More Extreme Waste by the US Department Of Energy (DOE)

The July 11 issue of C&E News also has an article entitled, "Powering Innovation". It says that the Department of Energy (DOE) is accelerating innovative energy research and development in the US. It wants to give teams of scientists and engineers the resources to solve what it considers the US's pressing energy challenges quickly..

The DOE has developed a new term called Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs). Twenty six of these have been funded by the DOE to "identify the gaps and challenges in the fundamental understanding of the science of energy". A second group is the Energy Innovation Hubs, which are focused on alternatives to petroleum based fuels, such as fuels from sunlight and nuclear reactor design/engineering. The third group is the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), which concentrates on high-risk projects, such as electric fuels using microorganisms to convert CO2 to liquid fuels.

There are 46 EFRC's costing $1.7 billion. There are three Hubs costing $75 million. There are 121 projects in ARPA-E's seven programs at a cost of about $120 million.

One of the Hubs is building new facilities which will employ 150-180 new government employees.

The above costs are on an annual basis and many of them are specified to continue for five years. It appears that total taxpayer-fund expenditures for this pie-in-the-sky operation will run almost $2 billion per year. I say pie-in-the-sky, because none of it is really necessary. We have in the US more than ample supplies of oil and natural gas. We also have private drilling companies in a position to develop these resources. The only inhibition is the US government, which has a twofold program. The first is to inhibit production of oil and gas and the second is to spend money on projects, such as the many above, which will have no practical significance in most of our lifetimes.