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Carbon Management: Implications for R & D in the Chemical Sciences and Technology (A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable) (2001)
Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications (CPSMA)

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. "4. Opportunities for Carbon Control in the Electric Power Industry." Carbon Management: Implications for R & D in the Chemical Sciences and Technology (A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable). Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2001.

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Richard Wool: The thing the academic research community could do that would have the greatest impact on the carbon management scenario.

David Thomas: This is not flippant. I think we need to be working on fusion a heck of a lot more than we are. I wish we would spend a great deal more effort in that area, because I think it has the potential of going beyond. I would argue that, although we will not run out of hydrocarbons in the foreseeable future, or at least the next several hundred years, we will see a hydrocarbon age, much as we saw a wood age, and so on. Also, I would argue that it may be 200, it may be 300, it may be 250, it may be 600 years, but there will be an end to the hydrocarbon age, and my question is, What is beyond the hydrocarbon age?

James Edmonds: Research is needed on the full range of sequestration technologies, going all the way from pulling it off as a solid, to disposing of it in the form of a gas, to nature reservoirs including soils and forests.

Brian Flannery: I'm going to offer you two suggestions. The first is be creative and invent something new, because none of the current approaches look like they are going to work in the near term. The second is very serious. Convince people that science and technology has been a positive force in their lives, and has something to offer. This can be a positive force in the debate, rather than being used to pick and choose from science and technology to build horror stories to convince people that there is no way out.

John Stringer: Electricity is a wonderful thing but is difficult to store. I would like to see the whole business of where you store things in the overall cycle addressed. As we move toward a hydrogen economy, this is going to become particularly important. Hydrogen is extremely difficult to store, electrons are very difficult to store, and some further work in these areas would transform the economies of some of the things that we can't do yet.

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