Dear Colleagues,

The 2023 Laufer Energy Symposium (https://lauferenergy.mst.edu/), co-sponsored by the Chemical Engineering, Nuclear Engineering, and Civil Engineering departments of the Missouri University of Science and Technology together with the Wayne and Gayle Laufer Foundation, Gulf University of Science and Technology, Washington University in St. Louis, Purdue University, University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign, and Elevated Analytics Consulting was held March 30‒April 1 2023 in St. Louis, Missouri. The focus of this symposium was on global trends in technology and policy. This conference brought together leading experts who talked about the development of resilient energy systems that optimize systemic surety, supply, sufficiency, and sustainability. Papers for this Special Issue will focus on integrated energy systems that enhance energy economics, unconventional fuels to augment our current energy supply with non-conventional resources, novel ways to improve the economic performance of renewable energy, and key policies affecting energy production and utilization.

Prof. Dr. Joseph Smith
Prof. Dr. Greg Gelles
Prof. Dr. Muthanna Al-Dahhan
Guest Editors

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• resilient energy
• climate change
• nuclear fusion
• bio-energy
• biofuels
• renewable energy

Title: Supercritical Transportable Modular Biodiesel Plant Design and Economics
Authors: Joseph D. Smith 1*, Shyam Paudel 1, Caleb Moellenhoff 1, Zachary Smith2
Affiliation: 1 Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, Missouri 2 Idaho National Laboratory, Idaho Falls * Corresponding author, [email protected]
Abstract: An attractive approach to reduce the net anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions from burning petroleum-derived diesel fuels is using biodiesel produced from waste vegetable cooking oil. Market research has shown that the conventional approach to produce biodiesel in large, centralized biofuels refineries, is slow and energy-intensive and produces high amounts of waste products and would greatly benefit from process intensification. To reduce production costs and reduce the environmental impact of biodiesel, an intensified mobile modular biorefinery has been developed. This biorefinery employs a continuous non-catalytic super-critical process to generate high-quality biodiesel from waste vegetable oil via a tubular separative membrane reactor. The biochemical process also involves recycling waste glycerol via a bioconversion process to supplement the alcohol feed stream. A novel biorefinery design has been completed which includes the 1) piping and instrumentation diagrams, 2) a full hazard and operability study, 3) a plant wide control narrative, 4) a preliminary bill of materials to construct the plant, and 5) a comprehensive ASPEN process model to evaluate process economics and scale-up. Using process intensification principles, this bio refinery has been shown to significantly improve the profitability and sustainability of the biodiesel production process. Hence, this process design can have a high impact on the biofuels industry by providing a marketable solution for distributed production of biodiesel that significantly minimizes the transportation costs and associated production of greenhouse gases produced during the collection and shipping to and from large centralized biorefineries and subsequent shipping this biofuel to multiple distribution centers.

Title: Energy and the finance of sustainable growth
Authors: Georgios Karakatsanis 1,2*, Christos Makropoulos 2, Nikos Mamassis 2 and Demetrios Koutsoyiannis 2
Affiliation: 1 Department of Water Resources and Environmental Engineering, School of Civil Engineering, National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), 9 Heroon Polytechneiou St., 15870 Zografou, Greece 2 Department of Research, EVOTROPIA Ecological Finance Architectures Private Company (P.C.), 190 Syngrou Avenue, 17671 Kallithea, Greece
Abstract: Human civilizations are historically distinguished by their dominant pattern of energy harvesting, called the energy paradigm. The energy history of human civilizations may be shortly described as the successive transition from one energy paradigm to another. As the transition of our civilization from its fossil-fuel energy paradimg lies at the top of the global sustainability agenda, the paper develops a model of a Research & Development (R&D) fund as a financial instrument that will institutionalize the finance of energy technology transitions. Based on a thermodynamic re-postulation of the Hartwick Rule, a generalized dynamic model of energy paradigm transitions is developed. At the macro-scale, energy paradigm transitions embody the combined effect of two main limiting factors that necessitate perpetual technological progress; (a) fuel availability and (b) pollution carrying capacity. As both factors are depleted, the Scarcity Rent (SR) is introduced as a fund that best reflects their depletion rate. The SR derives immediately from the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics expressing the compensation for resource or carrying capacity depletion. Reduced in economic values the SR consists in the lost net benefit when one unit of resource is currently consumed and is no longer retrievable (due to the validity of the 2nd Law) in the future. For renewable energy sources and carrying capacities, the SR is reduced by their renewal rate. The SR is embodied in prices and is re-invested as a minimum fund in energy technology R&D projects that as stochastic processes aim at the transition to a more abundant and sustainable world energy paradigm. At the micro-scale, R&D is modeled as a Schumpeterian information accumulation process that involves uncertainty on the innovation’s exact arrival time. Consequently, we study with OECD data the relation between the increase of financial investment and the increase of energy innovations’ expected arrival rate.