 Welcome to the 12th annual global climate and energy project symposium, so it's quite extraordinary that here we are 12 years later with at least some of the people here in the room having participated the entire time. So that's absolutely terrific. I myself joined in 2007, and of course this was started by Professor Lynn Orr, who's currently the Undersecretary of Energy back in Washington D.C. So each year I think this symposium provides a really unique opportunity to gather a group of people together who typically don't get together. We have leaders in policy, we have leaders in technology, we have NGOs, we have students, and it's a great time to be able to spend about two days thinking deeply about the future of energy and grappling with issues like climate change and energy access. So I hope that as we're here that you not only enjoy the talks, but I hope you sort of look around. We set this room up with tables for the specific region that it might encourage conversation. So if you're students and you're all sitting with your fellow students, you might at some point think about moving out to other tables, high students. So anyway, well that's terrific. So the theme of this year's conference is deep decarbonization. And as I think back to the origins of GSEP, our goal was always to work on the next generation of technologies in the sort of 10 to 50 year time frame. And I think in the back of our mind was always the idea that we were working on deep decarbonization because in fact there are many technologies that are relatively mature, such as wind turbines and now even photovoltaics. So we were always looking out. And so I like to think that back in 2002 that we really started on this path to deep decarbonization of the global energy system. So to set the stage for deep decarbonization, I want to begin with this chart that was prepared as part of the synthesis report for the IPCC, the Fifth Assessment Report that was completed in 2014. And I've been reading about climate change really since the middle of the 1990s. And in many cases we rely on models to forecast what we would anticipate changing. But there were often so many moving parts, so many variables that it was difficult to sort of get to the essence of the challenge that we faced us. There are apparently so many pathways. But I think that this graph, which basically illustrates the concept that we have a carbon budget. And what we mean by a budget is that there's only so much carbon dioxide we can emit into the atmosphere before we can have a high degree of certainty about what the temperature increase will be. So that's the idea. So we have cumulative emissions since the beginning of the industrial revolution. And that's plotted as a function of the temperature change. And there's a little red line there, which is the 2 degrees C line. And we are striving globally for 2 degrees C to limit the temperature increase to 2 degrees C or less. And if we're going to try to achieve that, that we need to limit our cumulative carbon emissions to about 2,900 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Okay, and that will give us a 66% chance of staying less than 2 degrees C warming. And so today, if we look at this budget that we have, we've used up about 2,000 billion tons. Okay, so we've used up 2 thirds of that budget. And so when we think about deep decarbonization, it tells us that somehow we need to manage this energy transition with a limited capacity to put any more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So that's our target. So we can look at the history of emissions. This is a chart that was prepared by the Global Carbon Project showing emissions from about the 1990s to present. And today we have about 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide that we're putting into the atmosphere. And for a long time, this has been rising. It was actually stable last year, but that is probably a temporary stabilization. But if we were to be able to never emit any more than the amount that we're emitting today, this 36 billion tons, by 2040, we will have completely used up that budget, okay? So not only are we on the path to deep decarbonization, but there's an urgency in doing so. Because unless we can begin to turn this curve down quickly, we are not going to be able to achieve this. Unless, of course, we're able to take advantage of things like negative emissions, which could actually scrub carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. But while promising, those technologies have a long, long way to go before we could count on them for gigaton scale reductions in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Okay, so we want to get to this two degrees C or less. So what does that mean for the pace of change for carbon emissions into the atmosphere? So what this chart shows us is that if you look at the red band there, the bottom one is what we would need to do in terms of having assurance of remaining below two degrees C. And the three degrees is shown by the second bar up there. So if we look at the light blue line that says minus 4% in emissions per year, basically it says that's what we have to do if we want to be able to achieve this two degree C with a 66% degree of certainty. So 4% a year, so what does that look like? This is just a simple little chart saying, okay, if we're reducing emissions by 4% a year, what will these emissions look like? And the blue curve there shows the emissions that we would need to achieve that. And if we look by 2050 or so, this is a 75% reduction in emissions. Now this isn't really a new story, but again, I think looking to the IPCC, I think the clarity with which we can tell this story is even more compelling than ever. So that sets us on the path for deep decarbonization. So the question then is where? Where are all these carbon emissions? And this is actually some data that was developed very early on in the Global Climate and Energy Project. It did a couple of things. One is it sort of looked at the global energy resources using the concept of exergy and which allowed us for the first time to put all the global energy resources into a single chart with a single set of consistent units so that we could really compare them apples to apples. And at the same time for the entire global energy system, we looked at both the energy that was used and the emissions associated with that. And so this is a little chart that provides quite a bit of granularity on that. And you can see that the big four are electricity, heating and cooling, materials processing and manufacturing, and transportation. So these are the big four. And you can see that there are two of them that we pay a lot of attention to today. We pay a lot of attention to the electricity sector. And we pay a lot of attention to the transportation sector. But you can see that even if we were to be remarkably successful in those two domains, there's still a lot of work to do on decarbonizing, heating and cooling and decarbonizing material processing and manufacturing. And so again, there's a little more granularity on this in the electricity system. Certainly going after trying to reduce emissions from coal with regard to transportation, road and rail are the big ones. But if we look down into again some of these sectors that haven't had so much attention, manufacturing, chemical production, metal purification, non-metal processing, natural gas processing, and refining. All of these are significant targets for decarbonization. Similarly, if we look in the heating and cooking domain a vast variety of energy services that are absolutely crucial to the well-being of our economy. So I bring this up to point out that we need to begin now to look beyond transportation and electricity if we're going to be able to achieve this 4% reduction per year. So last year, actually early this year in February, we had a workshop with all of the GCEP sponsors. We called them the Future Vision Forum and it's a fantastic meeting where we gather together with industry and academic and students and so forth to talk about an issue. And we decided to talk about deep decarbonization. Again, thinking about this very broad landscape. And in terms of framing this, what we developed to us is the idea is that there's sort of four major buckets of tools that we have for going after this issue. And that if one looked after these four buckets, then one could figure out how they apply to each of these primary emission sectors. So in terms of what are really the knobs, what are the opportunities we have? Well, the first one is to reduce energy use by conservation. There are many parts of the world where we simply probably consume too much, use too much, use too much energy and behavior decisions. Behavioral decisions can make a big difference. The second one is that we can reduce energy use by improving the efficiency. So these are technological fixes in terms of better end use devices, better efficiency and primary energy conversions and so forth. The third is to look at switching to lower carbon or no carbon fuels. So making that switch where we relied on a harder carbon resource today, switching to a low carbon option. So of course these are renewables, nuclear power as an example. And I think one of the keywords here is switch. What we've seen historically in the global energy system is every time we find a new energy resource, and once it gets to be inexpensive enough, we use it and it's fantastic. We go ahead and use that. But if you actually look at the trajectory, there is no energy resource that we use less of today than when we first started using it. And I know that probably comes as a surprise. But even if you look at biomass, wood, you know, wood was the primary energy supply, you know, back in the middle of the 1800s. And, you know, other forms came along, but we globally are as using as much wood for energy today as we ever did, even though many other forms have come along. So as we think about the introduction of renewables and so forth, we also have to think, are we making a switch or are we simply adding more energy to our system? And the final category that we have is carbon capture and storage, that we can capture the carbon dioxide from emission sources, we can compress it, and we can pump it back underground, where it's sequestered. That's the most mature approach to carbon capture and storage today. But there are certainly other people working, academics and researchers around the world working on alternatives, such as mineralization or even CO2 utilization, though that will certainly take a little bit longer. And we have to make sure if we're utilizing that carbon, that it's actually a carbon neutral cycle, that it's not just sort of a slightly more efficient cycle. So, okay, so these are the four major opportunities. And so then we can look in, you know, each of these categories. And, you know, again, electricity is quite straightforward. We, conservation, we can educate people, we can provide incentives with regard to reducing end use, of reducing energy through efficiency improvements. There are a huge variety of end use energy efficiency improvements that can be deployed through new technologies or just more efficient systems. And switching to low carbon, low carbon energy sources, certainly the renewables are here today. I think if you look at wind and solar, you know, it's extraordinary what's happening in California. We, on a good sunny day, we're producing about 10 and a half gigawatts of solar energy, solar electricity in the middle of the daytime. That can be, you know, up to 30 to 40% of the total supply of the state at that moment. So certainly those come along. And nuclear power, I think, is really struggling. But I think that in imagining a world with deep decarbonization, we really need to look carefully, can we afford to let this go? What are the consequences of letting it go? And if we decide we don't want to let it go, how do we make it, how do we design markets and so forth so that it's not penalized due to its lack of flexibility as an example? And then finally, clearly carbon capture and storage could be deployed on coal plants equally well, especially thinking about a world with deep decarbonization deploying carbon capture and storage on natural gas plants probably makes a lot of sense. Not only because it's actually sometimes cheaper to produce electricity that way as compared to coal plus CCS, but natural gas plants have the flexibility to help with the deep integration of renewable energy resources. So that's an example. And one can walk through the same kind of hierarchy with transportation. There are clearly, you know, conservation options, walking, biking, we can improve efficiency through better engines. We can electrify the transport fleet. If we are using electric vehicles, we can use the wind and sun or geothermal carbon free sources to power those electric vehicles. Alternatively, we could be producing hydrogen with renewable energy resources and using hydrogen and fuel cell cars. And one would ask does carbon capture and storage play a role in deep decarbonization of the transportation sector? And certainly if you think about heavy duty transportation with using fuel cell vehicles for heavy duty transportation, certainly one of the most well-established technologies for producing hydrogen is to do it from natural gas. And if you're sequestering that carbon during the process of producing hydrogen, again, you have a pathway to deep decarbonization based on CCS, even for the transportation sector. So looking briefly to some of these other options and material processing and manufacturing, conservation, use less stuff, you know, we've become a very material intensive society. And certainly there are many people who are emerging from poverty who need to probably use a lot more. So those of us that already have a lot, you know, I think should be thinking about conservation. If we look to other options for material processing and manufacturing, really thinking about what's the role for hydrogen? That, you know, there could, where we need heat, could that be provided by hydrogen if it were inexpensive enough? And again, finally electrification of manufacturing and materials processing. And again, if we're using carbon capture and storage, we can provide that electricity in a decarbonized way. So there's a role for everything. I don't want to go, there's a lot of detail here, but I hope that you, you know, it's clear the way we're thinking about the options across the board. Okay, so to try to, you know, really pull this up together, you know, going back to the notion that a portfolio is needed, we can't simply afford to wait until we fix electricity and we fix transportation. We need to do this simultaneously. So if one were to imagine the world where we forecast future carbon emissions based on the energy demands that would be needed by the, by, you know, developing world together with those who already have lots of access, that we would have some baseline. And there's a sequence of actions. We can conserve energy, which would save carbon emissions. We can improve energy efficiency, which would save carbon emissions. We can switch to renewable energy, which would save carbon emissions. We can switch from coal to natural gas, which can reduce carbon emissions and play has played a really instrumental role in the success of the United States at actually having reached peak CO2 emissions about six or seven years ago. We can switch to electric vehicles, which improves efficiency and can result in decarbonization if you have a clean carbon, low carbon electric grid. We can use carbon and capture and storage to further reduce emissions. We can ensure a healthy nuclear to reduce emissions. And then finally, we're certainly going to be needing new technologies as well, a world where we have this providing all the energy services we need with 75% or less emissions is going to continue to create new demands on innovation in order to get there. And I highlight one, that being negative emissions is if we can find technologies that both provide energy and at the same time extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, those could be very beneficial. The most prominent example of that is something called BEX, Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage. But doing all these things alone is not going to be enough because we're going to have the enabling, we need the enabling infrastructure to achieve this. We need a robust transmission system to bring renewable energy from where it's plentiful to where it's needed. We need to modernize the grid to make both the supply and demand flexible so that we can at every moment match supply and demand. We need to have a robust vehicle charging infrastructure to support electric vehicles. And in particular, really thinking about daytime charging, which would enable using the sunlight, using solar energy, which really you should do during the day. To guide all of this, I think we need a firm foundation of technology and energy systems analysis. What are the best choices to make now? What will be the best choices in the future when you consider both emissions reduction potential, energy efficiency and cost? We need to integrate all of those. To support the development, particularly of new technologies, we need to appropriate policies and financial mechanisms. And in the long run, we need a stable system that sends a clear message that we are going to go after this carbon problem. We as a carbon tax or cap and trade system that sends a very clear and not fickle signal to the markets that this is something we're gonna get on with. And finally, people are gonna be incredibly important. People make choices about what they're going to drive, how much they're going to drive, how big their house will be, how much energy will they use for heating and cooling. So the public is absolutely important to achieve this. So we really need this portfolio of solutions. We need everybody to contribute. We can't wait anymore with people sitting on the sidelines. And it's again, not just about technology, but it's finance, it's policy innovations. And we here in groups like this need to think about inventing the future. So that sets the stage for deep decarbonization. I'd just like to highlight a couple of, I guess I would call it cool science and engineering that you're going to be hearing about as part of this event. One of my favorites has always been some really fantastic work from Professor Shanwe Fan who realized that there was an untapped energy resource that the resource of the darkness and very cold temperature of space that the earth is actually always radiating energy out into space. And if you can devise a particular device that radiates very well and that radiation is not blocked, you can actually cool something by taking advantage of the spaces the rear four degrees Kelvin. And so imagine being able to cool without needing an independent source of electricity. So you'll hear about this work and actually we have a startup company that you'll hear about that is pursuing this concept. Biofuels is another very interesting area particularly in the context of negative emissions. And you're going to be hearing from our team from Princeton as well as Steve Tillman looking at can we imagine an agricultural system that's both producing biofeedstocks for energy resources but at the same time is sequestering carbon in the soils and how can we optimize this? And so you'll hear about that to a very important emerging area. You're going to be hearing from Professor Mike McGeehy about some really exciting new work on perovskites. You know, this has been the hot field in the solar PV area. And Mike just had actually a fantastic publication talking about a tandem perovskite cell that is truly exciting and he'll say more about that. And then finally, you know, historically, GCEP was really focused on energy resources and energy conversions. But recently we've had a somewhat broader view of our role and we've started some really interesting work with Professor Reinhold Duskart looking at light weighting of components, the car windshields, for example, and he'll talk about that. So some really exciting developments that could result in significant efficiency improvements in the transportation sector. So just hopefully a teaser for some exciting things. I will say, I think we have an absolutely fantastic set of plenary presentations. We'll start with Laurence Tubiana who will talk about COP 21 and all of the important work that was done there and what's next. We'll hear from Gary Smith who, from GM about the future of mobility. And then we'll hear from Rishenda Van Duven about work that she's done for a long time on energy access through the United Nations Foundation. So I'm really looking forward to those. We also, I think, have a treat for you and usually when you're here, you hear a bunch of detailed presentations sort of at the very bleeding edge of science and we don't sort of step back and say, well, gosh, what progress have we made? We've been at this for 12 years. So we actually have four fantastic presentations which will be led off by Richard Sassoon talking about sort of the impact, the scientific and engineering impact of GSEP over the years. But we'll hear about chemical making fuels, making carbon neutral fuels from Tom Haramio. Mike McGeehy will give the big picture on solar. Professor Yixue who's done fantastic work in storage. We'll talk about advancements there. Electricity storage. And then finally, we'll hear from our Lignin team about biomass energy conversion. And they've a team that's worked with us now for about seven years and done a fantastic job on making some real fundamental inroads. We also have something fun teed up for you. We decided as a last session that we would have an interactive debate discussion session where we'll be asking the audience questions and you'll be listening to what we're saying and basically providing feedback to us in a way that I think will be very engaging. We've got a fantastic group of people who are going to do that. Jeff Ball at our Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance will moderate that. So anyway, that should be very lively. I really encourage you to come. So I'll be there, Burt Richter on nuclear, Dave Danielson on renewables and innovation, Jim Sweeney on efficiency, Arun Majumdar on storage, electric grid, Nate Lewis talking about carbon negative fuels or carbon neutral fuels and Nancy Funn talking about innovation. So anyway, that should be very lively. And of course we have our technical sessions. This is a great place to hear literally what is the latest and greatest? And we have three sessions, one on CO2 conversion to fuels and chemicals, another session on solar energy conversion and final one on biomass conversion and transport. We also have a new feature this year. We're very excited actually, as we've been doing research and working away here, we've also spawned a number of companies and in partnership with the Tomcat Center for Sustainable Energy, what we've found is that a lot of the GSEP students who did their PhD studies, at some point got the bug to do something with making a company and the Tomcat program has been able to help them make that leap to a commercial venture. And so we'll have a special showcase with them joining us and they'll talk about where they are and what they're doing. And finally, last but absolutely not least is our student events. We've got our distinguished student lecturers which always do an amazing job. They put usually us faculty to shame with how articulate they are. And we have a great poster session. We have a special lunch for networking with the students and we have a student social. So anyway, enjoy the meeting. I'm really looking forward to it. Thank you all for being here and let's go on. So thank you.