 So, it's my pleasure to lead this panel about new energy carriers, new fuels. My name is Tom Jaramillo. You can also call me Tomas Thomas. I am a faculty member in the Department of Chemical Engineering School of Engineering. I'm also a faculty member in the Energy Science Engineering Department as part of the new school, Stanford Doors School of Sustainability, as well as in Photon Science, which is a Slack national accelerator lab. I also serve as the director for a center called Suncat that I'll be speaking to in a moment. Maybe what we can do is just go down the line. Each panelist can give the 30-second intro, and then we'll talk about how we have today's session organized. So, why don't you go ahead, Arthur? My name is Arthur Grossman. I'm at the Carnegie Institution for Science, which is on the Stanford campus. And I'm in a courtesy appointment in biology. I do a lot of work on photosynthesis, the mechanisms of photosynthesis, how organisms use sunlight, and also how they acclimate, they change under different conditions, how those processes adjust to the environmental conditions. And I've also worked with a number of companies to identify various organisms that would be good producers of various products, such as oils. Joanna? I'm Johanna Nelson-Wacker. I am a lead scientist at Slack. So that's Slack National Accelerator Laboratory, but it is affiliated with Stanford. At Slack, I do X-ray characterization, so I work at the synchrotron there, the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Light Source. And we can watch chemistries with our X-ray microscopes, so that's what I'll be talking about today. Great. Matt? Hi, I'm Matt Cannon. I'm an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry here at Stanford. I'm also director of the Tomcat Center for Sustainable Energy. My group's research interests are primarily in the areas of carbon dioxide utilization to produce commodity chemicals and fuels, as well as more recently in carbon removal. Super. Yeah. Mateo? Hi, everybody. Mateo Carniello from Chemical Engineering here at Stanford, also part of Suncat that is directed by our moderator. I work in general in heterogeneous catalysis and materials for the conversion of small molecules such as CO2, hydrogen, ammonia, methane and hydrocarbons, and also on carbon capture and conversion. Thank you all so much for those quick intros. We're going to dive a little bit deeper into each of their areas. So the way today's session is going to run is that each of us has a very short slide deck that we're going to present. We'll go kind of one by one. Each presentation will be roughly five minutes along with those slides. And then I'll have maybe a few questions for our panelists. And then we'll open it up to the community. The goal is to have at least half of our session today, half of the time, really open to you, the audience, to ask any questions that you may have. And I'm just so honored and privileged to be up here together with these all-stars who really represent a broad net of a network of scholars in our community. We have multiple schools represented in humanities and science, engineering, the Stanford Doerr School, Photon Science and Slack. We have researchers who have experienced starting companies, who work in fundamental science, we have biology, we have chemistry, engineering, materials. So really a lot of different expertise up here on the stage to speak to this very important area of new energy carriers and fuels. So we've had a chance to meet everybody here today. What kind of brings us together is the need and the opportunity to reinvent what I consider to be one of the greatest accomplishments of humankind. And that is the fuels and chemicals industry as we know it. It's absolutely remarkable that we could create molecules at scale and distribute them to billions of people across the globe at very cost-effective prices using things that we're breathing in the air right now, the molecules that we're breathing or molecules underground. So here's one example in case you are not aware. Let me hopefully I can exemplify how amazing these processes are. We're looking at this molecule ammonia NH3. This ammonia is produced by separating the nitrogen that you're all breathing in your lungs right now. That nitrogen is 78% of what's flowing into and out of your lungs. Unfortunately, your body has absolutely no ability to turn that molecular nitrogen into anything useful, like the amino acids that make up the proteins, the enzymes, the DNA in your bodies. And so how do we get that fixed nitrogen in our bodies through the food that we eat and this is what feeds billions of people 180 billion kilograms per year of ammonia production that's over 20 kilograms per person. So over 50 pounds of ammonia per year where you take that nitrogen from the air and you rack it from the hydrogen that comes almost entirely from fossil fuels. So there's chemical facilities like this all over the globe. So half the fixed nitrogen in your body, half that fixed nitrogen, which came from food like what we were just eating outside, touched this iron nanoparticle in some Habrabash facility across the globe. That's how big those processes are. And there's hydrogen, which we had a great session on yesterday. A lot of large scale hydrogen production facilities again coming from fossil resources, gasoline, plastics. You can see the scales of these types of molecular products. The question is, how can we make these things renewably? How can we make them sustainably? How can we make them equitably so they don't just access some billions, but all billions. So there's a lot to reinvent. I think that's what a lot of what we're gonna touch on today. So some of the things that we've been working on in our research group that is very consistent with everything you're gonna hear on our panel today is really how we can come up with new types of processes, thermochemical processes, electron driven processes to electrify, to use solar directly. At the end of the day, how can we develop catalyst that can make the products that we need using renewable resources and make things sustainably and equitably and across the globe. So this is just one image to kind of show different ways of doing it. Certainly not all inclusive. Again, on this panel today, we'll be hearing a lot about different approaches to this particular problem. In my research group, we focus a lot on electron driven chemistries. Really trying to make use of renewable electricity to make things like ammonia, to make things like carbon based products out of carbon dioxide, to make hydrogen out of water. Some of you might have seen a postdoc on our group, Ryan Hannigan yesterday present in the hydrogen session. And then we take those catalysts and we put them into devices. They could be ones that we layer them on semiconductors to directly harvest sunlight or electrochemical devices that look like fuel cells or batteries where you can make those chemicals or make use of those chemicals and fuels. And we do a lot of work in thermal heterogeneous catalysis as well. Just a few words about the Suncat Center for Interface Science and Catalysis were a partnership between Stanford University and Slack National Accelerator Lab, really bringing in the superpowers that an academic institution and a national lab can bring to bear on these important problems. You can see the senior personnel, I get to work with every single day. We have 16 senior personnel including Mateo who introduced himself just a moment ago. Each brings their own expertise, their own capabilities, their experience, their know-how and most are rostered at either Slack or at Stanford. And the goal here is to come up with new catalysts, new chemical processes, again for new energy carriers and fuels. We've launched a few companies that came out of the Suncat sphere. These are companies that you may or may not have heard of. 12 was launched a few years ago on CO2 electrolyzers as Kendra and Natasha. They were funded originally through the Global Climate Energy Project, was a really important foundation that was set here at Stanford some years ago in 2002. Nitricity on ammonia production, paropyr on hydrogen peroxide, dioxical, another CO2 electrolysis company. So we're very interested in fundamentals because we are a national lab and university environment. But we're very keen on how do we translate things into the commercial world. With that, on my last slide here and then I'll pass the baton, I just wanted to just say a few words of the Stanford Doorschool. A sustainability in general, but also the accelerator in particular. What we're really excited about in this new school is external engagement. There are a lot of problems in the energy space and the fuels and chemicals space. And naturally there's a lot of talent in our campus at the national lab working towards that. The Doorschool is trying to come up with some new pathways that maybe we can accelerate some of that work and get it into the community and have a more direct impact to get things to scale more quickly and address the urgency of the climate issue that we're facing right now. So happy to speak towards some of that later on. And with that I'll pass the baton to our next speaker, which is going to be Arthur. Well first I'd like to thank the organizers for inviting me. And I'd like to thank GSEP and CSERC for supporting some of my work over the years. We work mostly on algae and we work on getting various compounds out of algae and using those compounds for various tasks such as fuel and energy. And some of the reasons that you might work on algae are shown in this slide. For example, algae can grow in very harsh environments very often. And so there's a picture of the desert and you can get algae to grow in desert ponds. But of course you have to get the water to the desert as well. So there are complications that go with that. Algae can use water qualities that are very varied. In fact, many algae are used for bioremediation. They could take heavy metals out of water and other noxious compounds. If you're going after fuel, you can get algae to make a lot of oils that could be drop-in fuels, mostly triacylglycerides. And that fuel can be used for, of course, energy. But you also have various byproducts that come out of the algae after you extract the oil. And that includes food for humans, feed for cattle, fertilizer. You can use parts of the algae for cosmetics, so for high-value products, for tachycoferols and carotenoids. One of the reasons people have moved to algae to do this is because of what they call net-neutral CO2. And that is that if you think about what an alga does, it fixes CO2, you could direct much of it into fuel, you could then burn the CO2, use the fuel, regenerate the CO2, and presumably it's a cycle where you take up that CO2 again, and so it becomes neonet-neutral. Now, that's hope. It's not really a reality at this point, because, you know, you have to move sometimes the products around, you have to process them in certain ways, so energy is used. If you get to 80% neutrality, I think you're doing pretty well, generally. And of course, algae actually can make huge amounts of oil. And I'm always surprised when I see how much oil some of these organisms could make. In working with a particular green algae, we got them to make up to 85% oil by dry weight, which is a huge amount. And so those are some of the reasons why people are working with algae. One of the algae that we're working with now is an algae called batriococcus, and you could see it up in the left-hand corner of that slide. It's an interesting algae. It's a green algae. It almost grows like a network. You could see the sort of scaffolding that holds that algae in place. There are many algae within that colony. And the interesting thing about this algae is it exports the oil that it makes. And this is really, these are hydrocarbons that it's making. It's a little hard to work with. It's hard to do genetic engineering on these organisms at this point. It's hard to manipulate them in various ways. And that's what we're trying to explore because that capability of exporting the oil makes the processing very easy, ultimately. Now, we're working with postdocs and others like Ellen Yee and Petra Redicoppe and Lev Seppin. And they're doing, of course, most of the work. And what I'm showing you there is an initial effort to actually make that algae free of bacteria and also to make it amenable to genetic engineering. And I guess Lev actually developed, used an iodine method where he treats the colonies with iodine, basically. And single cells begin to come off those colonies because you get iodization, iodinization of the polysaccharides that hold the colony together and the algae begin to separate. When you get single cells, as you could see, you're getting them shed from that middle image. They can be then isolated. They can be grown probably as single colonies, we're hoping for that. And they could be, they would be amenable to genetic engineering. And you could see a culture of that growing, a culture of the algae growing on the right-hand side of that slide. Now the oils, the hydrocarbons that they make are shown here. And they're squalene, botrycoxene, and various methylated forms of that. And those basically can be treated as many of the oil companies treat them. They could be cracked. They could be made into drop-in fuels. The project actually that we're doing is to establishing, is to establish botrycox as a potential system for producing hydrocarbons, isolate high-quality DNA and RNA, and improve the genome assembly for the organism so that we could manipulate the biosynthesis of these compounds and the excretion and isolate the genes for making these particular metabolites and putting them into heterologous systems into other organisms that might serve as a better chassis for actually producing a lot of this. And ultimately figuring out how we can get the oil excreted in any system, ultimately, that we deal with. Okay, and right now there is a genome sequence. It's not very good. Lev is putting that together a little more, but we're using that genome sequence to isolate the genes for making the botrycoxene and the squalene. And we isolated the DNA, and what you see on the bottom are really their PCR blots. They're blots that basically show that we have good DNA, that we could isolate the genes potentially and ultimately we'll be tailoring those genes. Now of course there are many challenges that will come with this. Some of those challenges we can discuss more, but it's how light energy is used and how inefficient it could be and how we could improve on that. It's how we could use synthetic biology really to improve the system and generate a high value system, and it's even to explore other organisms to use in this arena. Okay, and I'll stop there. Thank you. So I'm going to talk to you about the X-ray capabilities that we have and how we're using them really to explore catalyst reactions and also as well as electrochemical reactions as well. So I just have a few examples just to give you an idea of the types of things that we can do. And so we have an X-ray microscope that gives you 30 nanometer resolution, 30-50 nanometer resolution, and it uses X-rays so it can penetrate materials that you wouldn't otherwise be able to penetrate either with optical or electron microscopes. So using this microscope we can do X-ray tomography for example, and this is an example where we're using the benefit of the fact that we can penetrate through materials. And so this is two different nanotomography images of platinum nickel nanowire electrodes and they're on a membrane. And so when we imaged these in a TEM you really couldn't see any of the morphology of the nanowires because the membrane was too thick. However with X-rays and with tomography we can see the changes in how the nanowires, the morphology, the interconnection of those nanowires depending on how we've made this membrane. In addition to 3D we also have the ability to look at things in situ, operando, and so that is the main thrust of what we've done on the X-ray microscope. And so here are just three examples of the types of systems that we've developed or in situ environments that we've developed. The first one is a nanoreactor and the top image on the your left is a glass capillary which you really can't see in the image and then metal tubing where you can flow gases through the glass capillary where your catalyst is sitting and and then the bottom image shows a the system on the microscope with an oven over top of it. And so we are imaging through the oven during the catalytic reaction so you can flow different gases at different temperatures, you can ramp temperatures, you can switch the gases as you would like, and you can take chemical images and I'll show you what a chemical image looks like but you can see the chemistry as it's changing by using the fact that we can go to the absorption edge of the metals that are doing the catalytic reaction. The second example in the middle is a three electrode cell and that we've done electrode deposition as well as corrosion experiments so it's an aqueous cell and your working electrode is really what you're imaging. And then finally we're also working on electrolyzers and being able to look at electrolyzers while they're operating as well and you know what's happening on the anode, what's happening on the cathode, what's happening on the the catalysts and what's happening with them. So one thing that we've been able to do is that we can tune the x-ray energy and go to the absorption edge of a particular element so for example if you're looking at going back to that nickel platinum nanowires if you want to look at the nickel or if you want to look at the platinum chemistry we can go to the absorption edge of the inner shell electrons of that particular metal and do imaging as well as spectroscopy at the same time so we image take images across an absorption edge and the absorption edge the the structure of the absorption edge gives us the chemical footprint the fingerprint of what's going on and so we've created movies of the chemistry as it's happening and we actually have done this in our little nanoreactor we've looked at for example a fissure tropes reaction was our initial reaction that we looked at and we studied the iron chemistry in time with temperature and different gases. I'll leave it at that. Thank you. Hi first yeah thanks for the invitation to the organizers thank you Tom for setting the stage for us this afternoon I thought what I'd do is talk about one project in my group directed toward liquid fuel production sustainable liquid fuel production first why liquid fuels no offense to the amazing community of battery scientists here at Stanford but I don't think liquid fuels are going away anytime soon particularly not the hydrocarbon fuels needed for things like aviation maritime shipping and heavy trucking to sustain global commerce so we took a sort of broad look at possible ways of making sustainable fuels we're somewhat technology agnostic I think and in our in our outlook and I identified the the sort of pathway that's schematized here is what we think is the most promising in terms of scalability and efficiency and then zeroed in on on what we think is a technology gap for really bringing this to fruition so what you see on the on the left is electrolysis to generate hydrogen so this is very much a play betting on the growth of low carbon and particularly green hydrogen perhaps gold hydrogen as well or geogenic hydrogen combining that with CO2 and then and then hydrogenating CO2 to get to liquid fuels you can do that in in two steps where you combine hydrogen and CO2 to make sin gas okay which is a combination of hydrogen and CO carbon monoxide and then take sin gas and convert that on to liquid fuels the reason we think this is an interesting opportunity is because on the on the left hand electrolysis I think we're actually really in an extraordinary time for hydrogen I'm sure you heard a lot about this yesterday the number I saw in the newspaper last week is that the planned projects for water electrolysis to generate hydrogen are now at one terawatt of course you know 85 percent of those are something are still in early planning stages but those are announced projects and some substantial portion financed so I think we are at an inflection point for for green hydrogen and in my opinion whichever technology is best able to take hydrogen and CO2 and make liquid fuels will be positioned to really provide sustainable liquids on scale and so then if you go all the way to the right to sort of the downstream the conversion of sin gas of CO and hydrogen to liquid fuels has been practiced for I think you know certainly upwards of 70 years industrially and now today it is practiced at least in in a handful of locations on very large scale and by that I mean a hundred hundred and fifty thousand barrels a day so in between is a process called the reverse water gas shift reaction RWGS this is what would take hydrogen and CO2 and make CO that's that other component of sin gas that's essential for the sin gas conversion technologies and that we view as a technology gap there are catalysts known today it's not clear whether those catalysts are suitable for sort of long-term operation and industrial application it's certainly far from clear whether they're optimal in terms of the overall process efficiency and cost and so so we've sort of honed in on this as the as the opportunity to contribute as energy researchers to unlocking this pathway if you forgive me I'll just give a really quick chemistry lesson here and in terms of what is the challenge of reverse water gas shift that reactions again CO2 plus H2 to make CO and water that's a little bit endothermic okay so it requires heat thermodynamically but you're competing with other hydrogenation processes when you're trying to catalyze reverse water gas shift and some of those are very exothermic so methanation for example methane is basically the thermodynamics sink of of CO2 hydrogenation that's very exothermic and so if you have an unselective catalyst that does both of those reactions then basically this is your product distribution as a function of temperature methane is going to dominate at at lower temperatures right because it's releasing heat and so at the lower temperature methane is going to dominate and you got to go really hot before CO dominates and indeed the catalysts that are being developed today and are being implemented and it's called a sort of pre-commercial reverse water gas shift sin gas conversion systems are essentially steam reforming catalysts so the nickel based catalysts that catalyze both of those reactions and so you operate them at 900 to 1100 or higher in order to favor CO production but as you can appreciate there's challenges associated with the materials of construction for your reactor and in integrating that in heat integration with the downstream processes when you're operating in that regime if you have a catalyst that shuts down the the methanation pathway then this is what your curve would look like under the same conditions and we think then there's an opportunity to operate it at more moderate temperatures change the materials of construction change the overall process design and so that's what that's what we've done we've been working on this project for a few years the the students who have really led that have a poster here you may have seen that at lunchtime is another opportunity this afternoon the calis is extremely simple we take carbonate salts okay so sodium or potassium carbonate some sort of mesoporous carrier for example alumina the most common catalyst carrier in industry and we insert the carbonate into the mesopores that creates a thin coating on the surface of that material and actually fundamentally changes the chemical properties of that carbonate and renders it reactive under the reverse water gas shift conditions so from a cost point of view there's ultra low cost materials that go into this we've also working with two of the largest catalyst manufacturers in the world verified that we can manufacture this at extremely low cost as well using existing procedures that are used for many catalysts on the multi-kiloton per year scale we've done a lot of work in my lab but then more recently over the past several months we've just used an independent vendor to do third-party testing of the calis this is in a high throughput manner looked at many different variants of this many different formulations and essentially the take home from that is that the calis is highly active in this target intermediate temperature regime because we have no metal there's no nickel there's no copper or iron it's only just the carbonate and the alumina it's incapable of of doing the methanation reaction so it's essentially completely selective for the co production even at temperatures where methane would be strongly favored and then the other thing that's important in terms of integrating it with a syngas conversion is that you're going to have a recycle loop in these processes you're going to have hydrocarbon impurities coming from the syngas conversion they get fed back into the reverse water gas shift reactor we've verified that tolerance to methane and propane in this testing and finally depending on your source of co2 you may also have significant sulfur impurities and we've verified that these catalysts can tolerate the sulfur as well and again this is an advantage of not having a metal it's typically the metals that are liabilities for coking or for poisoning and the presence of something like like sulfur so we have a catalyst technology that that we're excited about we think is very scalable and now we're transitioning to basically trying to establish the the partnerships to integrate that catalyst into a process and really take advantage of its properties to design a more efficient and hopefully lower cost process for going from co2 and hydrogen to sustainable liquids thank you great thank you tom for bringing us together and the organizers for this panel what i'm going to do in the next few minutes is to share some thoughts on the the topic of new energy cares and fuels and i will inter disperse some of the results things they were working on in in my lab but mostly use this as a collection of an incomplete collection of thoughts that hopefully will steer discussion in the next 30 minutes or so so when i was asked to put together thoughts on this it was a new energy cares and fuels and i decided to put the new in parentheses because i think we will be hardly pressed to find out new chemical compounds that or chemical compounds that will be really new i i think the idea is to find new ways to make and use these carriers and fuels that will probably be using for the past you know 50 to 100 years i haven't i again i would have a hard time imagining any molecule that will be new so then the question is how do we make them more renewably more sustainably just like tom introduced at the beginning so before we get into the topics i was thinking okay what are the few considerations that we have to keep in mind in thinking about a new energy system and new carriers and vectors so i i put them down here first of all electrification is unavoidable and not in the sense that is something that we want to avoid but in the sense that every trend tells us that that's going to be the case that electric we will use more electricity hopefully renewable and carbon free electricity and that will impact for example the fuel market because we can probably imagine in 30 40 50 years all of us will be driving an electric car very likely other means of transportation that will be electrified not so sure but at least that is something that we should consider decarbonization must be real in the sense that we need to move into systems that would generate less carbon in the emissions in the atmosphere and we have to account that carbon very much in detail because it's too easy to say we take co2 and make something some fuel out of it if the energy that gets into that molecule and that and reemitting the atmosphere is even larger than what we're using now talk a little bit about that i put in their hydrogen hydrogen hydrogen because i think it's whether we are on the yes or no about using hydrogen as an energy carrier we need hydrogen carbon free hydrogen to make other fuels in the future that are less carbon intense fuel so then the question is how do we make that hydrogen and finally just one thing that i think other colleagues pointed out as well is that aviation fuel for example is likely to stick around for long potentially will never go away so we have to find out solutions that would get around this problem of electrifying things that are hard to electrify so where do we start i wanted to start with hydrogen i know that you had a discussion probably most of you had a discussion yesterday and by comparing methods of hydrogen production that could potentially be carbon free one option is to continue business as usual or almost business usual with the steam methane reforming with carbon capture and storage the alternative is water electrolysis met just told us that there's a huge potential for this i wanted to present another alternative which is here at the bottom it's a methane paralysis of methane splitting why because despite the fact that there's a huge interest and promise in water electrolysis well that reaction is very hard to to happen and we need to introduce quite a large amount of energy carbon free energy in order to split the the water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen so an alternative could be to use still hydrocarbon fuels or hydrocarbon compounds to make hydrogen to extract the hydrogen from the hydrocarbons rather than burning them into co2 and rather than emitting the carbon in the atmosphere as co2 to convert it into a solid carbon of some form that i'll tell you in in a moment as well so that that that carbon is not emitted but it can be stored and and maintained into a form that does not end up in the atmosphere and the reason why methane splitting could be an alternative is because in principle it could be relatively carbon free or low carbon emissions and if you look at the minimum energy demand on the right of that slide it's much lower compared to water splitting and in principle it doesn't emit co2 if we use non-fossil electric heating for example to power this process one problem is what do we do with that amount of carbon because starting from methane for example as an example half of the energy is still then is converted into hydrogen and half of the energy is conserved in that carbon but the amount of solid carbon produces three times in mass that of hydrogen so we need to do something with that so one proposal for example and this is working collaboration with Aroma Jumdar here at Stanford as well as Rago Birgupta at Sastion is to turn that carbon into carbon nanotubes so that we could use carbon nanotubes for advanced technological applications and in principle if properly designed this system could lead to carbon fibers that are lighter than lighter and still stable and robust comparable in some cases to metals so we could use this carbon materials to decarbonize and remove from and replace some metals in that are heavily emitting such as steel copper and aluminum while at the same time making hydrogen as well carbon free hydrogen for many other uses so this is one idea around hydrogen I imagine we probably talk about that as well during the panel what are other opportunities for then using that hydrogen the carbon free hydrogen to make fuels that are important I thought I would also put my professor hat and give you a little bit of a tour on energy of free energy of formation of several carbon based materials from CO2 if you look at that graph of free energy of formation as a function of carbon oxidation state CO2 is basically the very bottom it means that it's basically the one of the most stable carbon containing compounds except for carbonates carbonates are lower in energy so if we want the point is that if we want to so CO2 sits at a minimum in the energy landscape and if we want to make anything else from CO2 we need to introduce energy so at this point it is important to keep in mind that when we introduce energy to make a fuel we need to distinguish between CO2 used and CO2 avoided so again if we're emitting more CO2 because of the energy introduced to make that fuel compared to the CO2 that is utilized then we are really not decarbonizing anything so one thing to keep in mind is that the market for fuels is a very very large market it will change because of the electrification processes but it is possible to imagine the long terms a way for us to find opportunities to create carbon based fuels from CO2 that would allow for megatons of CO2 avoided such as the ones reporting this relatively old life cycle analysis and we need to get there in order to continue to power some of the transportation means that we use today anyway one opportunity is to convert CO2 to hydrocarbons it's not the best use of CO2 and hydrogen in this case because again that hydrocarbon mixture let's say gasoline will go straight that carbon will go straight back into the environment but there can be ways to avoid CO2 emissions in this in this process there there are opportunities for catalytic processes to do this for straight from CO2 it's an exothermic process but requires relatively mild to high temperatures pressure sorry relatively mild temperatures in order to force those carbon atoms to stick together and form carbon chains the the useful thing of some of these CO2 conversion processes essentially it's modified fissure tropes or reverse water gas shift maybe with the carbonate cal is followed by fissure tropes is that we can make a variety of different compounds including all of these for example that could be helpful in other sectors as well one attractive fuels from fuel from CO2 is methanol it is nowadays made already partly from CO2 it's mostly SINGA so it's CO and CO2 and hydrogen the exciting discoveries in the last few years are the fact that there are selective calories that can take you directly from a mixture of CO2 and hydrogen into methanol and now methanol is being considered as a lower carbon fuel for large-scale applications such as shipping so we had Marsk CTO a few months ago here on Stanford campus telling us that Marsk which is one of the largest shipping companies in the world is considering moving to methanol from CO2 for their ships in order to reduce the carbon emissions from their their shipping again remember that that CO2 is going to go back into the atmosphere and we still need energy to make methanol but this could could still save us some carbon emissions the fact is that if we think about how to pack more energy and increase the energy density methanol is not the best alternative for from CO2 one other alternative would be to create larger molecules and higher alcohols directly from CO2 and I put a long table in there so forget about the rest but focus on that red box over there those are reactions that would take you from CO2 to higher alcohols especially ethanol ethanol is a compound that is used already as a fuel in in the world in Brazil in particular there are internal combustion engines that can run 100% on ethanol we use ethanol in the US as well blended with gasoline through fermentation though so the economic and the carbon emission proposition for fermentation ethanol are not as strong but if we could make ethanol from CO2 directly atrogenation then ethanol could be a much more reliable alternative compared to methanol the problem is that getting to that extra carbon from methanol to ethanol is very very challenging and this is another graph showing to the right of that y-axis the ratio between ethanol and methanol because in principle every time you have calories that can make ethanol they can also make methanol and that ratio is always almost unavoidably less than one it doesn't matter what system this is so the key is how do we selectively make ethanol from CO2 hydrogenation and the reason is in that schematic on the top right you have to combine reduced moieties like such as CH3 and oxidized moieties such as CO in a single step to couple and to form the ethanol molecule so the control of surface reactions is crucial and for the last three to four years in my group we designed materials that can do just that and I cannot reveal too many details of this because the project is still ongoing but basically we found the right combination of key elements that would provide us with a selectivity towards ethanol that is without taking CO into consideration 100% so that's the top right graph over there we make only ethanol there's no methanol traces that we produce at a relatively decent CO2 conversion of 7 to 8 percent and with relatively high stability although we ran the system for only a short amount of time so there are opportunities to directly make ethanol from CO2 by tuning the calories the properties of catalytic surfaces last I want to just mention aviation fuel I think it is important to keep in mind that again electrification will not potentially reach every transportation sector and despite the fact that there are companies startup companies demonstrating short flights with battery powered airplanes it is reasonable to imagine that we will need aviation fuel and then one opportunity is what if we get aviation fuel from waste so there are a lot of opportunities these days in taking plastics that are a problem on their own certainly we benefit very much in our daily lives from resistant plastics robust plastics but what if we could take recycled plastics and convert them into chemicals and one opportunity is here polystyrene which is one of the most used plastics contains some of the chemical molecules or chemical fragments that are part of the quite complex mixture of aviation fuel so there are now researchers including our group as well they're looking at turning recycled plastics such as polystyrene into into aviation fuel and aviation and jet fuel so these are some opportunities of how to continue to use the basically the carriers that we know and we love already today but making them in a different way or using them in in some other way so with that I think we have now the chance to start the panel all right everyone so in a moment we're going to open up the Q&A to the audience so you know you saw some amazing science and engineering that's happening here covering biology chemistry engineering different types of reactions are there gave a great example of using biology to make oils do you want to talk about using some of the most powerful x-ray techniques out there to look at chemistry and particularly materials under the true reaction conditions and how they evolved to understand them and make them better matt talked about a great example in his lab of developing catalysts that address challenges that hopefully will get things to commercialization for converting carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide and if you can do that that opens up a whole kit of possibilities for making fuels and energy carriers matt they all talked about taking that the next step further if you with that as a feed making things like ethanol methanol hydrocarbons you also touch base in a couple of other processes waste of fuels as well as methane pyrolysis and using you know natural gas directly to make hydrogen in your even though you're using a hydrocarbon feedstock you can bury that carbon or make use of that carbon to make nanotubes and have clean hydrogen so lots of we covered lots of technology space here and there's other things that we're all working on that we didn't have a chance to pack in there so love to field for you all to ask questions so they can field your any thoughts that you may have on the matter I'll just leave things off really with asking a question about barriers of all the things that were discussed today great science great progress still clearly some barriers to kind of get things into the commercial world I was just hoping any of you asking anyone on the panel we can have everyone chime in on this or just one or two what do you all see as some of the barriers in your space or in related spaces that we need to be thinking about maybe not just from the scientific perspective but more broadly who would like to take a first stab at that one Matt go ahead please I mean so first of all just talking about fuels just the the scale of production required to to make an impact on the sustainability of fuels is so large that the capital equipment needs are so massive the the planning the time the lead times the supply chains etc create a barrier for getting a new technology from let's say basically technical de-risking to to implementation and and that you know that makes it challenging to to really understand what the what the most impactful problems are so it's I think just that the reality of the the scale that that needs to be addressed that's part of the reason why I think it's important to try to have a good understanding of of existing assets and the possibility of repurposing some of those existing assets to get that to get over that that entry barrier so that you can go from the de-risk technology to an actual commercial technology to then enable the financing of the the you know the number of plants needed to to really make an impact yeah great response thank you Matt yeah Martha in talking about biofuels it's a it's it is a difficult proposition and part of the difficulty for the prop for actually generating high volumes of biofuels is that if you're doing it in a pond outside there's light penetrating and it's filling up with algae in that pond and ultimately you get to a point where the light is being absorbed out the algae are no longer growing because they just have enough energy to sustain themselves and when you get to that point it's generally very low density one gram per liter maybe and so you have to deal with getting those densities of cells up higher now people have done some of this with bags that are lined up in a vertical way that are very thin and can absorb the light better and could generate higher densities to some extent and but then there's the problem of light being also lethal a very damaging effect that is when pigments absorb light if the light energy is not used quickly it can actually reduce it could generate electrons that reduce oxygen and you develop reactive oxygen species and that could damage the cell very seriously and so the cells themselves have evolved something called non-photochemical quenching where they could actually eliminate that high light energy when you get very high as heat through vibrational states and various molecules like carotenoids so that means even in a water column if you put on very high light it's causing damage to the cells on top and it's still not getting through enough to really create densities that are high so you have to somehow improve the efficiency of photosynthesis and you have to improve the ability of the cells to detoxify light or to use that light more productively to produce biomass or oils now even if you do that which you can do so there have been ways to alter non-photochemical quenching to make it better in terms of light utilization but even if you do that you're still getting damaged to the cells to some extent so the cells have to repair the photosynthetic apparatus which is being damaged and if you could make a photosynthetic apparatus that is more resilient to damage or that eliminates reactive oxygen much more quickly you could improve that process as well so there are many challenges to getting biofuels to be actually sustainable and to be at a scale that is required. Cool Matto did you want to chime in? Sure I think just in general thinking about some of the challenges there's clearly scientific challenges that are specific for each individual project I think at the end of the day as scientists we have to face the challenge of cost and especially when Arthur was talking about biofuel that reminded me of when I started doing research and it was around like 2004-2005 this is back in Italy and we had a speaker talking about at that time I think the oil barrel was at like hundred dollars or so it was it went up by a lot in the space of just a year or so and this speaker was talking about the opportunities for chemistry to come up with different ways to make the fuels that we need at potentially similar comparable costs of oil and that was the case with biofuels I think at some point biofuels were really something promising because also the cost seemed to be matching with the increasing cost of oil now things have changed again and they will change but we have to find a way to decarbonize the the systems that we have while at the same time ensuring that the cost will not be higher than what we're paying today for the same types of fuels so that's something that we have to keep in mind absolutely I have a question for Joanna if I may the things that you presented really can cut across so many different domains and one thing that I've been really enthusiastic to see things that you've been pushing is you know you take these techniques which really work well in what we call the x-situ world which means you know out of its reaction environment it's static we can study them using these x-ray techniques that's hard enough as it is and you know that development has been amazing and you've been really pushing the frontiers to really look at systems as they're operating we've come a long way it seems like there's a way to go to get to looking at an organism under irradiation a biological organism like floating in water making oils or some of the chemistries of materials that Matt and Mateo were talking about how far are we how much farther do we need to go where do you see the advantage of applying these techniques to teach us the things that we need so that we can figure out what's working what's not working and make things better yeah so I think the the advantages goes back to these barriers the the scientific questions that are preventing us from for example making um you know some material do some catalytic reaction that we'd like to or why is this failing why do we have coking things like that that is sort of the driving force on why we've been trying to push this in situ characterization I don't I don't know if I would say that there's an end I I think the path I see it as going from really basic fundamental science questions where we've fully control the environment to realistic systems can we put can we get to a point where I'm putting realistic systems um from the field you know and and and and characterizing them maybe not with x-rays maybe with something else but characterizing exactly what's going on inside them um and really understanding the bottlenecks of a functioning system I think that's where the direction of the field is going at least that's where I think it's most interesting outstanding so why don't we take a moment now and open it up to the q and a thank you all for the answering my questions open to the audience we already have a question here if we can get a microphone here in the center so it's a question for Mateo and it's the value chain of recycled plastics so clearly we have a plastics problem and like you have a very high value stream in conversion to those plastics into useful product like aviation fuel but the simplicity of just recycling plastics into more plastics how do you compare those two and sort of the simplicity or difficulty of those processes and the value to go to that higher value product like an aviation fuel yeah that's a very good question so if I understand it correctly it's like comparing recycling the plastics the way they are compared to doing okay so there are so many issues about the mechanical recycling of plastics in the sense that most plastics cannot be mechanically recycled recycled the way they are so for example if we start from a plastic x will not end up with the same quality of plastics for very many different reasons so it's hard like it's hard to compare mechanical with chemical recycling now the chemical recycling is extremely complex because the variety of products that can be made from the processes that we do today is just very very broad the dream would be to take a plastic and convert it back into its constituent monomer so that we can remake the same plastic over and over again but we're not there yet for anything other than pt a polyethylene terephthalate just for because of the nature of the chemical bonds that is in there so then the idea is can we do plastic upcycling so rather than converting it back into the same plastic can we make some other chemical compounds that could have higher values and now that's an opportunity for aviation fuel for example because the reason is that aviation fuel is on one side more expensive than more valuable than a mixture of hydrocarbons on the other side because of the carbon proposition and the fact that we want to reduce carbon emissions and that is one opportunity biofuels are also being investigated as an opportunity to make lower carbon emission aviation fuels and that can be another alternative in terms of the if you want tech and economic analysis one thing that for sure I can tell you right now is that there's no single process in the plastic upcycling word word that would make sense other than pure pyrolysis into mixture basically of syngas and other small hydrocarbons and then do something with that right now most of the chemical companies are looking at that as the only profitable way to make value from waste plastics so there's a long way to go before we can see this really happen great thank you for the question the response Montello there's a question over here thank you it seems to me that you're all operating under the assumption that you have to match the price the current price of fossil fuels to make new solutions be competitive but those prices don't include externalities like health or environmental impacts or the cost of military to protect you know sources of fuels or wars things like that so do we need to have a public policy side that puts a cap on pollution and puts a price on carbon to equalize the playing field yeah who'd like to dress that one go ahead matt yeah sure I guess I see it as you know our job is to create options for technologies that have a carbon benefit and ideally the greatest carbon benefit at the lowest renewable energy input right and and any technology that's going to be relevant it's going to be dominated by the energy cost and so hopefully there's there's basically a palette of options for deploying you know renewable energy to to affect some carbon benefit for fuels you know in my opinion some of the liquid fuels you just can't really replace those on a timescale that that most people are talking about with with respect to avoiding climate tipping points for example and so so creating them from alternative sources is one way of decarbonizing them there will be a significant there's a significant minimum energy required to do that for thermodynamic reasons and then you try to get as close as possible that's what's going to dictate the cost it's going to come close I mean you know depending on your cost of renewable electricity it could come close you know to parity with with fossil but I think the more relevant question is what is the cost of some other decarbonization technology to have the same carbon benefit in other words I can either pay for sustainable aviation or I can pay for really good offsets that I know are permanently removed carbon and and you know from a pure carbon perspective in my opinion you should you know you should pay you know the lowest price for the most carbon benefit so so that that's really what this is about is just creating options for decarbonizing things ideally in multiple ways and then and then the best way we'll win oh go ahead Mateo yeah for me out to that I agree with everything that that Matt has said and we'd also like the question what price can we put to the carbon that is not the one just going into the fuels that we make and it's a very tough question to answer I think as scientists we need to there's it can vary quite drastically depending on the location on the where we are on the planet so at the end of the day we have to develop technologies that can take us at least to cost parity the way the the cost that we have nowadays with I think with a very good chance that in the near future there will be a cost that will a price that will be given to carbon if that leaves the fuel and gets into into the atmosphere right now we don't know what that right now there's no regulation there's no policy it's hard to imagine that even if that policy is being enacted in one country for example in the US or in Europe there are European countries that are far ahead in that sense there will be uniform and homogeneous and even in terms of energy justice the idea is to develop technologies that can take us at least to cost parity the way they are right now then if in the future it will be a fantastic thing if we can agree on a cost for carbon that will make these technologies even more economical than the the old technologies I think that's a win-win going back to how to manage about the carbon I think it's important to keep in mind that we need to do both at the same time we need to find ways to store the carbon and find ways to decarbonize at the same the same time that's important to do it I'll go ahead add in the thought and then we'll take the next question maybe we can bring the microphone over here but the comment I wanted to make was I really appreciate that question naturally you're talking to a panel of technologists we have plenty of other scholars and other parts of campus who just as much as we are all thinking about the technology side are really thinking about the policy side from a 30 000 foot view I used to to think of this as an engineer myself that if I could come up with tech that was cleaner greener faster better cheaper that we can solve this problem I've come to realize that innovation and technology is not enough we need innovation in policy we need innovation in finance and innovation in business models innovation in society that is willing to adapt and to adopt we need all of these things and that's also what I think is really exciting about nucleating this new school the Stanford Door School of Sustainability that now we have scholars who would nominally in all these different disciplines be in different schools and then Stanford's kind of decentralized world there are modes of communication but too few and far between now co-located under one roof can work together to figure out not to how to engineer tech but how to engineer society in all these different ways how do you create new markets for carbon how do you create new finance models for new companies that are based on brand new technologies instead of the incumbents there's just so many questions that need to be unpacked and we need to figure out how that works holistically because if everyone independently optimizes we can be pretty sure that the pieces of those puzzles won't fit quite right so we need to get them fitting every step along the way thank you for your question super question over here thank you so I want to take in a little different direction and instead of talking about parity with carbon-intensive fuels perhaps the question is there's a portfolio of technologies that can contribute to decarbonization and they are all in play and two factors that can drive the cost down because cost ultimately is the something that needs to come down is one scale which is maybe not technology question that just the size question and the second one is technological innovation uh and the question to the panelists I have is that is there a way to put these pathways next to each other and evaluate the if you will those learning curves that ultimately are going to drive down those costs because a lot of what we are projecting forward is really a function of what we think is going to happen with these costs and we all know we can all go back and look at the solar and other technologies but it does come down to whether it's 10 percent 15 percent 20 percent or whatever number there is and my guess is that these numbers will vary widely they will vary less likely they will vary less for the scaling up because scale is a scale and they will probably vary more for technology element so since this is technology conversation I was wondering whether you have thoughts about what of these pathways are more promising in terms of technological driven cost reduction great question that's Arthur you're gonna say something go ahead yeah I I think in terms of biofuels it's um it's often more expensive than even people say it is when you really do it and go through the numbers and figure it out um but there are some some technologies that might change the game one technology that has been used actually that brings down the cost is not using sunlight directly to grow the algae but growing them in 200 000 liter fermenters on sugars now you have to pay for the sugars and of course that may not be sustainable to use so much sugars but it's much cheaper to do that do it on sugars because the density on some of these algae can get so high on the order of 300 grams per liter which is actually amazing and it can only work because 85 percent is oil and it's not hydratable right so that you'll have to harvest much less to get much more of the oil the second thing that would change that would change the playing field a lot is if that oil were excreted from the cell which we know batria caucus can do and if it formed um a phase separation if we could break the emulsion then we just scoop it off the top and it's pretty cheap so those would be types of technologies that i think would change the game quite a bit okay other thoughts from the panel yeah i can comment just from the hydrogen perspective so um you need a you know about rounding up a little bit you know half a ton of hydrogen per ton of jet fuel that you're going to make from carbon dioxide okay that includes the hydrogen in the fuel plus the hydrogen in the water from reacting to co2 um and so at you know at at roughly sorry at two dollars a kilogram the hydrogen cost for making the fuel is basically the the cost of the fuel today right and so so then what is what are all of the and hydrogen includes the energy this is in this is in a scenario where all the energy goes into making the hydrogen it is downhill from hydrogen co2 to the fuel so that that you know the people i'm sure here it's certainly yesterday that that know a lot more about about the trajectories for hydrogen they can tell you how realistic it is to get to two dollars a kg but but you know i think my personal opinion it is feasible if you know the manufacturing capacity for electrolyzers are built out aggressively and basically people continue to place bets on big projects to sort of create the the market pool to scale that up and then i think it it becomes it becomes feasible um to to imagine generating hydrocarbon fuels you know competitive i would say to to fossil one last thing to add yet i would also take the the example of the electrolyzers scale it is known that as you start making things on a larger scale there's a learning curve so you start learning how to be more efficient and that could be applied to several different areas of new energy vectors and carriers there are however sometimes some limitations to that scale which is when the materials of construction potentially could be the limiting factor and that is one where it's not the only or the main limiting factor but in the case of electrolyzers that's one thing that we have to consider is that we're still running them with relatively precious metals so as we are learning how to make more and more of these electrolyzers the price is coming down but eventually resources other other elements will play a role in that scale up as well great why don't we move on to the next question who has the mic this question right here yeah great panel akshay sani from chevron my question is around what key enabling digital technologies for example high performance computing quantum advances in data science are you all using or plan to use in the coming years to accelerate technology developments in in your areas great question juana you want to start with sure i'll i'll talk about an example for what we've done with x-rays not me personally but we've done it at the synchrotron is whether we can use machine learning to rapidly analyze the data coming out and feed in the sort of new parameter space that you would like to explore so you can either so we've done this on rare earth magnets looking at different chemistries and characterizing them very rapidly we can also have done this on the catalyst space of doing the synthesis on the beam line characterizing with x-rays and then letting the machine decide what tweaks to the catalytic reaction are we going to do to sort of target and end case that we're looking for great other examples what are there yeah i could give you a very simplistic a very early example of this when i was working with a company called soul design we decided to tailor the oils we wanted to know how to tailor the oils and we knew there were about 50 genes that we could identify which were involved in making these oils and lipid biosynthesis and so we made mutants in various genes and we got outputs we figured out how much oil the quality of the oil and after we got enough information we asked the computer how do we make cocoa butter how do we adjust the fatty acids on the triacylglycerides to make palm oil and the computer would give us an answer eliminate this enzyme bring up this one and i would say after we had done it with 50 genes and we went through a couple of iterations it was 50 to 70 percent accurate in what it told us so it certainly gave us the right direction most of the time i'd say that great question love the question these are there's nothing like building capabilities and tools that can help like raise rise the tide for all boats so some of the things that we've been working on in suncat for one is just you think about catalysis we heard a lot about chemical transformations today you have bio catalysis homogeneous catalysis heterogeneous catalysis electric catalysis photo catalysis all these different camps of catalysis at the end of the day you're breaking bonds and you're making bonds to produce fuels and chemicals so we're working on a project really trying to to take data science from a lot of different reactions a lot of different types of catalysts and put it within a single database and hopefully make it created in a scalable way that isn't just working within the suncat domain but also can be portable to the outside if you take you know just my research lab it would take 500 years worth of experimental data to fill up a database that has all the diversity of materials and reaction space but if you took 500 labs across the globe and one year's worth of data maybe maybe we can we can get it that way but that only works if people are willing to make use of a tool where they can put their data in a place that that is sensible so that's one of the approaches that we have to data science we have other types of projects I could dive into but I do want to address that the high performance computing and quantum computing where you know the I'd say that what I have seen in the last 20 years in terms of modeling these types of processes you know sure the computational power is better today than it was 20 years ago we all know that but I think it's really the the the what's in the model that counts you know really calculating the right things and taking the right approach and then of course with faster computers that benefits everything but if your model is fundamentally flawed you could have a machine that's a million times faster it'll just be a million times faster giving you the wrong result and so you know really coming up with the right types of models right where I think we've come a really long way understanding salvation effects how water for instance the dynamics of a water molecule that it interface can can impact a reaction pathway now that we have the models better than now I think we're in a the best position to take advantage of high performance computing and ultimately quantum computing so now we can look at not maybe a hundred atoms but can we look at a million atoms right which starts to resemble all more characteristic length scales and time scales in in these processes super I think we have time for maybe one more question in the back is that Jimmy I made an arrangement with Jimmy earlier I'd guarantee no I didn't I'm just kidding no no such arrangements go ahead Jimmy yeah thank you Tom so the question is really around you know we've had a lot of activity in the policy space with the IRA infrastructure bill just a question to the general panel then if you could identify an additional area that you really think it's necessary to really jump start this in policy what would that be maybe can I ask you for more definition on the question there Jimmy I'm sorry to jump start what exactly the adoption of these renewable fuels fuel carriers you know this just part of that equation the rich question if you guys were like the policy god there we go you're writing the law yeah okay and you were saying okay this is the additional thing we need what would that be any takers any budding policy makers here I mean I I can't speak to any sort of sophisticated policy proposal but but I think sort of simplicity in incentivizing you know basically a carbon benefit right so it's if that's the goal then policy that rewards any technology that affords a carbon benefit and rewards it more if it if it provides that benefit at lower inputs lower resource inputs that's the ideal how to implement that what that looks like specifically and then and then how you could possibly hope to to get that to succeed politically I don't know but but to me that's what good policy would look like in this space so anybody who has an idea on how to do something to create a ultimately an emissions avoided or eliminated or whatever we want to talk about it but it you know can be quantified in a clear and transparent way they are able to to take advantage of that and I'm not quite sure that that we're there yet with the policy that we have from an outsider's point of view I would say that I don't I don't think there's one answer yet I don't see that that you know there's one clear solution like in photovoltaics there's a clear solution so I think a policy that promotes competition between budding startups that you know provides a a mechanism where cost isn't an issue in those first few years I think can be beneficial Arthur yeah I might say you know as as a species we really do a lot of patching up right we make a mistake we create a patch and I think we don't consider the long-term consequences and the unsuspected consequences enough we get so excited about the achievements that we create and the power of those achievements that we don't look to the future enough so I think there needs to be more examination of the long-term consequences I'm sure we still would have gone to gasoline even though we knew some of those long-term consequences early on but I think that is something we should take examine much more carefully Mateo yeah I just wanted to say I think at the end of the day it boils down to carbon whether it's like energy efficiency efficiency and transformations are used but it is like based on carbon it's nothing it's nothing new for policy though so we don't know what you to suggest and maybe my thought on that one would be that I think there's a short-term aspect a medium term aspect and a long-term aspect and all of us up here and many in the room the sustainability is something that we're after and for something to be sustainable and it's an interesting word actually there's no crisp definition that I've seen that that people commonly use I think we all define it in our way to me an important part of sustainability and for something to be sustainable it needs to be financially sustainable and I think relying on governments forever to to keep that going is probably not where we want to be if we want expect this thing to work in perpetuity what governments can certainly do through policy is get things on the rails get things going push things ahead try to get things to compete against incumbent technologies that have had all the advantage over the last century without having to necessarily think through all the things that we were thinking about today like environmental justice and energy justice and the externalities that were brought up earlier so my hope is that governments can come up with frameworks at the domestic and international levels they can help get these get these things off into the right direction and ultimately have these technologies compete head to head on a on a financial basis so let me wrap up with one final thought I want to thank our panelists first let's give them a warm thank you I've been inspired by their work in all these different domains lots a long way to go but we've seen a lot of progress in creating new energy carriers and new fuels we love electrification we're going to need more than that and hopefully you can share some of that inspiration and we'll carry that forward