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Scialog: Solar Energy Conversion
2011 Keynote Presentations
Nate Lewis
Improving on Photosynthesis
Caltech chemistry professor Nathan S. Lewis delivered a project report to Scialog participants on the $122-million JCAP project, which he directs.
The DOE-funded “innovation hub,” is located in two California-based sites, and is operated under a unified management structure, Lewis said. The Southern California site is on the Caltech campus in Pasadena, and the Northern California site is at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
JCAP’s goal, Lewis said, is to develop and demonstrate a manufacturable solar-fuels generator, made of Earth-abundant elements, that will take sunlight, water and carbon dioxide as inputs, and robustly produce fuel from the sun 10 times more efficiently than natural photosynthesis in typical current crops.
“Finding a cost-effective way to produce fuels, as plants do, by combining sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide, would be a transformational advance in carbon-neutral energy technology,” Lewis said.
To accomplish this daunting task within the project’s 5-year time frame, JCAP must have goal-oriented programs and strong central management, Lewis said.
He said JCAP’s “accelerated discovery department” is focused on the means to accelerate the rate of discovery of light absorbers, catalysts, and membranes. Meanwhile the “scale?up department” is focused on the scientific underpinnings for linking various nano?components into fully functional artificial photosynthetic systems on a length scale of centimeters, and incorporating these photosynthetically active elements into fully operational solar?fuels generators on the 10 cm x 10 cm scale.
Lewis said that in addition to creating theoretical tools for guiding discovery and scale-up efforts, JCAP is developing high?throughput systems for quantitatively evaluating the performance of new light absorbers, photocatalysts and catalysts; it is also developing methods and standards for benchmarking the performance of everything involved in photosynthetic systems.
Because JCAP is aimed at producing workable and efficient artificial photosynthesis in a limited amount of time, Lewis said, once various benchmarks are achieved, researchers will halt their work in those areas and focus will be intensified in remaining areas.
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