WEBVTT

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For the next few minutes we're going to talk about energy,

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and it's going to be a bit of a varied talk.

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I'll try to spin a story about energy,

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and oil's a convenient starting place.

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The talk will be broadly about energy,

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but oil's a good place to start.

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And one of the reasons is this is remarkable stuff.

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You take about eight or so carbon atoms,

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about 20 hydrogen atoms,

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you put them together in exactly the right way

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and you get this marvelous liquid:

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very energy-dense and very easy to refine

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into a number of very useful products and fuels.

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It's great stuff.

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Now, as far as it goes,

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there's a lot of oil out there in the world.

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Here's my little pocket map

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of where it's all located.

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A bigger one for you to look at.

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But this is it, this is the oil in the world.

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Geologists have a pretty good idea of where the oil is.

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This is about 100 trillion gallons

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of crude oil

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still to be developed and produced in the world today.

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Now, that's just one story about oil,

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and we could end it there and say,

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"Well, oil's going to last forever

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because, well, there's just a lot of it."

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But there's actually more to the story than that.

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Oh, by the way, if you think you're very far from some of this oil,

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1000 meters below where you're all sitting

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is one of the largest producing oil fields in the world.

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Come talk to me about it, I'll fill in some of the details if you want.

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So, that's one of the stories of oil; there's just a lot of it.

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But what about oil? Where is it in the energy system?

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Here's a little snapshot of 150 years of oil,

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and it's been a dominant part of our energy system

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for most of those 150 years.

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Now, here's another little secret I'm going to tell you about:

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For the last 25 years,

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oil has been playing less and less of a role

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in global energy systems.

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There was one kind of peak oil in 1985,

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when oil represented 50 percent of global energy supply.

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Now, it's about 35 percent.

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It's been declining

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and I believe it will continue to decline.

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Gasoline consumption in the U.S. probably peaked in 2007

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and is declining.

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So oil is playing a less significant role

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every year.

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And so, 25 years ago,

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there was a peak oil;

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just like, in the 1920s,

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there was a peak coal;

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and a hundred years before that,

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there was a peak wood.

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This is a very important picture of the evolution of energy systems.

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And what's been taking up the slack in the last few decades?

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Well, a lot of natural gas

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and a little bit of nuclear, for starters.

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And what goes on in the future?

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Well, I think out ahead of us a few decades

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is peak gas,

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and beyond that,

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peak renewables.

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Now, I'll tell you another little, very important

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story about this picture.

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Now, I'm not pretending that energy use in total

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isn't increasing, it is --

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that's another part of the story. Come talk to me about it,

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we'll fill in some of the details --

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but there's a very important message here:

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This is 200 years of history,

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and for 200 years we've been systematically decarbonizing

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our energy system.

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Energy systems of the world

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becoming progressively -- year on year,

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decade on decade, century on century --

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becoming less carbon intense.

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And that continues into the future

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with the renewables that we're developing today,

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reaching maybe 30 percent of primary energy

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by mid century.

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Now that might be the end of the story --

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Okay, we just replace it all with conventional renewables --

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but I think, actually, there's more to the story than that.

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And to tell the next part of the story --

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and this is looking out say 2100 and beyond.

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What is the future

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of truly sustainable, carbon-free energy?

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Well, we have to take a little excursion,

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and we'll start in central Texas.

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Here's a piece of limestone.

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I picked it up outside of Marble Falls, Texas.

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It's about 400 million years old.

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And it's just limestone, nothing really special about it.

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Now, here's a piece of chalk.

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I picked this up at MIT. It's a little younger.

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And it's different than this limestone, you can see that.

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You wouldn't build a building out of this stuff,

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and you wouldn't try to give a lecture and write on the chalkboard with this.

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Yeah, it's very different -- no, it's not different.

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It's not different, it's the same stuff:

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calcium carbonate, calcium carbonate.

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What's different is how the molecules are put together.

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Now, if you think that's kind of neat,

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the story gets really neat right now.

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Off the coast of California comes this:

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It's an abalone shell.

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Now, millions of abalone every year

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make this shell.

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Oh, by the way, just in case you weren't already guessing,

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it's calcium carbonate.

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It's the same stuff as this

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and the same stuff as this.

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But it's not the same stuff; it's different.

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It's thousands of times,

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maybe 3,000 times tougher than this.

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And why? Because the lowly abalone

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is able to lay down

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the calcium carbonate crystals in layers,

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making this beautiful, iridescent

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mother of pearl.

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Very specialized material

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that the abalone self-assembles,

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millions of abalone,

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all the time, every day, every year.

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This is pretty incredible stuff.

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All the same, what's different?

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How the molecules are put together.

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Now, what does this have to do with energy?

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Here's a piece of coal.

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And I'll suggest that this coal

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is about as exciting

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as this chalk.

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Now, whether we're talking about fuels

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or energy carriers,

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or perhaps novel materials for batteries

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or fuel cells,

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nature hasn't ever built those perfect materials yet

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because nature didn't need to.

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Nature didn't need to because, unlike the abalone shell,

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the survival of a species didn't depend

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on building those materials,

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until maybe now when it might just matter.

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So, when we think about the future of energy,

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imagine

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what would it be like

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if instead of this,

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we could build the energy equivalent of this

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just by rearranging the molecules differently.

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And so that is my story.

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The oil will never run out.

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It's not because we have a lot of it.

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It's not because we're going to build a bajillion windmills.

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It's because, well,

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thousands of years ago,

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people invented ideas --

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they had ideas, innovations, technology --

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and the Stone Age ended,

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not because we ran out of stones.

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(Laughter)

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It's ideas, it's innovation, it's technology

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that will end the age of oil, long before we run out of oil.

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Thank you very much.

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(Applause)