Sustainable Research, Development, and Demonstration (RD&D

Jun 10, 2010 - Sustainability in research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) faces these same challenges and must fit into a similar framework. CR...
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Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 2010, 49, 10154–10158

Sustainable Research, Development, and Demonstration (RD&D)† James R. Katzer* ExxonMobil (Retired) Affiliate Professor CBE, Iowa State UniVersity

The major theme of the 21st International Symposium on Chemical Reaction Engineering (ISCRE 21) is sustainable development. Many of the critical sustainable development challenges revolve around: energy, resources, food, water, and environment. Successful developments require sustainable resource-use strategies, processes, products, and services. In addition, the major challenges that we face are long-term, massive in scale, and have high future uncertainty. Sustainable developments must work now, work in the future, not put off addressing the problem, and not disadvantage future generations. These are tall challenges. Sustainability in research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) faces these same challenges and must fit into a similar framework. CRE is an important activity contributing to all aspects of RD&D. Sustainable RD&D supports both short-term and long-term needs, provides for a broad range of options, and continuously evolves to address progress made and shifts in future needs. Sustainable RD&D must provide society and/or business a portfolio of technology options and develop the science and technology base to support their application, to seed future discoveries, and to address uncertainty. This cannot be done at the individual level but must occur at the organizational level to be truly sustainable. Approaches to achieving this are illustrated with examples of success and failure from the health, semiconductor, energy, and transportation areas. This paper discusses issues and principles that are both critical and universal to assuring that technology development, in terms of research, development, and demonstration (RD&D), is both successful and sustainable. The ideas and issues apply to the key areas of focus of ISCRE 21 but also apply more broadly. This is, in part, meant to help set the stage for the other invited perspective ISCRE 21 papers as well as for the general meeting papers and discussion. It should provide food for thought for those who have a policy role, a management role, or an agency role in conceiving, supporting, and carrying out RD&D programs. For the individual researcher, it could help him or her align their R&D with the needed next steps or think about what is being done overall and why. The central theme of ISCRE 21 (Figure 1) is “Sustainable development: meeting the world’s demands for energy, food, water, and medicinesin a sustainable way, while protecting the environmentsrequires development of new technologies and advanced materials.” Achieving this objective is an enormous, ever-expanding challenge which is continually evolving. It is truly a journey in many respects. Figure 2 outlines the key issues faced in addressing sustainable development. Sustainable developments must address the major problems and challenges. These problems and challenges are typically long-term in nature, and they are often massive in scale. In many cases, they have a high degree of uncertainty because of the lack of technology knowledge or the uncertainty of the future. Sustainable developments, therefore, must be longterm in nature. They often must be massive in scale to have the needed impact but not always. They will often require changes in how we live and operate. If developments are to be sustainable, they must work now, and they must work in the future. They must not put off addressing the problem, and they must not disadvantage future generations. This represents a tall order. To accomplish this with all of the challenges involved, the approach must be broadly based, flexible, and not subject to

the “silver bullet” phenomenon, which often surfaces. In essence, the approach needs to involve sustainable RD&D. Figure 3 outlines proposed criteria for sustainable RD&D. Sustainable RD&D must address resolving both short-term and long-term needs. It must work on a broad range of options so that it can provide a portfolio of technology solutions. In addition, it must be balanced to address uncertainty, and it must constantly evolve to address advances in technology, changing future needs, economics, and changes in uncertainty. It must be balanced between innovation and the development of a solid science and

Figure 1. Key points of focus around the sustainability theme of the ISCRE 21 conference.

†

Invited perspective for ISCRE 21. * To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: jrksail@ comcast.net.

Figure 2. Critical issues associated with needed key sustainable developments.

10.1021/ie1005965  2010 American Chemical Society Published on Web 06/10/2010

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Figure 3. Criteria for sustainable RD&D.

technology base to support current technology development and the quest for future discoveries. Sustainable RD&D includes realistic economic evaluation and periodic reevaluation as a guide, and it rigorously benchmarks against other portfolio or next-best options. In addition to economic evaluation, sustainable RD&D involves life-cycle energy and GHG analyses as a further guide. It also involves learning-by-doing process demonstration and application activities which are often essential to achieving commercial deployment through cost reduction, and engineering design and operational improvement. The amount of R&D that is required to support a successful learning-by-doing demonstration and its value are often not fully recognized. Below, some of these principles are illustrated with examples involving lessons from history along with current experience. This is meant to be informative and thought provoking but does not try to recommend specific reaction engineering work to be done. This paper starts with an example that illustrates the principles outlined above from a historical perspective that is not directly tied to the reaction engineering community, HIV/AIDS. The technology development approach to HIV/AIDS followed two main strategies or paths.1 One involved the search for drugs to treat those who were already infected with HIV. The other involved the pursuit of a vaccine that could protect individuals from becoming infected. The difference in the results achieved via these two approaches could not be more stark 25 years later. People infected with HIV/AIDS who have access to combination drug therapies are typically experiencing radically improved health outcomes and lifespan. The development of a vaccine that has demonstrated benefits remains an unfulfilled challenge. First, the drug path will be discussed.1 In 1964, long before the AIDS crisis, azidothymidine (AZT) was first identified as a potential cancer drug. It was not effective for this application but was later found to inhibit the growth of retroviruses in mice. In 1984, scientists determined that AIDS was caused by the HIV retrovirus, and scientists began screening existing compounds. ATZ was quickly found to suppress the HIV retrovirus. The USFDA approved ATZ in March, 1987, following clinical trials. The threat of the disease and the potential for profits drove innovation as governments, industry, and academia worked together to find new drugs to treat HIV/AIDS. Patient groups were willing to try almost any new drug, and the approval process was sped up. In the next 25 years, 25 drugs were approved for treating the disease.2 By the mid-1990s, there was a marked decrease in deaths from AIDS in the US and Europe. In 1994, the two-year survival rate for people diagnosed with AIDs was less than 50% in the US; by 1997, it was 75% and continues to improve. Today, a person with HIV which has not progressed to the AIDS stage has a life expectancy equal to the

Figure 4. Microprocessor heat generation over time (data aggregated by R. Schmidt at IBM; adapted from the work of Welser6).

rest of the population. This success is due to innovation that was driven through largely empirical R&D focused on making drugs that worked better alone or synergistically in combination with existing drugs. The work did not require or wait for new basic understanding to be developed, although fundamental work helped guide drug development. The vaccine path to date is markedly different.3 The limited understanding of the HIV retrovirus and of how to stimulate immunity to it in humans made a clear focus on vaccine development difficult, if not impossible. Without a clear focus, the work largely involved academic-type research to develop fundamental understanding or small biotech firms trying to develop breakthrough new products. The major drug companies were not heavily involved, and progress has been slow. The lack of evidence of efficacy resulted in ambivalence or even resistance among patient groups toward participating in vaccine trials. As a result of these factors and the complexity of stimulating immunity to the HIV retrovirus, progress to develop a vaccine has been slow to nonexistent. The societal involvement in the two approaches was very different. This does not mean that basic research should not have been done or that it should not be continued; it was needed and should be continued. What it really means is that the vaccine approach involved a high level of uncertainty, was high-risk, and its timing for success was uncertain at best. On the other hand, drug development had an existing base, although very imperfect, but it represented a start on which to build. Thus, several approaches or options were needed in the effort to fight the disease. If a problem demands short-term technical progress, innovation policies need a heavy weight on what works and how to make it better. Technologies that require scientific breakthroughs may not deliver because scientific breakthroughs are not amenable to being scheduled. Betting solely or too heavily on them (the silver-bullet approach) is unwise. Applying an appropriately weighted portfolio approach is strategically the best. Next, let us explore semiconductor technology. For over 40 years, the semiconductor industry has been packing twice as many transistors onto a chip every 18-24 months, essentially validating “Moore’s Law”.4 This growth can be attributed to continuous technical developments in materials technology, in engineering design of the chip, and in chip manufacture. This has increased the number of transistors per chip from about 2000 in 1972 to about 20 million in 2002.5 This increased transistor density resulted in increasing power density and increasing heat removal requirements. The maximum practical air-cooling heat removal rate is somewhat less than 100 W/cm2. Figure 46 shows the heat generation history of microprocessors plotted vs the year that each specific generation of processor was announced.

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At the end of the 1980s, bipolar technology was reaching sufficiently high heat fluxes that further scale increases would have soon been limited. To avoid this, the industry switched to complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology because it only generates heat when a circuit switches (Passive power loss is very low.), markedly reducing heat generation and heat removal requirements. This markedly reduced heat generation gave microprocessors another two plus decades of scale growth before heat generation again began to approach the air-cooled limitation (Figure 4). On the basis of this situation (until most recently), a sustainable RD&D strategy should have (and did have) a focus primarily on driving innovation in materials and in design and manufacture of the existing technology, along with limited research directed to the discovery of major scientific breakthroughs. With exponentially increasing power density again beginning to limit continued scaling, the current technology has about a decade of further growth.5 (Note that increasing microprocessor speed is no longer being advertised.) This situation obviously required a change in R&D portfolio makeup and strategy to place much greater emphasis on new scientific breakthroughs that could allow building a new switch-device mechanism or a new computing architecture. These developments will be required to allow continued advances in the complexity and power of computing into the future. The previous RD&D strategy was no longer sustainable. The focus of the RD&D strategy had to evolve to remain sustainable. To meet this challenge, the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative was established and is addressing a number of new technology approaches in a highly collaborative structure involving government, academe, and industry. These approaches include7 • New devices: alternative computational state vectors or ways to represent information via two or more distinguishable states, such as the spin of an electron.8 • New methods of computation: nonequilibrium systems that might allow adiabatic or “reversible” computation to reduce heat generation.9 • New ways of connecting devices: noncharge data transfer to avoid the energy dissipation of moving electrons.10 • New methods of managing heat: nanoscale phonon engineering to manage heat in new ways.11 • New fabrication methods: directed self-assembly of devices to reduce costs and improve lithography for continued scaling of CMOS.12 This strategy recognizes the high level of uncertainty associated with any one of these approaches and attempts to maximize the chance of ultimate success. This is clearly a “non-silverbullet” approach that has all the key parties committed to a fundamental, coordinated effort to find a device or approach capable of extending information processing beyond the ultimate limits of CMOS technology. It illustrates the need for flexibility and evolution in the face of change and uncertainty. Recently Pisano and Shih13 have argued that vibrant, effective R&D (defined in this paper as sustainable RD&D) requires a substantial, sustained base of industrial or manufacturing activity in some way associated with or connected to it. This base of manufacturing activity on the ground feeds back needed technical changes and improvements for R&D to address and helps guide the challenges of future R&D. Without connected manufacturing, RD&D withers; without sustainable RD&D, manufacturing becomes uncompetitive. Consider Li-ion battery technology now being developed for light-duty vehicular (LDV) power. Early pioneering consumer electronics developments were largely based on materials and

electronic innovations and developments made in the U.S. Initial manufacturing of these consumer electronics in the U.S. drove further technical innovation. Later, consumer electronics manufacturing moved to Asia to access cheap manufacturing. RD&D followed to support the manufacturing and drive company growth and competitiveness; and as a result, Asia became the locus of consumer electronics RD&D. Competitive and market demands for performance improvements and reductions in device size and weight drove R&D to improve battery technology and battery performance, primarily for consumer electronics. Thus, the Li-ion battery technology, which was initially discovered by John Goodenough’s group at the University of Texas in 1996,14,15 was developed and commercialized in Asia. Today, only about 1% of the world’s Li-ion battery production capacity is in the U.S., with about 45% in Japan, and about 25% each in China and South Korea.16 It is not surprising that the Chevrolet Volt’s Li-ion batteries are coming from South Korea. For many of the consumer electronic areas noted above, sustainable RD&D activities no longer exist in the U.S. Pisano and Shih13 refer to the presence of a substantial, sustained manufacturing activity in a country, a state, or a geographical area as an “Industrial Commons” and assert that it is important to innovation, and thus to RD&D. They extend this commons idea to include a range of technical activities and skills, including first-rate university and research institution technical activities. The Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis moved its research headquarters to Cambridge, Massachusetts, because of the biotech industrial commons that the area offered. The role of this in nationally based innovation and international competitiveness as the focus of the work of Pisano and Shih is clearly important but is not the focus of this paper. The implications to sustainable RD&D, however, are very important. The energy area, which is central to chemical reaction engineering, is much broader and much larger in scale than the prior examples and has many large challenges. Energy is the absolute underpinning of our modern society. It has associated with it all of the key sustainability issues summarized in Figure 2, and thus, should be addressed from the sustainable RD&D perspective, outlined in Figure 3. Sustainability, resource utilization, and environmental challenges are central to the energy area, driven by the area’s massive scale and scope. There are short-term and longterm challenges. It is unlikely that there will be any silver bullets, and the “too-cheap-to-meter” thinking is false. New developments will almost always be more expensive than existing options. The energy area is so large and pervasive that the economics really matter. It is not possible to address the full picture of energy in a single perspective because of its scale and complexity, but some areas or issues stand out. A select couple of these energy areas will be addressed here from a largely U.S. perspective. The RD&D approach over the recent past has left much to be desired from a sustainable RD&D point of view, but most recently, things seem to be changing. The energy area appears to be at the point of beginning to undergo major changes. There are issues of ultimate availability, issues of energy security and diversity of supply, and since most of our energy comes from fossil fuels, there are concerns about CO2 emissions. To many in the U.S., energy is viewed as one of our largest challenges. The same can also be said from a global perspective. However, its scale means that change will be slow. The National Petroleum Council17 recently evaluated this area, and the National Academies have undertaken a major study addressing “America’s Energy Future”.18 In some respects, energy is similar to the HIV/AIDS example: We haVe a problem of which we haVe become acutely aware,

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and we need to address it. We also have a lot of technology that can be improved and applied to make major progress in the near term (akin to AIDS drug therapies). In addition, we have the desire to make and rely on major scientific and technical breakthroughs (akin to developing an HIV/AIDS vaccine). Sustainable RD&D says that we should aggressively pursue breakthrough R&D and aggressively improve existing technology through applied RD&D where applicable. Unfortunately, we tend to focus on breakthrough technology without understanding or communicating that the chances of success are unpredictable and long-term and on silver bullets rather than addressing a portfolio of potentially important but uncertain options for a given energy area. The silver-bullet approach, for example, lead to the “hydrogen economy” solution and to a large shift in resources and R&D to develop that approach, to the detriment of other RD&D activities. Fuel cell vehicle technology development was pushed as the almost-exclusive solution to our light-duty vehicle (LDV) emissions and fuels issues. Not only did the federal government shift much of its LDV technology R&D activities and resources, but some auto makers [original equipment makers (OEMs)] unbalanced their R&D activities so heavily that other R&D needs suffered. For fuel cell vehicles to become a major commercial reality, a couple of R&D breakthroughs (miracles) were required. The fact that these could not be scheduled was inadequately included in the equation. A recent NRC study of alternative transportation options19 found that continuing technology improvements in conventional LDV technology, if dedicated to reduced fuel consumption rather than to increased vehicle power, acceleration, and internal creature-comforts, could reduce fuel consumption by 44% by 2030 without changing the vehicle fleet size mix vs today’s spark-ignition gasoline vehicle with minimal cost increase. The report concluded that alternatives such as improved fuel economy for conventional vehicles, increased penetration of hybrid-electric vehicles, and biomass-derived fuels (in rationally limited quantities, ∼20 billion gallons per year) could deliver significantly greater reductions in U.S. oil use and CO2 emissions than could fuel cell vehicles over the next two decades. The report argued for a balanced portfolio. Longer-term benefits from the nonfuel cell alternatives are likely to grow more slowly, and fuel cell vehicles, if successful, could offer greater longterm potential. However, this would require cheap, “clean” hydrogen. Other silver-bullet approaches include ethanol from grain, and from cellulose. In a very short time, grain ethanol hit serious cost and food impact limitations The cellulosic (biomass) route to ethanol has potential, but several major technology development and cost issues must be resolved for it to become commercially competitive. These should be and are being addressed, but there is no assurance they will be economically resolved. With ethanol, fuel infrastructure is an issue. At the same time, the biomass gasification route, followed by synthesis,20 to produce liquid transportation fuels that fit directly into today’s fuels infrastructure has been almost completely ignored, even though most of the technology needed for this route is available commercially. This route could thus be available for deployment in the near term. What this route needs is integration of the technologies and their commercial-scale demonstration, with gains from learning-by-doing. In this case, the last D in RD&D is what needs to receive the most focus. When the defense agencies, particularly the Air Force, came to the Energy Department, when oil was over $100/barrel, in search of

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technology to fuel their future operations what they found was that the effort was essentially entirely focused on hydrogen and ethanol. Above, some examples of recent RD&D activities in the fuels/ transportation area have been discussed; next some thoughts on a more sustainable RD&D approach are summarized. Several illustrative examples follow. Because of the breadth of the energy area, the discussions can focus on a very limited portion of it, primarily related to fossil fuel and biomass use in generating power and liquid transportation fuels. Although the focus here is on the supply side, in almost all cases, increasing energy-use efficiency and conservation to reduce demand is critical and need an equally high level of focus and attention. Following are some thoughts on how a sustainable RD&D approach could be applied in the fuels/power areas on a national level. Assuming that the nation needs viable options to support a major shift in its energy technology mix, including management of CO2 emissions, the following issues should be addressed. First, the government should pick the major problems to be addressed and not pick technology “winners”, where its record is not very good. Second, the effort should be fully cooperative with industry, with universities and with other technical organizations, the mix being dictated by the nature of the project and external opportunities. The effort should support work on a balanced portfolio of technologies, and these activities should be viewed as a public investment in innovation that could provide a portfolio of robust technology options for the nation as insurance against future needs and developments. This portfolio of activities should include support for demonstration of almost-commercial technologies or of at-scale integration of commercial technologies for clean power generation and hydrocarbon fuel synthesis from both coal and biomass, both using gasification, which could be applied in the near and intermediate term. CO2 management requires aggressive focus, which it is now beginning to get. These technologies would then be ready to apply near-term and already have significant learning-by-doing improvements incorporated into them. The portfolio should also include work on biochemical routes for cellulosic biomass conversion to fuels, for biochemical fuels production, or catalytic biomaterials conversion to bring them to commercial readiness; where possible, for longer-term application. It should continue to support solar electricity generation (photovoltaic and other) and solar hydrogen production, which is clearly long-term and in a very early stage of scientific discovery. Sustainably addressing the challenges around fuels, transport, and electricity needs requires a balanced portfolio of options including energy efficiency, a long-range view, and consistency and constancy of effort with flexibility to meet technology developments, or lack thereof, and changing policy goals, which themselves should be long-term and strategic in nature. R&D efforts should be reviewed and changed as economics become better known and understood and as future needs change suggesting that current efforts must be altered. The total program and each component in it should be assessed with respect to economics, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and the environmental footprint and undergo periodic reassessment. Sustainability does not mean that projects not meeting their goals are continued. The integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) offers potentially large benefits for power generation from coal (or coal and biomass) with markedly reduced emissions, including CO2 emissions control.21 Yet we have not built a coal gasification (IGCC) plant in the U.S. in 15 years (half a professional lifetime) or a single IGCC plant with carbon capture and

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Table 1. Emissions Estimates from IGCC-CCS and NGCC Based on Commercial Performance particulatesa, SOx, NOxa, lb/(MM lb/(MM lb/(MM Hg, CO2, relative BTU) tech/emissions BTU) BTU) % reduction kg/(MW h) costb IGCC-CCS NGCC-V NGCC-CCS

0.001 0.001 0.001

0.015 ∼0 ∼0

0.01 0.01 0.01

95

92 360 42

1 1.1 1.4

a Particulates and NOx are from turbine and similar for coal and natural gas technologies. b Based on new plants with coal at $1.7/GJ and gas at $6/GJ.

sequestration (CCS), and thus, we have not gained from learning by doing for this technology. Thus, we have largely lost an industrial commons that could support innovation or other activities in this key area. Meanwhile, China has built a number of coal gasification units in the past decade. Proving and improving this technology with CCS and better quantifying the economics at commercial scale should be the primary objectives of demonstration work. This could provide us with a robust technology option, but it does not commit us to commercial deployment. The U.S. has started to move in this direction, but carry-through is essential. IGCC with CCS can produce electricity with criteria emissions that are as low as natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) technology and with 30% of the CO2 emission/(KW h) of NGCC at similar electricity cost, or about double the CO2 emissions of NGCC with CCS at significantly lower cost, as shown in Table 1.18,22 IGCC offers the additional benefits of much lower water usage, production of a dense, vitrified solid slag (vs fly ash and flue gas desulfurization sludge for pulverized coal (PC)) and high levels of Hg removal. Further, IGCC with CCS produces decarbonized electricity that is economically competitive with wind and new nuclear. All this suggests that it should be one of the portfolio technology options that we are aggressively improving through pioneer plant development. The same applies to coal, or coal and biomass to liquid fuels, where the technologies required, starting with gasification, are all commercial, but they need to be integrated and improved through demonstration with learning by doing to be available for commercial deployment. Fuels thus produced fit directly into the fuels infrastructure and would serve near-term needs. Furthermore, current estimates suggest that they would be economically competitive at expected future oil prices.18,23,24 Further, by combining coal with biomass (∼40%, energy basis) and CO2 sequestration, it is possible to produce decarbonized electricity and carbon-free liquid fuels that should be economically competitively with coal-based power and liquid transportation fuels from petroleum in a carbon-constrained world.22,25 This approach needs evaluation and potential demonstration as a technology to replace a significant fraction of our lowefficiency subcritical PC units with plants producing very low or carbon-free fuels and power. [As used here, carbon-free fuels on a life-cycle basis add no (zero) CO2 to the atmosphere, in contrast to carbon-neutral fuels which add no more CO2 than the same amount of petroleum-based fuels on a life-cycle basis.] Again, this demonstration work should be balanced with the very exciting work involving microbe metabolic engineering to produce fuels by novel routes. These routes hold a lot of promise, but commercial deployment is well in the future and economics are unclear. Chemical reaction engineering R&D is central to all of these activities and is helping drive the developments that are needed through both basic research and new technology development. In addition, the amount of R&D required to support technology demonstration with learning by doing is often under-recognized

and underappreciated. There are challenges and opportunities for CRE in all aspects of the work across the entire chain of technology development and maturity and over a range of energy-related technologies not discussed here. Evolution dictates that today’s E. coli to diesel fuel or algal fuel research may well become tomorrow’s process demonstration activity with learning by doing. CRE having maximum impact requires sustainable RD&D, independent of the technology area under consideration. Literature Cited (1) Sarewitz, D. Better all the Time. Nature 2010, 463, 607. (2) De Clereq, E. The history of antiretrovirals: key discoveries over the past 25 years. ReV. Med. Virol. 2009, 19, 287–299. (3) Cohen, J. Shots in the Dark; W. W. Norton & Co.: London, 2001. (4) Moore, G. E. Cramming more components onto integrated circuits. Electronics 1965, 38 (8), 114–117. (5) Welser, J. L. The Quest for the Next Information:Processing Technology. In Frontiers in Engineering; National Academies Press: Washington, D.C., 2009; pp 45-52. (6) Welser, J. The Quest for the Next Information Processing Technology. In NAE Annual Meeting, Irvine, CA, October 4-5, 2009. (7) Cavin, R. A.; Zhirnov, V. V.; Herr, D. J. C.; Avila, A.; Hutchby, J. Research directions and challenges in nanoelectronics. J. Nanoparticle Res. 2006, 8 (6), 841–858. (8) Zurtic, I.; Fabian, J.; Das Sarma, S. Spintronics: fundamentals and applications. ReV. Mod. Phys. 2004, 76 (2), 323–410. (9) Bennett, C. H. Notes on the history of reversible computation. IBM J. Res. DeV. 1988, 32 (1), 16–23. (10) Khitun, A.; Nikonov, D. D.; Bao, M.; Galatsis, K.; Wang, K. L. Efficiency of spin-wave bus for information transmission. IEEE Trans. Electron DeVices 2007, 54 (12), 3418–3421. (11) Wang, L.; Li, B. Thermal logic gates: computation with phonons. Phys. ReV. Lett. 2007, 99 (177208), 104. (12) Bernstein, G. H.; Imre, A.; Metlushko, V.; Orlov, A.; Zhou, L.; Ji, L.; Csaba, G.; Porod, W. Magnetic QCA Systems. Microelectr. J. 2005, 36 (7), 619–624. (13) Pisano, G. P., Shih, W. C. Restoring American Competitiveness. HarVard Business ReV. 2009, July-August, 2-14. (14) Padhi, A. K.; Nanjundaswamy, N. S.; Goodenough, J. B. LiFePO4: a Novel Cathode Material for Rechargeable Batteries. Electrochem. Soc. 1996, 96-1, 73. (15) Padhi, A. K.; Nanjundaswamy, N. S.; Goodenough, J. B. Phosphoolivines as Positive-electrode for Rechargeable Batteries. J. Electrochem. Soc. 1997, 144, 1188–1194. (16) Majumdar, A. Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy. In 8th Annual Engineering Public Policy Symposium, Washington, D.C., April 27, 2010. (17) NPC. HardTruths Facing the Hard Truths About Energy; National Petroleum Council: Washington, D.C., 2007. (18) NRC. America’s Energy Future; The National Acadamies: Washington, D.C., 2009. (19) NRC. Transitions to AlternatiVe Transportation Technologies; National Acedemies Press: Washington, D.C., 2008. (20) Higman, C.; van der Burgt, M. Gasification; Elsevier Science: Amsterdam, 2003. (21) MIT. The Future of Coal; MIT: Cambridge, 2007. (22) Katzer, J. R.; Williams, R. H. Coal and Biomass to Electric Power and Liquid Fuels In 5th Sino-U.S. Chemical Engineering Symposium, Beijing, PRC, October 13-16, 2009. (23) NRC. Liquid Transportation Fuels from Coal and Biomass; NRC: Washington, D.C., 2009. (24) Kreutz, T. G.; Larson, E. G.; Liu, G. Williams, R. H. In FischerTropsch Fuels from Coal and Biomass. 25th Annual Pittsburgh Coal Conference; Pittsburgh, September 29-October 2, 2008. (25) Williams, R. H.; Larson, E. D.; Lui, G.; Kreutz, T. G. FischerTropsch Fuels from Coal and Biomass: Strategic Advantages of OnceThrough (Polygeneration) Configurations. In The 9th International Conference on Greenhouse Gas Control Technologies; Washington, D.C., November 16-20, 2008.

ReceiVed for reView March 11, 2010 ReVised manuscript receiVed April 22, 2010 Accepted April 26, 2010 IE1005965