Episode 192 - A Scientific Look into the Future of Sustainable Energy

Grayson Brulte:

Hello, I'm your host, Grayson Brulte. Welcome to another episode of SAE Tomorrow Today, a show about emerging technology and trends and mobility with the leaders and innovators who make it all happen. On today's episode, we're absolutely honored to be joined by Dr. Robert Wagner from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and winner of the SAE Medal of Honor.

On today's episode, we'll discuss the outlook for sustainable energy future. We hope you enjoy this episode. Robert, welcome to the podcast. 

Robert Wagner:

Great. Thank you. Good to be here.

Grayson Brulte:

It's great to have you here. And I'll summarize this very simply. National labs are cool. The things that are developed in national labs are just awesome.

They have a profound effect on society and a profound effect on the economy. One of the great things that our national labs are working on now is sustainable energy, doing a lot of really good research around sustainable energy. Robert, in your opinion, what is the long-term outlook for sustainable energy?

Robert Wagner:

So one thing I should preface on the beginning is. I'm a researcher. I grew up in the labs being a researcher. So that gives my perspective and I've always dealt in knowledge discovery and then work closely with industry on how you get that to the market. But that hasn't been my primary objective of my career.

So just keep that in mind as I talk about the energy transition and things, it's a little bit more from a science perspective and what I think it's going to take to get there. I also, I always like to talk about the scale of things before I get into it, because in the U. S. we travel on road 3 trillion miles on road annually, and that's a little over 100, 000 miles a second.

And if you want to look at another way that I think is fun is, if you go back to the 70s, Voyager 1, we launched Voyager 1, furthest objects from the Earth right now that's man made, moving along at 38, 000 miles an hour. If you took after it right now, at that kind of rate, you'd catch it in 42 hours.

So the scale is huge. And I want people to understand that. And also the amount of right now we're putting out about, oh, transportation about 45 metric tons of CO2 a second, every second. When you talk about sustainable energy and what that future looks like, you're talking about a major energy transition.

Where you're really looking at transitioning about 80 percent of the national energy required and that's So that's a rough numbers about 80 quad and I'm not sure if you or your listeners are used to thinking about quads But as you can guess I probably have an example of what a quad is if you take the average home in the US 2, 500 square foot not the average home, but if you take a 2, 500 square foot home from the US footprint, you know The question I like to pose is how long do you think you could power that house on one quad at 24 million years. So anyway, I want to put this into perspective, the scale we're talking about, and the other thing that is changing is that. The world is looking at going it decarbonizing energy and looking for more sustainable energy future. So transportation, which is historically been, I'll say liquid fuels primarily now is going to need to work with and compete with others for electricity.

Hydrogen, perhaps a sustainable liquid fuel. So it's in the transition in the future. I think it's going to take all those things. They'll all be ready different times. They'll be applicable to different areas before we started. You mentioned green hydrogen and blue hydrogen and how much it's renewable, things like that.

And that's all going to be important. But I think right now we just got to get the infrastructure built. We got to get moving. And we'll sort those things out as we go. We can't wait for all green hydrogen. We're all decarbonized electricity. We need to be pushing everything at the same time to get there. It's probably more than you wanted. 

Grayson Brulte:

No, this is fantastic. Now I'm going to, I'm going into full blown geek out with you here. So how much infrastructure is needed? Obviously, the hydrogen infrastructure is different from. Road infrastructure different from liquid fuels infrastructures. It's different from renewable storage for batteries.

How is the infrastructure built where in, say, five years, six years, ten years, even a decade. It doesn't become obsolete as the technology has changed. Perhaps there's a breakthrough in National Lab and it's all hands on deck. We've got something special here and you don't have to go rebuild the infrastructure all over again.

Robert Wagner:

That's a really good question. But when you think about electricity and think about hydrogen and even sustainable liquid fuels, they're all just energy carriers, right? And I think there's good reason to see, to believe that electricity will be part of our future for a long time. And not just in transportation and buildings, industry, and all those things.

The same is probably true of hydrogen, but I think they have a longer way to go in terms of the infrastructure. We have a, we have electric grid, you can argue on. Is it enough or are the sources renewable? And those are all good arguments. Good discussions are all things. We're working hydrogen.

There's not a lot of infrastructure in terms of transportation, although Department of energy just announced several regional hydrogen hubs. This was just in the last week or 2 and these are going to really intended to push the development of this infrastructure. So I think watch for that. I think that'll be important.
The thing that. Thank you. To keep in mind, though, is we talk about electricity and hydrogen. It's a big part of our futures. It's not just ensuring we have sustainable, renewable sources. We also have to worry about, we have to worry about storage, distribution, dispensing. So there's a lot to this, and if the buildings industry saying, Hey, we want it and the manufacturing industry wants it as well, we need to work with them and sort out how we do this, of course, the grid's a big part of it's a grid mature enough to handle this probably needs more build out storage is going to be important.

If we're going to pull up, say 20 over the road trucks and charge them at greater than a megawatt, you have to have some storage, on site there. You're not just going to hook that to the grid and pull off and it could be short duration storage. We talk a lot about long duration, but what about short duration storage and on this theme of a sustainable energy future, how do you move?

Renewable energy around the world in a big way. Years ago, I read this interesting article where I think it was Germany was talking about how do we ship and get nation months of renewable energy stored. And so there it's interesting conversation to have because some parts of the world may not. Be able to be renewable a hundred percent based on how we think of it today and what our technologies are of today.

Grayson Brulte:

Short duration storage. How is that achieved? Is that through battery technology? Is that through some of the cement breakthroughs? Is that liquid fuel storage? What does that look like from a technical perspective? 

Robert Wagner:

In the simplest terms, I think of like flywheels. Yeah, that'd be a real simple thing to think about. Say you, you have some and this is just Robert's thought on this. Say you have, you have some truck stop and you're going to charge it megawatt plus, you spin up a flywheel, you're able to charge fast and then you spin it back up. For the next and again not advocating that's a solution, but just an example of what short duration storage might look.

Grayson Brulte:

So is it fair to say that the transition to sustainable energy is going to be a multi prong approach where certain solutions work for say, class eight vehicles where home storage or grid storage, there'll be different types of approaches to sustainable energy, depending on the use case. 

Robert Wagner:

Yeah, that's yes, absolutely.I think it's going to take everything and there's definitely going to be better fits for different things. And we're seeing this already. And if you look at, there was a national blueprint put out for transportation. And I'm not sure if you've seen it, but it was it's worth Googling if you haven't.

It was put out by DOE, DOT, HUD, and EPA. So they've got this national blueprint, which is a vision of what the future might look like. And it has electricity, hydrogen sustainable liquid fuels and different sectors. And it even shows that it's trying to give an outlook of what's near term, midterm, and longer term.

And it shows it's going to take a bit of everything as we move forward. One of the challenges comes though, is where do you invest now? Some things are harder than others. And so some tough decisions are made on how they invest. 

Grayson Brulte:

How would you, for our listeners, how would you classify sustainable liquid fuels as a renewable diesel, or how would you classify that?

Robert Wagner:

Actually, that's a really good question. Anything you can do to make it sustainable in terms of renewable and would it be if it's classic, what we think of as renewable diesel, where you could drop in, that's perfect because ideally it can just go in and there's not much change needed, but for other renewables, and let me give you an example of, say, ethanol. When I was earlier in my career, I helped lead a big Department of Energy initiative called the Co Optimization of Fuels and Engines, and we started, stood this up in 2014. NREL, National Renewable Energy Lab, John Farrell was the lead for us at that time and helped us stand it up, and we were talking about 30 percent displacement of liquid fuels with something like ethanol or some other, I'll say, renewable or sustainable fuel. And that was a really, that was a huge challenge. And now we're talking about a hundred percent. So the challenge is even bigger. So there's a lot of different ways to do this, a lot of different types of feedstocks. And we might need to get into fuels that we're not used to using in mass quantities. So say something like a methanol. 

Grayson Brulte:

What do you see the biggest challenge facing the transition to sustainable? energy today, especially looking at a low carbon future. Is it technology? Is it regulatory? Is it consumer adoption? 

Robert Wagner:

I think it's all those things and it's time. These things will take time, no matter how aggressive we are on the spending.

It's it, there's so many pieces of this that have to move together. And yeah you said it well, the consumer acceptance, we have to have a poll. As much as a push and I think we can get there It's just it will take time to get all this moving. What's exciting to me now though is A lot of companies are really they're really on board.
They're pushing these technologies. They're making big dollar decisions on what they push. The government's making big investments trying to drive the research, drive the infrastructure, the Department of Energy. I'm sorry, the Department of Transportation even has what they call ARPA I now, which is focused on infrastructure. It's just going to take all these things happening at the same time, and it's not going to happen overnight. 

Grayson Brulte:

The consumers, they have to buy in. They have to believe, they have to be a part of it, they have to see the positive benefit. I could see things, I'm talking to friends perhaps, that on the sticker when you buy the vehicle, this vehicle reduces carbon emissions by X and you've planted X amount of trees.

Oh, this is really great, this empowers them and they feel good about the purchase they're making. And getting into automotive, History always has a funny way of repeating itself. I forget the Mark Twain quote there, so I don't want to misquote Mark Twain, but sometimes it rhymes. In the early automotive design went through a period of diversified powertrain propulsion options.

And today we're seeing a large shift of towards battery electric. We're seeing a rise in hybrid sales. Does history repeat itself or rhyme where the consumer is saying, okay, these are my... Low carbon op options, not necessarily all battery electric, but there are different options and they just gravitate, which one works best for their family and for their needs.

Robert Wagner:

I think so. I think like for myself, we do a lot of traveling, across multiple States and right now we haven't bought an electric vehicle yet for that reason, but it's very high on our list. And I'll tell you with all the new offerings and what's happened with the range in recent years. It's starting to become practical, I think, for people who have a family situation like I do. Where we're scattered and we have to travel a lot. So I think, again, it took time, but I think we're to a point where we're starting to get a good market penetration. And the pull is because it's going to be a fun to drive vehicle and it meets my needs.

And it can do what I need on a day to day. Now, everybody, that may not be for them. And I think that's fine. It's just going to take time. 

Grayson Brulte:

I think a lot of, and I own an EV and I'm a proud EV owner that it's not discussed enough is the convenience factor. You come home, the vehicle goes to sleep. You go and make dinner for the family and you charge it and it's sleeping.

And when you got to take the kids to school the next day, it's charged. You don't have to go to a gas station. To me, that's a huge convenience factor. That's not discussed. Now that's on the consumer personal side. And then on the commercial side, over 300 billion miles a year traveled by commercial vehicles in the United States.

There's a lot of economic reports, we can't go battery electric, we're not going to get the range because of the weight issues there. Does hydrogen become, do you think, in your opinion, the dominant renewable energy for the commercial trucks? Or is there a new technology that's emerging that could eventually replace battery electric? Or hydrogen for those long haul commercial 8? 

Robert Wagner:

I think if we get the infrastructure in place, it's certainly part of it. It's, we have these... He's very aggressive goals going out to 2050, which is, it's a long time off, but there's a lot of infrastructure to change, I think for hydrogen. And I think the biggest application I'll say right now or near term, I shouldn't say right now, but near term is.

For those cases where it comes home at night. And so you have a consistent fueling place is it builds out the network builds out across the U S that'll change but right now, you have to have places to fuel and we don't have that at the moment. Not with enough quantity where electrification, if you look how that is built out.
and things like that. We don't have the charging stations we need yet, but look what happened in light duty in the last few years. It is really coming on strong and I have to think is they will sort it out and that'll continue to be built out. But if I can add one more thing too, we also have just an incredible liquid fuel infrastructure out there.

If you look at all the stations around the country. So the other question on that would be. If we do go to say a different type of liquid fuel and maybe it's methanol or something like DME or what have you, some, how do we deal with the compatibility of the fleet and the compatibility stations?

Is that something we could retrofit too? So I think we think about all these things and they're going to have different timelines. 

Grayson Brulte:

Does that then does renewable diesel become we want to call it as a friend of mine used to be called a bridge fuel to help us get towards there becomes the bridge or a steppingstone.

Robert Wagner:

I'm not sure if it's truly renewable. And it's truly net zero. I think it could be as much as part of the future is the bridge to that future. 

Grayson Brulte:

That's a very honest answer. And that's probably the best answer I ever heard on that. Cause there's been a lot of, there's been a lot of debate around that.

I have friends that own large shipping companies and they're trying to get by as much renewable diesel as they can. And then there's other friends on the other side say no, that doesn't, that's not as good as battery electric. So I really appreciate your honest answer there is infrastructure. The key to achieving the 2050 goals.
Is that the thing that has to be built up the most in order to achieve the global net zero 2050 goals? 

Robert Wagner:

Yeah, I think so. I would agree with that statement because there's just a lot to do. Pick all the energy carriers. We're talking about the sustainable liquid fuels. We've talked about. We do have a major infrastructure, probably not compatible.

Maybe it is if it's completely renewable and to drop in, but let's assume it's not. So what would you do to make it compatible? Electrification, massive grid system it's going to need some things, especially if we're depending on renewables that are intermittent. So we're talking, again, as we started with not just the sources, but the storage, the distribution, the dispensing, and then probably the least mature of them at the moment is as far as widespread use, I should say, is hydrogen. So you know, all these, there's a lot of different pieces to this. 

Grayson Brulte:

There's a lot of different pieces. Is that do we have the pieces, the well-known pieces. We have the battery electric technology with the hydrogen technology, with the renewable diesels technology, and we have micro grids that are now starting to pop up around the globe to help reduce the carbon output.

Overall though, do we have the technology that's needed today to achieve the 2050 goals or do we have to invent new stuff to companies, have to commercialize stuff, or where do we stand from a technological standpoint? 

Robert Wagner:

There's actually an interesting road. I think it was actually a roadmap put out by IEA. They talked about 2050 and the state of technology and I mostly agree with it where they said about 50 percent of the technologies we need are, they're in the market and they're being used and the other 50 percent are under development. So think of third prototype stages, but I would probably add that a lot of the technologies that we, I wouldn't say a lot, but some portion of technologies we need.

We haven't even thought of them yet. Or they're in very early development stages where we haven't made all the connections. 2050, years from now. And it is a, it's a short time when you think about all the infrastructure we need to build, but it's a long time than what can happen to technology.

I'll give you one, one quick example. The iPhone came out in 2007 and look how it's changed our life. 2005, I couldn't have imagined an iPhone. I joked to my friends on the chat GPT last November. I read this article and I was like, what is this? So I looked at it online and couldn't believe it.

And now it's evolved even more. Now it's just November. So what other things are going to happen between now and 2050? So again, we, it's your, maybe, sorry, I went off on a tangent a bit there, but. I think there's some technologies that will be part of it that we know, but I think there's a lot of unknowns and a lot of things being developed.

Grayson Brulte:

A lot of technology is going to change. It's going to be fascinating to watch from the sidelines, an engineer or somebody who's going to have a major technological breakthrough that could go on to potentially change the energy landscape. On that theme, are there any new energy technologies bubbling up in the labs or research papers that you've read that have really piqued your interest and said, okay, there's something here.

Something's cooking. 

Robert Wagner:

So the things that there's of course, lots going on in the labs, going on with industry in terms of. Better battery technologies, hydrogen storage, better utilize utilization of these things. But I'll tell you the things that get me the most excited to think about is the impact of, say, AI on these things going in the future in these systems, the impact of quantum computing.

What might quantum computing? Really look like in quantum security and quantum sensing and things like that, you know These are the things that I look back in history on just like we're computing has gotten us You know over the last I don't know 70 years say where will quantum take us? So it's a big unknown, but those are the things I think about to give me pretty exciting if I Tell you a little bit.

I have some thoughts on computing I thought I'd sure to put this in context is If you go back to the 50s, computing was electromechanical systems. And in the 80s, 15-year-old me was mowing yards and buying an Apple IIe. Late 90s, a teraflop was 50 something million dollars. And about, I don't know, within the last decade, you could buy a couple teraflop machine, it's liquid cooled, you put it in your car.

And now we're at exaflop systems. And Exaflop, if you're, so Oak Ridge has the world's fastest computer, I gotta, give props to that. Although, someone will surpass us, and it, we're always just pushing. Exaflop, a billion, billion calculations a second. And, to put that in context, The universe is about a billion seconds old.

So if you did a calculation every second for the age of the universe, that's how much an exit flop system does in a second. Technology is really moved. And so when I think about even the future of regular computing, I'll say binary computing, future quantum computing, all these things and what they're going to do on the development of new technologies that are going to be commonplace one day. That's what gets me excited, thinking about those. I don't know if you if you read anything on recent Nobel Prize in physics was for attosecond. Basically, they're able to pulse light at attosecond levels, which means you can start looking at inside atoms and looking at things that are going on with molecules.

That's an amazing thing and where that could lead towards sensing and development of quantum systems and stuff like that. Maybe more than you wanted. 

Grayson Brulte:

No, but it's good. But you think about the impact that breakthrough is going to have, especially as it gets commercialized. On the A I front and the impact that I will have. Do you see increasing energy? Because right now I could see AI where you demand spikes, where the AI can predict a demand spike in certain areas and the grid can have the excess capacity to handle that and from a prediction standpoint to handle all that and then to reroute energy sources automatically.

Do you see it from an AI in the, let's call it the early days of AI for energy, increasing the efficiency? Of the energy grid and the energy network that we have today. 

Robert Wagner:

Yeah, I, that's one, one application I could say. I could see the potential of doing things like that or managing complex systems of vehicles and mobility systems.
So think about, controlling these complex systems of systems. But I also think about it at the very fundamental level too. So say you're trying to do some very fundamental modeling from direct numerical simulation and you want to. You want to take these very fundamental things that are very computationally intensive and you want to use them in engineering codes.

There's a lot you can do around AI to bridge these things as well. So it all scales. What's enabled it has really been the speed of computers. So I'm very much a statistics person. So when I did my PhD, it wasn't a statistics, but I took a lot of statistics just out of, I enjoy it. I'm a numbers person and what limited us back then was compute power and now we have it.

So I tend to think about AI is just. It's a lot of statistics with a lot of power. Now, some might want to argue with me, but, because they certainly have developed new methods and some really clever things, but, computing has enabled a lot of it. 

Grayson Brulte:

Computing's special. You think about the impact computing has had on society. Imagine if we didn't have computers where we'd be today. It would be a whole, it would be a whole different world. And it's going to be exciting to see where quantum goes as well.

Robert Wagner:

There's so many examples like that, and I tend to, when I gave that Buckendale presentation, I referred to these things as disruptive surprises.

Because, even the internet. 30 years ago, when I was a student, the internet as we know it, was not a thing to the common person like myself. It just was not there. GPS. Was not there. A GPS came to be from JPL in the early 60s when Sputnik's up there and they're like three engineers are noticing that there's a frequency change and a signal off of it and use the Doppler effect and there's a lot of things that happened after that, but now we have GPS and it's on my phone.

So all these Really interesting breakthroughs that really weren't intended for say our industry, transportation industry. We're just reaping huge benefit from it. So what's next? And that's where I think quantum AI, new manufacturing methods. Think about if you were to design an engine right now. where you didn't have to worry about the constraints of casting.

It might be a very different approach. The fundamentals and material development, I mentioned that recent Nobel Prize with attoseconds, which is going to enable some attosecond physics. So imagine now you're starting to look at materials at an atomistic level with a lot more precision and perhaps able to design things differently.

And again, this is just me speculating, but the things that get me excited.

Grayson Brulte:

Because designs of the vehicles are going to change design of potentially rail will change design of maritime will change when we have all these breakthroughs and I've been on the big kick for a while. It's going to increase efficiency.

Perhaps there's a better design will less right that uses less energy that makes it more efficient. And that's special. We haven't touched on maritime yet, but there is a lot of globally to decarbonize maritime. What are your thoughts on maritime as it relates to decarbonizing maritime and using sustainable energy in maritime?

Robert Wagner:

I think maritime is interesting because. just in the nature of some of these big vessels. And, there's a lot of stories out there where they have some out there running on ammonia. Now they're of course looking at hydrogen. So they're looking at a lot of different say hydrogen or hydrogen dense type fuels, and it's an area, I think there's a lot of opportunity. The one concern that I think people will have is let's say I have a V or have a vessel out there that's, it's running on methanol. Will I be able to get that fuel in the port and all the ports that I need to get that fuel? So there's those kinds of considerations as well.

Grayson Brulte:

Do you feel that maritime is a competitive advantage since at the ports have, they have some ports, I repeat, not all ports, but some ports have the land. To put in the fueling infrastructure and a lot of these vessels run on fixed routes, perhaps let's just use New York to Liverpool, Port of Miami to Liverpool, for example They're going on consistent fixed routes where you only have to have the infrastructure at one place where a commercial vehicle Let's say you're going to visit Your parents, or I'm going to as my in laws, we're going to different destinations all the time.

Nobody's particularly going the same way. Does that give Maritime a, let's call it a competitive advantage since those are fixed routes, and the infrastructure is there, the room is there, and then from a policy standpoint, the facilities are zoned for that type of infrastructure as well? 

Robert Wagner:

It's a good question. I have to be honest. I don't have a good answer for it. You on the surface, it sounds like it would be, but I don't feel I understand all the economics and all the things that feed that. 

Grayson Brulte:

There goes the statistics for you.

Robert Wagner:

You had mentioned continuing to improve energy efficiency and all those things, which I think is really important.

Sometimes it gets lost in the discussion. When you factor like in the U S we reject two thirds of the energy that we produce and we don't use it. About a third of it's used. If you go look at, there's some. Energy diagrams that come out of Lawrence Livermore every year, they're really interesting from that standpoint.

So there's three parts. There's that part, the other part we talked about, you have to transition about 80 percent of your energy supply, and in distribution, dispensing, storage, all those things. But then the other part that we can't forget about is whatever technologies we put out there in mass, it has to be sustainable as well.

That's either with readily available, renewable resources, or we're getting into this very circular economy of reuse, repurpose, things like that. And I don't think we can lose track of that. That's, you can't, you can come up with great technologies, but if we don't have the resource. To build it out to scale.

It's not going to get there. Now, that doesn't mean that you couldn't have a lot of different technologies bringing what they can to the challenge. And I certainly would not say let's not pursue electrification because this one approach is not going to fully scale. It's we're going to take steps to get to where we need to be, but we can't lose sight of that.

Things have to be sustained sustainable, even on the resource front. 

Grayson Brulte:

Looking at that in a minute, I'm curious though, why do we reject two thirds of the energy? 

Robert Wagner:

From a thermodynamics standpoint, the parts that I would be used to thinking about is, it's very low quality, low temperature, not much you can do with it, it's rejected heat.

I'm sure there's many other pieces to that, but that's from being thermodynamics background, that's what I think about. 

Grayson Brulte:

Okay, so this is a broad national laboratory question. Is there a colleague of yours in a national laboratory that's studying this and trying to figure out how to capture some of that energy that is rejected?

Robert Wagner:

That's important to a lot of research going on. There was also a something the Department of Energy years ago put on what they call these Big Idea Summits. And there was one idea discussed and that was called HEATER. I can't remember what the acronym stood for. There was very much about that. That was a big part of it is trying to better utilize low grade heat.

And I know in the buildings areas they certainly look at those things. I would say probably across manufacturing. Everybody's always looking at that. How can we... Make better use of this low grade heat. 

Grayson Brulte:

As we introduce these new sustainable technology, how can we make sure that there's a sustainable resource where if somebody goes all in on this, that there's a, I don't know, I'll use a warehouse terminology, there's plenty of backlog, and there's plenty of freight, plenty of boxes, don't worry, we're not going to run out of Cheerios today, but for energy how, is that modeled out, or how is that done?

Robert Wagner:

I think that's modeled a lot of different ways, and it's, always a concern when we're talking about new technologies, is it? Yeah. If I like how you put it, if everybody says, all right, we're all in and we're going, is there enough resource to do it and what's the price of that resource, not just in, in dollars, but in what's going on in certain countries, whether it's social things or local economic things, how do we balance all that?

And it's a good question. I don't think there's a silver bullet to it either. But it's, we have to think about it. 

Grayson Brulte:

We have to think about it. And the one thing, this is my personal pain that we have to think about, and we can look at history. We have to understand the geopolitical or the potential geopolitical implications of going in on certain technologies.

And it just seems that we learn these lessons over and over again. As society shifts to a more sustainable, low carbon mobility future and the deployment of new technologies, what role will the national laboratories play in enabling this future? Will you be our cheerleaders? Will you be our developers?
Will you be our engineers? What role will the national laboratories play? 

Robert Wagner:

I think what we bring to it is what we've always brought to it is the national labs. I'll think about Oak Ridge, but then I can give you many examples from other labs is we steward very large science resources that like no other place can really store like industry wouldn't steward an exascale computer.

They wouldn't steward, massive neutron sources that are used for fundamental materials discovery, things like that. So the labs are really good at stewarding these big resources and then working closely with industry and academia and even other national laboratories to, to bridge that science.

And to me, that's been a really exciting thing for me having a career is I came to Oak Ridge is a mechanical engineer and I was doing engine combustion work. And within a couple of years. Oak Ridge turned on what they call the Spallation Neutron Source, which is the world's most powerful pulse neutron source.

So I had a friend over there and I thought, Boy, I'd like to image a diesel particulate filter. Could I do that with neutrons? And, turns out you can, although we did it on a, what do you call it, a high flux isotope reactor. And anyway, so there's These big tools that help you get to some of the fundamentals and then the application.
The supercomputers too, I've had a lot of great opportunity to help set up collaborations with industry and the supercomputers. So it's really neat to bring these big science tools to bear. The other thing I will say, I think the labs are poised pretty well to be nice about the last two that there's all this expertise.

There's all these facilities and we're really poised to help in times of national emergency. The pandemic was a recent example where the 17 labs formed a collaboration. They worked with others and, they accelerated our knowledge of the virus and what a vaccine will look like.

Accelerated manufacturing of masks and ventilators. So yeah, the labs play that kind of role. Right now, my division, there is many formal collaborations with industry where we're bringing our expertise and they're bringing their expertise and we work hand in hand. 

Grayson Brulte

So basically you're acting as a, I don't want to say as a media, but you're bringing individuals together to have open, honest discussions about the future sustainable energy and what is it going to look like and how do we do this together? Collaborate together, potentially. 

Robert Wagner:

Yeah, and then how do we answer some of the fundamental needs that they have that they need help solving? I've also viewed us as an unbiased source of data for decision making again on my background where I spent my time in combustion and looking at a lot of different say I'll say unconventional combustion approaches and engines and there was a lot of discussion out there on What does that really look like?
What's the potential of that? And so a lot of my work focused on trying to take these fundamental, I'll say, breakthroughs and combustion and put them in production viable hardware and trying to put that information out in the literature on, Hey, here's what it really looks like. When you have all the concerns and constraints of something that potentially could go under. 

Grayson Brulte:

So you have this experience of working in the National Laboratory, interacting with industry. What technologies do you think will be commonplace in transportation 25 years from now, two and a half decades? 

Robert Wagner:

I would say I think electrification is going to play a major role. I do think we'll still, we'll see sustainable liquid fuels in some form. I don't know if that will be more in, in say the commercial vehicle sector. Marine locomotive, things like that. I think we'll still see it. But I think electrification will continue to grow. I think it's all part of our future. Now, what the other part I think is gonna be really exciting too is To think about what will the computing sensing controls management of these complex systems.

What will that all look like? Connected and autonomous vehicles. I think that will continue to grow. I don't know what it'll look like and say 20 years from now, but it's certainly been very aggressive. It started out, I think, with a lot more. Optimism, then, and then it kind of reality set in and, but now, boy, a lot has happened in the last say decade in that area.

I tend to think of everything like the Gartner hype curves. I don't know if you've ever looked at the Gartner hype curve. And I love them because I actually wish they didn't have the word hype in them. Cause I think it's got a negative connotation to it, which it's not, it's okay, we are really excited.

And you have that peak of inflated expectations. And then the trough of delusion meant. And then you start climbing out. You start saying, okay, all right, here's where we really are. Now let's see what's going to happen. And I think some of the greatest technologies we had all started that way.

You get super excited, put a lot of effort into it and you find, okay, this is really hard. What can we do? And then you end up doing great things. I'm an optimist. If you can't tell. 

Grayson Brulte:

You have to be an optimist, you have to be the cheerleader for society. That's how I look at it. You have to cheer what's the best for society.

You mentioned rail. I actually, I had a long talk with a Wharton professor of rail a couple months ago about the friction on the tracks and how that plays into the energy. It was really interesting. Do we start to see more sustainable energy? You mentioned sustainable liquid fuels go into rail.

We're seeing stuff being developed, technology around battery for the locomotives. Do you see that? We talked about maritime, we talked about ground vehicles, commercial vehicles. Do you also see rail being a big target for increasing the sustainability of rail? 

Robert Wagner:

Yeah, I think it all has to be. I think every, everything does. If we're truly going to get to A net zero future, and I know the division is by 2050 and can't wait to see how everything develops. I think it's gonna be exciting, but we have to consider everything. And again, I think there's gonna be technologies. Out there that we're, we don't quite fully understand or have thought of yet.
I'll give you something exciting that I think is going to be important at some point is wireless charging. And you can argue whether it's going to be important for stationary or dynamic when you're driving down the road. But I think it's going to play a role. You're talking, you had electric vehicle.

You come in, come home in the evenings, you plug it in, you go have dinner. It'd be great not to even think about it. You just roll in and it just charges itself and they're to the point now where they're starting to put, a couple hundred kilowatts across, six, seven-inch gap at high efficiencies, high as you plug it into the wall.

And we're, I feel like we're at the early days still. So where is that going to really end up? I think all these kind of technologies that are being looked at and they're. Just continuing to push, they're all going to settle out somewhere that's going to, I think, change how we do things.

Grayson Brulte:

Change how you do things. Wireless power is interesting. There's a lot of talk of putting it on freeways or interstates, but what if you put it in parking lots? If you're at a Target or a Walmart or you're at a driveway at a home, so you're visiting your friend and perhaps you go to the friend's house for dinner and your vehicle's charging, you know what I'm thinking about it.

One, it's more cost effective because the homeowner will take care of that and then the retail establishment will pay for that because they want you to shop in their store. That wireless becomes a really interesting, let's call it an economic incentive to shop in my store versus The other store, and that could change consumer behavior and the consumers become part of it.

And then the whole debate around range anxiety, and then you have charge anxiety. That all goes away. What we do know, it's going to be a lot of fun to watch how these new sustainable energy technologies are developed, deployed, and commercialized. In your opinion, Robert, what does the future of energy look like?

Robert Wagner:

To me, and for transportation anyway, and let me focus more on commercials of different animals. Me and you driving our car every day. I could envision a day where we don't even know when we're fueling it. It's just fueled, years ago, we'd proposed something along this line, we line, we call extreme range where maybe you only fueled the equivalent of what you would for a, an oil change nowadays, but I can imagine a future where it's just always being refueled.

Whether it's wirelessly or however it's doing that, it's also scavenging and we're not even thinking about that. You talk about plugging in every night again. If you had wireless, would you ever know when you refueled it for sure? You just drive it. You just make the most of it. 

Grayson Brulte:

And then if I never had to think about refueling, I would never consider getting rid of an electric car 'cause you never, oh, you have to think about going to a gas station. I have to plan for this nonsense. Oh no. And then the con, then the consumers won. 

Robert Wagner:

And people could plug holes in that because okay, I'm gonna go on a trip. What's that look like? So that would be a different situation, but I don't know.

I'm optimistic that it's gonna be a really interesting fuel now, commercial or future commercial vehicles, different animal. Those things are up 95 percent plus of the time. They've got to be up. There's no two ways about it. It's just going to be different. 

Grayson Brulte:

It's going to be different. It's going to be exciting. It's as we said in this conversation, there's not a one size fits all to the future of sustainable energy, there's gonna be a multi prong approach, or if you want to use the flywheel term there, it's going to happen. Sustainable energy is going to scale and it is the future.

Robert, as we look to wrap up this insightful conversation, what would you like our listeners take away with them today? 

Robert Wagner:

Yeah, probably the takeaway from my career, I've had a fun career at the National Labs and with SAE, SAE has been my forum to meet people and, my takeaway would be that nothing's impossible.

If you have a strong and passionate team from diverse fields, it's amazing what you can do. Now, people say, yeah, but it takes money, it takes this, it takes that. Of course it does. But in terms of technology and where we will be we shouldn't limit ourselves. We will get there.

Grayson Brulte:

Nothing is impossible. Be a cheerleader. Be like Robert.

Nothing is impossible. Today is tomorrow. Tomorrow is today. The future is sustainable energy. Robert, thank you so much for coming on SAE Tomorrow Today. 

Robert Wagner:

Great. Thank you. 

Grayson Brulte:

Thank you for listening to SAE Tomorrow Today. If you've enjoyed this episode and would like to hear more, please kindly rate, review and let us know what topics you'd like for us to explore next.

Be sure to join us next week as we hear how Cumberland Additive is leading the growth of additive manufacturing in Pittsburgh. 

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