 We now have our panel discussion. It's going to be moderated by Dr. John Sutherland. Professor Sutherland is the head of environmental and ecological engineering. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has had an illustrious career in both mechanical and environmental engineering. And so I will turn it over to John to be the head wrangler in chief. All right, thank you very much, David. I'm going to introduce all our panelists that are up here and then ask them to each say a few words about their background and their expertise. And why don't we start with the gentleman that just introduced me, David Barr. Okay, so hi, I'm Dave Barr. As I said, head of materials engineering. It's just for a little bit of background. Actually for the students here, I did my degree here for bachelor's and master's degrees in materials and in metallurgical because we hadn't switched over between materials and metallurgical during that degree period. So the bachelor's was materials and the master's was metallurgical. I went on to University of Minnesota for my PhD. I've been doing materials reliability, mechanical properties, materials and how materials deform for about 30 years now. And I've had about 25 years in academia starting at Washington State University becoming department head there and then transitioning to department head here in 2012. So my interests that tie into this have to do with the school as a whole. I think our school is moving towards an area where as enrollment grows and as the students' interest in sustainability and in societal impact has grown. It's important for us as a school to think about if we make bumper stickers that say we can't make without materials, we may have to think about how we make those materials and what the impact that making is. So that's kind of what I'm here to talk about today. Thank you, David. Next up, we have Linda Sarros who comes from Arcelor. Right, I'm a proud Purdue grad. If I was a year older, I'd be a math teacher but Purdue started a summer engineering program for women when I was between my junior and senior years and I came down to see the campus and decided this engineering stuff is fun and I'd like to be an engineer. And that served me well. I was able to get a summer engineering job at Inland Steel after my freshman year because there weren't a whole lot of girls around. They wouldn't put me out in the mill because I was not yet 18. But I managed to retire from Inland and Successor companies 47 years later. So I was happy to be asked back to like relive my steel days I retired in 21. But Inland gave me an opportunity to work with a lot of different people, including Dr. Cram for a short period of time and I love the steel industry. So I'm glad to be here. Next up we have the reason we're all here today, Alan Cram. Did you want to send anything else in addition to comments from earlier in your introduction? Maybe a fact that we didn't know about. Sure, sure. I might have a challenge to think of a fact you didn't know that already said. I think the one thing I would say is that I've been fortunate to be at three different universities and three different technical engineering-based universities as this is a technical engineering university also. And I found them both all to be really interesting places full of very smart people who wanted to make a difference. And I think the highlight of my career was the 19 PhD students I have and the 28 master students I had. And I probably learned more from them than I ever did from anything else. And that's the beauty of being in engineering schools. Very nice. Next up, Eric Boria, who is from GTI Energy. Hello everyone, Eric Boria. I'm a senior analyst and project manager at GTI Energy. It's an organization that does research and development for energy projects across the US. I work on the Department of Community Benefits that works on developing and implementing community benefits and impacts for these kind of projects led by Elizabeth Koch, who is on the Sustainability Committee of the MRS Journal. My background, I have a PhD in sociology where the topic was looking at community response to the dredging of Indiana Harbor in Chicago and a master's in urban planning policy from UIC. And apparently there's a theme here going on. My father made his career at Inland Steel and then our slower mental steel is a research engineer. So apparently we have that theme going on here. Glad to be here. All right, well let's hear for the panelists before we get started. So our panel over the next 45 minutes or so is going to be, is there a path for green materials production for structural materials? So this is a panel session. So people should feel free to if they have a question to raise their hand and we'll try to get that question answered. So I'm kind of looking out there to see whether there's any pent up questions. So let me start and I'm going to leave it to you all to figure out who is best positioned to respond to this. But as we heard from Alan earlier, as steel production aims to reduce its carbon footprint, are there any unintended consequences to recycling steel using EAF that come to mind? I think Alan really touched on the major issue in the presentation, especially as EAF steel started producing for sheet steel where formability is more important. The residuals that continue to be present in the scrap can really restrict the use on some like deep drawing applications and those kind of things. You need to really watch nitrogen specifically, but there's a lot of other tramp elements that cause the problem. And you can't call those unintended. You really should, people have been designing for that for 20 years already since they started that. You just need to know that and application. That's very good. Other thoughts? Yeah, Alan? I think unintended consequences are inability to capture all of the dusts. You know, and the dust is a hazardous waste that can be transported across state lines. So unintended consequences be when you release it because you didn't expect it. Other unintended consequences could be also the gas that's coming off of even electric, our furnace at high temperature can precipitate dioxins, et cetera, as it cools down. And that has a really severe effect on local environments. So I think that that's too. The other one is that I just spent time on a large study of what to do with electric art furnace slag for the National Academy. And it's not a straightforward issue of, because I mean, think of it as 10% of the weight of steel. It's a lot of slag. And people would like to do lots of things with it, but you have to realize certain things. I didn't realize that just the fact that it's pretty basic. Therefore, you wouldn't want to ingest any of it. You know, for beginning, you know? So you have to think about, is there dust that children could ingest? It's also a pretty hard material that as you recycle it and you break it up, of course, to end up with a size distribution you would like. You know, pretty sharp particles there that if ingested to a child is very problematic too. So there are some unintended consequences of what you do with the other streams coming out of electric furnace. That's very good. I was thinking about some of the community issues as well, Eric. A lot of the work that GTI Energy does is looking at what impacts, how to mitigate impacts, both the expected and the unexpected. And a big part of what we're doing is workforce development and workforce implications. And whenever you have a technology, we try to work closely with the technical team to understand what potential air emissions, water emissions and discharges can come out and design workforce implications, like update to health and safety standards, update to risk assessment so that there's not only monitoring, but some mechanism to help the workers who are working there take precautions to reduce their impacts, have information that goes, that's publicly accessible, that the community can take to understand what the potential impacts of technologies are. Because even technologies that reduce some emissions can produce increases in other types of emissions. So having these types of metrics and transparency within the project team at least, and putting in monitoring so we know what's going on as the project's being developed is crucially important. That's very good. Okay, go ahead, David. I was going to shift gears a little bit since Eric brought it up, you brought it up and given my own background, as we begin contemplating issues like a greener steel and perhaps less carbonized grid and so forth, what does that then suggest? And you brought up issues as well, Eric. What does that suggest about how we should be evolving the curriculum at the university and thinking about requirements and so forth? I know David and Allen have had to deal with this in the past, figure out how we jam more and more into the curriculum and no one ever wants to take anything out. But are there some bigger issues? Maybe we can start with you, David, and talk a little bit about how we should be thinking about this. Sure, I mean, I think you're right on the nobody wants to ever take anything out. So if we want, and I think, are there any students here that think they have lots of extra time and that we've given them plenty of time to ponder and think about things carefully and take na, not usual. So I think one of the challenges is we're asking people to make technical decisions. We expect our students to be able to walk out and think about the ramifications of the technical decisions at a level, I think that is higher than we used to. And I don't necessarily, I think back when I was a student, could I solve a problem was what I was being asked? Not if I solve that problem were there knock-on effects and I don't think that, I think now most of the students come thinking about that. I don't think we as faculty necessarily address that yet. But I think of how do we integrate some concepts of sustainability across engineering disciplines is a challenge. And I think it is a question of what do we wanna take out because extending it to saying that we're gonna go the civil engineering route and to be a professional engineer, you really need five years and a master's, I don't think is palatable to a lot of our, the educational system we have. Yeah, maybe Eric, you have some thoughts. Yeah, I had two things. One of the, there's a couple of routes that we put into community benefits plans. And one is to move away from that model where you get educated, then you get a job in going to industry, you implement it and then there's a product and then if there's any community opposition to pollution that's a downstream effect and making it sort of a, first of all, a feedback internally where we've put together a couple projects where we try to make a consortium where there's more structured interaction between the industrial partner that's putting into technology, a university and then workforce training organizations and labor unions that do that kind of workforce training to try to get some form of information feedback because I'm not the technical expert but I know that there's some information that on application side that could feedback to the curriculum side and then we run up against that exact same problem that we know there's a need to do more research on this new technology but then getting space into the educational side so we're setting up the structure for that interaction, how you guys do it on the academic side is something that we need to figure out but we're at least putting together that structured interaction. So that's within the project, setting up this consortium between industry academic and training partners and the other feedback mechanism we get is a two-way communication that's literally stated by the DOE requirements to have two-way communication with communities. So we set up structured information feedback where we can take new information from communities and feed it back to project teams, feed it back to academic partners so that they have a little bit, they can broaden their scope of what the impacts are, what the concerns and priorities are on the ground, this information even and then adjust accordingly. And how many of you are required to get any tools for understanding community impact, social impact, how to look at census data, how to look at energy burden, how to look at environmental burden? Very few, right? So another tool that we get is training of technical young engineers and technical staff with environmental justice toolkits so that you could at least have the awareness and you have the tools to figure out what community impacts are. If air pollution is going to the community that's directly around the plant, how do you even assess in 15 minutes how do you assess what the existing burdens are within that community that you can be contributing to so you don't do what Alan mentioned of, hey, there's already this heavily industrialized, heavily polluted area, let's just put the heavy pollution technologies in there, right? Because that's exactly how you get community opposition that stops projects. So earlier one of the questions to Dr. Cram was where do we stand with the current electric furnace DRI base and going to hydrogen as a refining source but that presupposes that the electricity you're using in the electric furnace and for the hydrogen creation is clean in and of itself and that's huge because that's the big challenge when you've got all these worldwide steel makers saying that they wanna be carbon neutral by 2050, that's not gonna happen if we don't have clean electricity. So that goes back to putting it in the curriculum, it's not just in materials, it's in the whole of the engineering department or at school and it's good that we're working on things concurrently but this is the biggest challenge I've seen and I actually was making ingots when I started and was on the project to justify the first ladle met station. So the technical challenges are really exciting but the coordination is not something I have my hands around yet. Maybe I could talk about this in a different viewpoint in the philosophy of what is an engineer and what do we need an engineer to be? I think we need engineers to be leaders, simply leaders and the problem we have in society is we don't have enough engineers who are leaders and this means engineers, although they are very narrow in certain areas, they need to be broad. They need to communicate well, they need to listen to other people, they need to look at the big problem and be able to bring people together to solve big problems and they have to be willing to step up to go into politics, they have to be willing to step up and lead and I think the big failure and I'm gonna be honest, my whole career, big failure of engineering is not realizing the role is to make leaders who are engineers and I think if you focus everything that way these problems become straightforward. The fact is yes, you should understand community, you should understand impact, you should understand the technology but you should understand your role in life is to change things. You're a change agent as an engineer, not a person who works in a job. You're not a person who makes things for the electronics industry, you're not a person whose whole life is just to make steel, you're a change agent with your education and I think we haven't done a good job as engineers, is explaining to everyone, use your abilities to change the world, one person at a time. That's really good, I was just gonna, too often we talk about engineers being problem solvers and that's too narrow, too limiting. We need to be the leaders, David. I was gonna say, I appreciate, I think we also need to have students be comfortable asking for help because you can't be perfect, you can't be great at everything, you can be good at some things but you have to know when to ask for help and experts and you have to know when to accept that help and to trust their expertise and I think that's something we need to do a better job to teaching people to ask earlier and to find trustworthy help quicker. Yeah, go ahead. First of all, I think that's phenomenal, that's right on the money. One of the things is not just asking for help, it's getting the skill sets to learn to work in collaborations and coalitions that are with people outside of your discipline because your ability to communicate with people with very different skill sets is what's needed to move to the next idea, to move that idea forward because you recognize that you have a great skill set in here and for you to get the awareness and start moving, you need to be in these multidisciplinary teams, you need to be in these teams that are cross professions and learn how to work collaboratively with others. Those are skill sets that I don't think are emphasized enough but we focus so much on the technical side but your ability to work with others in other professions to be able to get from point A to point B, that's just as valuable as your technical expertise. If I could just, I think that's absolutely correct and the thing that I discovered myself when I was provost and all of a sudden I had a law school, I had an architecture school, an engineering school, et cetera, et cetera, reporting to me was that they speak in their own language and what you say is not what they hear. They hear their own language but it's not what you meant and when they talk to you, it's not what they meant to you, it's a very interesting thing, it took me a while to recognize the architects talking metaphors and what they're saying, you have to interpret, it's like a game but you know, everyone's like that, lawyers are very difficult to talk to because it's very transactional, you know? So, but I think that's something that everyone has to and it's part of when people say you have to work in multidisciplinary teams, this is why you have to work in multidisciplinary teams to listen, to learn how to listen and then start to understand what people mean by the way they say it and it's all in how we educated them. We are educated in a certain way so we think in a certain way and we refer to things in a certain way but architects are also educated but they were educated in a different way and they think in a different way because of that and it's the history of the area. We're all living in the history of our areas and if you don't have the background it's very difficult to understand exactly what they mean unless you spend time with them and spend time socially with them and the same with them all and they become comfortable with you to say I don't understand what you mean by that. You say what do you mean, you know? And then you start to realize the issue is communication in a very fundamental level. It's not the ability to speak English, it's the ability to understand everyone's English and the international thing adds another wrinkle to that too, you know? And because culture and language and what you mean is part of what you say also. So I found that that was the most interesting thing that I learned as provost was not only do I have to listen better just spend time to understand and it was my issue, not theirs. That's the other big thing. It's your issue, it's not they should learn to speak to me. It's you have to learn to speak to them so that they understand. Very good, yeah. We have a question from the audience. Who will wait to get the microphone so the question will be heard. Thank you, Professor. Have hydrocarbons or particularly biomaterials been tried in the reduction of iron ore processes? Yes, they have. It is another way of getting charcoal. I mean basically, I hear a lot of things about biomaterials and other things and when you look at it as a form of charcoal as a feed material into the furnace basically how do you take any carbon source and turn it into a carbon source you can use? So yes, there is many areas and there are companies doing some really interesting things because there's a lot of waste biomaterials that are just thrown away that could actually be turned into fuel. Yeah, and not to get rid of the hydrogen to make charcoal first and then to have the iron come in but have the hydrogen stay in and a process that could utilize the hydrogen for positive benefits. Yeah, and I'm sure there are processes doing that also. It makes sense. Again, it's how much can you make to make a difference? So unless you have sufficient volumes of hydrogen at the reasonable price, then you have to be able to using it. So we are in farm country. They would say we have a lot of biomass, not necessarily hydrogen. Ethnol, right? Yes. I was just gonna say that the Arsler Middle has got multiple projects going and they know they're gonna be using like sour hydrogen to start with because there's no way that they've got the clean green hydrogen available now. That raises issues for materials because anything that's containing this is gonna corrode faster. But ultimately, to get where we need to get, we need to get the clean hydrogen, right? Oh, and also we need an infrastructure to transport hydrogen. The big problem with hydrogen, as a graduate student and I started using hydrogen in one of my experiments I learned very quickly that it truly is more flammable and it's very easy to watch it explode. And I always remember in the lab watching the flame front run through my glasswork thinking, oh, that doesn't look good, you know? And there are significant issues with the distribution of hydrogen and an infrastructure that doesn't exist in the country. So that's another issue with, even if there was plenty of hydrogen and volume that becomes an issue of transportation and, you know, et cetera. David. I was just gonna comment on hydrogen and brittlement being the, you know, like a good career path to get into right about now, because there will be problems coming up because people will miss pick things that they didn't, that wasn't rated for this hydrogen service. Well, we didn't have that hydrogen service. It's actually not an unintended, it is a consequence that we can pretty much anticipate, right? So there was a question in the back. Yeah, thank you for the talk. I just wanted to go back to how you said, like, there has to be more leaders in the engineering field. I think it's like a easy topic to say, but like, it's a very simple explanation if you see me and my brother, I was good in math, I was incentivized to do that when I was a child. So I go to engineering school, my brother was good in English, so he just went into law school. And predominantly, if you see the actual changes, I think me actually spending my time in the lab and doing my PhD work doesn't do that big of a change in the world. And actually, like my brother, maybe he can go back to politics, oh, go into politics and change it. So what do you think like a practical change in the curriculum or like the incentive cycle for like children or like students to change so that they could be incentivized to be more proactive, more into communication while actually being an engineering student at the same time? I think every engineering student should take introduction to law. Simple as that. Is without understanding the law, you can't do any of these things. And by the way, as an engineer to understand the law, you can protect your intellectual property, et cetera, understanding this. So I was a big proponent always of there should be a lot more law in engineering curriculums as important as anything else because the engineers are the ones that are developing the next technologies, et cetera, that need to be protected and need to protect themselves so that their own intellectual property isn't lost. But if you want to go on into anything, you have to have some knowledge, and I don't say you have to be a lawyer, I don't mean that at all, but you have to have a knowledge of what the law process is and how it became as it is where you are. So I think for me, the first thing is understanding something fundamental about how the law process works is necessary for everyone. And the last one I would say is we should all tell all engineers, you can be anything you want to be as a change agent. You are not stuck in a career path defined by the four years you spent in college. The four years in spending college taught you to think in a certain way. It's going to be very valuable, but that way of thinking is very valuable in every area and actually more valuable than most backgrounds. And I'm not denigrating other backgrounds. It's just the mathematical bent and being numbers focused and actually being able to understand decision based on numbers is very important now and is a way to make decisions that make better decisions faster than others. Intuition is not a good idea. I mean, it works occasionally, but it's not a good idea. It's like hope's not a strategy. So go ahead, Eric. Just a very quick response. I recognize there are structural and there are individual level decisions that can be made. You, everything is set for you to go in one path and you can, as he said, Elsa, you can go work for a company, get a job and then just do that job. Like nothing's pushing you to do anything extra. Nothing's pushing you to be a leader. Nothing's pushing you to assess community impacts and whatnot, but you as an individual with the encouragement to take on those and expand your role, broaden out, work with others across disciplines helps push that a little bit in the right direction and from the top down, structurally, they see the need to change some of the... I think there's pressure on education to incorporate more community impacts, diversity impacts into curriculum because they see that a lot of these projects, they get halted because even a good technological project, if they don't work well with communities, they'll get community opposition, environmental group opposition, and it'll stop, right? So I think that's the motivation for putting community benefits into federal funding requirements. So there's that top down, but you as an individual, you can make the decision to be a leader. You can make the decision to incorporate some more awareness of community impacts and move in that direction on your own. There, another question right here and then we'll come to you. Oh, well, we've got two microphones, so we're gonna go with you first and then you're next. You had yours first? All right, all right, you guys worked it out. Go ahead. Guys hear me? Okay. So something here answered my question. The first question about my biohydrogen issues for engineering, but my question, second question is how can materials engineering like solve problems in astro engineering and also like space exploration issues? Like what's some ways like materials engineering can fix some problems in that field? Why did everyone look at me right away? I thought I'd let you go first. Yeah, no, no, I appreciate that. I mean, no, it's, so we had a speaker in one of our seminars a couple weeks ago who said, you thought materials was a great background because it meant that everybody used materials, so you had to learn that everybody had materials problems and that your job was not necessarily to bring your material solution to their problem, but to figure out what their problem was and was it tied to the materials they were using? And there's usually something. So if you look outside of, you know, we've been talking about making bulk materials, making structural materials very early down the feedstock, but if you think about then how do you apply that to, you know, the thing above you, right, since we're in Armstrong Hall and there's always a certain throwback to the fact that there's like a space aspect of things. Material challenges, how do you make it more efficiently? How do you use less energy? How do you use something that's more recyclable? That does, that pervades not just how you make it the first time, but then how you use it and where it goes. So I think there's a lot of potential for any industry that has materials problems. I think one of the things you asked was about space exploration. One of the biggest issues is where's the oxygen coming from? Because you can't take it all with you. You have to make it there. And that's a materials processing issue. And obviously that's an electricity issue and there are many ways of doing that. But you know, you start going through that and you see that many of the technologies we've already developed, you just change into the situation you're going into and you can come up with novel technologies because all of a sudden the financial constraint has been taken away. Because you just have to have oxygen. It doesn't matter how much it costs. For example, in many things like this. So I think there's a great future for materials in space exploration, in the materials for space, et cetera. And it's application of what we know to this new frontier, understanding what are the properties that are necessary to survive. So another one I was thinking of example, like the Splashdown example. Like the spacecraft going through the atmosphere. I think making metals that can withstand the heat from the atmosphere could be a great problem to solve for using the materials engineering as well. I think. Very good. Actually years and years ago when I was at Michigan Tech I ran into an alum that worked on the ablation process by which they dissipated the heat. There was a question. Okay. So follow up on the discussion before about all sorts of different things. I guess interdisciplinary work as engineers. Thinking with numbers. And hopefully I'll find my question as I keep talking. I'm thinking about this. I've seen the change within myself as I did my undergrad in engineering and now starting grad school where I'm thinking more in numbers and I'm approaching problems from that side. But I wasn't always like that. And the more I look around I almost feel like most people aren't like that. And when you talk in numbers even though that represents maybe the objective truth that's not what people respond to. And so what is your advice for these kind of situations as a young engineer? I think we saw it with COVID. We see it with a lot of such things where people just don't, as you said, speak the same language. How do you overcome that barrier? I think the first thing we have to realize is not all people need our brilliance. You know. Need our brilliance. But they need our knowledge. They need our wisdom. They need to learn to communicate it in a way that everyone can understand. And in doing that sometimes means we have to change the way we talk to people. Unless, you know, we're all have a problem of being impressed by our own impressions. You know, if you want to look at that we're smart. And we like people to know that. It's a failing and a benefit. But I think the answer is that learning how to talk to people so they understand your point without having to take them through the derivation of the equation to get there is really important. Among engineers, you can't do that. They actually want to know, how did you get to that answer? And explain it to them in detail so that they will accept it. They will go through their own derivation and say, yeah, that's correct. But for many people they're willing to accept that you have the intelligence and the ability to do this and they want to know the answer. You know, and they want you to tell them the answer in a way that they have confidence in you. So I am an engineer, so I do want the data. Not necessarily every piece of data. And I always used to joke at work, why did the engineer write a 10 page report? Because he didn't have the time to write a 10 page report. And it's really important and it's a big skill to be able to only give the elevator pitch or if you were presenting to somebody in the DOD, one of my fellow materials grads went to war college and she was working at the Pentagon. I mean she had five minutes to tell a general what they should be doing. And they also wanted to know she had the data. But the data is important so I'm glad you like it. But I agree totally. You need to know your audience and what you're trying to accomplish when you put your summaries together. First Eric and then. When you go to law school what they teach is a way of thinking. Not the knowledge that they give. When you go to engineering, it's a way of thinking. When you go to sociology, it's a way of thinking. It's a way of specializing in a way of thinking. And as they both mentioned if you're not able to communicate that to others who are not in your group, that's where the boundary comes. All the silo things where you were encouraged to use complex language that only those in the in-group understand that hinders actual progress because if you can't get from the 10-pager and explain clearly exactly what you're trying to convey that's why we have a whole science communication effort and there's specialists in science communication because they can convey complex thoughts very clearly so that others can use it build on it and interact. Hey, you didn't think about this. How does that apply to this? You can't answer that question if you're only speaking within your own framework. That's why communication is crucial. I was going to suggest two things. The first is have you seen three-minute thesis? So I think there's a lot of examples online. I don't know if the ones that Purdue are always the most impressive. I will be blunt. I think I've seen better ones from elsewhere. Three-minute thesis is a really neat competition because you only have three minutes and you have to explain it clearly succinctly to a broad audience. The other thing I was going to say is I asked my first-year engineering class which I think I can't see because of the light but I think they're all gone so then I can talk about them. I asked them to do me in a minute slides for material introduce themselves if they were material and they all managed to keep it to a minute. If I think if I asked the seniors to do that not a single one of them would be able to keep it to a minute and so I don't know if it's that they're more scared of me and follow instructions or that something we do between when they showed up on campus and they become seniors teaches them makes them makes it harder for them to only say what they want in a minute. I don't know if we do it to them or if it's part of what we do. Yes, please. So a little different question. So we're talking about structural materials so there is one structural material and considering it on a global picture bamboo so like there's a community aspect of it as well. So what are your views on this as a like can we put our resources into engineering that material and making some more solutions instead of with that material? Well we certainly see bamboo through the Asian world being used as structural material. It's been one of the ancient materials right also one of the fastest growing plants we have so and doesn't degrade very quickly what's cut down so it's an excellent material to begin with. So it's a matter of acceptance of the customer and what you can make with bamboo is quite different than what you're going to make with other materials as long as you can make the final end product that's acceptable to the customer it would be fine but bamboo is a fine material in the right circumstance for use. I think that is a good example of one of the push backs from communities where how often have you heard that you need to look at the entire life cycle from source to sink to decommissioning like where are the waste streams going communities are impacted by the waste streams if you're not thinking if you're only thinking of the process within the factory you're not thinking about the entire sustainability of renewable resources the forever chemicals and everything that's in the end products and those are the cumulative environmental burdens that communities deal with which pushes engineers to think in terms of entire life cycles so I think that bamboo is a good example of that. Very good. I see you. I'll stand up. I am currently building a campaign here at Purdue to get the steel mill companies in northern Indiana to commit to being low carbon to protect the environment, protect the affected communities and keep manufacturing jobs in Indiana. What do you think it would take in order to convince them to commit to low carbon production and change the way that they've done things in the past? So, Arcelor Middle sold the Arcelor Middle USA component to Cleveland Cliffs so you're dealing primarily with Cleveland Cliffs at this point. I actually went on their website and there's a stark difference between the Cleveland Cliffs and the Arcelor Middle website on this issue and I would say the biggest reason for that is because Arcelor Middle is in partnership with Spain for the Spain plant and Germany for the Germany plant and a lot of the money that's going into this is from Arcelor Middle don't get me wrong but a lot of it is from Canada and Spain and so when you're dealing with the people in northwest Indiana in the United States I know SDI has got the same commitment that Arcelor Middle does but I still see a focus on return on investment because it's a cyclical industry and they want to be around next year let alone in 2050 so we can talk later if you want but it's a challenge that I totally understand and it goes back to what Dr. Cram said throughout his whole presentation sustainable means that you've got to be able to stay in business too but it's a laudable goal so I don't think you're going to have any problem with any of the steel plants saying they're not in favour of that the issue will be the definition of what do you mean by minimal carbon I think the law say that they all have programs to do that and they all want to do that and it wouldn't surprise me that they're willing to support whatever you're going on openly because one thing we should realise all the people who are owning steel companies are working for steel companies have families and children and they're concerned about the future also it's just a difficult problem to solve but I think if you go to the individual steel companies they'll all say we believe in that too that's really good go ahead Eric they do believe in it the question is are they going to spend money on it they'll spend whatever money they have one of the kickers they do believe in it one of the kickers to get companies to spend money on it are the federal requirements for community benefits that are tied to federal funds for sustainability technologies technology technologies putting those in commitments and they put it into the plan and that gets executed into a contract that they then have to follow and that's why they that's that moves from wanting to do it to then now you have to do it by contract here's the metrics here's the monitoring that you committed to and then you know the entire issue is getting to that contract in the first place before coming to GTI I worked the zoning administrator for the city of Gary and it's the same thing you have companies who want to do the good thing but when you get down to putting the plans and what they can execute they say what does the zoning code make us do right and it goes back to Alan's point of hey do you know the law or do you not know the law thank you that's very good David go ahead I was just going to say in a few minutes we have to invite people down to the reception so I will let you wrap up can we have one last very short very short question I'll try my best here I know that being an engineer you want to lead and you want to progress the world to the future however just with history you need to have public buy-in to get anywhere so whether it's World Wars, a nuclear race, a space race that's when we really had scientific advancement today when you see the public and policy and legislation being passed that doesn't go along with science as much as it used to how can we work on that how can we as engineers present that to become the leaders I think that's why we don't have enough engineers in Congress or the Senate you know I've met with many of them but I know that there are very few PhDs who are in the Senate or the Congress for example very few have an engineering background and if you have people making decisions without some people there who can explain the impact of these decisions on an engineering base why is science important why is engineering important and it's all very well to the NSF and all the other national things the fact is without someone there actually in the committees who's willing to speak for science speak for engineering in a reasonable way with the background that they have gravitas to speak on that we have a problem and fundamentally that's one of the largest problems we have if we were in China we'd find that most of the leaders had a science and engineering background quite different than here now they have other backgrounds too but if you look at the leadership in which disciplines they come from they were proponents of engineering and science and that leads to a different discussion about the importance of science and funding of science and I'm really talking about the funding of science here which is your question and if you look at whose funding science it's countries that have engineers and scientists at the top levels that understand the benefits to their country of doing this but you're absolutely correct and real dollars were well behind what we used to be and if you look at leadership of technology when I came here to go to graduate school from Europe there was only one place in the world to go if you wanted to do top class research it was the country that funded research at universities more than any other country in the world that was the United States best research country in the world without a doubt there was no second choice that's not true now there are many countries you can go to the outstanding research abilities where you can go and do a great PhD with great faculty most of them trained here by the way and then gone somewhere else so we're still the training ground of the professors of the world but this fact that we don't invest in our own scientific and engineering infrastructure and more than that we don't invest in our people to become the leaders in this the fact is that regardless of the research that's done the most important output of research is the graduate student, the graduates and goes on to actually change everything so that's something we've lost and become not as competitive as we used to be the dominant force here in my lifetime when I went to graduate school to do a PhD there was nowhere else to go and the facilities that were in American universities were unbelievable compared to the facility I had in one of the best universities in Scotland I mean it was like coming from a high school to university so it's a very important point you're bringing up and we need to bring everyone back to the viewpoint that we need to invest in research we need to invest in graduate programs across the country in all areas just engineering in all areas I think that's a good spot to end up on let's thank all the panelists once again