 Obviously John Stewart's a hard act to follow, but I think Craig Venter might be actually more difficult. But in a way, I'm actually very glad that he was able to give that presentation before we took over this panel because he really, I think, brought home the fact that there are amazing breakthroughs out there, potentially. Out there in the lab, a lot of amazing work. Anyone who works as an injury reporter like I do gets bombarded with emails about all the amazing things that are close to happening. What we want to talk about here really is how to transition that from the laboratory and bring it actually in the commercial scale. To go back in the morning, I think we really emphasize the fact that that's an enormous challenge, that we have a very well-established energy system, and much more so than I think with other forms of high tech, this is going to be a hard thing to display. So the question is, how will we get out of this, how will we take these ideas and get to the point where they're actually making a difference in the market. Now, we have a great panel to talk about this. To my left is Vim Vermas, who is a professor in the School of Life Sciences at ASU, and as you just heard, he directs a project to create fuel from bacterium. To his left is Tom Hicks, who is the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy at the U.S. Navy, who oversees really all matters to the Navy pertaining to energy conservation, energy efficiency, and green initiatives. And if you don't know that, I'm sure Tom will talk about it. The Navy is doing some really amazing things on energy and on energy efficiency. So Vim, like, start with you. I mean, we just saw your video, and in terms of the work you're doing, you're in the lab right now, you're developing those techniques. How do you, what do you foresee as the path forward for something like what you're working on? I mean, how do you get an idea that's creating great papers, creating great academic work, and how to actually begin to make a difference and what's the step for you? I think that's the first issue here that we have to think about is look for what is needed, and then try to work to word that. And what is needed is that you have... Oh, does he have... It puts a button, I think, on the inside. Okay. Sorry about that. What button? I believe it's... Select. Okay. Sorry. That we are trying to look for what is needed, and then try to work to word where you need to go. I mean, that's really one of the things that people in academia haven't typically been doing. They do what they like, and then if there is an application, then that's good. But in the energy field, it is such a big problem, and it's such a huge application that you kind of have to look for where you want to be and then work back how do you get there. So what we have been trying to look at is how do you want to produce things if you want to just grow algae and then extract fuel, extract oil, that's not going to be cost competitive from what we have seen. You have to find a way that you take the processing out of the picture. So that means that if it's possible, you have to secrete whatever your fuel is going to be. That also takes out of the picture nutrient limitations because then if you view your organism as a bio catalyst, you can just essentially be independent of the biomass. The biomass is just there, it has grown once, and it produces for a long, long time. So that takes out of the equation those issues with phosphate, with other limiting nutrients. So what we are trying to do is use photosynthetic microbes to excrete what we have is fatty acids, when there is on the same path, and then those get chemically converted into alkanes and jet fuels. So essentially have solar energy plus CO2 with the organism as a bio catalyst making alkanes eventually. So it's a direct solar to fuel type of transition that takes out of the equation the issues of, you have to make electricity or you have to make fuel no matter whether it's light or dark. In this way you can just make your fuel during the day and you can use it during the night. So that's kind of the pathway we have been going for, but the real important picture here is that you make something that you think is going to be a scalable thing, and that's oftentimes what academia generally isn't really looking for. We'll come back to the details of that. Just to just join us is Daniel Betz, who is the director of fuel cell technologies for inner fuel. And if them is sort of the scientist in the laboratory in academia still, Daniel is working for a company that's trying to commercialize a new clean tech technology, trying to actually sell it. So Daniel, you may just talk a little bit about the work you're doing, what you're actually doing with fuel cells in terms of the company, and also maybe just begin to outline some of the challenges. Once you actually have the technology, now you actually have to do the work of finding the market and making sure that you can succeed. You've got to press the button on top, sorry, that turns it green. Oh, it should work. Oh, there you go. There you go. Technology's hard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's part of it. Well, yeah, I work for Inner Fuel, which is the fuel cell entity of Inner One. Inner One produces lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and grid energy storage, and Inner Fuel is developing fuel cell systems that work in synergy with the battery. And the idea is of having a fuel cell company along with a battery company has been that we're projecting into the future what are the limitations that exist on the rollout of vehicle technology. What are the things that are external forces that may prevent and increase the uncertainty associated with the rollout of electric vehicles and grid energy storage technology. And then to use technology, such a fuel cell that is complementary in order to reduce the potential effect that those barriers have. On the electric vehicle side, for example, when we are introducing electric vehicles, there are major, major barriers. One is the barrier of energy storage in a battery. Batteries don't have as much energy packing capacity as normal internal combustion engines or gasoline, and therefore you have limited range of these vehicles. And the other side to it is that you need to charge them up, and therefore you need to have a plug-in infrastructure for them. And so we believe that there is definitely a market for this due to the way that you can segment the market into having city cars or fleet vehicles that are electric and the electric vehicles can do a very good job. For the wider consumer market, this is a little bit more difficult. And so the industry recognizes this and therefore we're moving into PHEVs, which have an internal combustion engine. But when we forecast that, we realize that the internal combustion engine has to become smaller and smaller and smaller. And therefore the efficiency and emissions of the internal combustion engine become harder, you know, efficiency drops and the emissions increase or potential increase. And therefore a fuel cell may be better suited for that application. And one of the things that we're looking at is basically in the scale-up is trying to have a pathway to a technology that is ultimately useful and less dependent on government infrastructure or infrastructure in terms of fuels, like most of the other vehicle technologies on the electric field have had. One of the interesting things that happens is that as we're looking at this technology, we're not concentrating on just replacement on the internal combustion engine, but we believe that the adoption of new technologies is primarily done by offering the user an enhancement over the existing technology. And so the electric vehicle allows to do that. You get a great torque, et cetera. You get a lifestyle where you are free of the perceived burden of environmental, you know, the environmental damage that you're creating with a vehicle. But with the introduction of the fuel cell, we're looking at ways of really enhancing the comfort and the value of the vehicle. For example, the vehicle with a fuel cell, the fuel cell produces zero toxic emissions. It produces lower CO2, but no nitrous oxides, CO, sulfur dioxide, and all these other terrible chemicals. And thus, it can stay running in the vehicle while the vehicle is parked or idle. This has enormous benefit. It can recharge your batteries at very high efficiencies, but also it can provide comfort system for your vehicle. So your air conditioning could stay on or be turned on before you get to the vehicle. And therefore, you eliminate the concept of having a vehicle that is too hot or too warm. The other thing that you can do is have the fuel cell provide its heat for the vehicle, and therefore you eliminate forever the idea of having to scrape ice off your vehicle. So once you start doing things like this, the value proposition of this vehicle changes completely from being something that is equivalent, but something that is dramatically enhanced over the existing technology. So that's how we're always looking at how to increase the value proposition of the technology and how these technologies come together to change the lifestyle of people in a way that is irreversible. I'll give an example. I live in Florida and we have air conditioning in homes. Let me tell you, that makes living in Florida possible, in my opinion. But also it's irreversible. Once you have it, you're never going back. And so you'll pay for it. We'll return that idea because it's the point that an idea won't scale unless it's something that offers something additional to an audience and a consumer. But of course the question I think is going to be what really is additional. For Tom, the Navy and the Armed Forces really are in many ways, they're a major consumer of energy. They're the last part of this equation. It starts in university, it goes to a company. You're the ones who are actually using energy on a mass scale. What is the Navy doing to shape that market to maybe encourage the scaling up those kinds of technologies that private consumers or a private company would be less able to do? I think notably last week was the 236th birthday of the Navy. And I think if you look back at the history of the Navy, we have a history of being at the forefront of energy revolutions. So we went from sail to coal to power our ships. We went from coal to oil. We added nuclear and I'll say safely last better part of 50, 60 years for that. And all along the way we had challenges. We had known infrastructures that we were trading for unknown infrastructures. But in each case it was the right thing to do. In each case we added capability to the Navy. And we think as it relates to advanced alternative fuels that this will be no different. And then we're going to be part of this as well. We're going to have some challenges that we'll work through but this will be no different. We're also aware of a number of studies. And I think just the last speaker before us talked about the future of algae maybe being 10 years out. We've seen studies whether it's MIT or LMI and there's been a number of others that say this market won't be mature until 2020, 2025. We can't wait that long. And so we're doing something about it. But let me just tell you before I get to that is tell you why. And for us energy security is national security for us. If you think about it that you know where we buy our fuel we buy our fuel from one of 600 places around the world. Ultimately that fuel sourced from more often not countries that don't necessarily share our world view our perspective. And the alternative fuels offers us the promise to make changes there to really be thoughtful about whom we purchase fuel from in the future. And that's something that's really important to us. And as you can imagine that has strategic implications too. If we're getting more of our fuel from ourselves and being more energy independent if we're getting more of our fuel from countries that we are aligned with politically and otherwise that this has strategic impacts for us as well. But there's another piece to it and it relates to this. So what we see in the current fuels market we all know the trend over time is up. And it jumps around, it spikes up, spikes down. But the trend is overall up. For us though that we can absorb that trend but the spikes just kill us. So let me just give you an example of that. So in the past year the price per barrel fuel that we pay in the Navy has gone up $38 a barrel. To put that in perspective as an organization that consumes 30 million barrels of fuel per year $1 billion over the course of a year of budget uncertainty. $1 billion that we didn't budget for. $1 billion that Congress is not going to provide to us especially in this climate. And so what do we do? Well that impacts how frequently we steam our ships how frequently we fly our planes. So literally we have countries if you will that are organizations that control that price of fuel that have some say into our ability to conduct our missions or train and so on. Certainly that does not affect operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya and things like that but certainly it has an impact. And so that's why we're really interested in alternative fuels and really think it is the way of the future. Now what are we doing about it? So we could wait until the market is able to deliver fuels and the quantities and the price points could wait until 2020, 2025 and say we're there. We have stated goals that by 2020 half of our fuel will come from alternative sources but we know we need a ramp to get there. We also have stated that in 2012 we're going to demonstrate our interest in this area by having a carrier strike group go out and local operations on 50-50 blends of alternative fuels and then in 2016 going back to the Great White Fleet which turned the last century we're going to deploy that strike group and send it out over the horizon, look to unwrap it along the way. We think those are powerful signals but we also to the market but we also know we need to build a ramp to getting fuels at the right price points and in the right quantities for us. So what are we doing? So since March of this year we've been working with USDA and DOE as requested by the president, requested the Navy work with USDA and DOE to accelerate the alternative fuels market in this country. What we have done since signing an MOU between the three organizations has committed over a period of a number of years collectively a half billion dollars of investment that we will seek a price match from industry using existing authorities, powerful authorities that have existed for the last 60 years whose purpose, by the way, is to stand up industries where it's been identified as being critical to defense needs and energy has been identified as one of those critical needs. So we're looking to use that authority to identify, I shouldn't say identify, but to address the risk areas that can help stand up this capacity and capability in this country. So prior to March and actually ongoing I should say we've been very engaged with industry, the companies themselves, we've talked to venture capital, we've talked to, and I shouldn't say talked to, we have ongoing relationships with them as well as institutional investors, academia and others to understand what are the risk areas? What's preventing this market from being a mature market that's capable of being competitive with petroleum? And what we hear are kind of three risk areas. One is feedstock risk. In many cases we're standing up a new segment of the agricultural community or others that don't exist today. Two is I would kind of call it CAPEX and OPEX. Is there enough money for the bricks and mortar, the ongoing operations of the plant? And the third would be off-take risk. Do we have a customer there that can have a long-term relationship and contract? And what's attracted us to the Defense Production Act and led us there is that that can address all three of those areas. We can share risk with those companies in all three of those areas and in any varying degree. So if a company needed more effort on the feedstock side and less on CAPEX, you can do it. It's very flexible. We really see this as the way that we're going to execute, going forward so that we can ensure that the fuels won't be competitive in 2020 and 2025, but hopefully in 2014, 2015 and 2016. And I think these authorities are very powerful and will allow us to do that once we get all the funding necessary to align to support that. And again, this is an authority that's been around for 60 years. This is not intended to be a long-term government subsidy. The point of the Defense Production Act is to create a market and get out as soon as you can. And so we're looking at this as a two, three-year, four-year effort period and then at the end of that, we as a customer will be there. And the last point I'll make is, why is this different than what the government's done before? I think it's different in one key area. So USDA and DOE have, as many of you probably know, loan guarantee programs and grant programs related to alternative fuels. What was missing in those though, and I think those in many ways are necessary and there's a lot of goodness as we say in the Navy is coming out from those. But what's missing is a customer and that's where we come in, where we can align the USDA's connection to the agricultural community with DOE's connection to the technical portion of this with Navy as a customer. And I think that's what we're looking to do with this effort and we're looking to play a role in our future in building up this domestic capability in the country. Daniel, Tom talked about the importance of the Navy can serve as a customer and something in a big kind of way. I know, you know, your parent company is having some financial difficulties really in part because of looking for that market. You know, how do you as a company when you're developing a new kind of technology at this point, you know, it's very open. Is it going to be biofuels? Is it going to be fuel cells? Is it going to be lithium ions? Is it for you to try to prepare that sort of technology and spend that kind of money knowing that market is in flux in some ways? Right, so these are big bets that you take, but there is definitely an uncertainty in the way that demand will be materialized. You believe that demand will materialize eventually because you have a very strong value proposition, but it is uncertain how and how fast and to which scale things will happen and that's part of the risk of new technology and part of the risk of building out new technology because there is definitely in scaling up there are a series of chicken and egg problems. One of them is the problem of demand versus supply. There is an expectation that demand will occur, but demand doesn't occur unless supply is large enough to establish the economies of scale where you can get price points that create the demand. And so those two are not really talking to each other. There is an expectation that once you get to a certain scale demand will happen, but it may not happen as you expect. And here is where the government does a very good job. If government starts signaling that they have a need for the product and therefore they are willing to say if you build it and meet these specifications we will guarantee that the demand exists and it will exist in this way then it eliminates that source of uncertainty associated with the build up of scale. But in the private industry that's a little bit harder to do. And the other chicken and egg that I wanted to point out is the idea of specifications of whether when you are going through... you have a technology in the laboratory the technology as its scale changes in performance. And I see this primarily in the fuel cell side as you can expect a certain performance once you get into the field and mass production but you don't know what that is until you actually get into the field and have mass production and sold a certain number of these systems and have field validation and the government actually and DOD has done a good job in certain aspects of doing the testing of the technology such that that uncertainty is reduced but it's definitely one of the things that hampers technology and innovation. And another thing is the military market and government markets are very good to prime the pump of technology but the really big markets are outside are consumer markets that really drive the value of the company you want to have everybody driving cars with fuel cells and lithium ion batteries in them you want to have every home with distributed generation systems you want to have telecom power with baseline with fuel cell power systems in tandem with batteries etc these are sort of like where things could go and however there's a dramatic difference in specifications between the military market and the consumer market and some of these specifications that are given in the military market make it such that technology development takes off in a tangent that it's hard to bring it back to consumer markets so this is an item of discussion with some of the people in the Navy we've also done some things you've got the internet, you've got GPS we've done some things absolutely there's this concept of spiral development that you know as you go and enter new markets prototype get new products into the field that information that you obtain with that even niche market in the product is the thing that gives you the confidence to go to the big markets and so definitely this is that sort of spiral development I think there's a role there for government to play in those types of things, we've done it as I mentioned kind of jokingly but as you look at the alternative fuels market for us for example we would be a large airline if you looked at our fuel usage that said we also have a unique role because I think every major airline if I'm not mistaken in the last 10 years has filed for bankruptcy so there's some credibility issues there that I would argue we don't necessarily have those same ones and so we bring I think a value to that market and we can help so we really see our ability to help lead the making of this market I think you're absolutely right, it's going to be in this case commercial aviation, commercial maritime we're really going to be the ones that make the market but we can play that early role that I think government has done time and time again and I think that's for us and the Navy that's what we're looking to do as well You mentioned I think not every academic researcher thinks about what ideas can scale up when they're working on that why is that? Is it they're not sort of primed? Is there the sort of mindset necessary when people are doing that kind of work to think long term in terms of what idea will actually have that potential payoff what is it that makes you I suppose in your work different in that sense Well most academic scientists pursue an idea and develop that that's the sort of acquisition of knowledge of new ideas that's oftentimes what is driving innovation but in order to make that really work what you have to do is then also think about how are we going to scale it in the biofuels area one of the realities is there is a lot of infrastructure that you need to build that's not yet there there's photo bio reactor systems if you want to pump around to a lot of water there might be much better systems that haven't been developed yet so everybody sort of does their part but the parts don't necessarily all fit together biofuels that has been only something that has been seriously considered again since 2005-2006 before that there were a variety of things that kind of didn't pan out quite so it's really a young set of people coming together in terms of knowledge that needs to be put together in something that's actually going to work at the larger scale so it's you can't be so broad in science that you know of all the bits and pieces and those bits and pieces need to be brought together and that takes time and things of the caliber of 500 million or so that will be invested by the Navy that's going to be a real driver in bringing together those pieces that we really don't have yet we have the pieces but they are not a whole thing Craig Venter sort of implicitly criticized I think the way some funding is given out in terms of scientific research basically for not going after those breakthrough potential ideas is that your experience? Yeah there are some areas that are kind of innovative and there are those that require you to show that you have essentially already done the work and then they give you the money to do it and IH is a bit in the letter category there are areas RPE is probably a good example there of where you're trying to look what you need to do and then put the team together to make that work and bring all the innovations to gather that and some of your funding does come from RPE right but you know that that is a quite a different mindset that's more on the DARPA model whereas the NSF for example they have been always saying yeah we need to recognize innovation much more but at the panel level that never gets done because their funding rates are so awfully low that they can't take any risks you know they have problems funding stuff that is really working and that is going places and then to say okay you know here we have some really innovative proposals that we need to fund there's just not the need to actually make that work I wanted to point out that you asked the question along the same vein in that even though the technology that you're working on is not globally scalable it may be locally scalable and therefore it has merit sorry when you say locally like for example I don't believe that there has to be one fuel for the entire world you know that to me doesn't really make much sense actually because the planet is very diverse and resources that exist around the world are diverse and therefore your local resource may be good enough for you to fuel a town, a city or a group of resources may be able to fuel a town or a city or a portion of it may be thinking about it in terms of global magnitude now from venture capital standpoint it really looks great to think about things like you know I'm going to create that fuel that's going to fuel the entire world but I think that that's not very pragmatic because you end up in doing infrastructure problems and scale up problems and but when you know we talked earlier about the cell phone model in which you know they really use satellites and everything and then local guys are going around with you know towers and cell phones and that just have towers and radio for people to see I mean we have a long way to get before we get anywhere near the entire world I mean just electric vehicles so the idea of market segmentation and pathway is critical so instead of saying everything has to be scalable you're going to say no no no it's okay to have something mediocre in this area but it works in this situation and therefore it allows you it starts creating the pathways and the potential serendipities that create real innovation that will take you to the next step I see what you mean but it is it is sort of tough and energy for that way because it's not like cell phones in the sense that you were adding essentially a new industry that even though first when it began the phones were the size of car batteries and barely worked and gave you brain cats or properly a new set of values whereas with a lot of renewable energy you're not necessarily adding you may add value in terms of energy security in terms of diversification certainly in terms of cleaning up the environment but in terms of functionality not necessarily so it just seems like that challenge is all the greater and I wanted to ask you in terms of obviously a big part of this is improving your technology the better your fuel cells the better your batteries get the more competitive you'll be how important is manufacturing it's not just about being in the lab I mean and that's because manufacturing these kind of things is not cheap by any means absolutely not and it's one of the biggest hurdles and it's a hurdle in two areas one is you need a lot of capital to go to manufacturing you need to be able to hit price points and you have a technical uncertainty associated with it and so for example our company has put a lot of manufacturing effort in the United States and Indianapolis some of our competitors are definitely putting a lot of manufacturing capabilities outside the United States and taking advantage of structural benefits from that you know but but one of the games that you play is the farther you know how you do manufacture also affects your capacity to do product development so the farther away you put manufacturing from your R&D the less capabilities to do the breakthrough R&D becomes because you are farther away from the real problems of the product and so and that's actually a problem that the United States is facing moving into the future in terms of innovation because innovation actually comes from having feedback from the customer and having feedback from the manufacturing plant and what's going wrong and so as a company you have to balance that sort of risk of detangling yourself from manufacturing if you are a startup or do you keep it and then you need much higher risk and much higher capital requirements so I mean does not to step on the toes of the government policy panel that's coming later but I mean you know is it reasonable to expect a company like yours to be able to weather these difficulties I mean to spend tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to sort of do that go through that learning cycle while trying to create a market knowing this is all very uncertain I think it's worth it because nothing is wasting I'll give you the example of where a company comes from okay we are there the NRDEL which is a battery component of NR1 grows out of a joint venture and eventually a buyout of the Delphi battery technology now why is Delphi giving up its battery technology because EV1 failed right so it's not wasted it's just in the public's mind it's a series of failures but failure is a requirement for success if you're always winning you're running with losers okay so you must you must be willing to recognize that there are going to be failures and barriers in a way but that those are very important for your learning curve and so and nothing is wasted so we now have this technology and we've enhanced it and the same happens on the side of the fuel cell the fuel cell company in our fuel is riding riding high on the innovation of a bunch of companies that have done well, badly, and failed you know all over the gamut but the technology stays behind advancements have stayed behind people have stayed behind with know-how that allow you to move the technology forward and continue to develop and get it closer to the finish line so you have to have an appetite for that I like that line losers run with back winners but I mean it's a very painful process as well from an economic perspective failure is going to be part of that and I wanted to turn to Tom the US Navy does not have shareholders but you are taxpayers so you are obviously responsible to them do you have concerns about meeting these kind of goals or what if these goals prove harder to meet and I also wanted to ask you about you know that the RAND study that I know you are aware from earlier this year that questioned I think the military and the Navy's focus especially on biofuels so maybe you could respond to that as well but I mean how do you deal with are you ready to accept that kind of failure that might be part of this process well I mean I think another way to say what was just said is you know you can't have innovation without failure I mean that's just part of you know I think you know innovation is a function of many things and one of them is your tolerance for risk and if you have no tolerance for failures you're not going to get the innovation that you want and I think you know as we we have our own programs through the Office of Naval Research and the Naval Research Lab and through other efforts the small business investment innovative research program where we invest in emerging technologies and provide grants for emerging technologies and not all of them work and but you learn from those and those companies learn from those failures and other companies learn from those but you're advancing things down the field and toward a better solution I think and whether it's a failure because of business whether it's a failure because of the technology but you learn in that and I think that's important ability for all of government and I would say any investor to accept that type of risk and as you look at the venture capital community that's what they do they're in the business of assuming some failure threshold and that's how they make or break themselves I suppose on that second question I would with respect to the report that came out in January I would reference folks and I think it's up on OSD's website now to a report done the following year but just recently from LMI that is a very thorough understanding of the alternative fuels market done with a number of folks across academia and others to really try to understand all the different aspects of the market the report that came out last January I think was unfortunate and it's conclusions I think were ultimately flawed and we've made that, we've been public about that and we've said that to the Hill as well and we've talked to members of Congress as well on this and it was flawed for these reasons I mean it suggested that the best near term solution for the government as it relates to alternative fuels was to and if there's anybody in this room we can talk later about this was to essentially look at cold liquid but really looking at cold liquid fuels and to mitigate the kind of emissions penalty you would get from that suggested that we invest in and tap into carbon capture and storage so cold liquid you know the technology of fish or tropes behind that's been around since before too, it's fine it can be done for good and for I would say not so good as it relates directly to cold liquid or coal plus biomass I think we've seen those as well the challenges are the emissions that you get from that we are prohibited in the government from procuring fuels that have a life cycle greenhouse gas emissions worse than what we're currently using petroleum and without some other mitigation cold liquid just doesn't do that so the other mitigation that's suggested is carbon capture and storage which by the way we haven't done yet in this country, I mean lots of research going on it's important research that DOE and others are doing but we haven't done it at commercial scale and then lastly I would just say the cost to build such a facility by the authors I think own admission is 5 to 10 billion dollars is what you need to do to get it at scale and we don't even and it doesn't even talk about the impact to water the impact to the environment and where you're going to site one of these things I think there's a lot more effort that could go into those technologies whether it's carbon capture and storage fisher tropes and processes but to offer that as the best near term solution in light of what we see as how quickly the alternative the other alternative fuels markets are developing and biofuels in other areas it just didn't make sense to us and we reflected that back to the Hill, back to the author who by the way didn't engage the Navy in his report but that's a knit but anyway so I would encourage folks to really look at the LMI report because I'll just say this I don't agree with everything that's in that air and balance report and I think this other one I wouldn't put that same label on it would be ironic to have like a 21st century Navy that suddenly is being fueled by coal again a bit of a throwback if anything let's go back to sail why not? officially that's not the Navy's position just to be clear we have about 5 minutes left so I'm going to open it up to questions down there the question is for Wim if you are trying to get algae to secrete their oil which is a laudable goal everyone would like to do it you are going to be facing a challenge you either need sterile reactors because you don't want bacteria eating that oil as fast as they can get it but if you have the sterile reactors it's going to be too expensive to make for fuel and you're going to be using a lot of antibiotics how are you going to deal with that? that is indeed a fair question and a difficult one there are methods just as much as you can put into a cyanobacterium or algae the potential to make fatty acids you can also have them make things that will kill of competitors so it's just one more step of synthetic biology that you can employ and we are working on making that happen indeed sterility is a difficult thing but there are also compounds some of the fatty acids are fairly non biocompatible the shorter the chain length gets the less organisms actually can use it as a feedstock for themselves so there are a variety of ways around it and it's not something that has a solution right at this moment but there are four or five different ways that collectively will yield one this question is for you Mr. Hicks my understanding was that the U.S. Air Force is flying on cold liquids today they are identifying their aircraft on that fuel so are there differing regulations for the Navy versus the Air Force or is there any attempt to rationalize policy across all the branches the Air Force is not flying on cold liquids today they are held to the same fuel requirements that we are any fuel it's not petroleum must have a life cycle greenhouse gas emissions profile equal to or less than petroleum that's the law that's section 526 of ESA2007 that said they did have a program that invested in and did testing and certification along those areas I think as ESA2007 came out that made that more difficult for them I will say they have a progressive testing program and certification program as do we we have completed all of our manned and unmanned aircraft testing and we are in the process of doing the same for our surface vessels we share data between Air Force and Navy back and forth on similar platforms and they have efforts underway now in testing and certifying around HRJs looking at cellulosic fuels alcohol to jet they are very much moved on from that area so I think that might have been true in the past but we as DOD as a government are not allowed to purchase those fuels and frankly I think that as DOD has said as well that provision in ESA2007 is good policy we can argue about if it's well written policy and I think it's something that we need to take seriously because it has impacts to you know not just it has impacts into making the right choices about fuels So for just one more question Yeah, I'm charging by sister manned Mr. Heck so far since nuclear energy worked fine for Navy when Navy increased nuclear usage in the future So all of our subs and all of our carriers are nuclear powered and that accounts for about 17% of our total energy use those were done because they made economic sense but also because they gave us additional mission capabilities we can now go underwater for months at a time without having to refuel steam our carriers for you know half a year or more and actually we can go longer much longer than that and not have to kind of do any refueling I think as we look at other potential platforms that's something that we'll continue to look at and whether that makes sense to bring into other platforms it's going to be more driven kind of from the economic perspective now on the shore side you know so we have I think I know we have safely used nuclear power for the better part of 60 years in our fleet and so there's a lot of folks who think we could have those similar sized reactors or small module reactors and use those for our shore facilities and that's an area that we're looking at as well I think though it's a you know we're looking forward to say Oak Ridge National Lab I know they're looking to put a small module reactor in and how that will go through the NRC the nuclear regulatory committee about the process and the permitting of that I think some folks think that the Navy or DOD has some ability to ignore certain laws and environmental we're held to the same if not higher standards for that so we would still have to go through the same environmental permitting the same you know all the other permitting that's going to be associated with something like that so that's I think it's going to be on a case by case basis on that end as well as with our ships but I think what we have today we're very comfortable with and as you'll see with our new carrier coming out it's also going to be nuclear powered and we're committed to our carriers and subs for nuclear power well thank you very much to our panel and thanks for your attention as well thank you Brian