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U.S. DOE Funds 'Sunlight-to-Fuel' Project

July 29, 2010 | 5 Comments

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Washington, D.C. The U.S. Department of Energy Announced earlier this month that it would set aside more than $100 million to create an "Energy Innovation Hub" to encourage innovation around producing fuels directly from sunlight.

JCAP research will be directed at the discovery of the functional components necessary to assemble a complete artificial photosynthetic system: light absorbers, catalysts, molecular linkers, and separation membranes.

The DOE hopes to build new photosynthetic biofuels technologies and then partner with the private sector to commercialize them. U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel Poneman announced an award of $122 million last week to a team of researchers in California.

The Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP), to be led by the California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), will bring together leading researchers in an ambitious effort aimed at simulating nature's photosynthetic apparatus for practical energy production.

The Fuels from Sunlight Energy Innovation Hub is one of three Hubs that will receive funding in FY10. The Hubs are large, multidisciplinary, highly-collaborative teams of scientists and engineers working over a longer time frame to achieve a specific high-priority goal. They will be managed by top teams of scientists and engineers with enough resources and authority to move quickly in response to new developments.

JCAP research will be directed at the discovery of the functional components necessary to assemble a complete artificial photosynthetic system: light absorbers, catalysts, molecular linkers, and separation membranes. The Hub will then integrate those components into an operational solar fuel system and develop scale-up strategies to move from the laboratory toward commercial viability. The ultimate objective is to drive the field of solar fuels from fundamental research, where it has resided for decades, into applied research and technology development, thereby setting the stage for the creation of a direct solar fuels industry.

The Hub will be funded at up to $22 million this fiscal year. The Hub will then be funded at an estimated $25 million per year for the next four years, subject to Congressional appropriations.

Bioenergy, Solar Energy

5 Reader Comments

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1 of 5

glenn-doty-175949

July 30, 2010

This is a perfect example of why the DOE is such a monstrous failure.

Everything is pre-specified according to some bureaucrat's idea of how it should be.

The most cost effective means of producing carbon-neutral fuels is via three chemical reactions in an industrial chemical facility: electrolysis, RWGS, then FTS.

Introducing natural plants into the mix just forces the temperatures down to the ~300 K range, which means that the activiation levels for the chemical reactions that are of interest are reduced by as much as 9 orders of magnitude.

If you would like to see what the future of transportation fuels looks like, go to www.WindFuels.com.

Comment
2 of 5

jonheatley

August 3, 2010

www.windfuels.com is not available and is 'a site under construction'

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3 of 5

WillDeliver

August 3, 2010

windfuels.com is a viable website...I was just there. Converting CO2 to liquid fuel is part of a NASA Mars mission in the future. It is not new technology.

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4 of 5

david-doty-31004

August 10, 2010

It is true that NASA has been working on related technology for more than a decade, but the approaches taken by researchers there have achieved abysmal efficiency. Implying that going from 20% to 55% efficiency while reducing equipment costs by a factor of two is trivial and unworthy of support further highlights the reason real progress toward sustainable fuels is not being made – no one is interested in looking a practical breakthroughs. The average of the better solar-to-fuels demonstrations thus far are achieving system efficiency in the range of 0.1-0.2%. Many of the advances needed to get 55% system efficiency in making fuels from CO2 and off-peak wind have been published, and many are available at the windfuels website. Some are still proprietary, as work continues. Sound, practical solutions need support. Unfortunately, most DOE support thus far has gone either to the sexy sounding far-out ideas that have little chance of making a difference within this century or to routine incremental progress on proven technology that will never get to the level needed to really make a difference. There needs to be a mechanism for funding practical advances that can make a real difference within two decades.

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5 of 5

jackrabbit

October 6, 2010

glenn-doty-175949 is right on with his comments. DOE's insists on putting forth project solicitations that are indeed assembled by bureaucrats in DC, that lack depth with regard to meeting real U.S. needs, and that are over-constrained to the point of allowing changes in goals when changes are clearly clearly called for. For example, check out the DOE-sponsored, Range Fuels program to produce ethanol with mixed alcohols technology. So far Range can produce methanol, but stretching to economically viable ethanol with their process does not appear possible. But with $76 million already spent on it, DOE is unwilling to live with the embarrassment of pulling the plug on this one.

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