2023 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: The Future of Energy

thank you thank you I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson your personal astrophysicist I'm the Frederick P Rose director of the Hayden Planetarium and welcome to the universe welcome to the uh LeFrak Auditorium of the American Museum of Natural History the Isaac Asimov Memorial panel debate began 23 years ago as a way to remember the life of Isaac Asimov Isaac Asimov was a New Yorker much of the research that went into his 600 books was conducted here in this institution in our research library in the astrophysics library at the time co-located with the planetarium and so he's a kind of a Native Son of this institution and rather than create a memorial or an exhibit we wanted to create something that was alive and so why not create a series that explored science topics that he would have explored and he would have been Enchanted by as the moving Frontier of science continues so this isn't is officially titled the Isaac asima Memorial panel debate the word debate is in that title but it's not don't think of it as a normal debate Point Counterpoint vote at the end no it's a conversation on the frontier of a subject about which this only moderate agreement which is the same thing as saying about which there is a lot of disagreement but it's not so we will so every year we gather people on a topic that needs some airing and the way we run it is we have a conversation on stage and your eavesdropping on it that's how this works we're not presenting there's no slides no one is going to be showcasing it's just we're having a conversation and you're going to watch and lastly I'd like to warmly thank the estate and the family of Isaac Asimov some members of that family are represented here this evening I just want to publicly thank them [Applause] just for agreeing that this would be the appropriate the appropriate way to remember the man and that it's something that deserves our continued support as we go forward so thank you tonight's topic the future of energy oh my gosh could anything be more relevant scientifically culturally politically than that right now I don't think so we have five panelists that have very specific expertise in this Arena I guess I can call it an arena can't I because we're going to have a vibrant conversation about it so let me bring in first I need my glasses for this old people glasses it happens here we go uh let me first bring out David Wallace Wells David come on out here David is a writer for the New York Times opinion column and he's a columnist for the New York Times magazine and author of The International bestseller the uninhabitable Earth life after warming next Olivia Lazard Olivia come on out a fellow at Carnegie Europe a fellow at Carnegie Europe focusing on the geopolitics of climate change and ecological transitions and our research focuses on identifying managing and reconciling tensions between decarbonization and regeneration this is something hardly anybody talks about so thank you Olivia from coming from Europe for this event thank you for squeezing that into your calendar thank you yes next up oh my gosh the deputy assistant secretary for energy transformation at the U.S Department of State Anna schmitzburg Anna come on out she's responsible for supporting a shift to a decarbonized economy that enables resilient Energy Systems the fact that America has a department that's thinking about this just warms my heart this is oh my gosh I for a while I didn't think this was real all right we've got earth science Professor Columbia University Peter Kellman Peter come on out Peter has expertise in something who would have thought you would need it ever he works to design and engineer methods that emulate spontaneous natural processes to achieve CO2 removal from the air permanently storing it back in the Earth oh my gosh okay we're going to get into that some more Peter Kellerman and finally we have oh my God we've got a plasma physicist from the Lawrence Livermore National Lab Tammy ma Tammy come on out thank you she's a member of the team that achieved Fusion ignition at the national ignitions facility this past December give it up for Tim man sub Tammy what were you guys doing in December it was Headline News you you we know we've been trying to harness Fusion Energy like forever and then up Pops a headline at the ignition facility I didn't even know there was a whole separate Place Beyond just the labs where you're focusing on just that so could you tell us what actually happened remind us please sure so last December uh for the first time we demonstrated in the lab more energy out of a fusion reaction than was put in this is the Holy Grail of fusion what we call Energy gain and we did this using the national ignition facility it is the world's largest most energetic laser 192 of them that shine on a fuel pellet of deuterium and tritium they are isotopes of hydrogen if you get them to high enough density hot enough held together for a long enough time you get those Fusion reactions going and in this case this research has been going on for over 60 years and for the first time we were able to get more energy out that we put in with the lasers essentially generating a miniature star in the laboratory we had one of your we had one of your co-workers on my podcast and he told us what temperature you reached what temperature did you reach in there 100 million degrees Celsius okay just to make it clear the center of the sun is only like 10 million degrees so you were more badass than the Sun we were the hottest place in the solar system all right we're coming back to you for sure uh Peter lately you've been trying to sequester CO2 that's a good admirable thing but as a geologist most of you I don't think the public knows that many of you were sustained on payroll by the US government to look for mineral resources that the government could exploit economically well I don't know that the US government has ever paid me but I did okay but I did that for as a consultant for a dozen years yeah and so um so you have an acute awareness of the distribution of minerals around the world yeah I mean I teach a class on Earth Resources and and students take it because they're very concerned about shortages and things like that and so presumably that that list of uh call them resources minerals the ones we care about most can change from one decade to a next depending on the needs of of our culture or especially our technology yeah very much so and I think probably a lot of people here have read the New York Times over the past year or so and seen a real focus on the sorts of things that are needed for the clean energy transition where that would be the ingredients that go into Lithium-ion batteries and I guess lithium is one of those ingredients well lithium we could talk a little bit about that but so um and also Rare Earth elements but let's talk about the battery ingredients um the things that are prized in the automotive industry in the wealthy world are nickel and Cobalt and so the New York Times has had a lot of really good coverage of cobalt resources coming from the Congo but I know we can make nickel and Cobalt in Supernova explosions and in the universe there's really no shortage of nickel so what's your problem where are you looking for the Nickels well I'm actually not sure there's going to be a shortage of nickel but Cobalt is a little bit in short supply but something that isn't really widely covered is that in um less wealthy markets people make batteries for cars using other metals manganese and phosphorus instead of nickel and Cobalt and so that's interesting right so in the U.S people want to drive a long way between charges and they want to have a small light car and that's what the nickel and Cobalt ingredients are good for but in other markets people are more concerned about the cost of the car and you can make it cheaper with these more abundant ingredients so there's a decision Matrix that shifts depending on where you live in the world yeah and ultimately it will depend on these various shortages that people are quite concerned about but I think it's important for people to know that there are alternatives we're not going to suddenly come to a screeching halt yes Cobalt runs short and tell me also uh about removing carbon to briefly what is carbon sequestration what is that well so carbon sequestration covers a lot of sins um so you can either capture CO2 from point sources like power plants but also cement and steel factories and then put that in the ground or where it originally came from as fossil fuels well keep in mind that when we burn fossil fuels we pretty much we add oxygen that's what burning is and we pretty much increase the mass and volume by a factor of almost four and so there's there's um less space has been vacated by removal of fossil fuels and we need to put it back in the ground but so you need a really big hole uh you can use big holes or we can try in as a as you alluded to when you introduce me you can try and make solid carbon-bearing minerals which are denser than CO2 fluid so this okay that's because you can't just um replace volume for volume that's your point correct although yeah you can build a mountain what's wrong with that well uh yeah so if if we wanted to use mine tailings to carbonate to make carbon minerals on the surface you'd make a pile 30 to 300 meters thick in the area of Washington DC for every billion tons of CO2 removed from Air okay but to put it in a ski place and then yeah yeah I have a slide I use though where you know if you take out enough CO2 it'll be global cooling 100 meter pile and the mountains will have ski slopes on them there you go you're missing out on an opportunity Anna spinsberg thank you for coming up from Washington D.C thank you for having me thank you I'm just I'm so Charmed and warm and even tickled that you that your office exists at all just tell us what what what are the goals of your office at the Department of State sure so the the Mandate of our office is to design and Implement International Energy policy and our goal is through internet oh of course of course the state department for the benefit of the American people and our partners and allies but we have three goals it's energy security it's energy access and it's building a clean energy economy so we use all of our Partnerships with countries diplomatically and multilaterally to align in policy and to push Innovation and to push stabilization of markets and to support each other technically and regulatorily to achieve our goals that's a lot going on there that's a lot going on right because the geopolitics mixed in with the economics mixed in with the technology now you now you mentioned very casually uh the United States and our allies but it seems to me the energy future is going to require the whole earth not just USA and our allies yes so what are you doing about yeah so what are you doing about that how about the people who are not our allies what do we it requires a global solution which requires a global solution and that's why we do work multilaterally and we do reach out to everyone because the reality is if we look we only contribute we contribute 10 to emissions so there's no way the world's emissions the world's emissions uh of CO2 CO2 China's about 27 the next after us was India so just to be clear the population of China is at least three times that of the United States so to say oh they've got nearly 30 and we have only 10 that just tracks with population yes even very much so we need to work together and there are there are Avenues were said whether it's or climate it is not just about working with our allies we need to work with everyone so we do reach out uh to all our partners to try and push that so you got to make nice with people as the state department should be doing at all times yes okay I'm reminded of a quote from Abraham Lincoln which is do we not conquer our enemies by making them our friends Abraham Lincoln arguably we tried that [Laughter] [Applause] Olivia again thanks for making this trip yeah so you study things that people might Overlook in their Zeal and enthusiasm when they decarbonize so from what you've just heard or from what you otherwise know uh yeah yeah we all want an electric car and drive you know 300 miles yeah but presumably to manufacture the car itself had a carbon footprint and there's a carbon equipment practically everywhere so do we have blind spots right now are we delusional as we March forward thinking we're doing the right thing and maybe not we do and we have many um too many to list on this stage but I'll try to be as quick as possible but before I do I'll say this as a disclaimer decarbonization needs to happen we only need to look at you know the synthesis reported the apcc yesterday um yesterday oh wow I missed that yeah okay but so what happens what did it say it's it's just bad just don't don't tell us it is is you must have read that on the airplane coming from Europe okay thank you thank you for staying on top of it for this uh I missed it go on yeah but there is essentially um a number of different things that we need to to take care of in our efforts to decarbonize and we followed a very sort of linear type of thinking trying to say well CO2 is a problem so we need to solve this year to problems when you say will you mean Society it's very very linear thinkers exactly yes um and we won't get into the history of that but it's you know what we need to what we need to do but the thing is that in order to do this clearly we need to shift from a fossil economy to a mineral economy and Anna you were just mentioning that Peter as well and in order to produce the same amount the same concentration of power that can come from fossils we need a lot of different minerals and in order to decarbonize a lot of really energy intensive economies we need a lot of different minerals that are not well that are scattered all around so you said concentration of power so in the world of physics we recall that energy density it's the same thing yeah so how much energy fits in a pint of liquid and if sorry a half liter of liquid talk European to me please the French invented the metric system so out of respect and she's from France uh so so energy density so it's very hard to compete with you know the amount of energy in gasoline that you can dig out here and bring over there and use it there yeah so that's part of this challenge I presume exactly exactly and so where you're going to mine the minerals in order to assemble all of the clean text that we need to generate the energy that supports well the US economy for example or european economies outside of China outside of the US outside of Australia you need to look at places that are very ecologically sensitive so we're looking at you know sort of mineral belts in the Amazon basin and the conga Basin and the wet force of Asia and the Arctic and the deep seas essentially all places that we haven't conquered yet and that are very important to regulate and stabilize the global commit regime if we touch them we weaken ecological interdependencies and we weaken ecological Integrity not only that a lot of the places where we find this you're bumming me out I just want you to you know we'll get to the good part out oh that's good there's good okay thank you we're working on it so we'll look forward to tonight yeah um but the there is a stacking up of different risks another one is that the places where we find essentially those different minerals are very Clement vulnerable and Mining is very resource intensive and has an impact on water has an impact on soil which are really the groundwater below the aquifer sort of thing absolutely but also in the hydrological cycle the transformation of you know water from liquid to gas and back into liquid which helps to regulate some of the you know local temperatures and local ecosystems so if we touch those ecosystems and if we don't um gear Innovation towards how to regulate material use and material consumption then we're essentially maintaining business as usual economies that will plunder the planet on our way to saving the climate and that will have very large effects also in terms of systems rivalries at geopolitical levels but also and this is one of the last things that I mean there are many more but another risk to take into account is that a lot of places where we go in mine tend to rate fairly high scores on fragility and Corruption issues two different aspects that are very Cooperative a high score on a corruption scale is a bad thing yes no I'm not sure it the thing is that within a systems rivalry sort of you know constellation corruption can be cooperable and that will have very severe impacts on environmental safeguards on governance on social safeguards that need to be really controlled and sort of strengthened in order to transition not just fast but smart as well and for the global good okay promise you have some good to say later promise okay thank you journalist Among Us in fact the very first journalist we've ever had in this panel just to put a little pressure on you we brought you on because you've written about all of this and so you have a broad view as any good journalists should to be able to sort of stitch together places where people can think where they might not have thought natural to think that way so I just want to congratulate you on the success of that book which as I understand was based on a highly controversial widely distributed article you wrote for New York Magazine was that right yep yeah so what are your Reflections on this uh when you look at the balance of what it is people want to do yeah we want to go to solar right but not everybody has sunlight and not and the sun isn't up 24 hours and so that has some drawbacks and everything seems to have a drawback have you been able to reconcile all of that into some coherent narrative um there are challenges I mean the the transition is going to be difficult it will impose some costs on ecological well-being there'll probably be some social and political costs along the way too but when I look at the big picture I just see the logic is very very clear that the system that we are living with now and which we've been living with in the US for you know depending on how you want to count a century or two in other parts of the world for less time is doing much much more damage and that the logic is really really clear that we need to move from that system to a new system we need to design the new one in a healthy healthy way but when we're talking about fossil fuel pollution killing millions of people every year killing hundreds of thousands of Americans every year um you know that's a catastrophic immediate cost that we're paying right now for the privilege of living with the status quo which we also know is heating the planet beyond the envelope of temperatures that have enclosed all of human history we are already warmer than the planet has ever been whenever humans were around to walk on it which means that everything we have ever known as civilization is the result of climate conditions we've already left behind so we're in the middle of an experiment right now and yeah we kind of have to get it right all right and now you talk about systems and there's a lot in that word you're talking about the endemic structure of what we today call civilization needs a major shift that you can't just piecemeal throw in this solution and that and that and expect that to take us where we need to go yeah we've been talking a little bit so far about cars and a little bit about solar and those are really important they're the sort of lowest hanging fruit um and they're the things that we know we know how to do right now but actually there are even bigger challenges in heavy industry we don't have really good solutions for how to replace that power we don't really know how to do agriculture in a more climate-friendly way infrastructure is also a challenge so even the things that are like the easy parts of the solution are really quite hard and challenging it really is a systemic whole civilization scale infrastructure rebuild that we need to do in order to make sure that we're not producing so much additional carbon that the planet the planet's heating accelerates really quite dramatically and makes all the expectations that we've carried into the present about the way the future will be we need we need to we need to protect those expectations as opposed to discard them on a way to a much harsher future you're bumming me out more than Olivia did Tammy uh if your thing if your Fusion works we solved all problems is there any the the people who fear nuclear energy I saw bumper sticker once that said no nukes and the o in the no was it the Sun and I thought do they know how the Sun makes energy can we like complete that story here but if if what you do works it's unlimited so is there any like Radioactive backlash on this what's what is the was there a danger that people fear for what you're doing yes so Fusion is clean right in the process of using neutrinium which are hydrogen you generate helium and um energy neutrons um and so we know helium's safe right you you can suck a helium balloon and have a little fun and no damage unless that's all you breathe and then you die yeah okay yes yes in limited amounts so the helium is not what would have killed you it's the absence of oxygen that would have killed you okay so the helium is a byproduct the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade will love you for that exactly yeah um and and so we say it's clean right there's no carbon anywhere in the reaction um we say it is nearly Limitless because um deuterium is naturally occurring in seawater and tritium we know how to breed um it couldn't help meet base load power we envision fusion power plants to be able to replace gigawatt scale coal power plants and there's no high level nuclear waste which is what you're referring to Neil um we do generate energetic particles and small amounts of low-level radiation but it's different from fission which is the other nuclear the bad nuclear but it's actually not bad but we'll get back into that later so you just make you generate good radiation we generate radiation that decays quickly okay and so there's no long-lived waste that you have to bury and wait thousands of years for it to Decay but just to jump in about the bad nuclear for a second more people die every day from the air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels than they've ever died in all of the accidents from all of them David that tally is not commonly thought about it seems to me if it were we'd be taking faster action sooner so what you've I think what you've done is you look at the air quality especially where you have power plants and things and now we're not just talking about CO2 we're just talking about regular old-fashioned pollution they will grew up with here in New York with smokestacks and that sort of thing I'm old enough because I'm an old fart here that coming home from coming home from school I had to brush Ash off my shoulder that settled from smokestacks from apartment buildings burning their trash okay so now I just I don't want to put words in your mouth are you saying that you can there's a way to calculate the effect of this poor air quality on people's health and look at how many people have died because of it because whenever they die they don't say oh the fossil fuels killed me they just say I had asthma and it was a bad breathing attack so I think there's not truth in advertising here there I mean it's it's their uh scientific computational disputes about exactly how large the numbers are but there's no dispute that that effect is real and the range of estimates is globally even the low estimates are in the millions of lives every year lost globally according to a big project at the University of Chicago that manages monitors this stuff globally life expectancy is cut by two years by air pollution from the production of fossil fuels in India and parts of India it's as much as a decade so the average Indian in the endogengetic belt is living nine years less than they would without pollution and that has nothing to do with CO2 that's just like a regular old pollution yeah it's called PM 2.5 or particulate

matter what what about uh people who die mining coal that's a whole other calculation right yeah well I mean the for this guy here the mine coal yeah I will say the the deaths due to coal mining which were in the thousands per year and in China have come down a lot and in the United States it's down into the single digit so it was a fatality in coal mining was a tremendously big problem and it's still a problem and we should all think about that when we turn on the lights are they wearing masks now why does it drop from thousands to single digits because uh in the early days people didn't worry too much about mine gas they didn't worry too much about ventilation they didn't worry too much of the canaries are for and and keep in mind that we're not too far away from having robotic mining but I'm not advocating coal okay I just that's right we're one friends here we can say what you want uh by the way I remembered because I was I had enough geek in me as a kid in the Random House dictionary unabridged which I think was the largest sort of American language dictionary the longest word in that dictionary was new mono Ultra microscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis you're looking at there and I said what the hell is this a new mono Ultra you can break it apart pneumonoultramicroscopic silicon canoconiosis it's black lung disease yeah yeah that's the long word for black lung so I learned I knew that word before I even knew what it meant and then I found out what it is I see people dying from this like what's up with that yeah well I mean we'll get back to Tammy here Tammy um you just said that use the most powerful lasers in the world and from what I read each one of those 192 lasers is itself the most powerful laser in the world other than the other 191 lasers is that correct that is correct okay so almost energetic energetic so how could you possibly say oh one day everybody will have this only you have that how that is not going to be like Mr Fusion like in in what's the movie um Back to the Future where it comes from the future and he has a fusion device in his car powering his car that does not sound like it's going to happen anytime soon and David the how much of this is vaporware that we hear about do you want to ask her first I'll go first and let's okay you go first but I want David to sort of look at the broad spectrum of them yes um so yeah there's still a lot of work to do um you think yeah okay yeah uh like I said we've we've achieved a gain of 1.5 so far so we put two units of laser energy in two megajoules got three megajoules out so a gain of 1.53 over two um for a fusion power plant it is envisioned we have to get gains of 50 to 100 so there's a couple of orders of magnitude we have to improve our reactions as and furthermore right now we are a scientific facility so we've done it once we do an experiment about once every four to eight hours or so it's set by the cooling time of the lasers it's about as fast as we can go we would need to repeat this reaction about 10 times a second so still a lot of science okay you come back in 100 years when you got something there yeah yeah what's up here so what what's the minimum size you would Envision for a for a fusion power plant in gigawatts um about four to five hundred megawatts so half a gigawatt um kind of on par with today's coal burning plants to be economical but that is one of the big challenges not only do we have to make it work it needs to be economical to compete with these other sources of energy as well right okay but I'm surprised but so I had heard they have to be really huge and then that poses a strategic risk in the same way that if you're desalinating water to serve a million people and someone blows up your D cell plant now what so I had heard that Fusion suffered from that same kind of centralization problem but maybe not that's why we have Anna here so that no one does bad things in the world okay she oversees the bad the bad thing that sector wait so so Anna geopolitically and this panel never be sorry for jumping in go so the question of it obviously this is not vaporware obviously this is working but it is working in a laboratory one laboratory and we're talking about replacing the world's Energy Systems which is a global infrastructure supporting the daily lives of 8 billion people and when we talk about the climate crisis and talk about the challenges we fall into this trap so often where we think there's a magical technology right around the corner if we just solve this or just solve that we have the tools we need to do most of the work right now we're just not putting them um into you know we're not building them out nearly at the pace that we need to and we can't simply substitute future Tech that may be coming or maybe developing maybe scalable for the stuff that we know we need to do now the challenge for me she said she'd come back in 100 years I'm excited about it I'm excited about the future you know the future of nuclear power but we can't we can't wait for that to happen and there is like a long lag that is like we're not talking about this being ready at commercial scale in two years and three years and you know to try to avoid 1.5 degrees of warming which the ipcc says is like what we should be aiming for um we're probably going to run out of that carbon budget in less than two years Anna what uh globally or do you have to I assume the answer is yes but I want to hear it from you that globally not everyone has the same solution to these same problems and so their Regional uh ways people can meet their energy budget so are you here to Foster what can be local Solutions or might you have a a bigger solution that you can share with them or possibly even help them afford when I say you I'm talking about the American people yeah Department of State this is this is a really big geopolitical sensitivity because the reality is because of Supply because of cost you can have entire governments overthrown energy is is key to stability and the reality is that 70 percent of emissions come from energy so we paid the cost in the United States for example we pay over 100 billion dollars to recover from natural disasters it is a cost but we don't see it in our Energy bill same everywhere else around the world oh interesting so the problem for so the accounting is a little is a little deceptive it's an externality and so it's the pudding of resources to solve this issue issue if cost somewhere else is not apparent in any economy we have to make it apparent and in terms of technology and there being one solution every single place is different but to David's point we need us we need a slew of Technologies we need a bucket and it's going to be a different bucket everywhere but commercial technologies will get us part of the way the Technologies we're working on right now will we're going to need past 20 30 where there's no way we're going to actually get to it Olivia do you see I mean do you agree that there's not one Silver Bullet waiting to be introduced here is there ever okay thank you for that uh I've got a question dude if you if you succeed with your carbon sequestration you know that means the oil companies just keep making oil this is known as the moral hazard um the moral hazard yes so is taking CO2 out of the air just facilitating the bad guys to keep on doing bad stuff but then they're not bad anymore because they're not destroying good point but um frankly let's let's talk about so right now the ipcc and other people say that by 2050 we have to be removing 10 billion tons of CO2 for mayor every year that's two and a half times the mass of oil and gas that the industry moves around every year so we're imagining just to do what the IPC wants we're imagining an infrastructure an industry that's two and a half times bigger than the oil and gas Transportation industry now you want to make it bigger that's really asking a lot I think again let's go back to David's point we should be doing lots of things in parallel taking CO2 out of the air people have concluded is necessary is actually necessary to achieve Net Zero and you would do that at the points of emissions so at the power plants ideally no both no you just have something out floating in the air well it's not floating it's on the ground but you it is okay all on the ground climate models agree that we have to be doing by 2050 we have to be taking about 10 billion tons out of the year in addition to the point sources the reason they come to that number is because that's the number of carbon we don't know yet how to decarbonize so what's that's not the number that like oh that's going to allow us to drop our gas cars it's oh the heavy industry we don't have a solution for right that's after you've done all the steel factories and all the cement factories and all the carbon caps are at the smokestacks in the coal-fired power plants that people are still building okay so that would neutralize the future damage they would do now you have to correct for the damage that's already been done correct that's right okay there's a legacy yes okay and you talk about the scale of that for a second there's more carbon in the atmosphere by weight than the mass of everything that humans have ever built on Earth so when we're talking about undoing the damage of the Industrial Revolution um we're really talking about taking quite a lot of stuff out of the sky and burying it back on Earth so so we're doing our best but don't expect us to do this for you know now we can just go on with our party invent the Silver Bullet but it kind of sounds like that's what you're saying what we think it's a part of the solution a part of the solution I do have a question though about that um from what I understood one of the carbon capture systems that's been working so far is Clinton Works in Iceland yeah but it runs on geothermal energy yep if we want to do carbon capture systems in other parts of the world that may not have clean energy already then we actually produce carbon in order to store it right right so um there's a couple of different ways to address that one would be and what most of the people I talk with say well we'll be using solar then okay so the energy and there's the future oh that'll save it well no no that's that's a known technology that's that just means we're going to expand solar electricity generation very quickly the other way around that which is a little technical but if you um remove oxygen from Air at the front end and you burn methane the thing that goes up the smokestack is nothing but water and CO2 and it's very easy to separate those two gases and so you could now most of the people that I consult for won't do this because their investors don't want to have anything to do with fossil fuel Cradle to grave but you can oxy-fired methane is very easy to capture the CO2 all right okay so you're part of the solution here I certainly hope so okay so so uh but not the whole solution I just want to say don't count on us I'd love me some Iceland uh we filmed some episodes of Cosmos in Iceland because it's uh One Stop shopping there's like smoke coming out of the ground it's like primordial Earth you got mountains you've got valleys it's like you can cover billions of years of Earth history just snapshotting Iceland but I learned that they were once almost entirely on fossil fuels and then they realize we're sit they're basically sitting on a volcano and the volcano is like five inches below the ground and so they they converted on purpose to geothermal energy on a level where they now warm the streets so that and I want you just take it to 34 degrees whatever then the snow never sticks nobody has to shovel nobody has there's no car accident this could be bad weather and everybody's driving on dry roads so first is is how real is geothermal energy going forward so Iceland and the new and the big the biggest geothermal power plant in the world actually is in California they're mining fossil steam so there's steam in the ground and they're just producing it and running a turbine they do recharge a little bit because them earthquakes but anyway it's natural Steam when we talk about building this all over the world we're talking about so-called hot dry rock where there's not steam so we're going to circulate water down heat it up and then bring it back how far down do you have to go well a lot of people might say five miles in a typical place so every home would have a five mile hole underneath no no no no no these are no no dude you know what are you saying here I'm saying that we're building you know well so the power plant would have the fiber the geysers in in California used to produce uh two gigawatts and it's down to one their steam pressure's dropping but it's big but you know this I think calls to mind one of the things that we've been talking about which is that this seems like that seems like a crazy solution like a hole in the ground five miles deep but we're like we have holes all over the Earth to pull out oil we have mines that are really deep and environmentally destructive to pull out coal we're doing huge amounts of damage right now and we have this psychological bias where we think of the status quo as a Costless system and the future as something we're going to have to we're going to have to bear that cost the system is going to be difficult and complicated that we're going to build but we have one that's really messy right now yeah I've never been in a cold mine they're always hotter than at the that would be geothermal yeah yeah the center of the earth is hot I'm pretty sure yeah at last I checked you got a quick comment on what David said yeah let's let's interject a little note of optimism here so um 95 let's see how he does on this all the oil that's ever been burned was burned in my lifetime and so right so that's an incredibly fast technological build out unless you're just really old okay I'm pretty old but um population of the Earth is almost tripled in my life but um but okay so we did that so are our children going to be able to say 95 of the energy we're using came from solar and wind and nukes why not we did it already right we replaced the entire Energy System in a time that's so short that 95 of that energy was used in my lifetime so we can do that so I'm actually a fan of fast-moving change as well Olivia do you study societies and how they react to changes in technology I I say this because I'm reminded of a photo a file photo of Fifth Avenue here in New York City of course on Easter Sunday in the year 1900 and there are all these horse-drawn carriages up the road and there's one automobile in the picture it's probably a Ford Model T perhaps I don't know when they came out but it was an automobile 1913 the same picture going up Fifth Avenue Easter Sunday nothing but cars early Automobiles and there's one horse-drawn carriage we built civilization on the literal and figurative back of horses for thousands of years and within one 13-year span you couldn't give away a horse and so that gives me confidence that if you have enough of a of an incentive be it economic or utility incentive that change can happen like that do you study the pace of change in your work um partly but I'm more about the consequences and the impacts and sort of particularly at the moment we've we've learned how to read the world essentially between economies that have developed and therefore perform economically um and in terms of Technology technological innovation and those that don't and technically there is a direct relationship between the two in terms of material extraction and and use we're repeating that and we're repeating that with a business model that sustains energy intensive economies again the ones that I mean here in the US and in Europe in Japan and we're essentially looking at how to sustain the same level of pace the same level of Technology technological innovation on the basis of energy density and power concentration which is a bit less potent compared to fossils but there's still indeed a lot of different you know technical technological breakthroughs of the of the kind that Tami is working on that will probably sort of you know push progress in that direction but we need to find the right balance essentially between what David you've been saying and what Tami you're working on which is essentially well we have a Time problem here it's not just a problem of technological change and breakthroughs it's actually how do we potentially slow down how do we then sort of re-adapt economies on the basis of working with different Power densities um actually so because right now we're so one-dimensional in how we obtain and use our energy everything knows how to use it that one way and so we need some kind of is flexibility the right word or or some kind of yes and that will reflect upon the the type of different solutions in terms of energy generation from a local perspective the one thing however that we're facing and it's a fairly big hurdle is the geo-economic geostrategic geopolitical anxiety because at the moment we have really have like a geopolitical heavyweights that are competing with each other in terms of how will power relations be reorganized after well throughout essentially the way in which the energy transition plays out and this is driving essentially expansion and um growth and technological innovation at a moment where essentially we need to rethink the way in which economies need to be organized within planetary boundaries so we have two opposite directions playing on new levels of insecurity essentially so so Anna just what point you Anna there's in terms of insecurity uh if everyone uses the same kind of energy source and not every place has equal access to it it seems to me that's that can be highly destabilizing depending on who your friends are and who your adversaries are however if energy is in 25 different forms isn't that a stabilizing Force around the world geopolitically yes it's a stabilizing Force but we can never just look at the energy technology when we talk about critical minerals raw inputs what it takes to make that energy and how resilient that is and how concentrated it is contributes to that energy security I also just wanted to comment on the pace of change the pace of change I did because I'll say we have the ability to move fast we are nowhere near moving as fast as we need to be we need unprecedented change so if we look at we use biomass for a long time in the mid-18th century coal came started to actually come up first oil was drilled in 1859 it didn't make Headway until oil didn't at least become the primary energy source for another 100 years and still coal is the problem Peter's lifetime 18 years right that's when we've used from the 100 years from 1859 so but uh coal is still the primary electricity source and the prime 80 percent of our primary energy use comes from fossil fuels today that's despite all of the advancements we've weighed why because most of the advancements we've made are in the electricity sector which accounts for less than a third of our energy use if we don't tackle those hard to Abate sectors and we push money and innovation in a way we've never done before we're in trouble and I'll I'll point back to the 8 billion uh people number we added a billion people in the last 12 years we added 12 and a half percent of the population in the last 12 years so we need to completely change our entire Energy System for today that is also vastly growing in demand it's actually 14 because it's a billion on seven billion you're right yeah right yeah it's also interesting that's cool to think about the energy so you say 80 of the Glo the world's um energy comes from fossil fuel still and that's been pretty steady because what we've done basically to this point all of the energy Revolution all the energy we've put behind the energy Revolution over the last generation or two and even the incredibly rapid decline in the price of Renewables which is astonishing and the incredible rollout that we're engaging in right now all that we've really done has just been to supplement the system that we had before we haven't yet gotten to a point where it's comfortable or manageable to actually retire the use of fossil fuels we're just adding the new stuff on top and if we're hoping to ever ever stabilize the planet's temperature at any level we actually need to stop burning all of that fossil fuel and it's going to fix that she told she told us that right yeah so so Anna do you have sight lines to entrepreneurs to people who might do something in their garage that I mean is that still possible or do we need a bajillion watt laser to make the energy no I just made up that number that's not a real number good bajillion but yeah there's Innovation across the board it's the reason our department of energy our loan programs office they partner with small businesses the state department does a significant amount of commercial advocacy it is because Innovation is happening everywhere and we need to promote it we need to also be realistic about what it is and it can't just be a random project somewhere but it might be it might be but that's the thing it might be and so we've got eight billion brains going right now that's more brains that can solve problems you complaining like there's an extra Bill wasn't complaining I'm liking that extra brain power I I've just been notified we have a special call in video guest [Music] is somewhere in space our video guest this evening if we can get the signal to work are we good here let's try it there we go Jamie Hyman of the Ghostbuster Ghostbusters Mythbusters Jamie welcome to the azima of debate uh we've been talking about the future of energy and Innovation what role Innovation might play is it big corporations is it someone in their garage and you popped me an email a few weeks ago saying yeah I'm working on this thing but what can you say blah blah blah and that's how I'm putting you in the Asimov debate tell us what you've been cooking up in your spare time now that you are no longer making Mythbusters um I'll uh be happy to and uh just a forewarning we're in the middle of a storm here and so the lights you may even be able to see them flickering in the uh in in the thing but uh on my internet is out and so I'm doing this Zoom across my phone that I tethered it to but anyway um I and my associates have designed a geothermal energy system that will potentially be able to provide over half the world's electrical power needs within a few decades if we get the support we need uh this is possible the largely because of a couple of new technologies that only became available in the last few years the first is a non-contact type of drilling uh that that uh uses heat to spall and Flake off Rock Hard Rock and it can get down to the five to ten kilometer Zone where the temperature is about 300C now a borehole like that into the Hard Rock that's that's down there is exponentially more expensive if you use normal rotary drilling but drilling down there with a non-contact drills is linear as far as the cost and it can be done in a small fraction at a time in cost so you know we know that this actually works and it's just a matter of bringing it to the point that it's routine and reliable at 300C you can in theory generate enough power to run a turbine driven generator that would compete with a coal powered plant but with no fuel or emissions the problem is that rock doesn't conduct heat quickly enough for that and that brings me to the second Innovation that we're dealing with here which is that we've designed a closed loop heat exchange process to deal with the fact that rock doesn't to conduct heat as well as we need and the fact that this is a closed loop heat exchange is different than a lot of the attempts that have been done before that pump water down there we don't use water it's a closed system and uh there's no toxic chemicals or anything like that so the previous attempts they you know they use a lot of water and have proven not to be reliable now we've done the math and simulations and are in process of setting up the empirical tests of the approach it's being done in in Europe right now and what this means though in the larger pictures that we'll be able to uh put these power plants just about anywhere in the world I mean there are some areas that in fact there are a lot of areas that have a thicker rock that go that we would have to go past the 10 10 kilometers on to get it but there are plenty of areas that have five to ten kilometer zones that have that kind of heat and uh we'll be able to generate power 24 7 wherever it's needed basically cities server Farms steel plants so everything like that and what follows from that is going to be like a line of dominoes well uh you know it will democratize power instead of leaving it in the hands countries that control fossil fuel resources and when and where unlimited clean electrical energy takes is is right to unlimited clean hydrogen generation which could lead us right to the um uh to almost all forms of transportation being powered by Clean hydrogen and we'll have unlimited desalination and so on concrete production which is a huge carbon emitter would be produced by using hydrogen so basically we could be looking at cutting the world's carbon emissions in half or more if we do this it's going to take time and a lot of a lot of work a lot of money to to make it happen but it's it's in my opinion currently our best shot at turning things around so Jamie I thank you for that I hadn't considered when you first described this to me that of course you know you can't dig a 10 kilometer hole everywhere you would first start it with energy intensive Industries so if I build a factory I'd have my own 10 kilometer borehole and and I would be a self-contained unit by doing so that's that's that's how you would roll this out if it could work correct exactly and uh and we've got plans for doing things like taking over either defunct or existing coal-fired plants because they were they've already got the grid right there and they've already got the uh the the turbine and the generator so we just get rid of the coal and the furnace and and pump in all this heat that we're we're pulling from the ground Jimmy I got one last question uh you just kind of wafted by the statement it's contactless Drilling and The Rock just chips away this sounds like magic so what is your drill well uh there are currently at least two processes that generate this heat the one that I'm the most familiar with is plasma Drilling and uh you know plasma generates uh like 25 000 degree temperatures something like that it's it's like as hot as the sun and uh and it uh uh normally use plasma cutters for cutting steel and you ground the steel and you have a torch this uh this has the ground in the head and it generates massive amounts of heat and and you know as we know uh hard rock or well pretty much anything that you heat swells hard rock is brittle it swells and it falls off we blow it out or or pump it out and we're good to go oh so you break the rock just the the rock breaks under the its own temperature change basically yeah exactly yeah it's okay possible and it yeah it's false So Jamie good luck with this well we're delighted to hear that there's life after MythBusters and uh maybe we're glad MythBusters ended so that you can get your put your brain to solve The World's problems but uh thank you for giving your time to us here we're going to take what you said and chew on it because we've got a geologist right here who's itching his pants listening to you uh so I guess not no okay so so Jamie thank you thank you for this this time Jamie Jamie heinemann everyone yes thank you for having me so Tammy you're doing the wrong thing with your plasma apparently apparently yeah uh so have you seen plasma by the way just for Clear when he said 25 000 degrees the temperature of the Sun that's the temperature of the sun's surface okay so that's what he was referring to earlier we were talking about the core of the Sun um so you does that feel like something that can work there are a number of companies that are trying to and sometimes successfully using kind of thermal shock to break rocks at depth thermal shock that's a good term yeah but what what I didn't totally understand then is how we get the cuttings out so I actually I was hoping he would say it was so hot I turned the rock into gas because then that's what I first heard it I thought it vaporized The Rock but if it goes out then you've got all these rock fragments and one of the big challenges in any deep drilling project is getting those fragments out of the hole so but that's you know that I let's give them enough money to drill a two kilometer hole and see what happens but the um for sure right but the other thing that I really didn't understand that's been the Achilles heel of hot dry Rock is that they typically they Frac I'm sorry bad word but um so you drill a hole is fracking yeah right that's the word that he just apologized for using yeah okay one of those words but anyway typically they drill a hole they create a fracture Network and then they drill another hole and they circulate water through that system the problem has been that there's almost always one crack that's bigger than the others and it gets all the flow it's like a short circuit and you mine all the heat out of the rock around that crack and then 10 years before you thought you were going to be done that it stops because you can't access the rest of the rock volume so when um I'm sorry he's a celebrity but I forgot his name Jamie um Jamie heinemann when Jamie says they're going to have a closed loop I'm like how are they going to move that around how am I going to get to all the different parts of that hot rock volume okay that sounds like an engineering problem to be solved by an engineer and possibly not by you very likely not by me I'm just saying I mean any engineer Delights in solving a problem that has limits placed upon it in fact the last thing you could do is Engineers they solve this there are no limits there they won't know what to do you say you can't spend this much you got to do it with this in this mass in that temperature and they go to work and out comes the Ingenuity and that's the foundation of civilization as we know it yes sir do you have some money I'd like to sell you some real estate [Applause] I just wanna uh we discussed a lot here from a lot of different angles uh can we find out let me start with Tammy we began with you can you see 30 years ahead not a hundred I was joking earlier 100 is too much look back a hundred years what people were saying about the future everything they got wrong okay so and they often get 30 years wrong so let's go on records so that we can be embarrassed in the year 2050 about what we predict is your Fusion going to be available to us by 2050. if not according to David it's too late it's too little too late okay [Laughter] so yeah um it will still take time it's very much dependent on investment and and will and how much we're willing to put behind it we can't accelerate if there's there's more support from the government from Private Industry um but yeah at that point it leaves your sphere and goes into the hands of Engineers but it's not up to you to figure it'll leave my hands much earlier than 1250 I hope yeah um yeah so you know we by that time we should have at least some demo fusion power plants on the grid um as part of the portfolio of different energy sources and it will never be the only energy source because we need diversity but if effusion is made viable because it's so abundant because it can be located anywhere in 2050 I hope we're starting to put them all around the world and with that it helps with energy security energy sove

2023-04-05 16:48

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