 for joining us. I am Corley Lawrence and part of the S&P global team and today is a particular treat for me and I hope as well for you I get to speak with not one but four Stanford professors and we're going to talk about what is new at Stanford and it has been a really eventful year for the energy sector of Stanford. We're going to hear from that. There's a strong sense of excitement and above all which I find really striking there's a huge sense of purpose. There's a sense that the school wants to make a difference to the monumental challenge that is climate change. So this is the session where we get to hear all about that. I've got some questions prepared and then we'll open it up for Q&A. Please prepare your questions for the panel and we will move to ask them in due course. So it is an honor to welcome the panel today. Let me present. We have Yiqui who is the director of the Precourt Institute for Energy. Welcome Yiqui. Thank you. Naomi Bonas who is managing director of the National Gas Initiative as well as co-managing director of the Hydrogen Initiative. So lots to talk about there. And we have Aaron Majumdar who is Dean of the Doher School of Sustainability. Welcome Aaron. And Thomas Jaramillo who is associate professor of chemical engineering and director of the Suncat Center. So I've probably missed out a lot of your titles or accomplishments but in the interest of time we're going to move forward with the session. So I think to start off we're going to or I'd like you to tell us about Stanford and what do you do in the energy space. And to start with the beginning I want to bring you in Aaron please. And if you could tell us the big news this year is the new Doher School of Sustainability. That is new. You are the first dean. Can you tell us about that? Well let me first thank you for having us all here. Let me first ask how many Stanford alums out here. Okay. So the big news is that Lake Lagunita is full because of the torrential rains we've had. That's an amazing thing because it hasn't happened for a long time. You're very lucky that's all the rain that was due in Europe and hasn't come. With that big news behind us the Doher School obviously this has been in the making for the last five years. This didn't happen overnight. But in the scheme of academic timescale it is kind of overnight because most a lot of that happened during the pandemic. And you know when our new president and provost came in in 2016 they had a listening tour of all the faculty students and you know stakeholders and all and the issues of energy, water, food, biodiversity and all of these related issues all emerged and it was all grouped under sustainability and climate change affects all of them. And so then the question was what could we do about it and the proposal of a school Tom and I were in a committee together to propose. We always do things in committees by the way in academia and so we proposed a school because we wanted to go big and Stanford has not started a school in 75 years. This is the first one and we only have seven schools and this issue is different from many of the issues were tackled before because this is not just a business school issue or a law school or an engineering aside. It's all of the above. So why former school? Well we got to recruit some faculty. We got to you know admit students give degrees, develop curriculum. That's a kind of school function and that's needed new curriculum, new educational programs etc. But it's also we needed to form a connective tissue across whole campus. So the institutes were brought in and essentially what we have formed is a microcosm of the whole campus with partnerships with the outside world in a three-legged stool structure, departments, institutes and this new think-all-the-accelerator to think about scale from the beginning and so that we can develop solutions with that in mind, scalability in mind with partnerships. That's what has been instituted right now and we are in the second quarter. We only one and a half quarters old but the thinking has been going on for a long time and we're gonna we are really super excited about it. And so when you when you think ahead you know what are your do you have targets for this year for five years down the road for ten years down the road. Do you know more or less where you want to be what you want to be able to accomplish? Well this is in many ways the school is like a startup but it's also merger. We have joined appointments with every other school with faculty. This is new. So many joint appointments at one shot never quite happened. So we are figuring out how that merger you know these as you some of you may have been involved in mergers these take some time right to blend together to bring us common values and culture together but there's no and there's no question that we are going to you know focus in recruiting talent and fostering talent. New education, world-class education, insustainability all of these issues that are laid out before and this accelerator is a very important part of it and we're launching a third Institute in addition to pre-court Institute for Energy in the Woods Institute environment is the Institute for Sustainable Societies urban infrastructure environmental justice equity issues and all of the governance issues as well as you know how what what do we value. We got you know we have science and engineering on one hand and we have social sciences economics and law on the other. So usually they remain in the schools. Now we have all in one school so we got to make sure that their values are aligned with those values of curiosity driven research of you know blue sky discovery focused research as well as the solution focused research R&D and so those values have to be created and they take some time. So you're building links between all of these initiatives right okay so within the Doherr School of Sustainability that Erin was telling us about you head up the pre-court Institute can you tell us about that? Sure but let me just mention the Lake Lakonita again alone she's a full water it's looking beautiful so I'm moving closer to the lake while I cross the street from Mark Sobeck I think Mark Sobeck sitting right there we will become neighbor so very exciting Stanford alumni welcome back soon before the lake dries up. So pre-court Institute has been around for more than a decade roughly building on previously global climate energy project actually took over this position for Arloon and Sally Benson this is a big ecosystem and energy working on science engineering technology economics and policy and technology translation as well related to energy for example over the past about seven years starting from natural gas initiatives started by Mark Sobeck the Bitcoin Watch Initiative that's for Electrical Grid and Hydrogen Naomi's right here well actually Naomi also managing the natural gas initiative as well Storage X so there's a systematic plan to start initiative to tackle those areas those sectors with carbon emission how do we do that you know forming a sector with significant industry support yet at the same time we recognize it's very important to have finance policy technology translation global engagement coming in so this I call as interwoven fabric of Stanford ecosystem really bring together roughly about 300 faculty members a thousand students actually Suncat is part of ecosystem Tom is directing this is a DOE center so this is really really nice really have the vision I think the foundation for Arloon measure the new school formation because this is the experiment when all the expertise across the campus together you know over a decade ago now building on that now we have the school so it's a natural I think leading to the school formation I'll take a pause right here for now yeah it sounds very exciting Naomi do you want to tell us about the hydrogen and gas initiatives and possibly your comment on the lake as well I have I have no comment on the lake yeah I am Stanford alum that's true I've run around Lake Lagunita many times so yeah I focus on both natural gas and hydrogen you know both of those initiatives were initiated with a understanding of how natural gas and hydrogen could aid in decarbonization and we're really proud to be part of the school of sustainability and within the pre-court Institute for energy and we share that sense of purpose around sustainability and around implementing climate actions in a very direct and impactful way we have a short duration to make a big change here so off the back of the natural gas initiative which has had a lot of success in working with industry to solve problems like methane leaks for example we recognized about three years ago how important the hydrogen was going to be for decarbonization and we spent those three years building a community at Stanford and I think one of the really great things about the new school of sustainability is that it has really enabled multi-disciplinary approach to some of these problems and hydrogen is such a great example of that right we bring together the traditional energy community with the technology community of Silicon Valley with the investment community and with all of the NGOs in this wonderful partnership to use hydrogen to accelerate decarbonization good now that sounds that sounds really fantastic Thomas I want to turn to you now of course I think can you tell us about the Suncat Center and possibly about the accelerator as well yeah because that sounds like something that's very exciting a few of you mentioned relationships partnerships with the industry so let's hear about that yeah thank you so much for the questions first of all Suncat as a center were a team of 16 senior personnel about 70 or 80 students and postdocs all really working towards sustainable fuels and chemicals how to produce them using sustainable feedstocks using renewable energy how to make use of them in more effective ways than we currently do today how to use molecules as a means for long duration storage these are these are very key topics we're really very tech-focused science engineering experiment computational to address challenges that space we work on molecules like hydrogen supported through the hydrogen initiative we work on carbon dioxide conversion we work on ammonia we work on hydrocarbon chemistry so that's very very tech centric the beauty of Stanford among the many things I could say here to complete that sentence is that we're really a one-stop shop of scholars that work in many scholarly areas we're not we're not all about science and engineering we have amazing we have a law school and we have a business school you have a school of medicine and now a school of sustainability it's at that level and so really what we're trying to do is build that that ecosystem of scholars saying the future that we're trying to create together we can't just put blinders on and work in our own discipline and say oh I got there we reached where we wanted to be and then it doesn't plug into the rest of the societal framework so we need new forms of government regulation we need innovation and finance we need sociology how to sort of society adopt and adapt and the technology in oceans and atmosphere and subsurface all this has to work together and that's really what the school brings and then there's another dimension to all of this and that is well what can we do differently other than you know bringing everyone together that's great but how can we do more and that's really what the accelerator is aiming to do the way I look at it universities have had a massive impact on society it's it's just not direct meaning what are what universities what are we really good at we're really good at education and basic research those are the fundamental pillars of a university and look at thousands of movers and shakers at this conference right going through university setting foundations for education and and and how many people are contributing to the world today the basic research is turning into the technologies that are the solar cells that we see deployed new catalysts and oil refineries etc a lot of that came from basic researchers research coming from universities and then the question is how can we have a more rapid and direct impact to address the urgency in the scale of the problem and basic research and education is not exactly the fastest path but we do have the scholarly potential with 2,000 faculty 17 plus thousand students thousands of staff and we just have to create the right types of avenues and the accelerators designed to do exactly that is to create avenues that can more rapidly accelerate the basic research and education kind of mission and say we've got the scholarly potential if we can be more challenge driven and identify what might scale and who can we partner with to get there what role can universities play it's really not hard to get enthusiasm across campus to contribute to that and not just in the the way that in not just a one-dimensional way but in a multi-dimensional way that we can have all these areas of scholarship economics policy tech working together to create that solution ahead so the accelerators is about getting your research out of the lab into the marketplace is one example it's also how to talk to investors how to talk to policymakers how to how to how to work together as a team so that we can create that that interwoven fabric of the future together this business ready business ready that's exactly good good good it sounds like you know I want you said universities traditionally education research you're definitely going beyond that is that correct Aaron Naomi you know do you want to comment is that the case yeah I mean certainly you know this is part of reimagining academia and as just to echo Tom we have done a few things well we are good at fundamental research we publish our papers which is all good which are necessary but not everything that we do is actually scalable and I think the idea of reimagining one of the reimagination there are few reimaginations one of them is can we think about scale from the beginning for example if you are to develop solutions for grid scale storage right we know long duration storage we know it has to be one-tenth the cost of lithium-ion batteries because otherwise it just not economically does not make sense but it also has to be at the hundred terawatt hour scale and he will tell you all about it but what that does is that it constrains you with the materials you use with the infrastructure you may need right and if you can leverage existing infrastructure you can go faster so same thing with you know let's say hydrogen you know the hydrogen earth shot right that the DOE has few of us were involved in creating that whole model of okay dollar a kilogram within this decade what is missing in that is the hundred million tons of hydrogen that we need to produce when you put the scale along with the cost the techno economic target it changes the ball game because we may have to look at a portfolio of solutions that can actually scale and that changes the way you think in the way you do your research and that's the part of the imagination the other part of the imagination is how we educate some of these issues are not engineering issues or law issues or or business they all of the above the interplay between them is really important to understand for the students to be able to develop critical thinking skills to look at them the sort of connecting the dots and then making the right decisions about what to do the next step you do you want to add something a little bit to you know just add a few points related to what Arun just said when you have a Stanford students coming in whether it's undergrad and graduate students a long time ago you asked them they said hi I want to have a major discovery right so nowadays you ask the student they say some of them say I still want to have the major discovery that's fantastic we continue doing that we do that really well but many students ask how do I make a difference make an impact to the world that number the percentage is actually increased a lot I think the new school does a sustainability accelerator this really entertain these type of thinking how do you make an impact particular to scale I just look at myself in the last two years in the new school formation process these are key world scale and speed change my own research program I need to really see what's possible see the end of the game first come back to design my research I think that has huge impact among our faculties and students you can genuinely generate a solution that's scalable put a scale right at the beginning so this difference imagine the next five to ten years this keep propagating I believe for the new school they will be something scalable solution very big impact solution will come out so I'm very excited about it it's not technology for technology's sake this there's a bigger ball game and that's making a difference and this is about about scale Naomi and Thomas do you see that in your students as well this interest to be a part of you know a solution is that a driver and absolutely I you know I think back to when I was a graduate student and you know I was focused on studying geophysics in the department and and now I look at the students and they're so much more worldly so much more aware so driven I think you know and Stanford has set them up beautifully in this environment where they really get to embrace the whole sustainability discipline outside of you know their departments and I think you know Stanford has this startup culture right that's who we are we were you know instrumental in sort of Silicon Valley being established and the students embrace that they are you know really driven to make a difference and Stanford is a place that has a history of helping people do that and I think more than ever the students come in and we're all learning from each other in a community setting rather than it being a one-way flow of information which is wonderful that sounds very inspiring Thomas did you want to add something yeah I fully agree I would say that the students absolutely come in I see so many students they want to dedicate their life towards improving sustainability making a difference in the world I mean it's at the level of paraphrase Maverick from Top Gun it's not what they are it's who they are that's what they want to do forever so yeah that's a great a great and they're bright and they're they're fired up and just as we it's up to us to really create outlets for that creativity to channel that energy well it's a good time to be studying you know in your in your different fields of research I mean one thing so these today we talk to a number of industry folks I also see the new school particular salary to open up new mechanism to engage industry in a very different way compared to before even more powerful for example going from research to translation into the real world going through this multi-step Tom using your terminology is the pre pilot to pilot right in that zone of pre pilot and pilot scale engage in industry could be very different you know using this platform will be I think very effective I would also just add that the accelerator is about solutions at scale it's certainly the technology in the business part is very important but it's also policy it's actually all hands on deck whatever it takes including education normally we educate about few thousand students and maybe few thousand executives or corporate right this has to go out to millions because their lives are going to get affected and if you could reduce the barrier to access to education globally is something that is part of the accelerator you know that's again it's all about scalability of education how we do that with online post-pandemic and all we are still TVD but that's the intent is to really take education to scale so you're thinking about the future of how Stanford could provide education to a wider reach beyond the physical campus and the lake that's right that's exactly right and if I may add to working professionals who are already in the energy space and want to kind of like kind of retool a bit and with the lens of sustainability and to professionals who aren't even working in the energy space at all who have skills who can bring maybe they're working in software working in semiconductors or what have you and they want to apply their trade in the space and looking to think about the next phase of their career it sounds like you want to erase a lot of the boundaries between business and education and research so all of that is part of the program that's hugely exciting can we turn a little bit I want to hear about your research so can you pick one area of work that's happening in your department around you that you find exciting that you find holds a little bit of promise and tell us about it yes start okay well I'm I'm gonna break the rules and talk about two things but I'll keep it brief okay okay so in the natural gas initiative we have just got back from two months out in the Arizona desert we took 22 companies methane detection technologies and we actually released methane and we tested these technologies so one of the things that I think you know Stanford does really well right is provides a neutral ground for companies and we have sort of become the assessor of these technologies working with both the service provider companies and the operators to come up with really effective cost effective ways of mitigating methane detection so that's one thing that we've been doing on the hydrogen side we're working across the whole value chain and there's a lot of what you might expect you know in terms of nuts and bolts science work going on but the project that I really am excited about right now is a pre-court pioneering project on decarbonizing steel and I think you know really focusing on these nuts that are hard to crack particularly in these hard to abate sectors is one of the things that Stanford can really bring to the table and and it has huge implications right for not just decarbonizing steel but then rolling out the technology to decarbonize other yeah heavy industry sectors that does sound very exciting yeah yeah well I have 10 things to tell you but maybe one or two I learned I just come back from India a couple weeks ago it's very dangerous to put two people sitting next to each other to brainstorm so in the plane in the plane so we have a lot of idea flashing off I won't tell you that so because we haven't worked on that yet so let me tell you maybe just a couple of things one is for my lab so I work on for a long time in addition to high energy density batteries for electrical transportation I mean this problem has been in my mind actually a decade ago how to do long duration energy storage uh about four five years ago my lab invented this new technological called nickel hydrogen gas battery it's not nickel metal hydride it's very different this one has has a very long cycle life 30 000 cycle right that's five six times of lithium iron 30 years lifetime a quick solution extremely safe when we with recent analysis we we have a strong uh we believe this can go down below lithium ions cause in the system level oh my god this I think this is a game changer so I see Ashok is sitting right there right Ashok this is very very exciting I think this is going to change the world so uh well let's we look forward to push this to the market uh translate into the market in the next couple years so this is one thing I want to tell you second thing is come back to what Alun just said how do we get down to the cost 10 times lower for the long duration in the future when you go to 100 kilowatt hour scale and uh and inside Stanford we put together a team to really analyze hey to get there 100 kilowatt hour we need gigaton or batteries we need solvent in the gigaton level and how do you do that only water can do it and then we need to be in the way aqueous batteries when you look at a battery he's 160 years ago that's aqueous solutions base it was until about 30 years ago lithium ion come along organic electrolyte people kind of forget about aqueous solution now now it's coming back so too it has the potential for 10x lower cost I'm excited about you sound very excited yes no that's great so a couple of things one is a something that's going on in my lab you know one of the largest biggest challenges in greenhouse gases is methane and you know this is methane detection and what we're detecting is actually not a good story because there's a lot of methane that is leaking from the permanent basin etc so we have focused on atmospheric methane removal and this is going to be hard the only way you can remove it is actually oxidize it and the way nature does it is through UV light uh breaking ozone into oxygen molecule and oxygen free radical which other forms other radicals to actually activate methane which is very hard to activate but it activates at room temperature and then you got the methyl radical and then a sort of a cascading down to CO2 once it converts to CO2 we know how to take it out of the atmosphere through photosynthesis so what we are trying to do is to replicate that using UV light to produce free radicals and you know methane is at 2 ppm that's the atmospheric concentration in other regions it's about thousand five hundred four hundred ppm or so but in the atmosphere it's 2 ppm and that comes not just from natural gas from agriculture from patty from livestock etc so that's 2 ppm and so it's been very hard to oxidize methane below 100 ppm right now we are doing 30 ppm we're trying to push it down to 2 ppm it looks good but there's a long way ahead in terms of trying to get down to 2 ppm in an energy efficient way using background UV light and so there are a lot of science that has to be and engineering that needs to be done so that's one the other one is this is a group effort on stanford in partnership with google and that is on data and there's a lot of data out there in front in terms of demographic data in terms of you know household income emissions data where the solar panels are and you know temperature data weather data and climate predictions of the future all of that so what one of the things we are doing with google is to create a worldwide web of data so you can I can share the data with you and you can use my data and I can use your data to to understand something better in the energy climate and sustainability space and and so one of the use cases that we're going to launch is that you know in COVID you had the Johns Hopkins website so you could click on any country and find out how many cases how many deaths how many backs how much vaccination and all of that we don't have anything on climate on weather extremes and so we are launching this in live data on what are the issues going on for example there was this this is right now going on a massive famine and drought in east Africa there was a just biblical flood in Pakistan where 500 people died the glaciers melt and there was torrential rain and you know so one can attribute to climate and all of that and that will be done but the actual human impact of that what was the human response what are the human impact that story comes in wall street journey of times and just goes away we cannot forget that we got to retain the lessons learned from that we cannot forget those people so the lessons learned from that so that when there's another flood somewhere else in the world perhaps we could use those lessons so that's a repository of extreme events that we are just launching right now in partnership with Google pooling data for the greater good for everyone to be able to use that no one will ever have to do data wrangling in the future if we can collect our data sets put in essentially it's the same format like just like in websites you have HTML and and so that's a format right so and that you can now link websites the same thing should be possible with data if the format is the right one so that's the thing that we are kind of launching right now that sounds great Thomas great yeah some examples there hydrogen is a big one that we work in a lot of excitement across the globe of approximately 100 gigawatts of announced projects for water electrolysis and the challenge is really do we have the technology that can hit the the cost targets that steam methane reforming can provide which is about in the US a little over a dollar a kilogram very difficult to do we're taking a couple of different approaches one approach this is funded through the hydrogen initiative is we're taking you know the US taxpayer dollars have paid for a number of synchrotrons facilities across the United States the US national labs that can do some pretty exciting advanced forms of characterization we're taking that and we're building electrolyzers that are compatible with the synchrotron beam lines so we can get molecular and atomic scale insights to how they operate under try to understand what are the bottlenecks how do we how do we unlock new designs ahead based on that information another project we're working on is try to make electrolyzers that are resilient with respect to the feedstock instead of sending in super high purity water which is what PEM electrolyzers require can we get them to run off of tap water can we get them to run off of seawater and and that has all kinds of ions and other things in there that will absolutely mess up the conventional technology so we're trying to we're coming up with new designs that that are resilient and thus can be cheaper because you don't need to have all that water purification up front and carbon dioxide we spent out a couple of companies one called dioxical another called 12 that you'll find around here at this conference building co2 electrolyzers kind of like a water electrolyzer except for you're sending in humidified co2 you can make things like ethylene you can make ethanol carbon monoxide great platform chemicals from there you can take it on forward make sustainable aviation fuels for instance another big molecule for us is ammonia ammonia is already a massively worldwide produced molecule very key to feed all of us in the room and billions of others not in the room and ammonia could also be a great fuel for maritime and for aviation the question is can you make it sustainably and thus avoid carbon in the first place and so we're working on processes we've demonstrated we can do this electrified processes to take nitrogen which is 78 percent of what you're you having your lungs right now turn that into into ammonia and then which could be used for a lot of different applications including as a sustainable fuel yes difficult to abate transports yeah absolutely so I realize we've talked a bit too long but I do want to open it up to questions in the room yes wonderful do uh yeah I think a microphone there we go is on its way thank you thank you it's not okay uh Josh Shaver from electron capital thank you for that I guess previously in some discussions years past there was a lot of talk about solar panels and new technologies like perovskites and that sort of thing but I haven't heard anything lately with respect to that is there anything new on uh the possibility of perovskites and and being durable enough to to be a to be a new panel you want to say I think in terms of PV solar cells that's this is really lucky case silicon panel along already reduced the cost so low right now making perovskites work particularly overlay with silicon made efficiency higher will push that even more I will say that's a really scalable technology for silicon perovskite will add additional one coming so I basically basically take the PV area it's getting close to be the done deal just keep scaling what's missing is actually storage long duration storage which I would say the stability of the perovskites that's a lot of work going on yeah to make them much more stable and environmentally benign and so that's that's what's uh yeah we've got a question right here thank you and David Zetun head of the chemistry at Bariland um what are you doing to like merge the innovation from older universities like you got a lot in california going and I think that the challenge is big enough so that we should forget about the borders between berkeley and stanford and uc so is there anything going on with that to tell you what first is alun and I both used to be in berkeley so there's no border right there I'll add to it absolutely no we partner a ton so I'll just give you one example there's a the usa launched about a decade ago the solar fuels hubs there were a number of hubs that were launched and currently there are two ones called lisa one's called chase the lisa one is a partnership between berkeley so laurence berkeley lab berkeley stanford slack caltech uc ervine university of origan a couple other partners and so there's what we're seeing that's just one example of partnerships and the department of energy is a lot of the the funding that they're putting out there they're expecting big teams to tackle big challenges so so that is one kind of route that we're using to partner and I couldn't agree more that's uh it makes all the sense in the world to bring the different capabilities and expertise and perspectives I think given the global challenge we we need a myriad of solutions that work across the globe there's no one size fits all and so uh so I think that's that's a good approach when it comes to sorry go ahead stanford's also um part of something called the energy leadership institute which is a number of universities from across the country and recognizing that every university has its own set of strengths right and um our commitment is to educate mid-career energy professionals such that they have a broader understanding of the entire energy landscape by visiting stanford to learn about innovation or columbia to learn about policy and together as a set of universities we can kind of give a even more deep education to those already out making decisions in the energy world I was going to just say that look when it comes to football or basketball yes we compete with with cal but when it comes to science and engineering and and partnership there's a lot of things going on between the two schools great way to conclude the panel really nice note um I want to thank you all I I really took away the lessons that you are you know reinventing pushing academia out of its you know initial shell and into the world I like the focus about scale I think that's so interesting that you're looking at the work that you do with the idea that you know it needs to work in the real world we we didn't get a chance to talk but I feel that the school is also very involved in social justice and making sure that what you do here or in california it's going to have an impact outside of the US and focusing on developing countries which may not have the resources that we have to push this research through so I think that would have been an angle to discuss but it's uh it's it sounds like you're definitely on top absolutely we have a social sciences division within the school we are recruiting our first recruits are economists and we are now got a faculty position out for environmental justice we think this is not this is a domestic issue for sure this is also an international issue and I think this is something that we want to lean into and again provide the the balance between science and engineering one hand and the social science humanities on the other that's that's wonderful thank you so much thanks for your contributions I think it hugely interesting comments today and very helpful for everyone thank you thank you for attending please check the innovation agora agenda for upcoming hub pod and lyceum sessions our next session in this studio will begin shortly