In an October 24th talk sponsored by the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), Ellen Williams, chief scientist at BP, starkly acknowledged the daunting proposition involved in achieving energy sustainability, a goal embraced by BP. Scientific and engineering innovation will be essential to achieving this goal, she said, as well as greater collaboration between academia and industry.
“It is not too much to say that the future of civilization depends on our maintaining access to abundant and relatively low-cost energy,” said Williams. She first zeroed in on the critical matter of greenhouse gas emissions. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased from 300 parts per million to 400 part per million just since 1960, due to “vast increases in the amounts of energy that we use from fossil fuels,” said Williams. “Scientists know and predict that to keep temperature rise resulting from greenhouse gas warming…to less than two degrees centigrade by the end of this century, we need to stabilize CO2 in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million.”
This will be very difficult, she said, because increased energy demand continues to drive up emissions. BP estimates that in the next 20 years or so, the world’s energy use will increase approximately 40%, and most of that growth will occur in developing countries, which rely on gas and coal. The corresponding CO2 increase likely means a four degree uptick in the world’s temperature by the end of the century. “That’s not good,” said Williams.
But this dire scenario “need not happen, and it’s not what we think should happen,” Williams continued. Capping the impact of climate change to a maximum 2°C increase in world temperature is possible, she believes, with the help of new low-carbon fuel sources and expanded efficiency and conservation measures.
One fruitful area of investigation, she said, involves ways to make BP’s central business of oil and gas production more efficient. 15 years ago, BP scientists made a serendipitous discovery: low-salinity water works best for recovering oil from rock. As typical oil reservoirs age, additional water is injected underground to drive out more oil. BP’s experiments revealed that lowering the salinity of this injected water reduces the forces that bind the oil particles to the rock. In an industry where most oil reservoirs yield only 30% of their estimated total wealth, this insight seemed like potential pay dirt.
But, said Williams, “going from a beautiful observation to something you can actually put in the field is a huge development process.” BP defined a precise plan for advancing from laboratory tests that cost a few thousand dollars to full demonstration projects that cost tens of millions, backing up each stage with science and technology that “would drive our understanding of what was going on with this rock-oil interaction.”
The end result of this “pyramid of testing” is a 1000-ton desalination unit which will be deployed on BP’s Clair Ridge platform in the UK North Sea, and is expected to recover an additional 42 million barrels of oil over the next decade on top of the 600 million the development would be expected to produce without the unit. This technology’s success is “evidence of sustainability,” said Williams, since it means producing more oil from the same “easy and relatively clean oil sources and not having to drill as many new wells.”
BP is also making strides toward producing low-carbon transportation fuels, continued Williams. With two university partners, BP launched the $500 million Energy Biosciences Institute to develop a new generation of biofuels from lignocellulosic, or woody, types of plants. But while these crops show great promise – not competing with food crops, and offering greater yields per acre than the conventional biofuel crops of sugar cane or corn – they also present unique challenges. “Unfortunately, the cellulosic process is a great deal more complicated than the process for either sugar or starch,” said Williams. “Wood is just not very digestible.”
The lignocellulosic plants selected for this research contain two kinds of sugars, each with a distinct molecular structure, which must be fermented by yeast to make ethanol –up till now accomplished in a laborious, two-stage sequence. A scientific breakthrough opened up a new pathway for yeast to ferment both sugars simultaneously, enabling “a fast, efficient process and a much better yield of ethanol,” said Williams, and dramatically improving the fuel’s prospects for commercialization.
Another BP research program, the “Energy Sustainability Challenge,” is a detailed survey of the relationship between the world’s resources and energy, especially in light of anticipated global population growth to possibly 10 billion by century’s end. Within BP’s consortium of universities, said Williams, MIT “took the lead in the most important segment of the question: examining the energy-water nexus.”
Given that 9% of the world’s water is used in power generation, primarily for carrying away waste heat, BP wondered if more efficient energy production processes might reduce the global draw on water for power. For this project, MIT Professor of Mechanical Engineering Ahmed Ghoniem studied how power plants around the world currently use water, and then modeled “what the water usage should and could be in well-run power plants,” said Williams. This work suggests that existing, advanced technologies such as tower cooling could “produce all the power we need in the world with far, far less impact on water resources,” added Williams.
With the help of MIT’s Joint Program on Global Change, BP is also analyzing land use for biofuels. The company’s technical analysis suggests biofuels might “safely, without impacting our ability to feed the world’s population, provide between 20% and 40% of the world’s transportation fuels,” Williams said, as well as “make a significant impact on CO2 – on the greenhouse gas issues and climate change.” But there are also “societal issues that underpin biofuels use,” she added. BP hopes that with the help of Joint Program models, it can add these issues to the analysis, leading to a “good understanding of what it’s going to take economically to address climate change with biofuels.”
While Williams expressed cautious optimism about tackling the issue of global energy sustainability, she noted that “good governmental decisions” must accompany pathbreaking science and technology if there is to be progress. “This requires all of us to speak out and give our best advice and understanding to decision makers who will guide that process,” she concluded.
During her visit to MIT, Williams, who sits on MITEI’s External Advisory Board, met with President Rafael Reif and MITEI Director Ernest Moniz and renewed BP’s commitment to supporting energy research at the Institute for another five years.