Richard E. Smalley, the 1996 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry and Professor of Chemistry and Physics at Rice University has shown his energy concerns and the solution the world community should follow to curb the crisis of energy.
This is the summary of the information I read in the article containing the edited transcript based on the Symposium X- Frontiers of Materials Research presentation given by Richard E. Smalley on December 2, 2004, at Material Research Society Fall Meeting in Boston.
The top ten Problems faced by the world are:
- Energy
- Water
- Food
- Environment
- Poverty
- Terrorism & war
- Disease
- Education
- Democracy
- Population
The major problem is Energy and finding its solution can easily help us solve the other problems as well. For example, The second problem Water, the drinking water is the major issue for large population of the world and the resources to fulfill are limited. Hence we need to purify the existing vast mass of sea-water to solve this issue and to reduce the salt and purify the sea water we need cheaper energy for an acceptable solution. Hence energy is a solution to most of the problems on the top-10 list of problems.
The world population is expected to go around a maximum of 10 billion in our lifetime, hence we need to plan our resources so as to cater to these 10 billion people distributed throughout the globe. The total energy requirement to give all the 10 billion people on this planet the level of energy prosperity the developed world enjoy would be around 60 terawatts. If we rely on oil, which is our major source of energy it will take 900 million barrels of oil per day.
In 2004, the consumption of oil per day was 220 million barrels of oil per day to run the world, or 14.5 terawatts. The vast majority of this energy was from oil, gas and coal. Fission and biomass were also significant players. The biomass was the energy source for the bottom half of the global economic ladder, approximately three billion people. Quite a bit of this 14.5 terawatts was the hydro-power and an incredible small amount of energy about 0.5% was solar, wind, and geothermal with geothermal composing the largest part.
To solve the energy challenge, we will have to find a way to produce, everyday twice as much we produce now. Since resources like Hydropower have been tapped to their potential and oil and coal wont last long.
To provide the technology for accomplishing our energy goals, what we need to do is to find the “new oil”. Searching for the enormous amounts of energy that could accomplish this goal, the biggest resources are in the areas where we generate hardly any energy at all right now-solar,wind, and geothermal.
The solution to the current & future global energy crisis lies in the big hydrogen fusion reactor up in the sky , the sun. 165,000 terawatts of power hits the earth’s disk every moment of every day from Sun and it has been going over 4 billion years and will continue for yet other billions of years.
Nate Lewis of California Institute of Technology demonstrates that we could cleanly meet the world’s entire energy needs, 2 kilowatts per person for 10 billion people, by applying the following elegant solution shown below.

Solar Power Map
On a global map, identify six rectangular spaces located in areas of high solar radiation, create 10% efficiency, then collect the power, which would be about 20 terawatts of electrical power, the equivalent of 60 terawatts total energy power at a 30% energy conversion. Since at the time the technology to develop it at a few pennies per kilowatt-hour is not available. It can be done at 20-50 cents a kilowatt-hour currently but that is too expensive. Hence there is requirement of scientist to develop more efficient systems to contain this solar energy. The next issue is the distribution of energy to all the places in the world. This can be solved again with the aid of science & technology by development of Local Energy Storage Units, equivalent to an uninterrupted power supply for home computers, to provide a backup of 12-24 hours of full operation. This can only be done with the help of nano-technology & advents of science. These units should be small and cheap. This local energy storage would get us past the problem and give us an extremely robust, terrorist-resistant, delocalized electrical energy system. In addition to the local system, one other innovation is needed on the grid to make it work i.e the capability to transport electrical power in hundreds of gigawatts over thousand of miles. The High-voltage transmission lines would be very efficient for the purpose as they already carry electricity for 1500 miles with fairly low losses but they carry only about 1 gigawatt of energy we need innovation & new technology to solve this.
The solution of using solar energy is an efficient solution as it solves the problem of global warming as no CO2 emission takes place in this process and moreover no fossil fuels are used.