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In December, President Obama signed the 2012 budget bill, breathing life into the federal fiscal year before the continuing resolution flowed into the new calendar year. Credit: adapted from the Congressional Budget Office.

Previously, we reported that indicators were looking positive for federal R&D funding based on the “minibus” approvals Congress made in November, which covered NSF, NIST, NASA and OSTP. The agencies — the so-called innovation agencies — all saw budget increases, even if only modest. (The OSTP budget was cut severely, however OSTP is a White House office and not charged with funding research.) Now that the full budget is approved, the science R&D community has cause to be pretty happy about the outcome. Overall, most funding agencies saw increases, or at least flat budgets.

The AAAS R&D Budget and Policy program has analyzed the final budget in detail, breaking it out into manageable pieces. According to an AAAS press release, total R&D spending for FY12 is down about 1.3% ($1.9 billion) from 2011, but most of the reduction was in defense. The AAAS analysis showed that defense R&D spending is down 3.2%, while non-defense R&D is up 0.5%.

In the release, Matt Hourihan, director of the AAAS R&D Budget and Policy program, says, “It’s no doubt a tough fiscal environment, but the fact that we actually see some fairly sizeable increases in certain research areas suggests persistent support for science and innovation even now.”

In the DOD arena, the message was mixed. R&D budgets for operational systems development and classified programs were slashed 3.8% ($1.15 billion) and 7.6% ($1.33 billion), respectively, but basic science R&D (”6.1″) increased by 8.7% and applied research (”6.2″) increased 5.6%. This is welcome news for the DOD labs and their contractors, but where will that research go without operational systems research?

DOE R&D funding increased 8% overall, including an encouraging bump for ARPA-E to $275 million from $180 million in FY11. According to an article in Science (Dec. 23, 2011), legislators are impressed with ARPA-E’s approach to project reviews and have asked DOE to look into applying it more broadly.

The massive NIH $30.6 billion budget remained essentially flat with a 0.8% increase. That’s an increase of $241 million, almost the entire ARPA-E appropriation for 2012. For comparison, the FY12 budgets for NSF and the DOE Office of Science are about $7 billion and $5 billion, respectively.

The cross-agency support by Congress for R&D is a good sign, too, for the Materials Genome Initiative project. Last summer’s white paper (pdf) introducing the MGI included a request from the administration for $100 million. Because, the MGI is intentionally decentralized and managed for organic growth, there are no budget line items to point to. However, qualitatively, it looks like the agencies that have a natural role to play in the MGI — NSF, DOE and NIST — have received enough funding to advance MGI objectives.

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President Barack Obama announces Advanced Manufacturing Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. Credit: Pete Souza; Official White House Photo.

Last week President Obama unveiled a new initiative to invest in emerging technologies and create new manufacturing jobs and increase the nation’s global competitiveness. During a visit to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa., Obama introduced the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, which, according to the White House press release, will invest more than $500 million to leverage existing programs and proposals to meet these goals.

The press release said that AMP’s initial investments will target manufacturing for critical national security industries, advanced materials development, robotics, improving energy efficiency of manufacturing processes and accelerating the product development timeline for manufactured goods.

“Today, I’m calling for all of us to come together- private sector industry, universities, and the government- to spark a renaissance in American manufacturing and help our manufacturers develop the cutting-edge tools they need to compete with anyone in the world,” said Obama in the press release. “With these key investments, we can ensure that the United States remains a nation that ‘invents it here and manufactures it here’ and creates high-quality, good paying jobs for American workers.”

AMP is a response to the first of four recommendations made by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in their just-released report, “Ensuring Leadership in Advanced Manufacturing (pdf).” The report cites an erosion of domestic leadership in manufacturing and the heavy investment of other nations to fill that void, the advantages of having R&D and manufacturing located in the United States, the essential role of an advanced manufacturing competence in national security and that, historically, federal investment in new technologies has cleared the way for fledglings to become major new industries.

The PCAST report concludes that individual companies cannot go it alone: “Private investment must be complemented by public investment to overcome market failures. Key opportunities include investing in the advancement of new technologies with transformative potential, supporting shared infrastructure, and accelerating the manufacturing process through targeted support for new methods and approaches.”

To create an environment conducive to innovation and to overcome market failures, the PCAST report recommended a four-point plan:

• Launch an advanced manufacturing initiative;
• Improve tax policy;
• Support research; and
• Strengthen the workforce.

AMP is the administration’s response to the first of these, and as recommended by PCAST, is a government, industry and academic partnership. It will be led by Andrew Liveris, CEO of Dow Chemical and Susan Hockfield, president of MIT, and will work closely with the White House’s National Economic Council, Office of Science and Technology Policy, as well as with PCAST.

The first team has been picked already. From industry it will be Allegheny Technologies, Caterpillar, Corning, Dow Chemical, Ford, Honeywell, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Northrop Grumman, Proctor & Gamble and Stryker. Participating universities are MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech, Stanford, UC-Berkeley and University of Michigan. Government players are DARPA, DOE, DOD, and the Commerce Department.

The White House press release gives examples of how several partnerships that are in place will modify their programs to support AMP goals. Several of the named agencies have a long history as important, strategic investors in materials science and engineering such as NSF, NASA and NIST. For example, NIST, a Commerce Department agency, issued a press release outlining its programs that will support the AMP initiative including robotics, nanomanufacturing, advanced materials design through the Materials Genome Initiative and an advanced manufacturing technology consortium scheduled for launch in FY2010.

The PCAST report recommended that AMP funding should rise from $500 million to $1 billion over the course of four years. While touring Carnegie Mellon and seeing demonstrations of several cutting-edge technologies developed at the university, Obama said that it was important for ideas to have a place to incubate and become products that can be made in the US and sold worldwide. “And that’s in our blood. That’s who we are. We are inventors, and we are makers, and we are doers.”

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(h/t to RareMetalBlog) Two U.S. senators from Alaska and a U.S. representative from Colorado are steamed about what they perceive is the Department of Defense’s lax attitude toward the strategic supply of rare-earth elements. Senators Mark Begich and Lisa Murkowski along with Representative Mike Coffman last week dispatched a long letter to DOD Secretary Robert Gates to express their concerns about the agency’s dependence on non-U.S. suppliers of REE.

“[E]arly indications are the DOD has dismissed the severity of the situation to date. Based on initial discussions with the DOD Office of Industrial Policy, we understand the effort to precisely ascertain and fully comprehend DOD consumption of certain rare earth elements is still an ongoing effort. In our view, it is a fundamental responsibility of DOD industrial Policy to have a comprehensive understanding of the security of our defense supply chain, which requires understanding detailed knowledge of the sources and types of components and materials founds [sic] in our weapon systems.

. . .

Despite the uncertainty surrounding DOD consumption, DOD Industrial Policy Director Brett Lambert was recently quoted as saying, ‘the U.S. must only survive a few more years of Beijing’s dominance over rare earths minerals supply and pricing, then American and key allies should be able to turn the table.’ He has also argued market forces will naturally bring new supply sources on-line in the foreseeable future. However, the new sources of rare earths projected to be available in the near-term are primarily light rare earths. The recent Department of Energy Critical Materials Strategy notes some the most critical materials are heavy rare earths.

. . .

[M]anufacturing capabilities required to convert materials into the components needed for our defense systems are virtually non-existent in the United States Today and tour our knowledge, no prime contractor has long-term supply agreements to ensure access in a fully secure supply chain. Given the dwindling domestic supply chain and struggle to accurately identify DOD consumption of rare earth elements, we respectfully disagree with Director Lambert’s initial assessment.”

The three elected officials go on to recommend that the DOD demand contractors account for all REE consumption, define the agency’s current and future demand for REEs, and propose “real solutions on rare earth availability” in its upcoming report to Congress (National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2011).

Murkowski is the ranking member on the Senate Energy Committee. Begich sits on the Senate’s Commerce, Science, & Transportation and Armed Services Committees. Coffman has weighed in on REE issues before and in 2010 introduced the Rare Earth Supply chain Technology and Response Transformation (RESTART) bill. It should be noted that Alaska is one of several states that may have exploitable REE reserves, and Colorado is home to MolyCorp.

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Grad student Martin Duran and Azad, right, working on the processing of nanoscale ceramic catalysts.

(the following is a guest post from Abdul-Majeed Azad, associate professor, chemical engineering, University of Toledo)

As we know, the ultimate chemical fate of the conventional fossil fuel combustion is always CO₂ and H₂O, two well-known greenhouse gases responsible for contributing considerably to the global warming. In 2007 the global level of CO₂ was 30 billion metric ton and is projected to be 43 billion metric ton by 2030. The United States contributes the largest amount - 22.2% - of global CO₂ emissions.

What if we could convert CO₂ into carbon monoxide (CO), water into H₂ and a mixture of CO₂+H₂O (the ultimate product of complete combustion of hydrocarbon-based fossil fuels, including biofuels) into syngas (CO+H₂), respectively? Syngas is a valuable precursor for the well-known Fischer-Tropsch process perfected by Germans during WW II to make synthetic fuels since Germany had coal but no oil reserves. All these streams (CO, H₂ and CO+H₂) are also ideal fuels for solid oxide fuel cells. Hence, essentially the waste products of combustion could become a fuel source and can be recycled. Alternatively, if desired, CO could be converted into H₂ via catalytic water-gas-shift reaction that then could become feed for proton exchange membrane fuel cells.

We have developed an inexpensive heterogeneous ceramic catalyst that we experimentally found capable of converting CO₂ and H₂O into CO and H₂, respectively, on a 1:1 molar basis, under mild temperature and atmospheric pressure. These streams when fed into an intermediate temperature SOFC at 650°C create an open circuit voltage, quite comparable to that of the same SOFC run with pure H₂.

The technology is also of relevance to NASA’s in-situ resource utilization program for MARS exploration since Martian atmosphere is ~ 96% CO₂. NASA might be interested in looking at our technology for creating CO from Martian CO₂ and, use it either as such or after water-gas-shift reaction to generate hydrogen as fuel for a SOFC stack. In the Martian context, to make the process truly self-sustained one could use solar concentrators to generate enough heat to raise the temperature to cause the desired conversion (CO₂ to CO to H₂). Thus, the fuel can be generated (and used) during daytime and stored and utilized to run fuel cells in the night hours.

It is predicted that global clean energy markets are going to quadruple in the next decade from $55.4 billion in revenue in 2006 to more than $226.5 billion by 2016. The approximate market size of this greenhouse gas mitigation is over $1 billion. The technology and the product are potentially of interest to energy producers and suppliers, utility chains, SOFC manufacturers and users, organic synthesis companies and Mars human exploration missions. The United States Department of Defense uses logistic fuels for its operations and could employ the greenhouse gas-fueled SOFC technology for many military field operations, including mobile forward base units, auxiliary field hospitals, field command posts, operational forays, and unmanned aerial vehicles. NASA is also currently looking at non-petroleum-based jet fuels in the pursuit of alternative fuels that can power commercial jets and address rising oil costs. A greenhouse gas-derived F-T fuel could respond to that quest.

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Robot, powered by Adaptive Materials' SOFC hybrid system.

No, the little bot in the picture above is not a fugitive from a Star Wars movie remake. It’s actually an iRobotPackBot powered by a hybrid solid oxide fuel cell system developed by Adaptive Materials Inc.

According to an AMI press release, the Ann Arbor, Mich. firm recently completed tests that proved its hybrid SOFC system could power small ground robots across various terrains, while conducting surveillance and other mission-critical tasks for the U.S. military.

The release says AMI’s successful completion of these proof-of-concept tests marks a “key milestone” in a two-year project the firm has undertaken in conjunction with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DOD’s central research branch.

Testing took place at the Southwest Research Institute, an independent R&D facility in San Antonio, Texas. Here, paired with a lithium battery, AMI’s SOFC system gave life to a Packbot, proving that, “Lightweight, convenient and powered by globally-available propane, Adaptive Materials’ fuel cells improve the overall functionality and duration of a robot in mission-critical settings,” reports AMI’s chief business officer Michelle Crumm. Although the army currently utilizes unmanned automated systems to disarm explosive devices, Crumm explains that many more military uses for the robots could be found, if their operational time could be extended.  She says long-running robots could even be helpful in nonmilitary situations, such as searching potentially harmful debris for survivors in the aftermath of a disaster. Crumm says AMI’s goal is to develop a SOFC that can power a small ground robot for 12 hours or more. She disses competitive fuel-cell systems based on hydrogen or methanol, saying that AMI’s propane-based system offers greater potential for commercialization because propane is readily available around the world.

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