Tag Archives: Thomas Moore

Kavli Foundation roundtable on artificial synthesis as a means to produce clean fuel

A Sept. 9, 2015 news item on Azonano features a recent roundtable discussion about artificial photosynthesis and clean fuel held by the Kavli Foundation,

Imagine creating artificial plants that make gasoline and natural gas using only sunlight. And imagine using those fuels to heat our homes or run our cars without adding any greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. By combining nanoscience and biology, researchers led by scientists at University of California, Berkeley, have taken a big step in that direction.

Peidong Yang, a professor of chemistry at Berkeley and co-director of the school’s Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute, leads a team that has created an artificial leaf that produces methane, the primary component of natural gas, using a combination of semiconducting nanowires and bacteria. The research, detailed in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in August, builds on a similar hybrid system, also recently devised by Yang and his colleagues, that yielded butanol, a component in gasoline, and a variety of biochemical building blocks.

The research is a major advance toward synthetic photosynthesis, a type of solar power based on the ability of plants to transform sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into sugars. Instead of sugars, however, synthetic photosynthesis seeks to produce liquid fuels that can be stored for months or years and distributed through existing energy infrastructure.

In a [Kavli Foundation] roundtable discussion on his recent breakthroughs and the future of synthetic photosynthesis, Yang said his hybrid inorganic/biological systems give researchers new tools to study photosynthesis — and learn its secrets.

There is a list of the participants and an edited transcript of the roundtable, which took place sometime during summer 2015, on the Kavli Foundation’s Fueling up: How nanoscience is creating a new type of solar power webpage (Note: Links have been removed),

The participants were:

PEIDONG YANG – is professor of chemistry and Chan Distinguished Professor of Energy at University of California, Berkeley, and co-director of the Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute at Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley. He serves as director of the California Research Alliance by BASF, and was a founding member of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP).
THOMAS MOORE – is Regents’ Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry and past director of the Center for Bioenergy & Photosynthesis at Arizona State University. He is a past president of the American Society for Photobiology, and a team leader at the Center for Bio-Inspired Solar Fuel Production.
TED SARGENT – is a University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto where he is vice-dean for research for the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Nanotechnology and is a founder of two companies, InVisage Technologies and Xagenic.

THE KAVLI FOUNDATION (TKF): Solar cells do a good job of converting sunlight into electricity. Converting light into fuel seems far more complicated. Why go through the bother?

THOMAS MOORE: That’s a good question. In order to create sustainable, solar-driven societies, we need a way to store solar energy. With solar cells, we can make electricity efficiently, but we cannot conveniently store that electricity to use when it is cloudy or at night. If we want to stockpile large quantities of energy, we have to store it as chemical energy, the way it is locked up in coal, oil, natural gas, hydrogen and biomass.

PEIDONG YANG: I agree. Perhaps, one day, researchers will come up with an effective battery to store photoelectric energy produced by solar cells. But photosynthesis can solve the energy conversion and storage problem in one step. It converts and stores solar energy in the chemical bonds of organic molecules.

TED SARGENT: Much of the globe’s power infrastructure, from automobiles, trucks and planes to gas-fired electrical generators, is built upon carbon-based fossil fuels. So creating a new technology that can generate liquid fuels that can use this infrastructure is a very powerful competitive advantage for a renewable energy technology.

For someone who’s interested in solar energy and fuel issues, this discussion provide a good introduction to some of what’s driving the research and, happily, none of these scientists are proselytizing.

One final comment. Ted Sargent has been mentioned here several times in connection with his work on solar cells and/or quantum dots.