invest billions in this form of power without a single study that proves it will reduce our carbon output? And another inconvenient truth confronts us: Simply maintaining our electrical grid at its current capacity will soon require a $1 trillion capital investment. The coal-fired plants that supply 50 percent of our electricity, for instance, on average have a 40-year life expectancy. At this writing, 70 percent of them are over 30 years old. Even if we set aside the enormous sums of money involved, these are not trivial concerns. Choices we make in the next ten years may determine the prosperity and security of our nation for the next hundred. These commitments are too important to be decided without significant input from those who understand our current energy infrastructure best. And they are too important to be imposed upon one facet of the energy economy without considering the impact on all other facets. -------------------------------------------------------------------

B ehind a high fence in Menlo Park, California, a grey, tuna-shaped robot glides on a monorail around 20 solar panel arrays attached to steel poles, like WALLE on a Disneyland ride. The Solbot, made by startup QBotix, stops at each array and extends a cylindrical arm to adjust the angle of the photovoltaic (PV) panels so they capture the most amount of sun as it moves across the sky and through the seasons. Meanwhile, in Germany, a giant robotic arm that looks like it escaped from an automotive factory and mated with an army tank rumbles through a field, plucking 300-pound solar

panels from a pallet and installing them on steel racks. The robot is called Momo, and two of them can do the work of the 250 labourers needed to build a 100-megawatt PV power plant, its creator claims. Solar powers race to become competitive with fossil fuel has been aided hugely by the steep price drops in recent years for PV modules. Down 40 percent in the past year, PV modules now account for only about a third of the cost of a power plant. That has left developers scrambling for other ways to cut costs. To be honest, there hadnt been that much innovation happening, says Martin Simonek, a solar analyst with research firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance in London. Therere only so many ways you can put panels on the roof or the ground. So attention turned to such things as streamlining permitting and other paperwork and reducing the number of nuts and bolts needed to assemble a solar array. Boring. Its time to welcome our new robotic overlords, as startups like QBotix exploit advances in sensor technology and automation to cut solar power plant costs. We are the first company to bring robotics to the operation of solar power plants, says Wasiq Bokhari, QBotixs boyish 42-year-old chief executive. Much of the cost of a solar plant is the steel. The robots allow us to take out 50 percent of the steel used in the system. Solar installers would prefer to rig panels to a dual-axis tracking system so the flat arrays can follow the sun and seasons, thereby boosting a plants electricity production by 45 percent. The catch: Theyre expensive. Solar power plants can have up to hundreds or thousands of arrays, each with a tracking motor and other mechanical parts prone to failure. By eliminating individual trackers and letting one battery-powered robot do the work, QBotix claims it can cut total energy costs by 15 percent while increasing generation by 30 percent to 40 percent over systems that dont track the sun. That lets a solar developer install QBotixs dual-tracking robotic system for the same cost as a simpler single-axis tracking system that produces less electricity. The robot itself costs only a few cents a watt, notes Bokhari, a physicist and serial entrepreneur, who has raised $7.5 million in funding from investors that include NEA, Firelake Capital, Siemens Venture Capital and DFJ JAIC.
Illustration: Patrick Welsh for Forbes

QBotix is selling its systemsthey declined to reveal the pricein 300-kilowatt units that include a robot, a backup robot, a steel track and tracking stands for the solar panels. The bots run on lithium-ion batteries and can adjust 200 solar panel arrays in 40 minutes for about 30 cents of electricity a day, according to Bokhari. The QBotix system does not require land to be level or graded. And developers dont have to dig trenches to bury a power plants wiring, as it runs in a conduit alongside the QBotix monorail. You could install it on the side of a hill, and the racks can follow the contour of the hill, says Bokhari, who has recruited solar experts and roboticists from Stanford, Caltech and MIT.

If you can boost electricity production by 20 percent at a solar plant, thats huge for an operator or utility, says Michael Butler, a veteran clean-tech investor who runs Cascadia Capital in Seattle. One early QBotix customer is Sol Orchard, a solar power plant developer based in Carmel, California. Sol Orchard Chief Executive Jef Brothers plans to install the QBotix system at a 1-megawatt research station he is building in the southern California desert in collaboration with San Diego State University. If it works as well as they claim it will work, Im interested in using it at other installations, says Brothers. It all comes down to how acceptable it will be to the bankers. The pinstriped-suit set tend to be conservative, particularly when it comes to financing renewable energy projects that deploy new technologies. Tracking systems havent been a popular choice because banks dont like them, as they generally dont like black boxes or moving parts in solar systems, notes Simonek. But they might like Momo. The robot, developed by German engineer Bernd Brodbeck and Kiener Maschinenbau, a manufacturer of automated industrial systems, is a tool to build solar power plants rather than operate them. It uses 3-D cameras and other sensors to pick up large solar panels and place them on mounting racks. In a big PV plant, you have to assemble thousands of modules, says Brodbeck. Thats not economical, so we took the industrial robot outside and put it in the field. He estimates that it would take only four workers and two of the $900,000 robots to install solar panels on a 100-megawatt project. Kiener has sold one of the robots to German solar power plant builder PV-Kraftwerker, which is testing the machine at one of its projects, and is talking to developers in Europe and the US. Thats very innovative, says Simonek. But I wouldnt underestimate the need for human labour. Theres a huge emphasis on quality control that cant be eliminated by robots. In other words, there still might be a place for people under the sun.

Read more: http://forbesindia.com/article/cross-border/how-solar-panels-work-withouthuman-force/34283/1#ixzz2IE1RTYJi


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N early everyone thinks that generating electricity via solar power is good for the environment, but theres much less agreement on whether it makes sense from an economic point of view. At what point will solar power be competitive with electricity generated by conventional, fossil-fuel plants, and how long will subsidies need to remain in place before the solar industry can stand on its own? Those are some of the questions addressed in The Prospects for Cost-Competitive Solar PV Power, a new working paper by Professor Stefan Reichelstein of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Michael Yorston, graduate student in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford. Their paper

breaks new ground in studying the life-cycle cost of electricity generated by solar photovoltaic, paying particular attention to key factors such as location, public subsidies, and the long-term learning effects in manufacturing solar panels. Here is an excerpt from our discussion with Professor Reichelstein: Stanford GSB: Why did you decide to study the economics of solar photovoltaic power at this time? Stefan Reichelstein: Renewable energy and solar in particular remain rather controversial in the public debate about energy policy. Passions have been running high. What motivated me is the bewildering range of statements you have out there regarding the cost effectiveness of electricity based on solar PV. Given the range of opinions, I wanted to do my own analysis. Im looking at it from the point of view of a business economist who is interested in measuring the life-cycle cost of this abundant energy source. Your main conclusions? Solar PV is not yet competitive with fossil fuel, like natural gas, from the perspective of a utility that can either build a new natural gas power plant or invest in solar installations. For a commercial power user, say a business with plenty of rooftop space, the cost of generating your own electricity is now on par with what the business would need to pay in retail electricity prices. In that sense, grid parity has been achieved for commercial-scale installations. However, I need to add immediately that this is subject to two important qualifiers. The facility has to be in a favorable location, such as the Southwestern United States, and secondly the business must be able to take advantage of the current federal tax subsidies. Concerning the future, and this may sound like a pun, the future of solar PV looks rather bright. The industry has consistently been able to lower the cost of solar panels. If this trend can be maintained for the next 10 years, and if subsidies are continued for that period, there is a real prospect for solar to become cost competitive on its own (that is, without a subsidy), at least for commercial installations. Utility-scale installations will take longer to become competitive; possibly 15 years, though it obviously becomes murkier to make projections that far into the future. What happens if subsidies disappear or are sharply reduced? The current federal tax subsidies come out of the Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 and will be in place until 2016 unless Congress changes the rules. The solar panel manufacturing industry has been on a remarkably steady learning curve for several decades now, which has pushed down the systems price of solar panels at a dramatic rate. However, this learning curve seems very much dependent upon production volume. So, if the tax subsidies were to cease, new production volume would probably be lower, and the effect of that would be to slow down the rate of cost improvements.

If the current preferential tax treatment is kept in place for about the next 10 years, and the observed learning curve holds up, we are projecting that, at that point in time, solar-generated electricity would be competitive with that generated from fossil-fuel power plants. Why will it take longer for utility-scale installations to stand on their own, than for commercial-scale installations? You have different benchmarks. For commercial-scale and also for residential solar, the benchmark is the retail price of electricity, while for utility-scale projects it is the wholesale price. The difference between the two is the cost of transmission, distribution, and administration; that is, everything that gets you from generating the power to delivering it to your customers. What assumptions are you making about the cost of generating electricity from fossil fuels? We believe that natural gas, as opposed to coal, is the most important fossil fuel competitor to renewable energy. In our cost projections, we have assumed a modern combined-cycle gas power plant with the price of natural gas given by the historical average observed in the United States over the past 10 years. Are you factoring in the price of oil? No. Oil is not used widely to generate electricity. The price of oil would be relevant to our analysis only to the extent that you want to compare gasoline-powered cars against electric vehicles. Isnt it true that panel costs have dropped sharply because of excess capacity in the industry? Yes, solar panel producers are waiting for demand to catch up with current industry capacity. Until that happens, the panel producers will continue to hurt in terms of profits. In the last year, panel price came down about 40%, a drop that cant be attributed to the learning curve alone. Without the capacity glut caused by new entrants, but taking into account the historic learning curve, we would have predicted a drop in prices of about 20% in 2011. Without the excess capacity in the industry, our estimate of the current life-cycle cost of electricity generated by solar PV would have been about 15% higher than it was. In large part, solar PV panels are semiconductors; does Moores Law apply to them as well? Yes, in a sense. Moores Law speaks to the rate at which the number of transistors doubles on an integrated circuit. In the context of solar panels, it appears that whenever the total cumulative amount of panels produced doubles, the unit cost decreases by 20%. What is driving the economics of solar power? A mix of federal tax incentives has been especially helpful to commercial-scale installations, and even to home installations. Weve also seen dramatic growth in recent years of utilityscale installations despite their current cost disadvantage relative to fossil fuel power plants. The reason appears to be the additional subsidy mechanisms at the state and local level. Here in California, Assembly Bill 32 (a 2006 law that set goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions) and the states renewable portfolio standard, which requires that 33% of California's electricity come from renewable resources by 2020, seem to be driving demand. Other countries (such as Germany) have different subsidy mechanisms that yield similar effects.

Read more: http://forbesindia.com/article/stanford/solar-powers-brightfuture/34265/1#ixzz2IE1aQYfq


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Environment The ultimate climate change FAQ

Series: The ultimate climate change FAQ Previous | Next | Index

What's energy efficiency and how much can it help cut emissions?
This Q&A is part of the Guardian's Ultimate climate change FAQ See all questions and answers Read about the project

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Grantham Research Institute, Imperial College London and Duncan Clark guardian.co.uk, Friday 8 June 2012 09.32 BST

A compact fluorescent light bulb is considered efficient as it uses less electricity thana tradtitional bulb to produce the same amount of light. Photograph: Graham Turner/Guardian Energy efficiency means using less energy to provide the same service. For example, a compact fluorescent bulb is more efficient than a traditional incandescent bulb as it uses much less electrical energy to produce the same amount of light. Similarly, an efficient boiler takes less fuel to heat a home to a given temperature than a less efficient model. The phrase 'energy efficiency' is often used as a shorthand to describe any kind of energysaving measure, though technically it should be distinguished from energy conservation a broader term which can also include forgoing a service rather than changing the efficiency with which it is provided. Examples of energy conservation include turning down a thermostat in the winter or walking to the shops rather than driving there. Increasing energy efficiency often costs money up-front but in many cases this capital outlay will be paid back in the form of reduced energy costs within a short time period. This makes efficiency improvements an attractive starting point for reducing carbon emissions. The scope of the savings and the techniques required depend on the situation and location. For homes in cool countries such as the UK, the most effective measures include increasing insulation, draught proofing, installing good-quality double-glazed windows and switching to more efficient appliances and light bulbs. The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) estimates that these improvements could reduce annual CO2 emissions from British homes by around 17 million tonnes by 2020 around a tenth of the 2008 residential total. By contrast, increasing efficiency in non-domestic buildings often means focusing on ventilation and air-conditioning, in addition to lighting, heating and appliances. Many such buildings have achieved savings of around 25% after undergoing a refit to increase efficiency. Energy-intensive industries, such as iron, steel and cement manufacture, have become more efficient over time due to new equipment and better re-use of waste heat. For example, a hot pipe containing a chemical that needs to be cooled can be used to heat up other chemicals (this is known as 'heat integration'). Motors are used widely in industry for a variety of tasks,

such as pumping, mixing and driving conveyor belts. The installation of efficient, correctly sized motors and drives can result in energy savings of 2025%. Vehicles have also become more energy efficient over the decades thanks to factors such as improved engines and lighter, more aerodynamic designs. The potential exists for further improvements and in EU the emissions of the average new car is set to decrease from 150 to 95 grams of CO2 per km by 2020. The CCC forecasts that the introduction of efficiency improvements to cars, vans and HGVs could reduce CO2 emissions in the UK by 12.3 million tonnes by 2020 around 10% of total for surface transport in 2008. Improving energy efficiency does not necessarily translate into reduced CO2 emissions: the savings depend on the situation. If the energy is supplied from fossil fuels such as petrol in a car or electricity from a coal-fired plant then improved efficiency will cut emissions. But if the energy is supplied by a low-carbon source such as electricity from nuclear or renewables, then improving efficiency may have little impact on emissions. (When comparing electric and non-electric appliances, it's important to consider the efficiency of the power generation, too: switching from a 90% efficient gas boiler to a '100% efficient' electric heater will increase energy use and emissions if the electricity comes from regular fossil fuel power plants, which themselves are highly inefficient, losing much of the energy in their fuel as waste heat.) Energy efficiency is always a good idea. Whether it results in energy savings depends on what we do with the money we saved. In some cases, efficiency savings can be offset by changes in user behaviour the so-called 'rebound effect'. One example would be that insulating a home may make it more economic for the resident to maintain a higher temperature, increasing the standard of comfort but reducing the energy savings. Nonetheless, improving energy efficiency is a key tool for reducing CO2 emissions, alongside energy conservation and low-carbon energy sources such as renewables and carbon capture and storage.
--------------------------------------------------Getting More from Oil and Gas In 2008, oil and natural gas accounted for over 60 percent of primary energy consumption in the United States.69 (Oil is No. 1 by a good margin, and coal lags natural gas by a smidge). While natural gas may rise in prominence relative to oil in the future, the fact remains that this hydrocarbon duo will be powering America for decades to come. An increasingly popular view, championed by arch-druids and industry veterans alike, is that global flow rates of oil are approaching or have already surpassed their peak. Mature fields are declining, while discoveries of new supergiant fields have dwindled. These are major challenges, and its hard to predict what technical innovations could stave off the coming crude crunch. But innovations do come. Economist Paul Romer, speaking broadly about economic growth, put this best when he said: Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new

recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered. Possibilities do not add up. They multiply. He may as well have been talking about the history of energy discovery. The shale gas bonanza is just the latest in a long string of unexpected surprises that have kept the volatile fossil fuel industry vibrant. While no one can say exactly where the next breakthrough energy discovery or innovation will come from, its a safe bet that another one will come for the simple reason that it always has before. Such is the course of human progress, which is Romers point. In the following chapters, well take a quick look back at a past development that dramatically changed the exploration game. Well then turn our sights to the real prize, and to some technology applications that will likely help to secure adequate supplies of oil in the decades ahead. Next, well review shale fracturing, which in a short time has totally changed the outlook for natural gas. Finally, well present our vision of the digital oil field.

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