UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Franklin M. Orr, Jr., Keleen and Carlton Beal Professor Emeritus in the Department of Energy Science and Engineering at Stanford University, will give the 2025 G. Albert Shoemaker Lecture in Energy and Mineral Engineering at Penn State. His talk, “Transforming Global Energy Systems to Mitigate Climate Change,” will be held at 4:00 p.m. on Friday, April 11, in 22 Deike Building at Penn State University Park and online via Zoom. A reception will precede the lecture at 3:00 p.m. in the Earth and Mineral Sciences Museum & Art Gallery. The event is free and open to the public.
In the lecture, Orr will examine options for meeting the challenges of a successful global future energy system that will provide energy, economic, health and environmental security. Orr will also outline the need for additional energy innovation and explore research and development pathways that offer important opportunities for continued progress toward clean, available, affordable and reliable energy.
According to Orr, the range of opportunities available to create a clean energy transformation has never been bigger.
“We can address the climate challenge if we apply what we know how to do now, in a sustained way, to make progress on energy technologies that are clean, deployable at large scale and fully cost competitive,” Orr said.
Since 1985, Orr has been a member of the Stanford faculty. Orr was the Chester Naramore Dean of the School of Earth Sciences at Stanford University from 1994 to 2002. He served as director of the Global Climate and Energy Project at Stanford from 2002 to 2008, and then as director of the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford from 2009 to 2013. He was a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and the Precourt Institute for Energy. He served as Under Secretary for Science and Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy from December 2014 to January 2017.
Orr’s research activities focus on how complex fluid mixtures flow in the porous rocks in the Earth's crust, gas injection process designs for enhanced oil recovery and carbon dioxide storage in subsurface formations. Orr was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2002. He served as vice chair of the board of directors of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute until 2014 and rejoined that board as vice chair in 2017. He chaired the Advisory Panel of the Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering for the David and Lucile Packard Foundation until 2014, rejoining that panel in 2017, and was a Packard Foundation board member from 1999 to 2008. He joined the board of directors of the ClimateWorks Foundation in 2017 and is currently serving as board chair.
About the G. Albert Shoemaker Lecture Series
The G. Albert Shoemaker Lecture Series in Mineral Engineering was established in 1992 by Mercedes G. Shoemaker to honor the memory of her husband, a Pittsburgh civic and industrial leader dedicated to supporting higher education. G. Albert Shoemaker, a Penn State Distinguished Alumnus, had an eminent career in the mineral industries. He was a coal industry leader for many years, serving as president of the Pittsburgh Coal Division of Babcock & Wilcox, and later as president of Consolidation Coal Co. from 1960 to 1966. Among many civic and philanthropic activities, he served as a member of the Penn State Board of Trustees from 1957 to 1978 and as board chairman from 1970 to 1972.