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Energy

Smoke on the water

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Posted on behalf of Rich Monastersky

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{credit}© 2016 Lionsgate{/credit}

Nobody loves disasters more than movie producers. If threats in real life matched their frequency on screen, we should be in a constant state of panic over the risks of alien invasions, zombie viruses and asteroid impacts. Given the film industry’s appetite for catastrophes, it is no surprise that it has finally focused on the greatest environmental disaster in US history: the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that began with explosions that killed 11 people and sank the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.

Peter Berg’s film, Deepwater Horizon, is filled with Hollywood heavyweights. Mark Wahlberg plays an everyman electrician who finds his inner hero during the disaster. Kurt Russell portrays the grizzled rig chief who steps up while everything is collapsing, and John Malkovich is the company man chasing profit at the expense of prudence. But the real star is the rig itself. Berg provides a rare look at life on board one of the most sophisticated drilling platforms on the planet. For that reason alone, the film is worth watching, despite the unnecessary liberties it takes with several key facts.

Deepwater Horizon was a US$560-million marvel of engineering, with a gleaming steel deck bigger than a football field perched on four immense floating legs. In 2009, the vessel had distinguished itself by drilling the deepest oil well to date. Owned by the company Transocean, Deepwater Horizon was leased to BP at the time of the disaster and was finishing drilling operations on the Macondo oil well, which reached 18,360 feet (5,596 metres) below sea level.

Fire boat response crews battle the blazing remnants of the offshore oil rig Deepwater Horizon. A Coast Guard MH-65C dolphin rescue helicopter and crew document the fire while searching for survivors. Multiple Coast Guard helicopters, planes and cutters responded to rescue the Deepwater Horizon's 126 person crew.

Firefighters try to extinguish blazes on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the aftermath of explosions that killed 11 people. {credit}US Coast Guard{/credit}

The movie’s producers spared no expense on their star. Production designer Chris Seagers and his crew of 85 welders worked for eight months to build an 85% scale replica of the Deepwater Horizon, which helped to drive the cost of the movie to an estimated value well over $100 million.

To most of the public, the name Deepwater Horizon brings to mind the 4.9 million barrels of oil that spewed into the Gulf over 87 days after the catastrophic blowout. For the filmmakers, the spill is literally an afterthought — a few words that scroll on screen at the movie’s end. The drama concentrates instead on the first few hours of the disaster, when the crew was racing to finish its work on the long-delayed oil well.

Berg’s movie brings to life an industry that touches everybody but is seen by few. Oil and gas operations on land and offshore bore the holes that provide more than half the energy used across the globe. And yet the industry is overlooked, even shunned, in a society where most of us prefer not to dwell too much on the potentially disturbing origins of our gasoline, steak and smartphones.

Well from hell

Deepwater Horizon puts faces on the drillers, electricians, crane operators, toolpushers and mud engineers who were among the 126 people on board at the time of the explosion. That day began tensely: the crew was behind schedule in finishing up operations on the “well from hell”. Deepwater Horizon’s assigned task was to drill the hole and then seal the walls of the Macondo well with steel casing and concrete. On 20 April, the crew had finished pumping concrete to the bottom of the hole and was testing the seal job. After that, Deepwater Horizon would depart and a smaller production rig would move in to extract the oil and gas.

To the credit of Berg and the screenwriters, the movie accurately portrays many details of the critical testing phase, during which the first signs of problems arise. But in the interest of creating an engaging narrative, the filmmakers turn these pivotal scenes into a cartoonish contest of good versus evil. BP employees — particularly Malkovich’s character, Donald Vidrine — come across as primarily responsible for the disaster, while the Transocean crew members are the heroes more focused on safety.*

deepwater-cover-250That stark contrast in the way the movie treats BP and Transocean does not match the conclusions of several investigative panels, which found that representatives of both companies on the rig failed to heed important warning signs that immense pressure was building up in the well. The report to President Obama from the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling found plenty of blame to go around, including government regulations and the company Halliburton, which had previously identified problems in the type of cement slurry it used in the Macondo well on the morning of the blowout.

The movie also neglects to mention that Transocean did not tell the Deepwater Horizon crew about a similar pressure problem that had almost turned disastrous at one of its wells in the North Sea in late 2009 — a point raised by the National Commission in its report.  And Transocean did not identify problems with a crucial safety device, called a blowout preventer, according to an investigation by the US Chemical Safety Board, which issued its report this year. The blowout preventer is a 400-tonne apparatus that sits on the seafloor and is designed to seal the well if the pressure inside rises to uncontrollable levels. But the crew on Deepwater Horizon did not act quickly enough when evidence of trouble first appeared and the blowout preventer failed in the crucial moment.

In the end, though, blame is not central to the movie. It is more concerned with the heroic actions of many members of the crew, including some of those who perished, which saved most of the lives on the Deepwater Horizon. Although the film alters some facts here, too, it captures the central truth that some ordinary people stepped forward in the darkest hour and committed acts of extreme bravery.

*The US government indicted Vidrine and Robert Kaluza, another BP employee on the rig at the time of the explosion, on charges of involuntary manslaughter but later dropped the charges. Vidrine pleaded guilty last December to a misdemeanor pollution charge and was sentenced to 10 months of probation, a $50,000 fine and community service. Kaluza was charged with the same offence but took the case to trial and won in February.

Rich Monastersky is news features editor at Nature, based in Washington DC. He tweets at @RichMonastersky.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

UAE’s green city grabs the attention of international researchers

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Masdar city, in the heart of the Gulf desert, on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, has no light switches or water taps. In Masdar, movement sensors control lighting and water in order to cut down electricity and water consumption by nearly half. The city is touted by the UAE as possibly “one of the world’s most sustainable eco-cities.”

And now University of Birmingham researchers are presenting it as a model to teach the UK and the world about saving energy and resources, contrasting it with energy systems in Birmingham, United Kingdom.

They analyzed the differences and similarities between Masdar, founded very recently in 2008 against an urban environment, and Birmingham, a well-established post-industrial city that has evolved over 400 years. “Masdar City benefits from starting from a blank slate, whereas Birmingham has existing processes, procedures and an ageing infrastructure to negotiate,” according to the researchers.

Masdar is primarily powered by Shams 1, one of the largest concentrated solar power plants in the Middle East, and it houses the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, which carries out renewable energy research.

“We compared two very different cities – both aspiring to be ‘low-carbon’. Masdar has started well by building low-rise, energy-efficient buildings with smart metering,” says lead author Susan Lee, from the department of civil engineering. “Data from such buildings can help to change people’s behaviour and help develop more energy-efficient new and retrofitted UK buildings. The UAE is a hot and arid place; experience gained in Masdar will help us plan here in the UK for projected hotter summers, with more frequent heatwaves, particularly in cities, as the climate changes.”

Birmingham, says the researcher, has a few things to teach Masdar as well, including how the city adapted to new energy requirements. Lee believes that Masdar can also benefit from her university’s research into hydrogen fuel-cell cars.

Energy outlook sees continuing dominance of fossil fuels

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Just as the United States and China agreed on a landmark deal to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, the world’s leading energy think tank says that demand for fossil fuels is likely to keep growing for at least another 20 years.

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{credit}IEA{/credit}

In its latest World Energy Outlook, released on 12 November, the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that global consumption of primary energy — the energy contained in raw fossil fuels — will increase by 37% by 2040, driven mostly by growing demand in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.

Crude-oil consumption is expected to rise from the current 90 million barrels a day to 104 million barrels a day, but demand for oil will plateau by 2040, according to IEA scenarios. Coal demand will already peak in the 2020s, thanks to efforts such as China’s to reduce air pollution and carbon emissions. But the demand for natural gas, the only fossil fuel that in the IEA’s scenarios is still growing after 2040, will rise by more than half, the report says.

The output from US shale projects, which has been booming — propelling the country to become the world’s largest producer of oil and gas — is expected to decline in the 2020s, the IEA says. Even so, there are sufficient untapped resources to meet the growth in consumption. And despite a recent slump in the prices of oil and gas, the IEA warns that rising tensions in parts of the Middle East and in Ukraine pose incalculable threats to global energy security.

“A well-supplied oil market in the short-term should not disguise the challenges that lie ahead, as the world is set to rely more heavily on a relatively small number of producing countries,” the IEA’s chief economist Fatih Birol said when the report was released in London. “The apparent breathing space provided by rising output in the Americas over the next decade provides little reassurance.”

Widespread safety concerns over the use of nuclear power mean that few countries — including China, India, Korea and Russia — are planning to increase their installed nuclear capacity. Nearly 200 of the 434 reactors that were operational at the end of 2013 are set to be retired in the period to 2040. Germany and other countries that decided after the Fukushima-Daiichi accident in 2011 to phase out nuclear power altogether are facing the challenge of addressing the resulting shortfall in electricity generation.

No country has as yet found a long-term solution to the problem of disposing of radioactive waste, the IEA notes.

The IEA reckons that renewable sources — mainly wind and solar — will provide nearly half of the global increase in power generation to 2040. By then, low-carbon sources, including nuclear, are expected to supply about a quarter of the global energy consumption.

However, the IEA  also predicts that between now and 2040 the world will add 1 trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere — using up the budget that climate scientists say can give the world a reasonable chance to limit the rise in global average temperatures to 2˚C or less.

That calculation will sound cynical to more than half a billion people in sub-Saharan Africa — the regional focus of the report — who live without access to modern energy. Africa’s poorest suffer in fact the most extreme form of energy insecurity in the world, says the IEA.

 

European Commission: Tar sands no dirtier than other fuels

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The European Commission has backed down from plans to label fuels derived from tar sands as more polluting than other fuels.

oil-sands-1aThe move, which EU member states must yet approve, could ease the importation of oil extracted from Canadian tar soils. But environmental groups say it is a blow to Europe’s climate protection targets.

Thanks to Alberta’s extensive tar sands, Canada holds the world’s second largest oil reserves, after Saudi Arabia. But the extraction of oil from tar sands uses considerably more energy and water than conventional oil mining.

The EU’s Fuel Quality Directive requires fuel suppliers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from vehicle fuels by 6% by 2020.

In 2011, Brussels had proposed to restrict the use of fuel derived from tar sands by revising the directive to classify tar sands as 20% more carbon intensive – in terms of carbon dioxide emissions per unit energy – than other fuel sources. But the following year the European Commission’s proposal was voted down by member states concerned over Canada’s threat to take the issue to the World Trade Organization.

The Commission’s new proposal, released on October 7, requires fuel suppliers to report an average carbon intensity of different fuel types over their lifecycle.

“At this time, the proposed methodology should not require the differentiation of the greenhouse gas intensity of fuel on the basis of the source of the raw material as this would affect current investments in certain refineries in the Union,” the proposed text reads.

“It is no secret that our initial proposal could not go through due to resistance faced in some Member States,” Connie Hedegaard, the EU’s Climate Commissioner, said in a statement.

“However, the Commission is today giving this another push, to try and ensure that in the future, there will be a methodology and thus an incentive to choose less polluting fuels over more polluting ones like for example oil sands.”

Canada has only just begun to ship tar oil to European refineries, but Canadian oil producers hope to increase their market share in the region as EU countries seek to become less dependent on supplies from Russia and the Middle East.

Ahead of UN summit, chances dwindle to keep warming at bay

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Credit: Martin Muránsky/Shutterstock.com

Despite a slowdown in recent years in the rate of global warming, the world remains on a path to substantial and potentially disruptive climate change.

Global carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and the production of cement reached a record high of 36.1 billion tonnes in 2013, and are now more than 60% above the level of 1990, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)  released its first report. Compared to 2012, emissions grew by 2.3% last year and are likely to increase by a further 2.5% in 2014.

The new figures were released on 21 September by the Global Carbon Budget, a group that regularly analyses changes in carbon sources and sinks.

CO2 emissions continue to track the high-end scenarios used by the IPCC in its latest report to project the magnitude of global warming. Without sustained mitigation measures — including capturing and storing the carbon produced by power stations — the world is likely to warm by 3.2–5.4 °C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century.

“It is getting increasingly unlikely that global warming can be kept below 2 °C,” says Glen Peters, a climate scientists at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo. “In any case, the challenge is getting bigger every year and might be unachievable without our betting on negative emissions.”

The dire outlook — detailed in a package of research articles and commentaries in Nature Geoscience and Nature Climate Change — comes on the eve of a climate summit convened by the United Nations on 23 September in New York. At the meeting, world leaders aim to prepare the ground for an international greenhouse-gas reduction agreement to be signed next year.

“Governments say they agree with the 2 °C target but the urgency of action hasn’t really sunk in,” says Corinne Le Quéré, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, and a co-author of the studies. “We have already used up two-thirds of the fossil fuels we can afford to burn if we want to have a reasonable chance to stay below 2 °C warming. At the rate at which CO2 currently accumulates in the atmosphere, the remaining emissions budget will be exhausted in 30 years.”

When the latest set of IPCC emissions scenarios were developed about ten years ago, many experts had expected the ‘carbon intensity’ of the world economy’s to decrease by 2% to 4.5% per year. But that has not happened — mainly owing to China’s continued reliance on coal as the main energy source for its growing economy, the actual decline in the amount of fossil fuel used to produce 1% of global gross domestic product was merely about 1%. Given current projections of global economic growth, emissions are unlikely to peak and reverse any time soon in the absence of more stringent energy policies.

Despite its increased efforts to reduce pollution, China surpassed the United States as the world’s largest emitter of CO2 in 2007 and is now emitting more than the US and the European Union combined. China’s pro capita emissions are still not as high as those in the US, but in 2013 they were higher than the EU’s. Together, the three regions account for more than half of worldwide emissions.

 

Prime numbers, black carbon and nanomaterials win 2014 MacArthur ‘genius grants’

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Yitang Zhang, a mathematician who recently emerged from obscurity when he partly solved a long-standing puzzle in number theory, is one of the 2014 fellows of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The awards, commonly known as ‘genius grants’, were announced on 17 September. Each comes with a no-strings-attached US$625,000 stipend paid out over five years.

Zhang, a mathematician at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, was honored for his work on prime numbers, whole numbers that are divisible only by 1 or themselves. In April 2013 he published a partial solution to a 2,300-year-old question: how many ‘twin primes’ — or pairs of prime numbers separated by two, such as 41 and 43 — exist.

The twin-prime conjecture, often attributed to the Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria, posits that there is an infinite number of such pairs. But mathematicians have not been able to prove that the conjecture is true.

Zhang’s work has narrowed the problem, however. In his 2013 proof, Zhang showed that there are infinitely many prime pairs that are less than 70 million units apart.

Other science and maths-related winners of this year’s fellowships are listed below.

Danielle Bassett, a physicist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, studies the organizational principles at work in the brain, and how connections within the organ change over time and under stress. Her research, which draws on network science, has revealed that people with more ‘flexible’ brains — those that can easily make new connections — are better at learning new information.

Tami Bond, an environmental engineer at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, studies the effects of sooty ‘black carbon’ on climate and human health. Bond, who led the most comprehensive study to date of black carbon’s environmental effects, has found that the pollutant is second only to carbon dioxide in terms of its warming impact.

Jennifer Eberhardt, a social psychologist at Stanford University in California, studies the effects of racial bias on the criminal-justice system in the United States. Her analyses have shown, for example, that black defendants with stereotypical ‘black’ features are more likely to receive the death penalty in cases where victims are white.

Craig Gentry, a computer scientist at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, has shown that encrypted data can be manipulated without being decrypted, and that programs themselves can be encrypted and still function.

Mark Hersam, a materials scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, is developing nanomaterials for a range of uses, such as solar cells and batteries, information technology and biotechnology.

Pamela Long, an historian of science based in Washington DC, has examined intersections between the arts and sciences and issues of authorship and intellectual property. She is now at work on a book tracing the development of engineering in 16th-century Rome.

Jacob Lurie, a mathematician at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, studies derived algebraic geometry. “With an entire generation of young theorists currently being trained on Lurie’s new foundations, his greatest impact is yet to come,” the MacArthur Foundation said in its award announcement. In June, Lurie was named a winner of the inaugural $3-million Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics.

 

Egypt’s scientists want to redirect sunlight to narrow streets

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A group of Egyptian scientists at Ain Shams University have come up with the idea for translucent panels that are specifically fitted to be able to divert natural sunlight into densely-crowded alleyways, and can get easily positioned over roof tops, on a lower budget.

The scientists argue that a variety of health problems in overcrowded spaces—as seen all across the Arab world, including Egypt—are a result of the lack of sun exposure.

The proposed panel improves illumination by 200% and 400% in autumn and winter as per research simulations – the corrugated “sine-wave-shaped” structure is to be ideally installed on building roofs, only one meter beyond the roof edge, facing the sun and directing its light downwards into the alleys by diverging it.

“We expect the device to provide illumination to perform everyday tasks, and improve the quality of light and health conditions in dark areas,” Amr Safwat, a professor of electronics and communications engineering at Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt, told Science Daily.

Safwat is one of the authors of the study proposing the panel, published in Optics Express this month.

Previous structures used redirecting panels or guiding tubes that are optimized for certain solar altitude ranges, and which were suited for Middle Europe specifically; they also only direct the light upwards into the depth of a room and not into the depth of narrow streets, the researchers wrote. But the suggested panel, an improved model, can be tilted and operates over a wider range of solar altitude. “The fan-out angle exceeds 80% for certain solar altitudes and the transmitted power percentage varies from 40% to 90% as the solar altitude varies from 10°C degrees to 80°C,” the study reads.

The idea was to still use a sustainable source of energy to replace a conventional one—saving energy and reducing carbon emissions—while maintaining cost-effectiveness. The researchers say they have done this; the panels are made from polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA), a type of thermoplastic material similar to synthetic glass available at low costs, and common press forming equipments are used in the panel’s manufacture.

Safwat and his team told the press they would eventually build a full-scale model 10 times bigger for validation and testing purposes, and they plan to market and commercialize their panels.

The Ain Shams university researchers were funded by the Science and Technology Development Fund (STDF).

IPCC report calls for climate mitigation action now, not later

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The world is heading towards possibly dangerous levels of global warming despite increasing efforts to promote the transition to a low-carbon economy, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns in its latest report today.

As the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continues to rise to unprecedented levels, the groups says only major institutional and technological change will give the world a better than even chance of staying below 2C warming – the widely accepted threshold to dangerous climate change. Stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at 450 parts per million CO2 equivalent – a level which scientists think is needed to limit warming to 2C – will require a three to four-fold increase in the share of low-carbon energies, such as renewables and nuclear, in the global power mix. Improvements in energy efficiency and, possibly, the use of carbon capture and storage technology will be needed to assist the process, the IPCC says.

The report was produced by the IPCC’s Working Group III, which has been tasked with looking into the mitigation of climate change. Its 33-page Summary for Policymakers was approved, line by line, by hundreds of IPCC authors and representatives of 195 governments over the past week in Berlin. Launching the report at a presentation in the city, Ottmar Edenhofer, the co-chair of the working group, admitted the discussions were at times nerve-rackingly tense.

To assess the options, costs and possible adverse side-effects of different pathways to stabilizing emissions at safe levels, the 235 lead authors of the report analysed close to 1,200 scenarios of socioeconomic development and cited almost 10,000 scientific papers. The resulting work, although phrased in rather technical language, is unambiguous in its message that the challenge of climate change is mounting as time proceeds.

“Global emissions have increased despite the recent economic crisis and remarkable mitigation efforts by some countries,” Edenhofer says. “Economic growth and population growth have outpaced improvements in energy efficiency – and since the turn of the century coal has become competitive again in many parts of the world.”

The report makes clear that it would be wise to act now rather than later. But, in line with the IPCC’s mandate to be policy-neutral, it includes no specific recommendations as to the energy and related policies that individual countries should follow.

“Substantial investment in clean energies is needed in all sectors of the global economy, including in some parts of the world in nuclear power,” says Edenhofer. “But it would be inappropriate for the IPCC to prescribe reduction targets or energy policies to specific countries.”

Doing nothing is not an option, he says. In a business-as-usual scenario run without meaningful mitigation policies, greenhouse gas concentrations double by the end of the century, the working group found. This would result in global warming of 4C to 5C above the pre-industrial (1750) level with possibly dramatic consequences on natural systems and human welfare.

Mitigating climate change would lead to a roughly 5% reduction in global consumption, according to the report. But, says Edenhofer, this does not mean that the world has to sacrifice economic growth. In fact, the group found that action to keep temperature rises at bay would reduce global economic growth by no more than 0.06% per year. This figure excludes the benefits of climate mitigation, such as from better air quality and health, which are thought to lower the actual costs of mitigation.

The full report outlines in great detail over 16 chapters the emission reduction potential of sectors including energy production and use, industry, transport and building and land use, and describes how mitigation efforts in one sector determine the needs in others. The IPCC has also assessed the potential of carbon capture and storage technology, which it says would be essential for achieving low-stabilization targets. More ambitious geoengineering possibilities, such as proposals to deliberately reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface, have not been assessed in the report.

“There is a whole portfolio of mitigation options that can be combined in ways that meet the political priorities of individual countries,” says Edenhofer. “The means to tackle the problem exist, but we need to use them.”

Effective climate mitigation, adds Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, will not be achieved if individual nations and agents advance their own interests independently. Nations hope to agree on binding emission reduction targets at a United Nations climate meeting in 2015 in Paris.

Delaying action is getting increasingly risky and will only lead to tougher requirements and higher costs at a later stage, says Pachauri.

“We haven’t done nearly enough yet,” he says. “A high-speed mitigation train needs to leave the station soon and all of global society needs to get on board.”

 

Obama promises action and seeks a science-funding boost

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US President Barack Obama says 2014 will be a “year of action” in which he plans to use his executive authority to enact new policies, while seeking greater cooperation from the sharply divided Congress.

“I am eager to work with all of you,” Obama told lawmakers  during his State of the Union address on 28 January. “But America does not stand still — and neither will I.”

For those interested in scientific issues, this year’s speech contained few surprises. Obama did not hint at new policy priorities, as he did in 2013 when he highlighted brain-mapping research just weeks before the White House unveiled its Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative. Instead, he sounded familiar themes, beginning with a plea to Congress to increase funding for scientific research and development “so we can unleash the next great American discovery.”

Declaring that “climate change is a fact,” Obama once again touted his “all-of-the-above” energy policy, which supports the development of both renewable and fossil fuel energy sources. Two of the few new proposals in tonight’s speech included Obama’s plans to propose new regulations that would allow medium- and heavy-duty trucks to run on natural gas and other alternative fuels, and a tax credit to encourage the development of infrastructure to support such vehicles.

Obama also made a brief plea for patent reform, urging Congress to limit what he said was costly and needless litigation, following a series of reforms and recommendations released in June by the White House. The House of Representatives approved a patent-reform measure in December, with White House backing, but a similar effort in the Senate has made little progress.

The president also exhorted lawmakers to revise US immigration laws, though he offered few specifics about what that would entail. The Senate approved immigration legislation last year that would, among other things, allow thousands more foreign scientists and engineers to remain in the United States permanently, but the issue stalled in the House.

Finally, a note for US political trivia buffs. One notable face was missing from the US Capitol during Obama’s address: Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, who was chosen as this year’s “designated survivor”. He sat out the speech in an undisclosed location to ensure government continuity in case of catastrophe. (Moniz, who took office in May, is the second Energy secretary in as many years to earn the honor; his predecessor, Steven Chu, skipped Obama’s 2013 address.)

Updated: White House announces Energy Department nominees

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President Barack Obama today nominated Franklin “Lynn” Orr, a chemical engineer at Stanford University in California, as under secretary for science at the Department of Energy. Orr’s nomination was accompanied by that of Marc Kastner, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, to head the department’s office of science.

Orr joined the Stanford’s Department of Petroleum Engineering in 1985 and rose to become dean of the School of Earth Sciences in 1994. He led the university’s Global Climate and Energy Project before assuming his current post, in 2009, as director of the Precourt Institute for Energy.

Orr has proven his ability to integrate basic and applied research while focusing on big-picture energy questions, says James Sweeney, a colleague at Stanford who directs the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center, which is part of the institute headed by Orr. Sweeney says those skills will come in particularly useful now that Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz has given the under secretary for science oversight over both science and energy research. Orr is also co-teaching a freshman-level course on energy with Sweeney and another colleague, and Sweeney says Orr’s skills as a communicator will prove equally useful in Washington.

“Besides being a researcher and a manager, he is also an educator,” Sweeney says. “He’s got a little of everything.”

Orr’s appointment comes nearly two years after the departure of Steven Koonin, who went on to head New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress.

At the Energy Department’s office of science, Kastner would replace William Brinkman, who stepped down in April. Kastner joined MIT’s Department of Physics in 1973 and headed the department from 1998 to 2007. He has served as the dean of MIT’s School of Science since 2007 and remains active in semiconductor research.