NETL’s new director gazes into the future
Making a budget is rarely the stuff of grand ideas. But it should be, says Grace Bochenek, director of the National Energy Technology Laboratory in South Park.
Ms. Bochenek, who took the lead at the Department of Energy's fossil fuel lab in October, has asked her employees to think decades into the future and imagine what a lab catering to the energy landscape 20 years from now should look like.
It’s part inventory — Ms. Bochenek said she’s still coming up to speed on NETL — and part forecasting. And, in some way, it’s also part dreaming.
Should fuel cells be a bigger priority? Will burning ice to release methane hydrates be the next big fuel source?
“As the director, I think my No. 1 responsibility is [to figure out] what is the next generation of people I’m going to need to do these things? Is it a different kind of skill set I'll need, different tools?
“In some ways I am asking the people at NETL to think differently,” she said.
Ms. Bochenek comes to energy from the Department of Defense, where she most recently served as chief technology officer of the U.S. Army Materiel Command.
In many ways, the jobs are similar. Both require balancing what’s needed for the future with what’s available today. But in the defense sector, customer interest is guaranteed, Ms. Bochenek said.
With energy, the market’s whim, politics and regulations will control whether all the effort NETL is pumping into making coal
cleaner will be made moot by a total switch to natural gas or renewable energy.
Regardless of what Ms. Bochenek’s idea gathering yields, NETL’s focus will continue to be on fossil fuels, with an increasing emphasis on oil and gas.
What will likely change is how government research enters the commercial sphere.
“The old model used to be you had these federal labs and they’d work all by themselves,” she said. “One thing I want people to think about here is how do we allow other people to come and use our facilities and collaborate.”
The goal is to have a strategic plan in hand by January, Ms. Bochenek said.