On Our Energy Future
UC-BP Partnership Offers Path to Energy Independence
Robert J. Birgeneau, Steven Chu
Sunday, April 15, 2007
San Francisco Chronicle
Stronger storms, shrinking glaciers and winter snowpack, prolonged droughts and rising sea levels are raising the specter of global food and water shortages. The ominous signs of climate change we see today are a warning of dire economic and social consequences for us all, but especially for the poor of the world.
The development of new, carbon-neutral energy sources are needed to avert the predictions of disastrous climate change. The landmark global warming legislation signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last year committing our state to ambitious reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2020 is a strong and encouraging step. California is a national and global leader moving toward a sustainable energy future, and it is in the public mission of the University of California to help find ways to meet these goals.
How do we solve the world's energy needs in a clean and socially responsible way? In addition, how do we find solutions that can be rapidly and widely deployed to alter our trajectory of global warming? We believe that the path to finding these answers is to bring together the finest, most passionate minds to work on the problem in a coordinated effort, and to give these researchers the resources commensurate with the challenge. This includes offering the best financial and infrastructure support, and creating an intellectual environment that is so free and dynamic that it expands the very notion of what is possible.
That is why we sought -- and why we won -- an international competition to land a $500 million university research contract with the global energy corporation, BP, to establish at UC Berkeley the Energy Biosciences Institute. The EBI will be a partnership between scientists, researchers and scholars at UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and BP.
Solving the energy challenge is essential for the responsible stewardship of our planet. The EBI will work to find and develop carbon-neutral alternatives to petroleum-based transportation fuels that will mitigate global warming and break our growing dependency on imported oil. By harnessing some of the most rapidly advancing sciences, such as synthetic biology, our researchers will develop an entirely new source of biofuels that will help us transcend today's corn and sugar-based ethanol. These require a great deal of energy to grow and process and are only marginally better than fossil fuels in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.
We face challenging scientific, economic and social problems in finding better, cleaner transportation fuels. The advanced biofuels we plan to develop must make the transition from the laboratory to the fuel pump as soon as possible and on a global scale. This is why a partnership with a major energy company such as BP is of fundamental importance.
Universities have long partnered with industries in research initiatives and these partnerships have repeatedly helped connect academic research with practical applications. California's information technology and biotechnology industries would not exist without such partnerships. Our mission as a public research and teaching university to serve society, often and properly requires that the work of our scientists and our scholars reach beyond the university walls. A growing number of universities are bringing their intellectual resources and scientific and technical expertise to partner with energy companies to develop new, clean fuels. On April 11, Iowa State University announced an eight-year research contract with the Conoco-Phillips Company. In California, Stanford University and UC Davis are also partnering with industry on energy research.
In these partnerships, universities must protect the academic integrity of faculty. The terms of the partnership must be based on fundamental principles that allow for open and timely dissemination of research results. Agreements must respect our primary commitment to the education of our students, and support our ability to make research results available for public benefit in a diligent and timely manner. The contract with BP for the EBI, which is being drafted for approval this summer, will meet these requirements.
Similarly, universities must also protect the academic freedom of the entire faculty. Faculty who mistrust industrial partnerships should not be allowed to block other faculty who want to partner with industry. Ironically, an earlier generation of concerned faculty voiced misgivings that the large increase in government-funded research shortly after World War II would distort academic research that had been previously supported primarily by industry and private philanthropy. The lesson we should remember from this earlier experience is simple. As long as the source of external funding is not permitted to compromise the core values of a university, additional support provides us with the means to better serve our students, our scholars and society.
EBI will serve as a model for large-scale academic-industry partnerships that will play an increasingly important role in solving the major global problems of the 21st century.
Robert J. Birgeneau is the ninth chancellor of the UC Berkeley campus and a professor of physics; Steve Chu is the sixth director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics.
This article appeared on page E - 5 of the San Francisco Chronicle