Between decreasing resources and increasing environmental impact, it cannot be denied that there is a growing energy problem, not only in the United States, but across the globe.

On Feb. 6, Professor Robert E. Armstrong, associate director of the Massachutes Institute of Technology (MIT) Energy Initiative, spoke on this issue at the Science and Engineering building as a part of the College of Engineering Distinguished Lecture Series.  

"I think there are good reasons, perhaps, why it's so hard to get our hands ... as a nation around energy issues and energy opportunities," Armstrong said. "For the most part, we as consumers are just concerned about energy services, what we get out of energy."

According to Armstrong, there are three elements that create this crisis: supply and demand, security and the environment. He calls the trio "The Perfect Storm."

Armstrong addressed "supply and demand" through statistics. The prediction is that by the year 2050, the use of fossil fuels will have doubled and use of electricity will have tripled. It also has been predicted that there will be 1.3 billion people without electricity by 2030.

Today only one percent of our total energy comes from renewable sources.

Have efforts been made soon enough to stave off this threat? Not quite, Armstrong said. "Timescales are very long in the energy business. It takes on the order of about 50 years for a turnover in infrastructure in energy -- much longer than timescales we're used to thinking in terms of in many fields of science and engineering."

Some the security issues are those of natural disasters, nuclear proliferation and the realities of geopolitics, as seen in the fact that the majority of oil reserves are found in the Middle East.

"The core issue in security is the basic inelasticity of the transportation fuels. We consume globally about 80-something, 83 [or] 84 million barrels of oil a day in the transportation fuel business. There's a slack of excess production there of about 3 or 4 million barrels a day," Armstrong said.

"About two-thirds of that extra supply capacity sits in Saudi Arabia, so they're a very important country to providing secure and reliable supplies."

 
        Fifty years is not a long time in energy business. Robert Armstrong  To ensure better security of supply, he recommended three strategies: address sudden disruptions to the oil market, increase and diversify supplies and weaken the global "addiction."

Armstrong again used facts to drive home the severity of the situation in regards to the environment. The average temperature of earth is rising, most likely due to excessive amounts of carbon in the atmosphere.

"We're within about one degree centigrade of the maximum temperature on earth in the last million years," he said, referencing a book by the Carbon Sequestration Initiative Program at MIT.

In response to the energy dilemma, MIT Energy Initiative is taking a broad approach, covering all of the bases. They want find cleaner and more efficient ways to produce energy, adjust existing energy systems, and look at advancing the energy systems in developing countries. Armstrong particularly pointed out Howard Herzog of the Carbon Sequestration Initiative Program at MIT.

In terms of creating energy sources, scientists have been researching biofuels, hydrogen production and nuclear energy. "It's going to take a mixture of technologies and energy sources to meet our growing demands responsibly," Armstrong said. 

Recently, the team has been looking into biomass as a major source of fuel: ethanol.

"There are at least two main reasons for optimism here, and one is that between 1995 and 2005 there was a substantial reduction in the hydrolysis cost to convert the biomass into sugars that could be hydrolyzed," Armstrong said. "So we went from about a dollar a gallon to ten cents a gallon for ethanol."

If the biomass option is pursued, it could account for 40 percent of annual liquid fuel demand in the United States. Still, biomass is only one of the several routes to be taken.

"We have to start now," Armstrong concluded. "Fifty years is not a long time in energy business."