Within days of the November announcement of a $225 million, 10-year collaboration between Stanford and private industry, students were e-mailing and calling the professor of petroleum engineering who will head it.
“Some are dying to get started on projects, and some are concerned that we’ll be biased by the sponsors,” says Franklin M. “Lynn” Orr Jr. “I told them we have a long history of working on things that have practical applications and working with companies in Silicon Valley, and it’s important to the companies that we remain independent, as well.” Orr, ’69, stepped down November 30 as dean of the School of Earth Sciences to guide the new initiative (see Top Jobs).
The Global Climate and Energy Project (G-CEP) will be funded by up to $100 million from ExxonMobil, $50 million from General Electric and $25 million from Schlumberger Limited, a global technology services company. Europe’s largest privately owned energy service provider, E.ON, intends to join the project and contribute $50 million. Orr predicted in November that the first research projects would be underway by early January.
Working with Stanford and other institutions around the world, G-CEP aims to identify and develop energy systems with low greenhouse-gas emissions. The technologies might use hydrogen, electric, biomass fuels, nuclear and renewable power sources. “What we’re trying to do at this point is to keep a very open mind about potential low-greenhouse-emission future scenarios,” Orr says. “We’re trying not to say, ‘We know who the winners are,’ because there might be lots of them.”
Orr already has enlisted the support of faculty from a wide range of departments—petroleum, chemical, civil, environmental and mechanical engineering, geophysics, and management science and engineering. Christopher Edwards, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, will serve as deputy director of the project. Orr expects about half of the research over the next decade to be done on campus, and the other half by scientists around the world. “This is a very exciting opportunity to unleash the creative talents of Stanford faculty and students on a problem that really matters,” he says.
Concerned about the acidity of the upper ocean and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which has risen by one-third since the industrial revolution of the mid-19th century, researchers will look at carbon sequestration, or ways to capture and store or reuse the gas. “What we’re talking about is the idea of putting some of the carbon dioxide back into rocks or underground reservoirs, like depleted oil and gas reservoirs and coal beds,” says Orr, a specialist in oil recovery.
He acknowledges that similar work is being done elsewhere in the world, but says that no one is taking as broad an approach as G-CEP. “It’s a huge challenge, and we need all the players we can get to work on these problems.”
