At the fall 2006 LES annual meeting in New York City, the Chemicals, Energy and the Environmental Committee of LES International and the Chemicals, Energy and Materials Committee of LES (USA and Canada) sponsored a mini-plenary session on global energy. Leaders from government, industry and funded institutes presented facts, figures, insights, challenges and hopeful options that society is relying on to solve one of the greatest, if not the greatest, challenges to our way of life: having enough energy to spur and sustain economic growth and development without strangling humanity in a noose of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. Just about all conceivable energy source challenges and options were covered at the session, as was the realization that licensing was going to figure into the solution as a mechanism to ally interested parties into collaborations and ventures that can solve the problem and motivate the committed participants.

What follows is a collection of presentation excerpts by each of the presenters who are as follows:
• Samuel F. Baldwin, Ph.D., US Department of Energy: Chief Technology Officer and Member, Board of Directors, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
• Peter Dobson, Ph.D., Professor, Oxford University and Oxonica
• Norma Formanek, Vice-President and General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, Electric Power and Research Institute.
• Andrew R. Barron, Ph.D., Associate Dean for Industry Interactions and Technology Transfer in the Weiss School of Natural Sciences, Rice University
• Stanley Gembicki Ph.D., Vice-President, UOP and Simon Hobbs, Business Development Director, UOP
• M. Rashid Khan, Ph.D., Intellectual Assets Management and Technology Consultant of Saudi Aramco (current assignment to King Abdullah University of Science & Technology)
• Carsten Heide, Associate Director, University of North Dakota Energy and Environmental Research Center.