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Editorial:
Energy Security—
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R.
G. Gilliland
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The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon using hijacked commercial airplanes on September 11, 2001, aroused concerns about the vulnerability of the U.S. critical infrastructure to future threats, whether natural, accidental, or deliberate. The Department of Energy responded to this threat by commissioning a senior-level committee to identify and evaluate the Department’s capabilities to help power producers and energy developers assure the reliability of the nation’s energy infrastructure.
What is energy security? Broadly defined, it includes three critical components of our energy systems: A sustainable energy supply, energy infrastructure assurance, and international efforts to develop and provide energy technologies to help developing nations improve their standard of living.
ORNL is committed to a science and technology research program that provides affordable and reliable supplies of energy from environmentally benign sources to meet our nation’s growing needs, which include avoiding economic recessions and ensuring our national defense. We import 53% of the oil we use for propelling transportation vehicles (including U.S. fighter jets), heating and cooling buildings, and producing electrical power, and some of this oil comes from potentially unstable Middle Eastern countries (e.g., Iraq) that are supporters of or havens for terrorists. Therefore, a key component of energy security is reducing our reliance on imported oil and gas. We have many options. We could burn coal more cleanly, use alternative fuels (e.g., ethanol from biomass crops), extract methane from ocean hydrates and coal seams, increase use of other sources of energy (e.g., nuclear power), and develop new sources for the long term (e.g., hydrogen fuel cells and fusion energy).
In this issue of the Review, we describe ORNL’s research and development (R&D) work in support of increasing the nation’s energy supplies using a variety of sources. All of ORNL’s energy-related research is consistent with the goals of the President’s energy plan, as described in the Report of the President’s National Energy Policy Development Group.
After September 11, protection of our energy infrastructure from natural, accidental, or deliberate threats that could disrupt energy services has moved to the forefront of our R&D agenda. Our energy infrastructure includes coal and uranium mines, oil and gas wells, electric transmission lines and oil and gas pipelines, petroleum refineries, and power plants, as well as information technologies that operate and control these systems. This issue of the Review discusses ORNL technologies that could identify vulnerabilities in the energy infrastructure and offer ways to prevent, detect, mitigate, or recover from natural, accidental, or deliberate threats or actions.
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Components of the U.S. energy infrastructure include electrical transmission towers and nuclear power plant cooling towers.
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Power grid technologies developed at ORNL can help provide energy security by assuring both energy supplies and the reliability and protection of the energy infrastructure. ORNL’s work on transmission-grid-reliability issues has been nationally recognized.
ORNL researchers have analyzed how people respond to emergencies in many types of events related to disruptions of the energy infrastructure. This work may result in ORNL becoming a leading laboratory in emergency management.
Our nation’s energy security will also be increased by improving global energy supplies and use to help lift developing countries from poverty and provide employment to young people (so they are less likely to become terrorists and so their countries are less likely to become havens for terrorists). ORNL’s programs that are providing advice to developing countries on how to increase their energy supplies in the face of rising demand and a changing climate are also covered in this issue of the Review.
Visionary thinkers from ORNL’s new Oak Ridge Center for Advanced Studies (ORCAS) will meet this summer in Washington, D.C., with researchers from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and key universities and industries to address energy infrastructure assurance. Results from this ORCAS symposium should help us understand energy assurance implications for future energy systems.
Clearly, ORNL has much to contribute in imaginative new concepts and technology developments that could help boost energy security in the United States.
Related Web Sites
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| Associate Laboratory Director for Energy and Engineering Sciences |
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Web site provided by Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Communications and External Relations |
