Mark Mills Speaks at Dean's Seminar Series
May 9, 2008
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Mark Mills, businessman and author, spoke April 29 as part of the Dean’s Seminar Series at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering.
Mills’ lecture, titled, “Energy - From Oil Sands to Data Centers: Unlimited Supply and Infinite Demand,” dealt with energy policy and what this and future generations should keep in mind about the supply of energy.
Right now the world uses 3,000 barrels of oil per second, he said, and consumption of energy will go up at least 50 percent over the next couple decades because history shows that when energy becomes more efficient, it becomes cheaper and people consume more energy.
As oil reaches $120 per barrel, that’s what makes the headlines, and that’s what politicians discuss as part of energy policy. Policy makers largely ignore electricity when developing energy policy, but due to the growth of the digital economy more than 60 percent of the energy we use is electricity.
Data centers — large warehouses filled with servers — use as much energy as steel mills, and an iPhone, when the phone’s network is taken into consideration, uses as much energy as a refrigerator.
As energy demands continue to rise, we need to continually innovate and create new technologies to tap into the endless energy supplies in the universe, Mills says. For example, there is plenty of oil in Alberta, Canada, we just need to come up with a cheap, efficient way to extract it from the sands.
“Our only limit is a willingness to build stuff,” he said.
When asked about depleting oil reserves, Mill said that he believe there are 300 to 500 years worth of conventional hydrocarbon resources left on the planet. Nevertheless, the energy market is so large that there is plenty of room for different types of emerging technologies that harness energies like solar and wind.
“We have the ability to do it in a clean way,” he said.
Mills is the co-founder and chairman of the board of ICx Technologies Inc., a company that develops and sells new and emerging technologies for homeland security and force protection. He is also a co-founding partner in the tech venture fund Digital Power Capital, a Wexford Capital fund.
Mills has been published in publications like Forbes and The New York Times, and he is the co-author of The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy.
Mills has served as a staff consultant to the White House Science Office, several federal research laboratories, the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, and the U.S. Department of Energy. He was an experimental physicist and development engineer in integrated circuits during the 1970s and holds patents in fiber optics and defense and solid-state devices. He has a degree in physics from Queen's University, Canada.
