Strategies for the Energy Crisis

BP’s chief scientist, Steven Koonin, says cutting greenhouse emissions will take major changes.

After nearly 30 years at Caltech as a professor of theoretical physics and, eventually, provost, Steven Koonin took a leave of absence in 2004 to become BP’s chief scientist. After a year of study, he recommended a strategy for the company that has included investments in unconventional sources of oil as well as renewable energies such as solar. The company has also invested $500 million in research on biofuels. Technology Review’s energy editor, Kevin Bullis, sat down with Koonin after his talk at this week’s EmTech conference to discuss BP’s strategy and whether it will be possible to meet the world’s energy challenges.


TR: When you look at public policy decisions, what are some other mistakes you’ve seen?

SK: One is confusing transportation with stationary sources of power and heat. What problems are we trying to solve? If it’s carbon dioxide emissions, there are cheaper ways to do it than improving transportation. If you improve the efficiency of a vehicle to reduce fuel use and carbon dioxide emissions, for many vehicle technologies it will take several hundred dollars per ton of carbon dioxide. But transport is only 20 percent of energy-related emissions. Heat and power from stationary sources are most of it. At $50 a ton, there’s a lot of carbon that can be wrung out of stationary sources. When you start cranking the price up to $100 to $200, that’s when you start to affect transport, whereas we can shift to lower-emissions heat and power at $50 a ton.

TR: Why the difference?

SK: There are about twice the emissions, per unit of useful energy, from coal as from gasoline.

TR: But isn’t it still worth reducing gas consumption for the United States to reduce dependence on unstable or even hostile countries for oil?

SK: Security of supply is much more important than carbon emissions, in my opinion, in transport.

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