 Dr. Bones is the Managing Director of the Natural Gas Initiative here at Stanford. And she has been at Stanford now for a couple of years. Before this, she was in technical and management roles at Chevron for many, many years. And I'd love to hear from Naomi and to hear what NGI is doing in the area of research. And what opportunities there are for folks who are interested in this area to get involved. Naomi, it's over to you. Thank you. Well, welcome to Stanford, everybody. I know this isn't the experience you were hoping for, but we are thrilled to have you. I'm really happy to be here with you today. You know, Professor Dion is a tough act to follow, but I am not going to be talking about a specific technical project, but rather I am going to kind of zoom out and talk to you about the role of natural gas in the energy landscape. So I'm pretty sure that yesterday you heard from both Sally Benson, Chris Field and others probably about the global energy and environmental challenge. One of the things I love about the Stanford energy community is that we really try and look at this problem in a holistic way. And, you know, trying to provide almost twice as much energy for the growing population that's accessible, affordable, secure while we protect the planet. What a challenge and natural gas has a role to play in that. I know most of you are probably coming to Stanford to work on, you know, 100% carbon free solutions. So for the next 30 minutes, I just want you to keep an open mind about the role that natural gas has to play. And indeed the fossil fuel companies, they, you know, have many issues that I know we're all aware of, but I really think that in order for us to solve some of the big decarbonization goals, they have to play our role. So I'm going to talk to you about a few things. The first is really around how we have such an abundance of natural gas. And that provides immediate opportunities for decarbonization. And, you know, in the US, we are very focused on decarbonization and that is the luxury that we have because we have access to energy. That is not the case across the world. And certainly in the developing world, there's a huge role for natural gas to improve the quality of life for millions of people. So I'm going to, or billions of people actually. So I'm going to talk specifically about the role of natural gas for thermal fuels. And a little bit about how natural gas is going to or is starting to interplay with renewables, both in developing economies and in places like California, where we are rapidly decarbonizing. Why do I think that gas is going to continue to play a role for a long time? And finally, I want to emphasize that, you know, the oil and gas industry has a major role to play. And I'm going to talk about some of the technical issues around reaching CO2 emissions reductions that I think the oil and gas industry are really the only players in the room that have the means to do it at the scale necessary. So, you know, hopefully you haven't been living under a rock and you know that in the United States, we've had this huge acceleration and uptick in the amount of natural gas that is being produced. So the graph on the right shows the natural gas production in barrels per day as a function of time. And it's, you know, primarily in the Permian and the Marcellus, but certainly across the country, we're seeing this huge natural gas production uptick. And that directly correlates with a reduction in CO2 emissions. And hopefully yesterday, you touched base on this a little bit and know that natural gas is responsible for displacing coal. So the graph on the left shows the U.S. coal production, the black dots are the data points. And the red is where we were headed before natural gas became available to displace it, primarily in power plants. And the plot on the right is some work from Professor Kopchak's group who works with my program, the Natural Gas Initiative, looking at the avoided CO2 emissions. If you look at using natural gas with CCS, with renewables and how that all plays out. And we're talking about gigatons of avoided CO2 emissions. So we know that fuel switching from coal to natural gas works. And in the U.S., we've been really successful at doing this. But elsewhere, there is still a lot of coal production. So the plot on the left shows the projected coal production. And you can see that it is expected to increase substantially in the next 20 years or so. Mostly in China and India and mostly because of the cost factor. So coal is locally available and very affordable. So right now in Asia, there's currently about 300 gigawatts of coal generation capacity power plants under construction. And that's roughly what we have left in the United States right now. So this is a very serious issue because coal provides about 38% of global power, but it's responsible for 75% of the emissions. So anything we can do to displace coal is a good thing. So how do we make natural gas cheaper than coal? So one of the things that we work on in the natural gas initiative is looking at things like carbon pricing. There are a number of different philosophies on how you could implement a carbon price, whether it's a tax or a cap and trade. This is some work from Mark Thurba, who is in the School of Economics, and shows that even at a very reasonable carbon price of about $20 to $25 per ton of CO2, gas plants start looking as attractive, if not more attractive than coal plants. And the quote on the right, I don't expect you to read all the numbers, but just to show you that this is all of the current carbon pricing schemes that are currently in effect throughout the world. So there's about 50 countries or states or territories where there is some kind of carbon pricing scheme. So the y-axis here is the carbon price, and the x-axis is the volume or the percentage of the carbon that is being addressed through the pricing scheme. And this was from a 2020 World Bank study. So we are looking at doing this, but again, in the United States and in other developed countries, we have the luxury of thinking about decarbonization as our primary target. But of course, that's not true throughout the world, and energy poverty is a reality. I'm sure many of you have traveled to countries where you've seen this firsthand. And for me, it's unacceptable that we live in a world where, you know, in places like the United States where we're squandering energy and then there are people who are living in absolute poverty. And of course, energy demand is only going to increase. So this is a map showing how energy demand will change between 2016 and 2040. And so you can see the United States, Europe and Japan are expected to reduce their energy demand. But the rest of the world is greatly going to increase. So of course, Africa and India and China in particular are on our minds when we think about energy access and changing energy demands. And we know that wealthy countries have access to energy. That's just a fact. So there are still upwards of a billion people without access to electricity. So in places like India, great strides have been made. So now if you look at electricity in India, what you see is that actually 100% of the country has access. But of course, that means that your village might have access and you would have access if you had the means to pay for it. So even though, you know, we have to be careful about how we think of this and how we measure it. Having access doesn't mean that you actually have electricity because it's a function of whether or not you can afford it. But nevertheless, India has made great strides. China has made great strides. But Sub-Saharan Africa, which is the big yellow bar at the bottom here, is in a ever-worsening state, actually. So in Africa, the situation really hasn't improved. We know that one in two people that are going to be added to the world's population in the next 30 years are in Africa. And there really hasn't been a lot of great progress on the electricity front. So that's something that we are working on actively in the Natural Gas Initiative to come up with innovative ways to solve some of these energy issues. So I think it's really interesting what's happening in India. And I just wanted to take a moment to talk about the interplay between gas and renewables. So in India, I'm sure many of you know, renewables are set to generate almost 50% of all the electricity by 2030. That's remarkable, right? Because in California, we're at something like 35%. So they've really kind of embraced the renewable energy transition. But in order for them to have reliable electricity, and typically that's measured as a function of reliability as a percentage. So 99.97% is a kind of standard number. That's the reliability of electricity in developed countries. They need 12 hours of storage, which is going to cost $675 billion. So that's a quarter of India's GDP. And so their government has actively embraced gas as kind of the backup for renewables, if you will. The reliable backup that allows for energy electricity to be continuous. Because unreliable energy, you know, if you look at places like Pakistan, they have electricity. It's 100% access almost, but it's very unreliable and it has absolutely crippled their economy. Their manufacturing and industrial sectors in particular suffer greatly because of the reliability factor. So India is thinking ahead about this, and they now have a target for 15% natural gas consumption by 2030. And they're investing $60 billion on gas infrastructure, which when you think about it, it's kind of a drop in the ocean compared to the $675 billion that you'd have to invest in storage to go along with the high renewable share. The graph in the bottom just shows the increasing imports of liquefied natural gas. So India receives a lot of imports mostly from Qatar because of the close distance. But certainly as the United States begins doing more imports, some of those will also be going to India. So we talked a little bit about electricity, and I want to also talk about cooking fuels. So the number of people without electricity is around a billion. There's almost three billion more people, or many of them are the same people, I guess. It's kind of an overlapping venn diagram that require clean thermal fuels. So they're using wood and biomass and four million people die every year from this type of indoor air pollution associated with cooking. So I mean, I was shocked when I heard this number and to put it in perspective, that's more than eight malaria and tuberculosis combined. And again, the graph on the right kind of shows the breakdown of where this is the main issue. India is actually doing much better now. So this was data from the last study that the IEA did on this in 2017. In the last few years, India has put in government run subsidies to get LPG propane tanks, just like the ones you use for your barbecues, to people in India. And this has really kind of been a successful program that has really, really sort of changed the death rate in India associated with indoor air pollution. Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia remain concerning and certainly in Africa, again, as the population is increasing and no real solutions are being put in place, it becomes even more of a concern. So in my program, we kind of look at this in all sorts of shapes and sizes. You know, it's very easy to sort of jump straight to the bottom picture, which is this huge LNG import facility. It probably costs $10 billion of capital investment to put in place. It requires the cooperation of countries, governments, companies, and it's got a very long time frame. But some of the most successful programs in addressing some of these issues are actually at a much smaller scale. So I mentioned the government subsidy program in India as picture on the left there, this guy delivering the propane tanks on his motorcycle. And we've also done some work with some really kind of interesting entrepreneurial companies in Africa that they have a pay-as-you-go propane tank system that they deliver out to villages. So that's a picture from, this is B-Box, but there's actually a number of companies that are now doing that that's very successful. So, you know, I think keeping an open mind and the reason I wanted to mention this is I think you're, you know, looking for projects and companies that you want to get involved with, I think scale matters. And sometimes the best solutions are at the smaller scale. So thinking about these problems in different ways is really important. All right, so that's a little bit about the developing world. So let's jump back to California. And I just want to sort of highlight the main issue on the table here. So here's a timeline of California policies for greenhouse gas reductions. So nobody is disputing that, you know, this is a great set of goals and we need to have goals and targets. So I think up to about 2035, for me it all makes sense, right? We've got, you know, a 60% renewables goal. We've got a target for about 5 million electric vehicles. I'm like, okay, you know, this all seems manageable. But it's what happens after 2035 that I think is concerning. So we now have SB 100, which is 100% zero carbon electricity goal by 2045. So I am many, many people at Stanford. This is the space that we're working in because it is unclear how we're going to meet these goals. So having goals is one thing, but the pathways to get there are unclear right now. And we need to be explicit in how we're going to meet these goals. I mentioned the cost of storage in India for renewables. Well, that's also true here. So we could not afford as a state to move to 100% renewables and expect everyone in our state to still have access to energy. And so those issues around affordability and social equity are really emphasized here. And to put this in further perspective, right, we're, you know, I think about the, I've been thinking about the electric car evolution. And 5 million EVs roughly requires doubling the electricity from our energy supply. And roughly about 70% of our energy comes from natural gas. So we're talking about, you know, moving to higher shares of renewables whilst increasing the overall output of our electrical supply system. And if we now talk about 2050 goals of around 15 million electric vehicles, that's quadrupling our current energy supply from the electricity grid. So these are very real problems that need to be solved. And one of the things that my program and pre-court and others have been working on is looking at hydrogen to solve some of these issues. And, you know, it's really interesting. So I worked at Chevron for many years and back in like the, I don't know, 2000, something like that. Hydrogen was the latest fad and everybody had research centers set up around it. And then it died a quick death when the oil price dropped. And it's kind of made this resurgence. And I think many of us feel that it's different this time because we now have a clear vision of how hydrogen could help us. I think back in 2000, we were like, oh, hydrogen seems interesting. Like, I'm sure we can figure out a way to use this, but we didn't really understand what role it was able or going to play. And now we do, right? So particularly for heavy duty transportation, hydrogen has some really interesting and exciting prospects. And of course, you know, the natural gas initiative is so involved with this because right now 70% of hydrogen is made from natural gas. So we're looking at ways to make that 100% carbon free using carbon capture and storage and other techniques. I'm a co-instructor for the Stanford hydrogen seminar class in the winter. So I'll put in a plug for that. I construct that with Sally Benson and Jimmy Chen from pre-court. And so, you know, there's lots of, I think, pathways within this that are going to become more and more important. So, you know, for the foreseeable future, oil and coal remain about the same and new energy. So from the increasing population and increasing energy demand in general, it's going to come from renewables and gas. So gas is around to stay and it's our job to make sure that it is as clean as it can possibly be and that we consider, you know, the future and how we're going to eventually phase it out as carbon, completely carbon free technologies come around. But, you know, no doubt that gas is going to be around for the long term. So one of the things that I think is really important is if we're going to be using gas, let's do it as clean as we possibly can. And there's been a lot in the press over the last five years. I would say it's really kind of increased around methane emissions. We have a big team. It's one of our biggest focus areas in the Natural Gas Initiative, looking at how we can better detect methane emissions using a variety of technologies. We have some papers that we've written on using aeroplane detection methodologies and how we can mitigate it. How can we ensure that we are limiting the release of methane as much as possible? But given that we are, you know, in this world where we have increasing emissions, I really, you know, want to emphasize that I think we need to work with the fossil fuel industries, the oil and gas companies. And I'm going to talk a little bit now about carbon capture and storage. So this is a graph that shows the amount of carbon dioxide in gigatons that would have to be captured and stored in order to achieve the two-degree Paris Accord scenario. And it's broken down into, you know, various sectors, power industry and other, but that's sort of irrelevant. So right now, we capture and store globally about 30 megatons a year. So this is a gigaton scale, so it doesn't show up. It is miniscule. But the technology exists. I worked on a project at Chevron where we captured carbon in a depleted saline aquifer. It is completely doable. Now, what we want to aim for in the next 10 years is being able to capture somewhere around three gigatons. And it turns out that three gigatons a year of carbon dioxide is roughly equivalent to the volume that is extracted in global oil production. So it's about 30 billion barrels a year. So in my mind, there's this huge opportunity as we produce oil and gas to fill the depleted reservoirs with carbon dioxide as a means to reduce the carbon that's being emitted into the atmosphere until we get to the point where, you know, maybe some of these negative carbon technologies that people are working on are developed. In the short term, I really believe that this CCES is really the only realistic option for meeting our two-degree scenario. And, you know, I'll tell you why. So the oil and gas industry has a lot of existing knowledge of the subsurface. We already have these reservoirs mapped out. Much of the infrastructure is already in place. It's actually relatively simple to take an old oil and gas well and turn it into a carbon dioxide well. And we have the pore space to accommodate these huge volumes. And it's been done safely and effectively for many, many years. There's also the upside, you know, the oil and gas industry as much as we wish they were altruistic or not. So they have the potential for improving their production by injecting the carbon dioxide to push out the oil and gas. So this is just one of the things that we're working on. I just want to say a couple of words about my programs and the Natural Gas Initiative. We have about 40 research groups from Stanford. They range from nuts and bolts science and engineering through to business economics and policy. And then we have a consortium of industry partners. All of this is on the website. So you can just go to ngi.stanford.edu if you want any more information. So we have seven focus areas. Again, a range from chemistry and science and engineering through to global markets and governance. And we hold a number of events. This year was a little light. Obviously, we had a lot of postponing happening with COVID. But we're now planning a few different events. The next year focused on methane detection, flaring solutions, energy access, hydrogen. And usually we have about 10 events a year. And you are all welcome. So it's invitation only. But feel free to reach out to me anytime. And I guess with that, I know it's tough to engage with the community when it's in this COVID virtual world. But I'm always open to having a Zoom chat or touching base. I've worked with lots of students on specific projects. But also just if you want to have a coffee chat about the energy landscape, I am always happy to do that. So I will pause. And maybe we have a few minutes for quick questions. Folks, we have time for a couple of questions if people would like to raise their hand. Catherine, Bernard has a question. Catherine, go ahead, please. Hi there. Thank you very much for the presentation. Learned a lot. So at the end, when you're talking about carbon capture and sequestration, obviously this will have a lot of cost. Can you speak at all as what you think are the most promising ways to finance that and get it going? That's a great question. Yeah, I can. So there is an initiative called the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative. And all of the big oil companies have committed $10 million to that fund. So that organization is actively seeking carbon capture and storage technologies. They are looking at investing in small companies. Stanford has a carbon capture and storage initiative and is actively working with a couple of oil companies. I don't think I'm at liberty to say which ones yet, but on specific projects. Because it's obviously the oil and gas industry is going to have to reinvent itself. And I worked at Chevron for many years, and I understand the industry. But my greatest hope is that they move from being the evil fossil fuel producers to being the climate carbon sequesters. And it's really the only option on the table that could be done at scale and in the short time frame that's necessary. We need to move on this in the next 10 years. So I'm not suggesting that this is the only thing that we should be working on, but it is the only thing right now that can move forward. And everybody sees that. So I think funding through programs like OGCI is only going to increase. Thank you, Yomi. We have one more minute for a question by Matt. Matt, go ahead. Yeah, OK. This is going to be a tough question to answer in a minute. But I guess I find one of the difficulties when discussing natural gas and renewables tied together is that the conversation tends to drift to either no renewables are the solution or no oil and gas is the solution. So how, in your opinion, what's the way to kind of bridge the gap in that conversation to kind of allow those two sides to come together? Yeah, and I think it's a very charged conversation, right? So people on both sides feel like they're fighting for everything. And I think, for me, when I talk to state legislators, I just adopt a really pragmatic approach to this, right? And that diagram that shows the different things that we're trying to balance. So we've got the environment, national security, affordability. I'm missing one, but I think helping people think through that is really important. And we live in a very privileged world where everybody is just assuming that when they flick the light switch, it'll continue to work. And right now, we are not in a position where we can do that with 100% renewable. So we have to think about this in a more nuanced way. So certainly, one of the reasons that NGI was set up was to try and have that unbiased, scientifically based perspective, right? So that we're not biased one way or the other, but this is what the science is telling us, that we need to have a gradual transition in order to manage all of those competing factors.