Jen Wilcox, an expert on direct-air capture, is the inaugural faculty appointment in the Kleinman Center and served for three years as principal deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Fossil Energy in the U.S. Department of Energy. She discusses her time away and her return to Penn.
Jen Wilcox has returned to the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design and to the School of Engineering and Applied Science following three years in at the U.S. Department of Energy, where she served in the Biden Administration as the principal deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management.
(Image: Courtesy of Jen Wilcox)
In February 2020, at a talk hosted by the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, Jen Wilcox, who at the time was a visiting scholar in the Kleinman Center, said “There’s no silver bullet to address the ever-pressing climate crisis.” It’s a phrase she’s come to embrace as her tagline in explaining her approach to tackling climate change.
The talk centered around her area of expertise, direct-air capture—essentially, pulling CO2 from air and storing it to reduce its deleterious effects on the environment—and she pointed to the pressing need to scale up “a portfolio of approaches” geared toward addressing the nearly 40 billion tons of emissions produced each year.
That September, Wilcox made her way to Penn to take up her role as the first faculty appointment as the Kleinman Center Distinguished Presidential Professor along with her primary appointment at the School of Engineering and Applied Science’sDepartment of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Yet, just as she was getting settled in, she received a surprising email from the newly-elected Biden Administration transition team inviting her to interview for a position in Washington to serve as the acting assistant secretary for the Office of Fossil Energy.
“I thought it was spam,” she says with a chuckle, noting that it was for a role she didn’t fully understand and for an office that she didn’t know all that much about. After six interviews, Wilcox was offered the job and took a sabbatical from Penn. The new job, she explains presented an impactful opportunity to “advance the U.S.—and the world writ large—toward a pivotal shift in our climate change trajectory.”
She says her focus became scaling up solutions, developing mitigation and adaptation strategies to minimize the environmental impacts of fossil fuel dependence, and setting the country on a path to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
In a conversation with Penn Today, Wilcox reflects on her time working in government and discusses her plans as she returns to academic life.
Could you talk about your assignment in D.C. and how you approached the task?
It wasn’t until the day after Christmas that I got the call congratulating me on the role, which made me realize that people in government don’t really take holidays. My official start date was January 20, 2021, the very first day of the Biden-Harris administration, and I was stepping into the position as the acting assistant secretary for the Office of Fossil Energy.
When I got to D.C., my first task was to reorganize the office as we were coming off a period where the office’s mission didn’t support the kind of climate action the Biden Administration was pushing for, especially since we had just reentered the Paris Agreement and were establishing a net-zero goal. So, my role became about flipping the office’s mission to focus on minimizing environmental and climate impacts rather than just improving the efficiency of fossil fuel extraction and use.
The development of the strategic vision was one of the most rewarding yet challenging tasks during my time at the Office of Fossil Energy, which we renamed to the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM). When I came on board, one of the first things I realized was that the office’s divisions were operating in silos, especially between what we called the ‘above-ground’ and ‘underground’ operations, despite their work being interconnected.
The underground operations were called the Office of Oil and Gas, which we renamed to the Office of Resource Sustainability to better reflect the activities of the office. Their primary role was on investing in solutions for industry to mitigate environmental and climate impacts from fossil fuel extraction, such as critical minerals production from waste materials of coal and mining operations, and mitigating methane emissions from the oil and gas industry, including abandoned and orphaned wells.
On the flip side, the above-ground division became the Office of Carbon Management, focusing on reducing and managing carbon emissions from industrial sources such as cement and steel, in addition to direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and ultimately coupling the captured carbon with deep underground permanent storage.
And then, as the planning for new pilots and demonstration projects were underway, we wanted to engage communities in a way that their concerns were addressed with solutions embedded into our projects, rather than just telling them, ‘Hey, we’re coming in with a bunch of machinery to do stuff we think’s good for you.’
To that end, we recruited a brilliant social scientist, Holly Jean Buck, who came to FECM and helped us in creating our Office of Engagement, which includes both domestic and international stakeholders. She helped us in developing guidance documents for applicants that took into account diversity, equity, inclusion and the administration’s Justice40 initiative. President Biden’s Justice40 Initiative commits to delivering 40% of the overall benefits of climate, clean energy, and infrastructure to disadvantaged communities, including tribes, communities with environmental justice concerns, rural areas, and energy communities.
So, by April 2022, we had so many of the components we needed in place and in time to deliver in a meaningful way on the provisions outlined in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, the most impactful climate legislation in history, passing in November 2021 and August 2022, respectively.
What were some of the most exciting large-scale initiatives you saw?
But even before that, one of the initiatives that really stands out is the ‘Carbon Negative Shot’. It’s a bit of a play on the idea of a moonshot except, instead of being the first nation to land a person on the moon, these energy earth shots were a series of impactful solutions that will collectively lead the U.S. in meeting our net-zero greenhouse gas emissions goals by 2050. The idea was to create a massive push, akin to the space race, but this time to develop the technologies and infrastructure needed to both mitigate carbon emissions from entering the atmosphere and removing carbon dioxide directly from the accumulated pool in the atmosphere on a large scale.
We officially launched the Carbon Negative Shot at COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021. It was the first time the U.S. was back at the COP after the previous administration had pulled out of the Paris Agreement, so there was a lot of energy and expectation around it. The Carbon Negative Shot became a collaborative effort across several Department of Energy offices, including Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, the Office of Science, and of course, our office at FECM. Together, we pooled about several hundred million dollars in annual investments to fund research, development, and demonstration of carbon-removal technologies.
This initiative wasn’t just about pulling carbon out of the air but doing it in a way that was economically viable and could be scaled up quickly. We’re talking about everything from direct air capture to natural solutions like afforestation but with a focus on ensuring that these approaches are effective, sustainable, and equitable.
And just like the Methane Mitigation program, the Carbon Negative Shot also had a strong community engagement component. We weren’t just developing these technologies in isolation; we were working with communities to make sure they were part of the solution, whether it was through job creation, improving local air and water quality, or making sure that the benefits of these technologies were shared broadly.
Now that you’re back at Penn, back in your lab, back in Philly, what’s next?
I’m really excited about the coming months, diving back into the research that bridges academia and the real-world impact of climate solutions, seeing familiar faces again, meeting new collaborators; it’s going to be so much fun. But one of my immediate and most exciting priorities as a lifelong lover of teaching is preparing for this semester’s new course, ENMG 5400: Clean Energy Deployment to Achieve Net Zero.
It’s a two-parter, and this semester it’ll focus on deep decarbonization, and in spring 2025 we’ll shift our attention to greenhouse gas removal strategies. The class is designed to give students a comprehensive understanding of what it takes to achieve net-zero emissions, covering everything from state and federal clean energy policy to the fundamentals of industrial decarbonization and pathways toward commercialization.
Next, I’m really thrilled about hosting a small conference at Penn on Sept. 18 focused on carbon dioxide removal and its role in net-zero emissions goals. It’s going to be an intimate, high-impact event with some of the leading minds in the field, and, although seats for the event are limited, there will be a virtual component. We’ll have an impressive day of panels with topics ranging from coupling direct air capture with the built environmental to the potential of achieving greenhouse gas removals in agriculture to societal considerations and impacts of all of these approaches.
I’m excited to see how all these different threads—policy, technology, community engagement—can come together to push forward the work that’s so critical to our future. So, it’s going to be a busy but incredibly rewarding year, and I’m thrilled to be back.
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