HYDROTHERMAL ENERGY CONVERSION AND RECOVERY FROM BIOMASS AND GEOTHERMAL RESOURCES
Friday,November 6, 2009
3:30 p.m.
131 DeBartolo Hall
Jefferson W. Tester
Croll Professor of Sustainable Energy Systems
Cornell University
Recent international focus on the value of increasing the supply of indigenous, renewable energy underscores the need for re-evaluating all alternatives, particularly those that are large and well-distributed on a national or global basis, to expand and diversify the portfolio of options we should be vigorously pursuing. In this presentation, two renewable energy sources – biomass and geothermal energy - are discussed because of their large potential and their relevance and connection to chemical engineering process fundamentals and development. Specific examples of basic research into reaction and transport processes in hydrothermal and supercritical water media will be presented to illustrate how new knowledge could lower risks and costs for deploying geothermal and biomass on a much larger scale.
Dr. Tester is the Croll Professor of Sustainable Energy Systems in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Associate Director of Energy Programs in the Center for a Sustainable Future at Cornell University. For more than three decades he has been involved in chemical engineering process research as it relates to renewable and conventional energy extraction and conversion and environmental control technologies. His other appointments have included H.P. Meissner Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1996-2009), Director of MIT's Energy Laboratory (1989-2001), Director of MIT’s School of Chemical Engineering Practice (1980-1989), and a group leader in the Geothermal Engineering Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory (1974-1980). He is currently a member of the advisory boards of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (chair), the American Council of Renewable Energy, Idaho National Laboratory, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is a member of the IPCC’s Working Group on Renewable Energy Sources and has served as a member of the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust (chair) and the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland. He was a member of the 1997 Energy R&D Panel of the President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), and has served as an advisor to the USDOE and the National Research Council in areas related to concentrating solar power, geothermal and biomass energy, and other renewable technologies and waste minimization and pollution reduction.