MIT President Says Security Risked Without U.S. Energy Research
By John Lauerman and Jim Efstathiou Jr.
The lack of U.S. government investment in energy research is increasing the risk to national security and hindering the creation of breakthrough energy technologies, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said.
A federal funding effort modeled on the National Institutes of Health, which has pioneered treatments for AIDS and heart disease, is needed to sustain energy research at a level that will reduce dependence on imported oil and gas, said Susan Hockfield, president of MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in an interview yesterday at Bloomberg headquarters in New York.
The NIH, based in Bethesda, Maryland, grants about $31 billion annually to university scientists to produce technological advances, which are often commercialized by industry. President Barack Obama added $10 billion in two-year stimulus funding. Obama’s request for $6.7 billion in U.S. energy-research funds isn’t enough to move the U.S. toward energy independence, Hockfield said.
“Our history of funding energy research is terrible,” Hockfield, 58, said. “You don’t get technological miracles out of funding at that level.”
MIT is one of the leading universities of science and technology in the U.S. with 27 Nobel Prize winners among its current faculty and alumni, according to its Web site. MIT conducts research on solar energy, batteries to store energy, wind and wave power and technology to remove carbon dioxide from power plant emissions.
Energy Initiative
In 2006, MIT established an initiative that focuses on developing clean energy technologies that can displace fossil fuels. Last year, MIT and Plymouth, Michigan-based Fraunhofer USA, which operates research facilities at universities in Maryland, Michigan, Boston and Delaware, opened a center to study renewable energy at the Cambridge campus.
Since the mid-1990s U.S. investments in energy research and development have accounted for about 1 percent of the country’s total research spending. From 1961 to 2008, the U.S. spent about $4 trillion on all research, with defense accounting for at least half in every year except one.
“The problem with roller coasters is you always come back to the starting gate,” Hockfield said in the interview.
Department of Energy funding for basic and applied research rose to $5.8 billion in 2008 from about $3.8 billion in 2000, said Patrick Clemins, director of R&D budget and policy programs for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Washington-based advocacy group.
Falling Short
Federal energy efforts fall short in terms of their overall spending and focus, the Washington-based Brookings Institution said in a report this year. Most research is conducted within “siloed” labs that are too far removed from the marketplace, according to the report.
Instead, the government should create dozens of research institutes at universities or national laboratories, each with as much as $200 million in annual federal support, Mark Muro, a policy director at Brookings and co-author of the report, said on the group’s Web site. The facilities would link scientists and engineers and help move innovations into the market.
“We certainly support large amounts of longer-term fundamental basic research, but we also need to push research closer to the private sector,” Muro said. “We can create huge economies, new firms, spinoffs, all kinds of employment, ancillary related companies can result from this kind of activity.”
Without plentiful new sources of energy, the U.S. will remain dependent on supplier countries, Hockfield said. That reliance threatens consumer and industrial supplies, as well as the U.S. armed forces’ energy needs, she said. If other countries take the lead on alternative sources, the U.S. will remain dependent, according to Hockfield.
Climate Change
“Right now we are dependent on undependable countries for oil and gas,” Hockfield said. “It’s a national security issue, no question about it.”
A climate-change bill approved by the Senate Environment and Public Works committee yesterday would establish a program to award grants for advanced energy research. The bill didn’t specify how much would be allocated under the program.
“The president’s budget for energy reflects his commitment to ending our dependence on foreign oil, restoring our scientific leadership and putting Americans back to work through investments in a new green-energy economy,” Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in May when the department’s $26.4 billion budget for 2010 was presented. Chu said the budget demonstrates the president “commitment to using taxpayer dollars wisely.”
Department spokeswoman Stephanie Mueller didn’t respond to an e-mail message yesterday seeking comment.
Industry Leadership
The U.S. needs more industry leadership in energy research, Hockfield said. Of 14 companies that are partners in the MIT Energy Initiative, a university-wide effort to modernize energy systems, just two are U.S.-based, she said.
“I can’t tell you how unsettling that is,” said Hockfield, who began the initiative in 2006. Founding members of the group are London-based BP Plc and Rome-based ENI Spa.
MIT has stressed energy education and research, Hockfield said. About one in five of MIT’s about 1,000 faculty members is involved in the school’s energy initiative. The school this year began offering a minor concentration in energy, and about 1,700 of the school’s 10,000 graduate and undergraduate students belong to the MIT Energy Club.
MIT Startups
MIT research has also been targeted by the Energy Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy, which released $151 million to 37 projects last month, six of them in Massachusetts. Four of the companies that received a total of $24.8 million from the agency — Sun Catalytix in Lexington, FastCAP Systems in Cambridge and Agrivida in Medford — were based on research pioneered at MIT, she said. Another project experimenting with the use of liquid metals to store energy got $6.9 million and is based at MIT, Hockfield said.
“Department of Energy programs are more fluid than others,” AAAS’s Clemins said. “ No one really knows what’s going to be the next big energy technology, so distributing your investments across areas is good.”
Such new technologies are vital to the nation’s regaining control over its energy needs, Hockfield said.
“We’ve got to get back into the business of making stuff,” she said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Jim Efstathiou Jr. in New York at jefstathiou@bloomberg.net, John Lauerman in Boston at jlauerman@bloomberg.net.
