About Us - GCEP

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About Us

The Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) at Stanford University seeks new solutions to one of the grand challenges of this century: supplying energy to meet the changing needs of a growing world population in a way that protects the environment.

Our mission is to conduct fundamental research on technologies that will permit the development of global energy systems with significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions.

The GCEP sponsors include private companies with experience and expertise in key energy sectors. In December 2002, four sponsors – ExxonMobil, GE, Schlumberger, and Toyota – helped launch GCEP at Stanford University with plans to invest $225 million over a decade or more. These four global companies have collectively committed over $150 million towards GCEP so far. In September 2011, DuPont joined the Project as its newest corporate sponsor.

GCEP develops and manages a portfolio of innovative energy research programs that could lead to technologies that are efficient, environmentally benign, and cost-effective when deployed on a large scale. We currently have a number of exciting research projects taking place across disciplines throughout the Stanford campus and are collaborating with leading institutions around the world.

Objectives:

We believe that no single technology is likely to meet the energy challenges of the future on its own. It is essential that GCEP explore a range of technologies across a spectrum of globally significant energy resources and uses.

As a result, our primary objective is to build a diverse portfolio of research on technologies that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, if successful in the marketplace.

Among GCEP's specific goals:

1. Identify promising research opportunities for low-emissions, high-efficiency energy technologies.

2. Identify barriers to the large-scale application of these new technologies.

3. Conduct fundamental research into technologies that will help to overcome these barriers and provide the basis for large-scale applications.

4. Share research results with a wide audience, including the science and engineering community, media, business, governments, and potential end-users.