 The panel today on industry decarbonization is covering a lot of ground, right? And this is such an important topic when, you know, we're thinking about human and economic development, industrialization is really the underpinning for that. And I think about industry decarbonization sort of in three buckets. The first is how do we decarbonize the actual processes that we're using within industry that produce emissions and other greenhouse gases, you know, it doesn't have to be just CO2. And, you know, these are things like within cement and chemicals and those account for about 5% of global emissions. And then we can think about how do we decarbonize the huge amounts of heat and power that we use within industry and that accounts for about 25% of total global emissions. And finally, I think about, you know, how do we decarbonize the feedstocks that are primarily hydrocarbons at this point in time that are used directly, for example, in making things like hydrogen or, you know, in processes like reducing steel. So I am thrilled to be moderating this panel. I feel like, you know, this is a topic which requires some really gritty people and we have four all-stars on stage who are going to share with us what they're doing in this space around addressing these sort of three pillars within industrial decarbonization. I'm gonna take a moment and say a few words about each of our panelists before I invite each of them up in turn to give us a lightning talk and share some of their research and then we'll have a discussion here. So our first panelist is Professor Leora Dresselhouse-Marais. Leora is an assistant professor in the Department of Material Science and Engineering with a courtesy appointment in Mechanical Engineering and a term appointment in Photon Science at the Slack National Accelerator Lab. Leora studies how modern methods can enable new opportunities to update old-school materials processing and manufacturing for sustainability, including steelmaking, which she'll be talking about today. To Leora's right is Professor Tiana Venorio, who is an associate professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and by courtesy, Civil and Environmental Engineering and Geophysics, which is where we first met 20 years ago, I think. Tiana's research involves the mechanical and chemical interactions of fluids with Earth materials that drive many geologic as well as engineering processes and today she's gonna be talking to us about decarbonizing cement. Next we have Professor Jonathan Fan, who's an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford, where he's researching new design methodologies and materials, sorry, and materials approaches to nanophotonic systems and Jonathan's been working on developing alternatives to combusting fossil fuels to produce high-grade heat and power. And last but not least, we have Dr. Sahar El Abadi, who is a postdoc in energy resources engineering. Her research focuses on developing circular economies by transforming waste methane into useful products as well as quantifying and mitigating fugitive methane emissions to ensure gas feedstocks into industrial processes are as clean as possible. So we have a really broad range of topics here, so something for everyone and with that, I would like to invite Leora up to the podium to kick us off. You have a clicker with a big green arrow. Awesome, big green arrow, good start to any talk, right? Okay, so thank you all so much for coming. It's my honor to get a chance to talk to you today about decarbonizing deep industry and in regards to the steel making industry in particular. So as Naomi nicely mentioned, my group focuses on using modern toolboxes and technology, either using photons at synchotrons and at x-ray free electron lasers or novel computational approaches to be able to get some deeper insights to allow modern science and technology to be able to start to push forward the large scale industrial problems that need to be decarbonized. So before we dive into the science, it's important to remember why we care about steel. So I probably don't have to make too great a point of this, but steel, it turns out, is ubiquitous in modern society. It was the underpinning that enabled the Industrial Revolution to modernize society to what it is today. Today we make one point, or at least last year, we made 1.92 gigatons of steel that year and that produced 3.8-ish gigatons of CO2 just from that process. So what does that mean? Well, steel underpins our modern society. It's ubiquitous in our technology, but is 8% of the global CO2 emissions and that number is actually only going up. Demand is projected to increase by 35% by 2050. So you might ask yourself, where is all of this emissions coming from? And the answer, when you look across the entire industry at all of the different parts of steelmaking from preparing the ores, then making rocks into iron, iron into steel, and then steel into something that is useful to be able to build cars and windmills. Actually, half of the emissions there come from just making iron rocks into iron metal to be able to start the process of alloying. So when we look a little bit kind of big picture at what exactly iron making means here, we can see that this process is at such a big scale that no one solution is gonna solve everything in time to avert catastrophe from climate change. So to be able to decarbonize this industry, what we need to think towards is every single step and trajectory within the time scale of being able to develop the next generation of clean technologies. So the way that I like to put this is that we have kind of three buckets that we need to think in. There's the bucket of how do we clean up and modernize today's infrastructure that is already in place to be able to at least clean up the infrastructure we have. Then the second box is, you know, what are the transitional technologies that we need to start developing for things that we haven't yet figured out all the optimization tricks to be able to make work at the appropriate scales. But how do we get started on this process on building the infrastructure to decarbonize a gigaton scale industry? And then we need to start now today at building the carbon zero versions of these technologies so that within a hundred years we'll be able to roll those out at scale at the gigaton scale. And hopefully we'll do it in less than a hundred years. So now let's look at the science, of course. So when we take a deeper look at iron making, it turns out that a lot of these CO2 emissions are not just because we're performing a process at 2600 Kelvin, sorry, Celsius. It's also that actually the carbon monoxide and carbon in coal is what is used as the active reagent to take these iron ores that are hematite and turn them into, there's three steps of reaction here going from hematite to magnetite to wustite and then to iron. So that produces at least three molecules of CO2 just from the process itself, ignoring all of the heating requirements and things like that. So this is done today at incredibly large scales. It's 75% of the industry with furnaces that are 100 meter tall called blast furnaces that allow us to be able to, alternating layers of coal and iron ores, be able to do this type of conversion to get molten iron. So hydrogen offers an opportunity to be able to decarbonize the process itself, going instead of converting your carbon or carbon monoxide to CO2, it now offers you the opportunity to turn that into going from hydrogen to water that is easier to be able to capture afterwards with condensers and other types of technology. So this seems like the golden ticket, the winning ticket but of course, like many things in industry, it's not quite that simple. First off, of course, hydrogen is difficult to make and especially difficult to make inexpensively. But another pesky challenge here is that hydrogen makes what is previously an exothermic reaction generating heat to thermal runaway to be able to make a process that is really downhill once you get it started to a four times more endothermic process that now becomes an incredibly difficult reaction to stabilize every time you increase the scale. So in my group, we look at connecting fundamental science at going from the atomic scale picture of how the atoms are actually moving around, transporting through each other and propagating heat all the way through then exploring how to implement that into building the next generation of reactors to be able to either optimize the technology we have today or to be able to come up with the next generation of technologies of tomorrow. So I'll focus in for today on some of our initial work that we've started doing really at the very fundamental scale and I'll close today by showing you where that comes and how we connect the fundamentals back to these megaton scale reactors required to be able to decarbonize these processes. So as I showed before, we have a beautiful phase diagram here where we're reducing these hematite ores, first to magnetite, then to wustite, and then to iron. But if you ask yourself, well, what is so difficult about this process, it turns out the last step is the rate limiting step because it couples the interesting reactive chemistry to structural transformations that can cause the reactors to shut down and fail. This is called the sticking or the whiskering mechanism by which effectively, as you convert from your iron oxide to your metallic iron phase, the transport of iron ends up actually bridging particles that are near each other, causing them to whisker and stick together, therefore causing what might in a reactor, either a fluidized bed reactor, which is one type of approach to scale this process, or a blast furnace and pellet-based reactor, which is a different version of the process. In both cases, it causes these sticking effects that ultimately prevent the reactor from continuing and cause catastrophic failure that then requires you to close down the reactor, clean everything up, and restart the problem. So to be able to design efficient reactors, we need to be able to understand the fundamental science that underlies these types of sticking mechanisms and whiskering, but we also need to be able to understand how to efficiently navigate this whiskering process to avert it from the optimized conditions and the full range of optimized conditions to be able to be relevant in a reactor that is 10 meters wide. So as you start to try to ask that question at every length scale, what it turns out is that the answer looks very different at every single scale you ask it. In fact, of course, this problem has been studied for over 100 years. A lot is known at each scale, but being able to connect the dots between the scales is still an ongoing challenge that prevents us from being able to push this technology towards the full macroscopic scale required for the reactors. So in our work, we've been looking at the smallest scales that are often overlooked at the large processes and trying to find ways in synergistically connecting these length scales to be able to describe them at the large scale of the process. So we put on our hats and decided it's time to learn what the reactors are actually doing. So we got some industrial ore finds from US Steel from the Iron Range here in Minnesota, and we very quickly found that indeed when you look at these under a scanning electron microscope, you find that there are a lot of features and grains that are sub 10 nanometers in scale. So we as material scientists know that nanochemistry in these types of particles is not the same as the macroscopic chemistry that we typically would use to describe a reactor at this scale. So we generated these 10 nanometer particles to be able to actually look at the process at the relevant length scale to be able to describe a scale that's always been overlooked so far. So we went to the synchotron and we did an experiment and we were able to show as a function of temperature that these nanoparticles really do behave quite differently at these very unusually low temperatures. And at the lowest temperatures, we could actually separate each of the steps of the chemistry. And we were able to demonstrate that at 300 Celsius actually first off in the nanoparticles, you generate a phase that you wouldn't normally see until the high temperatures. But second off, we demonstrated that this breaks down into three different stages. The first of these stages is this really rapid surface chemistry where all of the reactive sites on the surface are exposed and therefore the kinetics go rapidly through every single step of the process. Then in stage two, we start to slow down because we've passivated our surfaces and now our kinetics are dominated by diffusion or fixed laws as we discuss in material science. And then in stage three, we end up in a very different stage of this process where now we've gone a large step of the way through the formation or consumption of the magnetite and now we start to convert to iron. And as that happens, we were able to demonstrate with this 3D of tyco-tomographic imaging how the nucleation and growth of the iron phase actually couples to the centering of the particles at this small scale, causing them to increase in length scale by a hundred fold, even though we started with 10 nanometer particles that who would care at the gigatonic scale? So what this really shows you is the beginning of a long term of work that we're doing in my group now, laying the groundwork to be able to enable this type of multi-scale view of the process to be able to link and connect the dots between the scales that have often been overlooked and the full reactor performance. But of course, you might be sitting there asking yourself, well, Leora, come on, how is this relevant to these huge reactors? So I have a little roadmap here laid out for you guys to show you how this type of really fundamental science actually does connect to these megaton scale reactors. So we start with interdependent driving forces that we understand from kinetics modeling and such are incredibly important to be able to effectively and accurately describe the process. Then we go to the synchotron and we do our measurements to be able to really effectively validate our models. But then we translate those with reactor scale models to be able to inform which are the relevant order parameters to describe the process with the full fidelity of the kinetics that I just described. And then we start to do some techno economic analysis to be able to effectively show, you know, now that we understand the process, how to make it work effectively, how do we know how to ask the right questions to be able to roll out this technology actually for commercial use. And then finally, we start off by building those actual pilot scale reactors to be able to demonstrate not just that it works in theory but it works in practice and to be able to do the refining and such at the relevant scales. We already have some partnerships with a couple different companies to be able to make this translation really happen. So long-term solutions like what I'm describing for carbon zero steel have to be prioritized today to be able to enable full industry decarbonization when we really need it. So on that note, thank you all for listening. I will happily take questions at the appropriate time and looking forward to discussion. Thank you, Leora. I'm actually gonna take the liberty of asking a question because I feel like it's gonna be hard to ask one question that will be appropriate for everyone. So I'm gonna ask each of you a question after your talk and then we'll open it up at the end to the crowd. So, you know, I'm really interested in, you're working with the steel industry and how are they receptive to this idea that you've got to sort of invest today to ensure that we're limiting emissions with the current facilities while investing in potentially a whole new build out down the road, right? So can you talk a little bit about how they're thinking about this strategy? An excellent question and a very important one to ask. So in this industry, mining and extraction is an industry that works at a very large scale and is very conservative. You know, there's a running joke in the field that you have to really be able to demonstrate your work at about 100 kilotons per year scale to be able to really be relevant and demonstrate that it's worth scaling beyond that. And while that might be a joke, it's not so far off from valid. And so what we often find in this industry is that startup companies are the ones that are able to push hardest at the carbon zero versions of the technology, but the big corporations in steel need to be working on cleaning up the infrastructure of today. And so this is where kind of those three pillars that I showed are really important because they translate between kind of each of the layers of this that are required to be able to decarbonize and everyone needs to see this as a priority to be able to make a difference at each scale, time scale. I would say the other aspect of this that has been really refreshing to see over the last year or two is that some of the very, very large companies, these are huge multi-trillion dollar corporations, some of them are also now starting to invest in clean steel startup companies. And so they have accelerator programs for mid-scale versions of startup companies that have already gotten to the scale that they've demonstrated at maybe 10 kilotons per year. So not quite the hundred you would need to be able to get the funding to build a billion dollar plant, but at least enough to be able to demonstrate that it's an approach that really is pushing the frontier and is viable. And you started seeing some of these companies now start to invest in startups that are enabling that. And so I think that's actually probably gonna be the thing of the future is watching how the large and established companies invest in the technologies of tomorrow. And we'll see who ends up being, what the tea leaves read, but it's been really promising thus far. Perfect, thank you. Tessiana, I'd like to invite you up to the podium. Thank you for having me and for joining today. The focus of my talk today is on geomimetic cement. I'm very happy to share the latest development of this technology. So the focus is on geomimetic cement. I will show what we are doing and most importantly, why? And I will start with why. But before doing that, I'd like to acknowledge the team. It's so far has been really interesting collaborating across disciplines. I'm a rock physicist. I'm collaborating with Alberto Zalayo, who is a material scientist, and Matteo Carniello, who is a chemical engineering. And then we have two fantastic postdoc from the geoscience side, and then from the engineering side. And the students, undergraduate and graduate students who are moving the first step. So a very exciting team. And I also like to acknowledge OTL that this year has decided to highlight our technology for their report. So I mentioned that I would like to start from the why. Why do we need a different cement and why we're focusing on geomimetic cement? So when it comes to cement, there are three challenges and need. The first one is the reason why we are gathering here today. We need to decarbonize that industry. Cement manufacturing is responsible for age to 10 of the world's CO2 emissions. The reason is because if we do not include or neglect transportation, CO2 at least one third comes from the use of energy. That is used to calcine the carbonate rock. And then two thirds or 70% comes from the reaction that breaks down the calcite mineral and to obtain the calcium oxide or the lime. So from here we can make a first reflection if tomorrow, for example, we are going to have the cleanest energy resource. We would take care only of one third, but we still have to deal with reducing the emissions and so the two thirds are 70%. So for this, we need a different rock and that's how the role that geoscience plays. And so we need a low carbon binder precursor. The second challenge and the need is that cement is a great material but has one flaw and the flaw is it needs reinforcement because the tensile strength is low. And so reinforcement is really a blessing and a curse because it's good, but at the same time, as Liora just mentioned, the stainless steel and so that is used for rebars create even more emissions. The second thing is that rebars are responsible for the corrosion of concrete and then create spalling. And we can also think of reinforcing the cement at lower scale by using fibers that are added to the slurry. However, because the fibers have different composition with respect to the matrix, normally the materials experience what is called debonding or fibers pull out. And then there is another problem. The more fibers we have, clearly it's better because the strength and the ductility of the material increases but then the greater is the viscosity of the paste which then brings lower workability of the slurry. So what if we decide to reinforce the cement at the nano scale by growing fibers in situ? The third challenge is serviceability. There are many applications from aerospace to the subsurface. We need to take care or we need to make sure that cement, the integrity of cement remains as it is for a long time, especially if we're dealing with harsh environment. Just for your knowledge and just as an example, here in this plot, I'm showing that 50% and this plot has derived from the analysis of 18,000 wells in the Gulf of Mexico. So 50% of the wells experience sustained casing pressure, so excessive pressure on the casing of the wells after just 15 years of production. And about 15% of primary cement jobs fail costing the oil and gas industry more than 450 millions annually in remedial cementing work. So for this reason, we need a different material, an enhanced cement that has an enhanced response to stress, changes, temperature, and chemical attack. And clearly when we talk about serviceability, serviceability is extremely linked to safety. And we all remember that the horizon oil rig blowout, which was due to poor design, so a cement flow design. So what are, what is the material that includes all these properties? Clearly those are rocks. And so our technology is focusing on geomimicry because there are certain rocks that have low carbon composition. Clearly Earth has already calcined those rocks and so especially volcanic rocks do not contain the carbon ion. Some of these rocks have exhibit high strain energy because of the presence of fibers that grow into the material directly. And some of these fibers exhibit an entangled structure which we will see is important. And then we know many times rocks bear harsh environments whether it's temperature and then clearly they also self heal. So we are working on this technology and we're focusing on an alternative raw material as a binder that is made of a volcanic rock blend. A volcanic rock cannot contain a CO2 ion because again Earth has already calcined this rock and this rock can replace the limestone rock. On your right you see a plot showing the reduction. There is a drastic reduction in CO2 upon calcination. But just to, this is a different way of showing with respect to Portland cement we can have a reduction of CO2 that is depending on the calcium-silicon ratio that goes from 50% to 70%. We still need to calcine these rocks just to transform the minerals into oxides. So calcination is still required. Once the calcined material is created, the material is exposed to hydrothermal synthesis. The composition does not, as you have seen does not have a lot of calcium but has alkali-rich minerals. And it forms the same minerals that are formed in Portland cement. Mention we need fibers that grow and we use hydrothermal synthesis. The most important thing here is that the fibers needs to be entangled. Why? Because we see that the entanglement of the fibers plays an important role on the strain absorbance. If the fibers are straight, the stress is higher but the strain is much smaller. So in order to get the same stress you just need to use more fibers and grow more fibers into the material. At the end our material is in between Portland cement based and alkali-activated or a geopolymer. So it's a hybrid composition. And in this plot here you see the bonds, silicon-oxygen bonds. And normally in a hybrid material the FTIR response is in between. And interestingly enough this is the same response that Roman Marie Concrete has. So Roman Marie Concrete is also a hybrid and naturally cemented cop rocks that exhibit high strain absorbance. So as a summary we are using a calcol-caline volcanic rock blend that has low carbon footprint. We use in-situ growth of mineral fibers for reinforcement and most importantly the fibers must have an entangled structure at the nano-microscale to favor strain energy absorbance. And so at the end this alcoline and the calcium composition makes the blend hybrid that is in between the Portland cement and the geopolymers. If you want to know more, yesterday or today there is a poster. So please see Davides and Jorge poster. These are the first experiments that we are making and so it's interesting to see that despite the high porosity. So this is really high lightweight cement the stress of failure is very promising and this is not yet the reinforced materials. So I thank you for your attention and at some point I will answer your question. Thank you. Well I want to know more. So I'm curious that the durability and the service ability is that what you called it? Yeah, how do you think about those in terms of life cycle assessment of I guess both emissions and cost? Yeah sure. So as I mentioned clearly the focus is on reducing the energy emission and also finding another material that emits less CO2 compared to the carbon rocks. But I still believe that when it comes to concrete durability and service ability should be factor in in the life of concrete. Because clearly the more durable is the material the environmental impact is spread over long period of time. Clearly it will use less resources it will create less waste. And so just for that the durability and the service ability of the material should be considered when having or making a new recipe. But in my opinion there is also something that sometimes is not often looked at and is the fact that sometimes there are situations there are application where the cost for replacement are too high. And so in that case there is a lot of pressure on communities or even consumers that do not come from privileged or they come from socioeconomic disadvantage areas. So at the end I see service ability and durability not only important as properties of the material but also a way to, it's also important to make materials more equitable for inaccessible to communities. Yeah, great. All right, we're gonna move right along here. So Jonathan's gonna give a talk while he's walking up the podium. I recognize that I have the luxury of asking these amazing professors questions anytime. So when we're done with the talks you're gonna get your opportunity. So be jotting down your questions as we go here. All right, Jonathan over to you. All right, thank you. And it's a real privilege to get to tell you about some of the work we've been doing in electrified reactor systems. As we've already talked about throughout this whole week nearly a third of greenhouse gas emissions are due to industrial processing of materials and chemicals. We've already seen two really great examples of this in the steel and cement industry but it's certainly not limited to that. It's really everything that you see around you in this room, the pulp and paper industry, the food industry and for me and what will be the focus of this talk the gas reforming industry where high-grade heat is used to do everything from producing ammonia and hydrogen to ethylene. The majority of these emissions in the chemical industry are due to fossil fuel combustion to produce this high-grade heat. And that is really something that I want to focus on here. Now as we've seen throughout this week and as you know there are going to be a lot of really promising ways to use electrochemistry and photo catalysis to name a couple of ways to begin to reduce the amount of heat required for the chemical industry. But we should also be reminded ourselves of just how incredibly efficient and this industry is and how catalysts and processes have been developed not just for the last decades but for the last centuries. And as such thermal chemical processing will continue to serve as the predominant chemical synthesis platform in industry. I'm showing a couple of examples of how high-grade heat is used in the gas reforming industry typically in order to get heat into these reactors schemes based on wall heating or heat transfer through heat transfer fluids are used these are extremely well known and mature technologies but this gives you the idea of the type of infrastructure required in processes today. So of course as we start to think about decarbonization and specifically decarbonization on time scales that are really important in the world today which is to say over the next couple of decades one way to really address this problem is to think about generating high-grade heat with green electricity. Now there are of course many ways to generate heat from electricity. You simply have to look around your own kitchen to see that there are methods based on resistive heating, inductive heating and microwave heating amongst others that are used which begs of course a couple of questions. The first is which one of these methods do we actually want to consider and the second is are there actually new things to be done in this domain or is this actually a very mature topic? Well I'd like to argue is that this is not actually a solved problem in that there's a really big opportunity which is to co-design the electrified heating method with chemical reaction engineering to enhance the performance of chemical reactors today. By performance I refer to achieving higher conversion efficiencies, mitigation of parasitic thermal gradients within reactors and to potentially have smaller reactors and process intensified processes due to the fact that most reactions today are endothermic and that heat transfer is in fact a bottleneck for the type of reactor processes. In fact I would argue that the development of new capabilities is really necessary if we want to start utilizing in practical ways green electricity for heat because of the relatively high cost of green electricity compared to the combustion of methane today. So it's not going to be sufficient for example to electrify a boiler and to use heat transfer fluids in the old fashioned way to actually come up with a techno economic argument but we're actually going to have to significantly reduce capital costs and improve the performance of these type of reactors. So our group has been really thinking about this co-design problem and we are developing chemical reactors in which the inductive heating of free form susceptors enables fully customizable volumetric temperature profiles. So by susceptors I'm referring to internal structures within the reactor which are three dimensional that can be heated in ways where the heat volumetrically as well as temporarily can be fully customizable. These reactors eliminate thermal transfer bottlenecks which is to say the amount of energy that can be delivered to catalysts can significantly exceed those of conventional reactors methods. Thereby improving conversion efficiency eliminating many of the parasitic bottlenecks that we see in current reactor technologies and what this ultimately does is enable reductions in reactor form factor. The key for making this happen is in fact advances at many different stages and I just want to talk about this at a very high level though I'm happy to talk about this in more detail later. Many of these ideas really stem from electromagnetic. My background is really in understanding the relationship between geometric structures and their interaction with electromagnetic waves in over the last two decades. There have been some really new theories on how structured media can interact with electromagnetic waves in order to achieve certain types of desired properties some were exotic and in this case we're talking about uniform or a tailorable heating profiles. There have been some incredible advances in manufacturing where again especially with the emergence of the current state of the aerospace industry it is now possible to additively manufacture super alloy materials and even complex conductive ceramic materials to have nearly any type of form factor in shape which really introduces the possibility of truly customizing what we can do with reactors. So in fact in the chemical reaction space this has taken the terminology of structured reactor engineering. Scientific computing has certainly advanced tremendously over the last again couple of decades where we're really looking to push the limits of multi physics, multi scalar computation involving fluids heat transfer and electromagnetic coupling. These are extremely complex problems that require not just interfacing with super computing infrastructure but also new ways of accelerating these computing means using for example machine learning and a major point of value add that we've been focusing on with my collaborator Juan Rivas has been recent developments in power electronics where wide band got semiconductors made from gallium nitride and silicon carbide based switching technologies now enable switching at very high frequencies including megahertz frequencies. And it's really the collection of all of these different ideas that really enable the co-design of the inductive heating process with reaction engineering which is to say that and ultimately combine all of this together we are able to create reactors in which uniform heating and is able to be achieved and we're ultimately where we are able to optimize not just for heating but also for mass transfer and heat transfer. We have theoretically and experimentally verified these volumetric heating concepts including uniform volumetric heating with high surface area volume susceptors with efficiencies that are over 90%. One of the really difficult parts for us in fact that we're trying to tackle is this question of efficiency with induction heating which for many typical applications such as welding people don't think about efficiency but for the energy space efficiency is everything. And we are currently testing our concept with mesoscale reactors for electrifying the reverse fire gas shift reaction in fact working with my colleague Matt Cannon in chemistry. I believe he filled you in earlier this week on work he's been doing on Save the Yard carbonate catalyst for reverse fire gas shift. It like all endothermic reactions still requires methods to deliver volumetric and heat into the side of the catalyst. I want to maybe end on a broader picture which is that if we look at the reactor landscape today we are typically dealing with either very small reactors which is to say micro reactors where the enhanced surface area to volume enables superior heat and mass transfer. And as such there's a cottage industry and micro reactors where very high performance can be had on small scales. And also very large scale reactors and of course when we visit the exons and the shells we're talking about huge refineries with close to gigawatt type energy consumptions in order to achieve incredible performance. With low cost. But as we start thinking about the chemical industry on a more sustainable platform there will need to be new distributed infrastructure where we may not necessarily be thinking about just building huge refineries everywhere but where we may be thinking about more mesoscale reactors. And as we go about designing these reactors to optimize for all major chemical reaction engineering phenomena that we essentially will have mesoscale reactors that can operate with one or tens of megawatts but that have the capabilities of micro reactors in terms of heat, mass, transport and such. Lastly I want to acknowledge my team. It's been tremendously gratifying and I think similar to what Titiana was showing we have a very interdisciplinary group of people in electrical, mechanical, chemical, material science for even working with someone at Slack. And I think it's very clear as we look to continue to really push what we push these topics in electrified chemical reaction systems that this is definitely a topic that's gonna require a tremendous leverage from every major engineering department on campus. And so stay tuned. I think the last thing I'll say is that in developing these ideas for high temperature gas reforming reactors it's also extremely clear that the ability to control heat as a function of volume and time in nearly arbitrary ways with temporal resolution down to microseconds is actually something that will benefit a great deal of technologies and not just thermal chemical reactors. All right, thank you. All right, let's get real. Are we really gonna scale this from the lab out to the scale we need for commercial processes? We've got what, 25% of total energy is in industrial heat and power? Talk to us about that a little bit. That's a great question. I think when I started thinking about these ideas around three years ago, and if you read the literature there's a lot of academic demonstrations showing topics in micro scale resistive heaters, microwave heaters at the lab scale. And there's no question if you're looking to do a small academic experiment that pretty much any method can be tailored to something. But a big reason for us to focus on inductive heating is at least two reasons when we're talking about scale. The first is that it is currently used at scale in certain industries like the metallurgy industry where inductive heating furnaces are used at tens of megawatt capacities for example, the melting of metals. So we know that the infrastructure is there and the concepts are there, of course adapting it towards something like gas reforming is what we're trying to do, but that there is a pathway to scaling. And the second comes down to understanding how the grid and how power works at megawatt power levels where you're no longer even going to be using power electronics but ideally you'd like to use wall plug, very high voltage type of sources. And that's of course one of the really compelling reasons for us to use inductive heating because of just the mechanism we are potentially able to directly use electricity from a generator without additional transformation. So we do see inductive heating playing a major role in scaled technologies in industry. Great, thank you. All right, moving on, Sahar, last but not least. Thank you so much, it's wonderful to be here today. Today I'm going to be discussing methane emissions and how new technologies are revolutionizing greenhouse gas detection and mitigation. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas. It has over 25 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide over a 100 year time period and contributes about 30% of the temperature increase that we're going to be seeing associated with climate change. There are several different anthropogenic and natural sources of methane, key among these is oil and gas production and use. And while this is a key contributor of anthropogenic methane emissions, it also is a ready target for cost-effective mitigation. However, mitigating methane emissions requires that we are able to identify methane sources, which brings us to the question, how do we currently measure methane? And this is the work that myself and several others at Stanford have been focusing on for the past several years. Conventional approaches for measuring methane involve individual site visits. So for example, a technician with a handheld device, such as an infrared camera or a handheld sensor, would visit a site and monitor every piece of equipment in order to determine the leak rate of methane on site. This was improved somewhat with sensors mounted on vehicles. However, both of these conventional approaches are incredibly time and labor intensive, and they often do require on-site access in order to obtain measurements. As a result, new technologies have come into this space and are aiming to improve our ability to measure methane. And I'll walk you through what some of these classes of technologies are now. The first of these are on-site sensors. These will be deployed throughout a facility and continuously measure the concentration of methane and in order to determine if there is a leak or a flow rate of methane on-site. This has numerous potential advantages. You collect incredibly high-resolution temporal data. This could also provide very rapid alert for leak detection, and these can be deployed for an extended period of time. However, you still do likely require on-site access and cooperations with operators. So the next class of technologies aims to address some of those issues, and these are airplanes. There are several different technologies that are being deployed in this space, but most of them rely on hyperspectral imaging and the shortwave infrared. This is an image from our field work from 2021 in which an airplane flew over a methane plume, conducted a snapshot image and identified the source of methane. This technology poses several potential advantages. You have with the ability to conduct entire basin-wide surveys, rapid and widespread spatial coverage. No on-site access is required, and this allows for unbiased sampling in order to get a more accurate assessment of methane emissions. However, you're measuring methane concentrations from several thousand feet in the air. As a result, you can expect higher detection limits, and also many of these technologies rely on reflected sunlight, and thus you need favorable weather conditions and minimal cloud cover. Additionally, they only provide sort of a one-moment snapshot in time. Finally, the last class of technologies that I'll be introducing you today are satellites, and these operate very similarly to the airplanes as the satellite is passing in its orbit overhead. It collects images and evaluates methane enhancement in order to identify potential methane leaks, and this is another photo from our research groups, recent publication by Sherwin et al. 2023, in which a satellite here identified this methane plume. Satellites can provide you with truly global coverage, which is the key advantage here for this approach. This is really how you can achieve rapid scalability with regular repeated observations of the same location. However, of course, now we're measuring methane, not just several thousand feet in the air, as was the case with airplanes, but through the entire atmosphere, and as a result, you can expect even higher detection limits. Of course, the same weather limitations associated with cloud cover apply, and these are also incredibly expensive to launch. With all of these novel technologies entering this space, this begs the question, how well do they work? And this is what we decided to find out. Over the last several years, my research group led by Professor Adam Brandt here at Stanford has been developing and pioneering methods for evaluating methane detection technologies. I led our most recent campaign, which was last fall, and our most ambitious one to date. We conducted two full months of testing located in the desert outside of Phoenix and tested over 20 different technology types. Our participants in this campaign are displayed on this slide, and we really attempted to bring together all of the major players in the methane detection space. The participants in this campaign analyzed data ranging from that collected by drones to airplanes, satellites, and ground-based sensors. And these participants represent university research groups, nonprofit organizations, startups, as well as fully mature companies. We tested five different airplane teams that use varying methods, as well as nine different satellites. These satellites are both privately owned, as well as owned and operated by various international space agencies ranging from the United States, the German space agency, Italian space agency, and the Chinese space agency. And we worked with our partners in order to provide the data collected from these satellites to six different analysis teams. We also evaluated eight different continuous monitors. This is a combination of point sensors, metal oxide sensors, and infrared cameras, which were deployed throughout our field site, collecting data throughout the entire two-month period. We work very closely with the different test participants in order to develop testing protocols. And this schematic on the slide shows what testing an airplane might look like. Methane is an invisible gas, but we can visualize our release stack in the image to your right, which shows the plume that we are releasing. Stanford, our Stanford team on the ground, controls the release rate from our work station where the Stanford logo is. And we release a known amount of gas to us that we do not disclose to the test participants. And we ask the test participants, in this case the airplane that's flying overhead, to conduct routine survey operations and closely mimic their field operations as much as possible. We work very closely as well with rawhide leasing. They operate our natural gas equipment. We use compressed natural gas, which you can see in the trailers next to the rawhide logo as well. And we work very closely with them sort of on conducting this type of field testing. So after collecting two months of data for over the 20 different teams that we participated, we are currently deep in data analysis mode and preparing our results. And one thing that we're really proud of and excited about is the fact that the results from all of our testing for all of these companies are fully transparent and identifiable. When we publish our results, they will appear alongside the names of the companies. And this is to advance R&D as well as to provide full transparency for operators. However, while we're still currently analyzing results, I'm excited to be able to share with you a sneak peek of our satellite and our airplane data. And this is just to give you a sense this is sort of hot off the press of what we're seeing. So to start off with the satellites that we tested, this is work, an analysis that's being conducted by my colleague, Dr. Evan Sherwin, also a postdoc in our research group. So in a moment, I'll sort of reveal the different data points that we collected, but I'll walk you through the plot first so you understand what you're looking at. So on the x-axis, this is our ground truth metered release rate. So that's sort of our known flow rate of methane that we're releasing. And on the y-axis is the reported value by the test participant. Each of the points represents a measurement. They are color coded based on the satellite and the shape of the point indicates which team was conducting the analysis. These are our satellite results. This looks, there are large error bars and it may look sort of a bit scattered, but I'd like to point out a few key points here. This is the only way that we can truly achieve global coverage. And if you look on the whole at the aggregate trend of these data, you see that they are in line with the x equals y parity line. So while we may miss smaller releases here with satellites, we are overall able to get a fairly good sense of what is happening on the ground. And this is an incredibly hard problem which only has room to improve in the next few years as we're going to see the launching of several methane specific satellites. As for our airplane results, the plot is very similar. You'll see our metered x axis, the x axis represents our metered methane release rate and the y axis represents the quantification estimate by the participant that we were testing. So we tested five different airplanes. I didn't want to play favorite, so I selected one and anonymized them for the purposes of today. And this is what this particular test result looked like. And you can see that this aircraft performed incredibly well. The parity line is very close to, or sort of the best fit line is very close to our x equals y parity line. And they're able to accurately quantify emissions spanning orders of magnitude as low as 30 kilograms per hour up to nearly 1,500 kilograms per hour. Overall, our results indicate that these novel technologies are incredibly promising for improving our ability to detect methane. But what does this mean for climate change? And here I'd like to highlight the work by some of my colleagues at Stanford who are analyzing the data sets that are produced by airplanes who conduct surveys similar to the results from the one that I just showed. This is work by Yanlei Chen and Dr. Evan Sherwin. And they used data from Kairos Aerospace that surveyed the Permian Basin, an oil and gas producing region in the United States. And here they found that we are seeing larger methane emissions than expected, far greater, several fold greater than those reported for the same region in EPA's greenhouse gas emissions inventory. This is the work that analyzes data from one oil and gas producing region, but Evan Sherwin extrapolated this to six different oil and gas producing regions across the United States using over one million measurements collected by aircrafts. And I'd just like to point out that this is really the scale that we are able to achieve with aircraft measurements. Just several years ago, collecting one million measurements with individual site levels would have been a nearly impossible feat. Evan's analysis found that less than 1.5% of sites contribute up to 80% of emissions. So we are seeing both larger emissions than expected, but the key culprits are a very small number, a very large. So aircrafts and satellites who are helping us revise our understanding of what the methane budget is in the United States, however, can also play a key role in helping us identify and fix these large emissions. However, in order to meet our global climate targets, we still are going to need to identify leaks that are below the lower detection limits of airplanes. And so this is a very active and ongoing area of research. I would like to thank sort of the entire Stanford methane group led by Professor Adam Brandt and all the students and postdocs who are involved in this work and have contributed immensely to the work that I shared today, as well as the funding sources for our field work this past fall. Stanford Natural Gas Initiative, as well as the Environmental Defense Fund, Global Methane Hub, and the UN Environmental Program. And finally, I'd just like to end by thanking our partners at Rawhide Leasing and Volta Fabrication, who we work with very closely on designing and operating all of our equipment for these field studies. Thank you so much. Yeah, why don't you come in and take a seat? So I'm curious to hear, how well do you think you're replicating the real oil and gas operations out there in the Arizona desert? By the way, you're a badass being out in the desert for months on end, but yeah, do you think it's an accurate representation of what's actually going on in the field? Yeah, thank you, Naomi. So our release apparatus can be thought of as sort of an unlit flare, so this does mimic the type of point source emissions that we do expect to see in oil and gas operations. The other aspect of this question that you asked is how, or the other sort of facet of this question, is how the operators are conducting their assessment. And so here we ask all of the operators that we're testing to mimic their field conditions as closely as possible. So we ask them to use the same sort of data collection process, data analysis pipeline, et cetera. I think the real key difference is that in our studies, we are telling the operators where to look. So they don't know how much we're releasing or even whether or not we're releasing, but they do know the location to look. And so I think that's sort of allowing them to see things that if they didn't know where to look, they might not have seen some of our smaller releases. And so I think that's sort of where we're moving forward in this area. All right, thank you. All right, let's open it up. Questions, raise your hand right here. So let's get a microphone. My name is Vishwanath. I'm a postdoc at Suncat. My question is to Leera. First of all, thank you so much for the great talk. So I have two parts to my question. First is there's a lot of innovation happening in Europe, particularly related to Green Steel. There's this company I've heard H2 Green Steel in Sweden. They are almost on the verge of commercializing Green Steel using renewable energy powered electrolytic hydrogen. So can you talk a little bit about how the technology is different from the conventional blast furnace based technology? And the second part of my question is for a country like India where majority of the steel industry is based on this coal-based blast furnaces, how do you envision transitioning into greener steel production or decarbonizing that sector? Great questions. I will start with the second one. And you can maybe remind me of the first one if I get off track. So India is a really interesting example. India currently is the second largest producer of steel on the planet, but is in the process right now of expanding their base of steel-making facilities by 100% over the next 10 years. So what does that mean for steel in India? Well, that means that India is one of the epicenters in the world right now of enabling this green transition because the platform is already there and the funding is already there to be able to roll out these new facilities at the appropriate scale to be able to really have an impact by 2030, by 2035, on really, really lowering the bar or raising the bar in terms of amount of CO2 emissions from steel. And right now, there's an interesting interaction that's going on between the Indian government and the Indian research programs and corporations to try to figure out how to get that implemented in the appropriate time. And there's a lot of discussion there. I probably can't get into it right now, but I'd love to chat with you afterwards because if you're interested, now is actually the time and India is the place to really make a big impact in terms of rolling out this type of green technology. The other question that you asked was about the hybrid plant in Sweden, which I will actually broaden your comment to a bigger comment, which is that at this point, there are demonstrations of three technologies that are opportunities for carbon-zero steel that have reached the pilot plant stage and have been demonstrated at the pilot scale stage and are at the cusp of being possible for really rolling it out at scale. Absolutely, this is a game changer. I don't want to misspeak at all. This is incredibly important for the steel-making industry, and this should not be understated. That said, this is also not the first time this has happened. So the first version of a pure hydrogen zero carbon steel that reached the pilot phase was in 1954. And none thus far have actually gone from the pilot scale to actually reaching the full scale, except for one example. And that was funded by Arcelor Matal, sorry, by Cleveland Cliffs and was a technology that effectively was rolled out in Trinidad to be able to use fluidized bed technology to use pure hydrogen for this. And that, after eight years of actually truly reaching megaton scale, ended up closing down because of an issue in the economics of it that they forecasted with a little bit off and they weren't able to meet the production required to be able to actually make it profitable. And so this is one of the things that's so challenging is as much as I make it seem like a science problem, it's actually not just a science problem. It's a problem that we need to be thinking about the techno-economics of the system as we're developing the technology because it's not enough to come up with the technology if we're aiming for a gigaton scale. You have to be asking the questions that can actually make it profitable on day one. Otherwise you're never gonna be able to roll it out in a way that's meaningful. So there are three different types that have reached this phase by now. One of them is called the falling particle reactor. One of that rolled out in Utah. One of them is called the molten oxide electrolysis that's in Boston. And one of them is the hybrid facility that's in Sweden. I encourage you to check them out to get involved if you can come up with your own because it's really important that we continue this progress. So I wanna build on that. We just have two minutes left. So this is gonna be like rapid fire. You mentioned a really good point, right? We're focused on the technologies, developing the technologies, but we gotta think about cost and also about policy. So as you interact with companies, industries, in your respective areas, can you just say a few words about what you're seeing in terms of their motivation to decarbonize? Do you feel like there are adequate policies in place and how are you sort of seeing that in response to the technical work that you're presenting them with? And I'm looking at you so hard because we're gonna go up the line in reverse order. So I'll start with you. So your question is sort of how is the industry receptive to efforts to decarbonize? Yeah, I would say in the oil and gas space, I mean we are seeing advancements in sort of EPA policy that is pushing this space along and applying sort of pressure to industry in order to implement a lot of the technologies that we've seen today. We're seeing regulations that are supporting sort of more technology agnostic approaches such as aircraft surveys for identifying sort of methane leaks from oil and gas. And I would say, I mean we've worked with some of the large players in sort of funding some of this work who are interested in really identifying methane emissions and reducing them. And we've got the methane fee in the IRA which is like a little bit of a stick as well there. Jonathan, how about you? Yeah, cost is everything. I mean when it comes to these really big industrial commercial processes, I think for us focusing on hydrogen production we've been thinking about it in two ways together with industry. The first is to see given the relatively high cost of green electricity whether there is a pathway to make our technology cheaper compared to blue hydrogen as a point of cost comparison. And then the second in part because of cost and in part due to deployability is to see how we can adapt this to methane pyrolysis as a means for producing hydrogen in a way where the carbon can be captured in a more practical and economic way. Solid. Assuming that, yeah, solid carbon. So yeah, it begins and ends with cost and you just have to really make a case that what you're doing is bringing value beyond what currently exists. Great, is it, Sienna? Well, if I echo what Jonah just said, cost also when it comes to cement is very important. I think everyone has to play its part. So there is the part of having policies and that incentivize the use or different technology. But at the same time when it comes to the cement industry it's also an industry that has to innovate a little bit more because if we think that Portland cement is the recipe, is a recipe that comes from the 1800, has been definitely tweaked over time, but not that much. And then the other thing is that it's also an industry that needs to diversify a little bit depending on the application. The recipe, again, is a little bit, if you have to build skyscrapers or curbside, the recipe does not change much. So I think that costs are important but also innovation. They are, briefly. I will echo what everybody just said before me. In a slightly different way. So in steel it's always about value added that just decreasing the emissions is never gonna make business sense unless you can show that doing so gives value added to the product that you generate. And so that manifests itself from the perspective of the business decisions that are made but it also manifests itself from the perspective of the policy decisions that are made. So for example, Europe is one of the leaders in green steel and the critical decision that enabled that was the carbon tax that was put in in Europe that there was a critical point when that happened that is when all of the different technologies in green steel started being born and coming out of that. And finding a way, that changed the incentives because suddenly economic sense did not lie in keeping business as usual because suddenly business as usual became a lot more expensive than it used to be. And so finding ways both at the policy level and at the technology level of making it make economic and business sense to be able to decarbonize is absolutely the winning ticket to be able to ensure decarbonization. And I'm sure that's not unique to steel. Great note to end on. Please join me in thanking our STEM panelists.