AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Two teams of scientists from the University of Texas have been asked by the U.S. Department of Energy to set out on the energy frontier — one team in search of a new way to collect solar energy, the other to contend with the byproducts of America's energy use.
Professors Paul Barbara and Gary Pope have been given $30.5 million in grants as part of a $777 million national energy research effort that its developers have likened to the creation of the atomic bomb and the mission to put a man on the moon. Their projects were two of 46 that the Energy Department's Office of Basic Energy Sciences chose from among 260 proposals.
These energy frontier research centers, as the Energy Department calls them, have been charged with providing the research foundation for a multibillion-dollar government drive to answer some of the biggest questions of national energy use and its consequences.
The Office of Basic Energy Science is financing 30 of the projects, including Pope's, at $100 million a year for the next five years. Sixteen other projects, including Barbara's, are getting $277 million over five years as part of President Barack Obama's stimulus package.
"Considering the urgency of the energy problem, the magnitude of the needed scientific breakthroughs and the historic rate of scientific discovery, current efforts will likely be too little, too late," the advisory committee that developed the guidelines for the grant proposals wrote in its report. "A new national energy research program is essential and must be initiated with the intensity and commitment of the Manhattan Project and sustained until this problem is solved."
Harriet Kung, associate director of science for the Basic Energy Science Office in Washington, said the program was launched "to address the most fundamental knowledge gaps in the area of energy."
"Each of the proposals from the University of Texas attempts to get at one of those questions in a unique way. There was a very rigorous peer review process in selecting these projects," Kung said.
Barbara's and Pope's teams are partnering with Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, which, since 1949, has conducted research into nuclear power and weaponry, chemical and biological warfare and other matters of national security.
Barbara's $15 million grant will pay for a team of about 25 professors, graduate students and two Sandia researchers to study materials that scientists think have the potential to revolutionize the capture and storage of solar energy.
Barbara, a chemistry professor and director of the Center for Nano and Molecular Science and Technology at UT, said researchers are in the early stages of looking at a carbon-based plastic that holds the potential to capture light energy many times more efficiently and cheaply than the silicates used in making today's solar cells.
Barbara said they're also trying to tackle other practical problems, such as trying to teach narrow-focus scientists how to communicate with big-picture engineers. The goal is to create more efficient ways of applying scientific breakthroughs to real-world products and problems, he said.
"I think we will be judged by how much we have changed the foundation of science," Barbara said. "I think this project gives us a shared sense of purpose. Academic science should have a big societal impact."
The team of 25 professors and students assembled under Pope, a professor of petroleum and geosystems engineering, will study ways to contain greenhouse gases.
The $15.5 million grant will be spent in four stages to assess the overall effect of returning carbon dioxide produced by power plants to the underground spaces where oil, gas and coal have been extracted, said Laurence Costin, a member of the team and a division manager at Sandia in Albuquerque, N.M.
An expensive process exists for capturing carbon dioxide and converting it into a lighter-than-water fluid, and Pope's team hopes to discover what effect this fluid would have on the environment if it's stored underground, Costin said.
"To this point, there has been very great difficulty in modeling what happens when you return the product of burning fossil fuels to the ground," Costin said.
Like the Barbara team, Pope's researchers are responsible for leaving a trail for a new generation of researchers, Costin said.
"We've recognized for 10 to 15 years the need to understand carbon dioxide's relationship with climate change," Costin said. Sandia "concentrates on issues of national security. We consider energy and climate change to be two of them."
mlisheron@statesman.com; 445-3663
