By the year 2020 the world will be consuming about 40 percent more energy than it does today, so that daily energy consumption will equal 2,000 round trips to the sun, or a mid-size car traveling roughly 378 billion miles a day,an analyst for Exxon Mobil Corporation said at a Cornell Engineering conference in April.

The graphic estimate was made by Elissa P. Sterry ’79 ORIE, speaking at the Cornell Society of Engineers (CSE) conference at Barnes Hall. Sterry is manager for economics and energy in Exxon Mobil's Corporate Planning Department, the fact-finding unit for senior management and directors on energy issues.

Alumnus Chris Xu, assistant professor of Applied and Engineering Physics, looks, with hiw wife, Alice Li, at the Tau Beta Pi/Cornell Society of Engineers teaching award he was given at the Dean's Award Banquet in the Statler Ballroom, April 16. The banquet was part of the day's Cornell Society of Engineers conference.

This year's conference, sponsored both by the CSE and the College of Engineering, featured talks on the applications and business potential of new technologies in energy, as well as sustainable development in industry, presented by Cornell alumni who are leading energy industry figures and faculty members who are leading the research at Cornell. The talks included topics such as bringing an environmental approach to mining and manufacturing and development of wind power and fuel cells.

Sterry, who was looking at energy trends through 2020, noted that energy demand will continue to be driven by economic growth, estimated at 3 percent annually, and by the expected rise in the world's population over the next two decades.

The question most often asked these days, Sterry said, is "how much oil is there and when will it run out?" While admitting that the question is difficult to answer, she illustrated her answer by putting world oil supplies in three "buckets." The first — conventional resources that can be exploited using available technology —contains 3 trillion barrels (compared with the 1 trillion barrels of petroleum that have been pumped since production began in the 1800s).

The second bucket contains oil sources that can't be recovered using conventional technology, such as oil sands and extra-heavy oil. These amount to an estimated 4.3 trillion barrels. And in the third bucket are unrecoverable resources that "we are pretty sure are there, but we are not sure how to get them economically," she said. These amount to an estimated 4 trillion barrels.

"There are a lot of resources here," Sterry said, "and will allow for oil and gas to be the primary sources of energy through at least the middle of the century." She noted that new technologies likely will continue to extend the recoverable resource base, making additional, but currently uneconomical, resources commercially attractive.

—David Brand, Cornell News Service