Imagine a world that’s energy-rich

Storing electricity locally was late Nobelist’s dream

The late Dr. Richard E. Smalley was a Nobel Laureate and professor of chemistry at Rice University. His Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded in 1996 for the discovery of a new form of carbon, buckminsterfullerene (”buckyballs”) with Robert Curl, also a professor of chemistry at Rice, and Harold Kroto, a professor at the University of Sussex in England. At the time of his death in October 2005, Smalley was focused on finding solutions to the global energy problem. The article below is a summation of Smalley’s thoughts on an energy solution excerpted by his colleague, Amy Myers Jaffe of Rice’s Baker Institute.
I have been on a personal journey for the past year and half in a search to find some happy answer to the energy problem.

I believe the problem is, simply stated, that we have to find a new oil. Oil was, unquestionably, the basis for prosperity for this country and the planet in the last century — particularly the last half of the century.

But it is very clear to many of us, including leading scientists and policymakers, that if oil remains the basis for prosperity for the world throughout this century, it cannot be a very prosperous or happy century.

There are two reasons for this. First, we will certainly peak in worldwide oil production sometime in the earlier part of the century; and second, there will be vastly more people (billions of people) on the planet consuming energy in the future.

As this energy consumption rises worldwide, we will create a huge wall of carbon with immense negative impacts.

So we need to find an economic alternative to oil. We need a new basis for energy prosperity.

(We need) a technology that makes us energy-rich again in an environmentally acceptable fashion for 10 billion people.

I have tried to imagine at least one acceptable scenario for new energy by 2050. When I think about the answer to that question, I am imagining a scenario where we do not cart energy around as mass and then reconvert it, but we cart it around as electrical energy.

And so, if you have one word in this scenario to describe this new oil, it would not be ”oil,” it would be ”electricity.” That is the key conceptual insight that makes things work.

Houston Chronicle