 Good afternoon and welcome to today's energy seminar. I'm very excited to introduce our speaker today, our own Tom Hormio, professor of chemical engineering photonics here at Stanford and the director of the Suncat Center for interface science and catalysis. His lab does the cutting edge catalysis work which I understand is ways to convert electricity into chemicals and vice versa. His lab has done cutting edge scientific work but also in recent years led to a number of innovative energy startups. I'll come back to that in a second. This is a personal nice event for me because the very first energy seminar was responsible for September 21st, 2015. The speaker was the same professor, Tom Hormio, update us on what he said then. And fortunately for me, he knocked the ball out of the park and it was very well received. So I started out with a bang. He also though set up high bar for all the subsequent speakers. I don't know how that works out. Now, since then he's done a couple of panels for the energy seminar but not a solo talk. But perhaps more importantly, as I mentioned, students in his lab have gone on to do many innovative startups. And we did have last November at Natasha Cave, a former student in the Armeo lab talk about Opus 12 which is of the five or six startups. There may be more by today that Tom's lab has found probably the furthest along and gotten the most money and the most publicity. So with that said, Tom Hormio who does both excellent science and is here to change the world or produce students who will do so Tom. Well, thank you very much, John for such the warm introduction, such a kind introduction. And it really is my pleasure to be part of this energy seminar. And it's just, it's been around for a good amount of time which is really an indication of being part of this Stanford community that has been caring very much about energy and sustainability and related matters. And it's just really an honor and a privilege to be part of this community and to be able to speak with you all today. The theme of today is catalyzing a sustainable future. We'll talk about what that means and more particularly developing new processes for the chemical and energy sectors. Lots of energy in the fuels and chemicals industry and we'll talk about what the challenges are, what the opportunities are. And I hope there's something for everyone in this talk today. We'll be talking at a high level kind of framing what some of those challenges are. We'll talk about some of the technical economics behind some of the new technologies that might be in the future. We'll talk about some of the, we'll deep dive into some of the techy stuff, some of the science and engineering that we're working on to satiate the appetite of those of you working in these technical areas as well. So hopefully a little bit for everyone. And I'd like to start really by thanking and acknowledging the tremendous team that I get to work with every single day. And this is at the Suncat Center for Interface Science and Catalysis. It's a partnership between Stanford University as well as Slack National Accelerator Labs. I hold joint appointments on faculty both on Stanford and at Slack. And I serve as the director of this fantastic organization which is just over 10 years old. And the idea is to bring together a research personnel from both institutions to really work towards these very challenging problems of understanding interface phenomena for the science-based design of catalysts and to provide solutions for sustainable processes. And so as you can see here, we have a number of Stanford faculty that are involved directly that are really kind of at the core of the center. A lot of Slack personnel as well and many collaborators, just a few listed here coming from the Slack and Stanford community and a few from abroad as well from outside of our local community. And the goal here is really again as we approach challenges in catalysis, problems in energy and sustainability. It's really one of the fundamental tenets of the center is to bring together theory and experiment. So it's really grounded on a lot of theory that's coming of different flavors and types but a lot of the modeling that's done in the center is really at the atomic and molecular level. And that really feeds into the design of real materials and real systems that we synthesize using a broad range of techniques. We characterize them using a very wide range of tools as well, some of those tools are on Stanford campus. And we also have the powers of a national lab that we can bring to bear on these challenges, things like a synchrotron and a free electron laser to study using some really sophisticated tools and very difficult things to be able to see things that are very difficult to normally observe. Then of course we test things and understand the efficacy of these different catalysts and these different processes and feed it right back into the theory. And we wrap it all with a cozy blanket of data science and trying to make the most out of the data that we collect. So before I start diving into what the future might be maybe a moment to reflect on the world as we know it. And I wanted to share with you what I view as one of the greatest successes in the history of humankind. And that is really the modern fuels and chemistry, chemicals industry as we know it. And so you look at these molecules, things like hydrogen, things like ammonia, gasoline and plastics. And we might have different reactions as we just look at these different types of molecules. But let me tell you that these are the molecules that have allowed us to be so successful as human beings to lead us to the quality of life that many of us have and not everybody. But if you're on the Zoom call, probably, right? So hydrogen, take a look at hydrogen. You don't go to the store and buy any hydrogen but you sure buy products that have that hydrogen in it. That hydrogen comes almost entirely from fossil fuels. And we produce it at a rate of 65, maybe now 70 billion kilograms per year. And I like this unit of billions of kilograms per year because you can just divide by the seven or so billion people on earth. And that gives you about nine kilos per person per year. And that's about 20 pounds of, you know 20 pounds of hydrogen is which if you average across the face of the globe is what each of us accounts for in terms of global hydrogen demand. And those of us, again, who are on the Zoom call are probably using more than our fair share of those 20 pounds because there are billions of people who use very, very little of that at all. Now, where does that hydrogen go? It goes into really two major processes, oil refining, as you can see down here as well as ammonia production. Ammonia is at 180 billion kilograms a year in climbing. And this is a very important molecule. This is the molecule that is the key ingredient in fertilizer. So about half the fixed nitrogen in your body right now half the fixed nitrogen in your body touched one of these iron nanoparticles sitting inside of one of these Haber-Bosch facilities one of a few hundred around the globe where we take hydrogen that comes from fossil fuels added to the nitrogen that we're all breathing right now to ultimately make that ammonia and send it around and put it into agricultural fields. We grow crops, we can either get the crops directly or eat the animals that eat the crops. So one way or the other that's how half the fixed nitrogen enters our body. Now that hydrogen also goes into oil refining it's basically taking crude oil which is called crude for a reason. And hydrogen is a very key ingredient to upgrading that to be able to make things like jet fuel or gasoline or diesel or lubricants all kinds of different important molecules that we use every single day. And then here's the Houston ship channel and these are where there's a lot of chemical plants doing a lot of different important things in terms of large scale chemical and fuels manufacturing. And the plastics industry of course is massive and ripe for reinvention as well 300 billion kilograms a year and climbing. So you just take a look at a few of these examples and again, these are just a few examples of the many different molecules on earth that we utilize which is about 70,000 in case you were wondering 70,000 different products are made across the globe to fit different needs and different markets with different sizes. And it's amazing and astounding how that system works and we take the resources that Mother Nature gave us and scientists and engineers have come together to come up with a scheme to process those grab stuff from the ground or from the air or from wherever and be able to make products that are needed across the globe and get it to where it needs to be and all at fairly cost effective prices. Now there are many issues with that system having said that, having explained a little bit of what I appreciate about it of the many challenges there one of them is that these processes that we're looking at are driven really by fossil fuels and fossil fuels are intrinsically not sustainable. So these are unsustainable processes in the long run. So that's one challenge that we need to address. And another challenge is equity. And while there are billions of people that get to leverage the processes that we're looking at right now there are billions that don't. And that's also an issue that we need to think about in terms of providing access for all. So that really motivates coming up with some new ways of making the molecules that we need in a more sustainable and accessible manner. And good luck. That is really, really hard to do because we as human beings have done such a good job to develop all the tech that we have in place right now. But there are some forces at play that are pointing in the right direction. And one of them is the dropping price of renewable electricity. I imagine that at this stage this is not news to anybody on the line right now but certainly worth being really clear that the last decade has seen just absolutely remarkable drops in the price of renewable electricity whether you're looking at wind on the left or solar on the right we're talking about around four cents, a kilowatt hour and it continues to drop. So a decade, two decade, three decades ago the thought of using say renewable electricity as a sustainable source of energy to drive some of these chemical transformations might have seen ludicrous now that's actually in play. And so the question is goodness, okay great how can we make use of this renewable electricity if we want a hot swap electricity coming from a conventional source versus say wind or solar to power say my refrigerator? Okay that seems like a pretty straightforward challenge it's not as straightforward as I make it sound but it's something that uses electricity naturally but what if you want to make chemical products you want to make fuels you want to make fertilizers you want to make molecules you want to make plastics you want to make things sustainable you want to use this renewable electricity we can't eat the electrons we have to put that electricity into a process that ultimately makes the ammonia which is that then what goes in our body and provides the fixed nitrogen that we need. So how are you going to use that renewable electricity? This is what's going to allow us to provide grid scale storage of renewable electricity if we can pull that off and actually make products and integrate renewables more into our system. Now I've got good news for you it turns out that there are some already scaled up industrial processes that use electricity reasonably well. I'll give you some examples here of scaled up industrial processes on the left this is aluminum electro refining every time you grab a can of soda that aluminum was not something that was mined as an aluminum metal from the earth that came in as an ore it was a metal oxide, a complex oxide I'm just going to call it aluminum oxide just to make the chemistry simple here and we need to turn that into aluminum metal so how do we do that? It's we put in electricity and we've been doing it for a long time here's a plant in Louisiana that was doing this many decades ago it has since been shut down but there are other facilities more modern facilities that have come up you can see the scale of the humans here in this large warehouse full of these banks of electrolyzer the grabbing electricity it came from natural gas in this particular case back in the day and we make about 60 billion kilograms a year of aluminum from this process where basically this process is designed to electrolyze the aluminum oxide which means really stripping the oxygen off of the aluminum oxide sticking it onto carbon emitting CO2 but you get your aluminum metal here that you can process. So again about 60 billion kilograms a year we've already talked about what kind of scale that is massive and that's about a hundred gigawatts on average of electricity goes into global aluminum production a hundred gigawatts just for a frame of reference a typical nuclear reactor is about one gigawatts so that's about a hundred nuclear reactors powering this type of a process. Other molecules that we might care about is a process called chloralkali or brine electrolysis brine is very heavily saturated salt water very high concentration salt water so we take that sodium chloride and water and we electrolyze it to make sodium hydroxide base as well as chlorine with a little bit of hydrogen emerges as well and so again you don't go to the store typically and buy sodium hydroxide or buy chlorine my lab buys it you probably don't but that these are very important molecules that we use for so many products out there next time you touch a bar of soap you probably base was used in that process if you pick up a piece of PVC pipe or if you grab a credit card then chlorine was used in that process as well as many can you can see the scales here water electrolysis of course another process out there definitely industrialized large scale I grabbed these photos of plants that have been around for many, many decades really just to show that it's been around for a while the technology's been around for a while but still there's massive opportunities to make it better to really make it cost competitive and that's what we'll be talking about momentarily in this case this is water electrolysis really for the production of hydrogen so this is coming from Norway and back in the day this is how Norway was making their hydrogen which then fed into the Haber-Bosch plants to make their ammonia so with fossil fuels coming onto the scene in a big way and processes becoming more cost effective there it became more sensible from a cost standpoint a fiduciary cost standpoint to go with hydrogen derived from fossil fuels instead for the Haber-Bosch facilities now this type of concept is coming very much back into fashion so this is just to show you that this is not pie-in-the-sky chemistry or engineering by any stretch this has been done but the question is can we make processes like these cheap enough to compete with fossil fuel conventional processes number one and number two this is just a few different examples of molecules that we've made and atoms and metals through these types of electrolysis process can we make all 70,000 or at least enough of the 70,000 that we can actually meet global sustainability goals so that's the challenge and how do we create that paradigm so one important equation here is that if you make it you have to be able to at least compete cost effectively with it it's just one of the major one of the many domains that we need to think about in terms of developing new processes and so I show you this very simple equation that the production cost dollars per kilogram is gonna be equal to the capital expenditures dollars per kilogram plus the operational expenditures dollars per kilogram and for a lot of these molecules that we're talking about a good frame of references around 50 cents to a dollar per kilogram which you've really think about a kilogram of stuff two pounds of stuff for 50 cents to a dollar that sounds pretty cheap and that's where most of these molecules are some of course north of that some are south of that but that's a good ballpark to give you an idea so how do we get there I think we have four key ingredients we're gonna need some really inexpensive electricity I showed you were down about four cents a kilowatt hour if we can get down to more like one to two cents a kilowatt hour that will open up the aperture for products in a very substantial way even at four cents there's a lot that we can do no question about it but if it gets down to one to two cents we're even in better shape we might need some inexpensive energy storage I put down here about $10 a kilowatt hour the idea is that a lot of these chemical processes they're really not designed to be operating kind of eight to four every day they're designed to be running 24, seven, 365 and so perhaps some energy storage to load balance that feed of electricity would be really helpful here and this is about a factor of 10x cheaper than what our current state-of-the-art is today in terms of lithium ion batteries so a long way to go but this would certainly help in any of these processes if you're looking to make a carbon-based product then you need a feedstock for carbon that is sustainable and so wouldn't be lovely if we could get it from CO2 and CO2 we can find in lots of places you can, there are some point sources of CO2 out there of course it's in the atmosphere every stream of CO2 out there every possible stream has its own set of challenges to be able to purify it and put it into a process but so we need to capture it cheaply and so if you can get it cheap down to say $30 a ton these are all aspirational numbers I'm presenting on this slide but these are the types of numbers that could really flip the switch and make these processes much more viable and then finally you need the box that you feed all the stuff into and you can actually do the chemical conversions and make the products that you want so that box that let's say if you can get it about down to 20 cents per kilogram cap X that feed you feed in water you feed in carbon dioxide you feed in nitrogen whatever your feedstock molecules are hopefully it's something nice and abundant across the globe then you can just kind of feed this stuff in and do your conversions and get out an output price that is somewhere in that 50 cents to a dollar regime which can make it instantaneously cost competitive so there are many researchers here at Stanford, Slack other places that are working in different domains here what I'll be focusing on today is really these types of chemical processes that do the conversions and very importantly the catalyst that are the ones that are actually doing the chemical transformations and so this is kind of our view of what the future could be it's a subset of possibilities we're looking at different types of chemical transformations certainly using renewable electricity to electro-catalyze transformations using sunlight directly to power transformations you can either make the molecules that you want instantaneously whether it's fertilizers or fuels or you can maybe feed in these molecules into more conventional temperature and pressure different driven reactions and reactors that can then make the products that you want so there's a whole opportunity to kind of create a new set of technologies that will make a big difference in terms of energy and sustainability ahead so there are three types of molecules that I want to talk about today hydrogen, carbon-based products and we'll wrap it up with ammonia so let's start with hydrogen first and we're gonna get our hydrogen from water and so let me start with some technical economics there's a technical economic analysis done by a company called Proton Onsite they're located in Connecticut they were recently bought out by NEL the Norwegian electrolysis company and they're the long-standing player in water electrolysis technologies and what Proton really focuses on as part of their startup part of their technology is focusing on PEM water electrolysis or proton exchange membrane water electrolysis is based on an acid membrane napion as opposed to the conventional water electrolyzers these days that are alkaline and so this is Proton's technical economics saying hey if we can meet all of our goals in developing this technology this is what a chemical facility looks like a chemical plant looks like that makes hydrogen looks very different than that steam methane reforming plant that I showed you a few slides back which is the conventional technology in this case you're feeding in water feeding in electricity and these electrolyzers these banks of gray boxes you see here are what are splitting that water into hydrogen and oxygen but of course you need more than the reactor chemical engineering 101 you know plant design 101 says you start by designing the reactor and then you gotta build out the balance of plant you need water management you need power management you need hydrogen management you need all kinds of safety and controls et cetera et cetera and they cost it out they came out with a if you're making say 50 tons a day of hydrogen it would cost about 50 to 60 cents per kilogram H2 if they kind of met all the goals that they're aiming for in terms of of their technology roadmap now this looks pretty good it's you know this is the capital cost this does not account for the electricity cost and just to give you an idea of why it's so important to have one or two cents a kilowatt hour of electricity one kilogram of hydrogen requires about 40 kilowatt hours of electricity so if you're paying one cent that's 40 cents of electricity if you pay two cent a kilowatt hour that's 80 cents of electricity and the current market price of hydrogen is somewhere between one dollar and dollar 50 so if you wanna keep this price less than say a dollar and 50 you'd better be paying less than two cents a kilowatt or an electricity to be able to get there okay so that's just one example now the other lever is cap X you wanna lower that cap X and as I pointed out in a previous slide the cheaper the technology is the better chance you have to be able to compete and so if we look at the pie chart of where the costs are coming from of course the costs are coming from lots of different places but the biggest slice of the pie is coming from the stacks themselves again these are the gray boxes that are doing the work and a big chunk of that 54% is the fact that this technology requires precious metal catalyst platinum and iridium so a lot of our research effort in our group is aimed at really trying to reduce the precious metal content so how do you go about thinking on how do you develop a cheaper catalyst a non-precious metal catalyst and then how do you go about integrating it into these types of devices that's what I'm gonna to get at and so we originally looked at we got inspiration from biology so here's nitrogenase and hydrogenase these are two biomolecules been around for a long long time and they have been engineered through evolutionary processes to a lot of really interesting things including make hydrogen and so understanding how these work has been a major undertaking of the scientific community I'm sharing with you some density functional theory calculations some atomistic modeling of the active sites of these different enzymes this was done by Barrett Hineman and Jens Narsko some years ago and they basically showed how the active sites of these biomolecules work now biomolecules are great enzymes are phenomenal how do you integrate enzymes into a large-scale industrial process that remains a challenge and many are doing fantastic work in those domains in our group what we've been saying is okay or one approach we've taken is like okay we collaborate with a lot of folks who work on the bio side that's for sure I won't be talking about that element right now what I will talk about is trying to take some learnings from the biology side and develop catalyst materials that are more integration friendly with technologies as we know them so long story short we found that the edge sites of molybdenum sulfide a material that you can find at the hardware store it's a really good lubricant in fact kind of works like graphite has the edges of molybdenum sulfide are very very similar have a similar motif I would say to some of the motifs that we see in these biological enzymes and so when I was a postdoc back in the day working in the technical university of Denmark we had done some studies of molybdenum sulfide and showed that in fact it is the edge site that's doing all the work and then when I started here at Stanford some of our early stage researchers Jabo and Jacob among others started making all kinds of different varieties of these molybdenum sulfides and what we found whether they were nanowires or they were nanoporous materials or these really small molecular clusters what we found is that the more edge sites we could build in the more active the catalyst and I'm gonna show you here some current voltage data where you're looking at voltage on the x-axis current on the y-axis and when you see a negative current that means that the molecule sorry these materials are making hydrogen and so if we go to motif one to two to three we see that this curve marches closer and closer to zero and the closer it marches to zero means on this scale, the better the catalyst is this if it operates at zero that basically says that that it's operating right at the thermodynamic limit of how good any catalyst can possibly be so this is all good news it's also working in acid and that's important because in the technology like the PEM electrolyzers I was talking about those have a napion membrane which is very acidic so what was next so we did all these fundamental studies now let's try to do some translation so here's Desmond and Desmond was another PhD student in the group and Desmond said, okay well I wanna start building my own homemade electrolyzers so here's a membrane electrode assembly a piece of napion sand which was some carbon cloth and that carbon cloth contains some of the catalyst that he had reformulated to be fabricated in a way that was friendly towards this type of device design which is exactly the types of system that you find in industry now it's a very modest cell it's only about five square centimeters but the idea is can we prove the concept that we can get this thing to work under more industrially relevant conditions and so here's the again a different type of voltage current curve this is one amp per square centimeter if you think about it one amp per square centimeter pushing an amp of electrons through that to make your hydrogen that's what I call a commercial level reaction rate and sure the membrane electrode assemblies that Desmond had made that contain the iridium platinum which is again, that's the de facto what industry uses in this context if he swaps out the platinum with these non-precious metal catalysts molybdenum sulfides of different kinds and molybdenum phosphides and molybdenum phosphosulfides he shows that they could actually work under this type of condition so this is a very important step in the direction of getting this thing to a commercial scale what's better than that is actually putting them into a real commercial electrolyzer and that's what some of our more recent efforts have been targeting here's Mackenzie Hubert who's a 50 year PhD student graduating in the next couple of months Laurie King, a former postdoc now a faculty member in the UK and so they started scaling up all kinds of different catalysts non-precious metal catalysts from our laboratory a lot of these ionic materials of metal phosphides, sulfides nitrides, phosphosulfides you name it and scaling them up and sending them over to Connecticut where proton on site could then integrate them into their real deal commercial grade electrolyzer so proton actually sells these electrolyzers they sell them with platinum and iridium you can see the operating conditions here 400 psi output pressure of the hydrogen 50 degrees C and operating at that 1.8 amps per square centimeter and what you see from these polarization curves is that for the cell potential you need for the cobalt-phosphide membrane electrode assembly it requires about 0.2 volts extra than the platinum so you take a hit in energy efficiency but the idea is that now you've got effectively a free catalyst making your hydrogen as opposed to the platinum which is of course very expensive and scarce precious metal so that was not too surprising because no human being on earth that I'm aware of has made a catalyst as good as platinum without using precious metals but a big question was stability how would this thing hold up over the test of time and so our collaborators over a proton onsite let this thing run for a little over 1700 continuous hours I should say well it had some interruptions here and there that were not exactly designed but it was interesting to see how they responded the cobalt-phosphide was able to keep on ticking and that's an important parameter for us to pay attention to if we want to integrate renewable electricity into these types of electrolyzers and so what they showed is that in fact this thing was very stable over long periods of time and by the way it did not catastrophically fail at the end it was just the end of the Department of Defense funding on the project and so they flipped the switch and we all moved on so the good news though is that these catalysts were performing well they were very active very stable and really setting a path towards larger scale industrialization now I want to switch gears a little bit and say okay great let's say you have a photovoltaic that works well and an electrolyzer that works well how do they work if you pair them together so that was another project that we've been working on really trying to say okay can you just plug in some electrolyzers into PVs like what kind of efficiency can we expect out of that and so we work together with Professor Jim Harris in electrical engineering to really answer that question and so he had a student Jian and two students from my group Jesse and Lindsey were working together on this we're taking a very high efficiency photovoltaic this was fabricated by Solar Junction which was a company that was founded by some of the former Harris group members and it was a 39% PV efficiency which means it's very very high end it's a triple junction photovoltaic and quite remarkable if you can think about a device that all you have to do is put it in the sun and 39% of that energy is converted into usable electricity and so what Lindsey and Jesse and Jian had done is they constructed some electrolyzers and hooked them up to these photovoltaics we made these electrolyzers as good as we could and spared no expense using precious metal catalysts as we needed and we were able to get an average solar to hydrogen efficiency of about 30% over the course of a 48 hour experiment so that just to give you an idea of while this 30% is not as high as the 39% you have to remember that now you actually have hydrogen which is a molecule that you could store for years if you wanted to and is a pathway to a large scale a large scale grid scale energy storage because that hydrogen is used already in so many different industrial processes so you can think of it as as a sustainably produced hydrogen that is handling some of the energy storage needs as well of our technologies what's another thing that you can do is you can do what's called unassisted photo-electrochemical water splitting so now we can take some of the catalyst that we've made and you could surely make electrolyzers and plug electrolyzers into the photovoltaics or you can imagine layering those catalysts directly onto the semiconductors and dunking them in the acid and have them split water off the bat and the good news is if you do that it's you can think of it as a slightly more expensive kind of contraption than a photovoltaic but perhaps cheaper than a photovoltaic plus an electrolyzer Jerry's still out on that question but it is a pathway that is worthy of pursuit, I would say the challenge of course now you're dunking this whole thing this very fancy semiconductor into a strong acid medium that could in principle tear it apart now our collaborators at NREL the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden Colorado James and Todd they've been working in this space for some time and they showed if you use precious metal catalyst that they could achieve 16.2% solar to hydrogen efficiency however these catalysts did not protect the semiconductors very well underneath it it failed catastrophically after only one or two hours so we worked collaboratively with them a former and recent PhD graduate Ruben Brito, Mika Ben-Aim who is on route to graduate in the coming weeks he they worked together and really to develop molybdenum sulfide coatings for this type of system and show that they could get almost a factor of 10x improvement in terms of durability compared to the platinum ruthenium case but 10x is good from a comparative point of view but at the end of the day failing after I don't know 12 hours or so it's just not going to cut it and so there's a lot of work to be done here and we put and we constructed this plot to really kind of show where the challenges are and we're showing on the x-axis the highest solar to hydrogen efficiencies for these types of devices and the lifetime hydrogen produced how many milliliters produced a hydrogen per square centimeter this is where we want to be this is the DOE goal that says that if you're making you want to make 25% solar to hydrogen over the course of about 10 years with a capacity factor of about 20% this is where you want to be and you can see that we've made a number of systems we meaning the community have made some systems that are knocking on the door of 20% so we're kind of getting there getting we're on the path of 25 it's not easy but on the path but here's a two order of magnitude stability gap in terms of the amount of hydrogen produced so I think the stability and durability are major issues that need to be addressed so how are we addressing them one of the questions that we're asking is how do these things operate under real world conditions so here's Mika and our collaborator Chase at NREL and Mika went over to Golden Colorado to work together with Chase and the others to really establish a real world testing system a testing apparatus that we're putting it in under the golden sun golden Colorado quite literally and this thing is tracking the sun all the meanwhile and making hydrogen and we can actually see how is this thing performing under true real world conditions what can we learn from that and hopefully make more durable systems and so without getting too much into all this data we're measuring the current voltage profiles we're measuring the hydrogen gas that's coming out of these systems we're tracking the stability as a course of time we're also tracking how the daylight is changing it's different obviously in morning, noon and night it's different during the course of the day when clouds come in and so even though this is obviously in January in Colorado it's not exactly a very sunny set of conditions this device worked quite well it showed 12.8% solar to hydrogen efficiency and was able to make about 14 milliliters of hydrogen in one day under a true real world condition so this is just one example of many experiments that we've been working on together with NREL to really address this durability challenge all right so I have a few words to say about carbon dioxide and then we'll switch to ammonia and then I'd be happy to take some questions so these segments will be shorter then the hydrogen really I wanted to focus on hydrogen first it's the simplest of these reactions and one can start extending some of those concepts to really carbon-based chemistries and nitrogen-based chemistries so carbon dioxide is actually one of the challenges here is selectivity when you're taking water and you're splitting it chances are you're making hydrogen and oxygen not a whole lot of other products you could possibly be making but if you throw carbon dioxide into the mix you're gonna make a lot of different molecules you can make for some catalysts would care less that CO2 is even in the vicinity and they'll just make your hydrogen anyway or you can take the carbon dioxide and make things like formate or carbon monoxide or formaldehyde or methanol or methane you can do some CC coupling and start linking up carbons together and you can make a CC coupled hydrocarbons or CC coupled oxygenated molecules so many different possibilities and really steering selectivity is one of the fundamental challenges here so I thank the wonderful team of researchers I had a chance to work with and I continue to have a chance to work with over the years earlier John mentioned Etosha there she is she was certainly one of the early stage researchers and together with Kendra and David were really kind of the first three and Toru came along shortly thereafter Jeremy shortly thereafter and really advancing the technologies here now before I talk about some of the science there let's look at the techno economics we did some techno economic modeling just to see like could electrochemical technologies impact the fuels and chemicals industry with respect to carbon dioxide I'd already shown some examples in the case of hydrogen that that look promising if you meet technological objectives but what about the case of CO2 and so there are a lot of assumptions that go into these types of models but the long and the short of it is yes it can be cost-effective and of the many, many different levers here certainly the cost of electricity is an important one and the energy conversion efficiency of the device is another and so whether your product that you're after is carbon monoxide or it's ethylene or it's ethanol or it's methanol or it's jet fuel whatever it may be basically they all have their own sets of maps all of them have some sliver of hope where you could potentially end up in a profitable region if you can make catalysts and technologies that have the right performance characteristics now when Kendra, Tosh and David started working on this we took a very simple system it was a what I call a vanilla copper foil this is just something we bought high purity foil, we polished it up cleaned it up and we still get into something that was kind of like a glorified pariet it was just sparkling water effectively with a little bit more salts added and it's carbonated water and we said, okay let's give this thing some voltage and see what happens and there's a lot to be said about all this but I'll make the story short and that is that we saw 16 different products of reaction which is really quite remarkable especially when you're doing this at just these mild conditions of room temperature and room pressure you're just giving the thing some voltage and so you can see all these different types of molecules that are just so many of these are very important for our global economy whether you know it or not you use a lot of these molecules every single day and we also tracked the reaction rates and figured out as a function of voltage kind of when the chemistries turn on or turn off for certain products and it's really challenging to understand all of this frankly we're still trying to figure this out no doubt one thing I'll point out is that the voltage is required to get this chemistry to go or far more negative than the ones on the hydrogen so the energy efficiency is not nearly as good it requires a lot more voltage to go and the other thing is that the last thing you want well it's really great that you're making all these great products that unfortunately a lot of these products are emerging at the same time and if you have to deal with separation processes so you can sell your product you're in bad shape so you really wanna come up with selective catalyst and here's Steph and Chris and others who really work to understand what are the mechanisms going on and I'm certainly not gonna go through this slide in detail if it looked confounding to you let me just say it's that's because the chemistry is confounding you're starting with CO2 and you're trying to understand pathways to methanol pathways to methane pathways to ethylene pathways to acetaldehyde pathways to ethylene glycol pathways to it's just it is a mess and there's no consensus in the community on how all of this works so there's many many unanswered questions but I wanna share with you just a little snippet of some of the things that we've been up to to try to understand some of this so here's Lay who yet this hypothesis where just in increasing electrode surface area can impact the selectivity and steer the products towards some directions versus others which is actually quite unconventional quite counterintuitive usually if you have a higher surface area catalyst you can increase the overall rate of reaction but how is it gonna actually steer the selectivity so let me just show you what it does he developed these systems where I should say he leveraged literature reports on these copper nanoflowers that we call them that's what they look like to us this had been synthesized decades ago for other technologies Lay repurposed it and said okay let's go to really high surface area systems I bet we see something interesting here and now what he was able to do you can see here there's a lot of different nuances to these studies happy to entertain them in the Q and A if you'd like we're using carbon monoxide instead of carbon dioxide is what we're feeding in we're doing this in base instead of in neutral conditions which is closer to the peria that I was kind of alluding to before and the long and the short of this is that Lay was able to show that at more modest potentials not going nearly as negative in voltage so you get higher energy efficiency he's able to get almost a hundred percent of the selectivity not towards those 16 different products but really to these three you see here ethanol, acetate and acetaldehyde which are all really really important molecules out there and so he was able to steer the chemistry towards just a subset of that large mix of different products and then he took it one step further and he said well I want even more selectivity than that so then he started decorating the surface with a little bit of silver and I'll show you what happened so if you take a copper foil without the silver this is what the data would look like in terms of you know you give me different voltages you see a different mix of products that you see here what I'm going to call some of the usual suspects and he just on this flat foil decorates a little bit of silver and now you can see just by eye it's the colors are different you see a lot more blue what is that blue it's acetaldehyde it's really got the chemistry to steer towards that one particular carbon-based product I won't go into there's a lot of theory calculations I mentioned we do a lot of theory and experiment combined work in Suncat won't dive into that at the moment but we do have a good there's a logic and a rhyme behind that reason and what we see here is that that if we take that strategy and take a one step further we have the copper-silver foil versus a copper-silver in this nano-flower geometry we can improve it even further we get better energy efficiency because we're operating at less negative voltages and you can see that this bar that's blue is much much higher that's again the acetaldehyde so what are we looking at here instead of 16 different products that we're making of all kinds of different varieties and flavors that are happening at very negative voltages we've scaled back the voltages to a much more energy efficient condition and we're steering the selectivity where about three quarters of the current is going to this one product of acetaldehyde and if you notice most of what's not acetaldehyde is actually hydrogen so if we actually account for just the carbon-based chemistry over 90 percent of that selectivity is going to that one product of acetaldehyde so if we go back to this kind of map that Stephanie and others had put together you can see that here's this one molecule of acetaldehyde you know somehow we've been able to figure out some way of steering the chemistry to go down all the right pathways to end up here not going further not stopping sooner and that's just one example of one molecule and we have to understand all of them if we really want to develop catalysts and processes to cover it all so still many challenges remain I'll wrap up with just a few brief thoughts on ammonia and ammonia we've already assessed the importance of that molecule I want to again thank the wonderful friends and collaborators that I've had a chance to work with over the years on this this is part of a project that we work in very close conjunction with the Technical University of Denmark where Professor E. Korkendorf my former postdoc advisor in fact has a center called the V. Sustain Center which is funded by the Vilem Fondin which is a private foundation in Denmark and so working together with students and postdocs there faculty there and folks over here on this side at Slack and at Stanford we're really trying to aim to to make ammonia in a more sustainable way and you already have heard the motivation we have this wonderful Howard Bosch process that works so well but what it's not so good at is ultimately delivering that ammonia to the crop that needs it and so in other words the distribution of ammonia is a major problem because this chemistry only works if you operate at really high pressures and really high temperatures and it's tough to decentralize that type of a process you need these just a few if you want to call it centralized facility that make it by the megaton and then you send it around by the time it gets deposited and delivered to the agricultural fields more than 50% of it will end up as an environmental problem as in runoff in water for instance less than 50% what came out the plant gate actually ends up in the crop so that's an inefficiency that we can address to make it more sustainable and very importantly we'd like to make it more decentralizable so that people across the globe have more access to ammonia the price by the way of what you would pay for fertilizer in Central Africa is about 5x the price that you would pay in Central United States so that's just an example of some opportunities and what we would love is something like this a contraption where you put some solar cells you put in some technology that can do the chemical conversions you feed it electricity and when the sun is shining and water is present and actually nitrogen is already present in the atmosphere at 78% or so then you this technology could make that ammonia on the fly and feed it right to the crops and you could do this any place on the globe where you have sun and water and agriculture without getting too much into the nitty gritty there are some major challenges and at the end of the day what this plot is saying and I'm not going to go into the details is that these types of catalysts they could possibly do this chemistry of N2 to ammonia it would much prefer to make hydrogen instead and that's not in this case the desired product so how do you get the selectivity towards ammonia instead of hydrogen and so three of our former students in Suncat Ayush and Josh and Jay got together to work on this together with some others and came up with a process that could work with renewable electricity so here's the idea you have renewable electricity you feed it into this contraption we're doing molten salt electrolysis and so we feed it in some lithium hydroxide use that electricity to plate lithium plus to lithium metal and then that lithium metal you can feed it into a reactor with nitrogen a tube furnace or you know doesn't have to be high temperatures or high pressures you just feed nitrogen to lithium you'll make a lithium nitride you dunk that lithium nitride in water you'll hydrolyze it to make ammonia coming out and lithium hydroxide once again and you can collect it cycle it right back through and just keep going back and forth so it's a way of renewable electricity going into a process and ultimately making ammonia where 88% of the electrons end up is ammonia that's a much higher selectivity than any catalytic process under similar conditions that we're aware of how much land area would you need if you're a farmer you're saying okay that sounds great you know how many solar cells do I need to cover my agricultural field with my my crops need sunshine too so we did the calculation if you have 100 kilograms of ammonia per hectare per year is the standard consumption rate and you have this process that say 88% ferritic efficiency you only need about five square meters of solar cells and that's like to our to the best of our power point ability is the way of representing five square meters of solar cells within one hectare of of 10,000 square meters so so it does seem from a number of different metrics potentially feasible so in fact Josh and a few others from Suncat have have started one of the companies that John was alluding to earlier nitricity it's called that is aiming to to do exactly that scale up processes that involve nitrogen to ammonia so the last technical comment I'll make is right here and then we'll conclude is that for those of you who are interested in ammonia production studying these chemistries this is really directed towards the those who are at the bench trying to make some measurements to know how you quantify the ammonia that you might be producing I just want to encourage you to take a look at these two papers that we've been working on our three papers excuse me regarding protocols and methods for really being able to do the quantitative analysis for ammonia production under these mild conditions I won't go into the details there I just want to point out very important to have rigorous protocols on that front so let me summarize and really the main overarching theme of the talk is that through catalyst design and process development there are promising pathways that are emerging for the sustainable production of fuels and chemicals I showed you a few examples here there's many other examples that we're working on that others are working on but hydrogen is a big ticket molecule aiming to make that through water electrolysis and PEC water splitting photo electrochemical water splitting CO2 electrolysis if you're interested in making carbon-based fuels and chemicals as well as nitrogen processes to make ammonia and with that I just want to thank the many students researchers postdocs faculty members staff members so many wonderful collaborators that we've had a chance to work with on the on the on what I've shown you today as well as our funding agencies I thank you all for your attention and I'll leave you with this and happy to take any questions thank you all so much great thanks Tom that was terrific a tour de force going from macro global scale down inside molecules of various sorts we do we do have maybe 10 minutes for questions before your student session I guess the first set of questions are around the kind of new paradigm cost goals in the four areas you preferred and you did say those were stretch goals really aspirational but you also said we could do a lot even the current current cost and prices so how far do you have to go and how fast do you think we're going to be able to go in that direction yeah great question thank you so much for asking though let me see if I can get to the appropriate slide here give me one moment there we are so yeah so I get if I understand correctly the question is how far are we from these numbers so let's start with renewable electricity so this is the one where I probably have the most confidence well actually before I dive into some of the details on these quadrants let me just say this that already today there is a market to do what I was just talking about for for certain applications so let's not think of it is either we're there or we're not there of course it's a it's a road map and it's really just as simple it's just just like dispatch curves for electricity right there's different prices and supply and demand dynamics and you know what people are willing to pay is really dependent on certain situations and so so already today a lot of these technologies are in play and the problem is is that while they might be sustainable the the amount that's produced and the amount of electricity let's say or renewables that are going into that is so small there's really not making a global difference when we're trying to meet sustainability goals at that level so it's a it's a road map and we got to figure out like with each step how do we make things cheaper and better so we can access you know open that aperture to that piece of the market the aspirational numbers that I present here are the one where if we can get to this spot the paradigm is all set to flip even without say you know subsidies or anything is like why wouldn't we use this technology and so so you know so then we can look at these numbers with that framing and say well one center kilowatt hour there are some in the electricity sector that feels like we're on that path and we're going to get there almost no matter of what and the only question is is it five years out 10 years out 20 years out I'm not an expert in in in those market dynamics but the fact that we're already down at four cents now granted that the decreasing in price in the last two three years is a different slope than what it was the the years before that but this one is probably the one I have the most confidence in nonetheless energy storage here we just don't have a solution right now lithium ion is phenomenal it's awesome I love it let's keep rolling that out that price will keep going down I don't know if we're going to get down to say $10 a kilowatt hour using lithium ion as we know it we just need fundamental new chemistry new designs new ideas and let's rely let's bet on ourselves human ingenuity to be able to get there carbon capture this one is going to be this is a really tough one especially if you want to get it from air so I don't know if we'll ever be able to get to this value from air without subsidies I'm very curious about that but that's you know one of the more ambitious ones I'd have to say of the bunch but there are other there are other point sources of CO2 for instance bio refinery the ethanol that we make in the United States just as an example for those of you who don't know about 10% of the gasoline when you stop in the tank or stop at the philip station put in 10 put in gasoline 10% of that is actually ethanol and that ethanol is coming almost entirely from fermentation and so the the US demand on on gasoline is about 140 billion gallons per year so that means about 14 billion gallons of ethanol per year and these bio refineries that are doing fermentation have a really nice stream of CO2 coming out of them that actually ends up in soda is one of the one of the outlets for it but you know thankfully for a health reason we don't drink as much soda as we consume gasoline or I wish we consumed as little gasoline as we did soda bottom line is is that that's another source of CO2 that we could get at that is is much easier to capture in process than that in the air so again different stages you can imagine of technologies and then this is what we talked about today where say water electrolyzers commercial water electrolyzers today are in the ballpark of about a dollar a kilogram cap backs just to give you an idea so to get down to 20 cents sounds easy but remember that's a very scaled up commercialized technology so much like the lithium ion example I gave here we just really need to come up with all kinds of new concepts ideas catalyst to make them cheaper and and we are on a good path but that's still I would call that an aggressive target great so it sounds like there could be significant improvements in sustainability even if you only got part of the way to these goals is that correct that's right so every every step of the way is in the right direction and the question is how far can we push this because we have 40 gigatons and climbing that we need to deal with yeah yeah then there's a set of questions around I guess it really has to do with what I would call chemical pollution so there are a few questions on could you use biofuel feedstocks like excess or old trees was a specific or dead trees was a specific question and on the other end of it there was a couple of questions regarding excess chemicals are you still going to have on these are even how long will it take to engineer things so you don't have residual kind of excess chemicals around even in as you get into the new paradigm or is that part in parcel for the new paradigm yeah these are great questions on the first question using dead trees for instance I mean that is a resource it's absolutely a resource and I don't think we're in any position to really kind of discount any type of technology the first question I would ask is what's the possible scale of a technology and you know is it going to be contributing at the kilowatt level at the megawatt level at the gigawatt level at the terrawatt level and I don't think we need to restrict ourselves to only things that are operating at the terrawatt level as lovely as that would be at the end of the day it's really a sum of technologies that it's going to get as to where we hope to be and so let's not discount things you know let's if it has some sensible scale it might be a great local solution or a regional solution you know that could be a very fantastic concept that needs to be developed so that's the first thing I would say and you know and remind I want to remind everybody that's very different from how we've lived life we have we have relied on fossil fuels over 80 percent of our energy has come from fossil fuels they're absolutely astounding remarkable amazing it's basically one platform of technology that has provided for all these things that we have today and now we have to say well maybe we need 50 different technologies that that all work very differently but have to work in concert to get us to where we want to be in terms of sustainability that becomes a different type of challenge now that Houston ship channel that I showed you earlier I worked on the Houston ship channel after college and it was amazing I worked in a monomers facility you know producing acrylics by the megaton it was amazing and more but more cool or as cool is working on that particular facility and seeing things work at a large industrial scale to me what really struck me was how interconnected the Houston ship channel is and we're talking about miles and miles and miles of facilities where you know feedstock comes in products come out some of those products go right into the next door facility they get used by some other company perhaps a competitor that uses it for its purposes and that interconnectedness has been woven and that kind of grew somewhat organically over the past you know half century more and that's why we have such inexpensive gasoline or inexpensive plastics or inexpensive fertilizer it's like these things are all really interconnected so how do we how do we develop that level of interconnectedness with all these new technologies that are coming out we have to think at that level too we can't just focus on our own little technology that produces its molecule and hope that it's drop in replaceable with what's out there because chances are it's not going to be able to compete we need to be designing at least two three four steps ahead kind of know where all the other technologies are going so that we can create an ecosystem where they can all cooperate together great thanks Tom Roach just about out of time so I think I'll leave my normal advice would you give to the young students coming through about where the most attractive areas are to be working nowadays in your deck of the woods which seems to be a pretty big one and a very important one so with that I'd like to thank you for a truly inspirational thing it made me all the way through make me maybe think that I wish I had paid more attention when I was taking AP chemistry years ago but I think things have progressed a long way since then as well thanks to people like you so thanks once again and you're now almost to the time where you've got to join your student follow-up session so thanks once again for an outstanding seminar yet again I appreciate that John thank you so very much for inviting me and having me it's always a pleasure great thank you