Nov 18 - Oakland Tribune

By the time General Electric delivered its latest gas turbine, with half the air pollution and 15 percent greater efficiency, the company had spent 20 years and roughly $1 billion.

Researchers say that magnitude of money and time for developing conventional energy technologies is instructive in light of projections that global energy supplies must grow

40 percent by 2025 and double by 2050.

Such demand could drive big changes in the fuels that society uses, but the search for a new energy economy free of fossil fuels is in its infancy, said Paul Roberts, author of "The End of Oil," a warning that the era of cheap energy is over.

Americans trust that business markets automatically will deliver a cheap alternative to oil and gas, Roberts told scientists Thursday in Livermore. It is "a faith-based energy policy," he said.

"This culture expects that, 'Well, we went from wood to coal and from coal to oil, and now we'll go from oil to whatever. So what's the problem?'" Roberts said.

"We haven't come to grips yet with the notion that the market probably will not provide what we need," he said.

Yet evidence of the slow scientific shift can be found in a Bay Area lab devoted for 25 years to studying the burning of fossil fuels.

Plenty of experimental diesel and gas engines still run inside the Combustion Research Facility at Sandia National Laboratories, with the lab's signature lasers measuring fuel mixing, burn efficiencies and more. But more and more, scientists are turning to work on hydrogen engines, fuel cells and biofuels.

The combustion lab grew out of the 1972 oil crunch and President Carter's doubling of research into energy conservation and production.

"When we started this, there was one fuel, and we were supposed to figure out how to use less of it," said Sandia biological and energy sciences chief Terry Michalske. "Now there is less of it."

In the combustion lab's early days, scientists didn't know much about how fuel burns inside engines, for example, or how the burning at the cylinder walls produces chemical changes and pollution.

In time, Sandia scientists teamed up with academics, automotive engineers and other energy scientists to boost engine efficiencies and cut emissions from burning gas, diesel and coal.

These days, Sandia mechanical engineer Chris White peers inside an engine by sending sheets of laser light through clouds of burning fuel.

Instead of gasoline, the engine burns an invisible compressed gas, hydrogen, with virtually zero air emissions. The engine gets better efficiency than a gasoline engine, White said, and a hydrogen- burning car is likely to be cheaper and longer lasting than a hydrogen fuel-cell car.

"You can do it a lot cheaper than a fuel cell. You don't have to have this renaissance of revolutionary technologies," he said.

Elsewhere at the combustion lab, scientists are studying biofuels.

In recent years, energy companies have moved away from refining oil to using it as a raw material for chemically manufacturing fuels with specific kinds of emissions and power performance.

Scientists might be able to tailor fuels from multiple new sources, including grains, trees, microbes and gasified coal.

The next step, said Sandia's Michalske, is to design fuels, fuel cells and engines to match.

"We now have the opportunity to decide what that fuel looks like. And if we can tailor that fuel, we can tailor how we use it," he said.

Contact Ian Hoffman at

ihoffman@angnewspapers.com.