The Rational Design of Catalytic Materials

• January 15, 2008: 7:00am - January 16, 2008: 2:14pm
• Location: Lawerence Berkeley National Laboratory

Creating the fuels of tomorrow:
Danish scientists connect with the Helios project

Berkeley, CA - A catalyst starts or speeds up a chemical reaction. On Monday, the conference The Rational Design of Catalytic Materials at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) was in itself a catalyst in bringing Danish scientists together with their American counterparts in a quest to create transportation fuels of the future.

Nobel Prize winner, Steven Chu, director of Berkeley Lab, opened the conference by explaining how new catalytic methods are at the heart of energy storage and will be the long term solution for transportation fuels. He was excited to be working with Denmark on this as the country has long been a leader of research and development in renewable energy sources.
"Look how Denmark made wind energy commercially viable. As a country it is small but its impact on renewable energy is much bigger than the size of its population," he said.
Denmark holds a world record of generating 21 percent of its power from wind and has long been recognized for groundbreaking catalysis work in the cleantech field.

Simulating catalytic processes on the nanoscale is one of the areas Denmark is known for. With better catalysts it will be possible to use solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, ethanol can be produced from abundant feedstock and electrochemistry can turn electricity from solar cells into fuel.

Bridging the gaps
But before these scenarios can be realized on a mass scale, there are many gaps that need to be bridged. Research into using new combinations of chemical material in catalysts and more efficient catalytic processes in general are crucial.

The conference, with 140 scientists attending, will kick off concrete talks on how the Helios project and the Danish scientific community can work together. Helios is a joint effort of Berkeley Lab and the University of California at Berkeley to develop methods of storing and utilizing solar energy. Through Helios, the two Berkeley institutions, in partnership with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was recently awarded a 500 million dollar grant by the petroleum company BP to find ways of creating transportation fuel from biomass. Professor Jens Nørskov with the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) has been working with catalysis scientists at Berkeley Lab since the eighties and is excited to enter into a more formalized cooperation with the Helios project.
“I anticipate that up to 100 participants from DTU, including PhD students, could somehow be affiliated with the Helios project in the future,” he said.
The conference is initiated by Innovation Center Denmark in Palo Alto, which led a Danish science delegation visiting the Helios project a year ago, with co-funding from the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation. Co-Leader of the Helios project, Paul Alivasatos, who holds a joint appointment with Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley, said that the project has been visited by many international delegations.
“As scientist working on this huge and important problem we have to look for unprecedented ways of working together, and this Danish group of scientists has unique knowledge fundamental to our common goals,” says the Helios leader.
He is especially looking forward to cooperation within fuel electrolysis, where electricity from solar energy is made into hydrogen, ethanol or other alcohols.

“Homo Catalyticus”
Alivasatos’ colleague at Berkeley Lab, professor Gabor Somorjai also stressed the cooperation aspect, labeling it Homo Catalyticus:
“Basically in working with catalysis, we have to combine the fields of synthesis, characterization, reaction turnover and selectivity and have people in these fields work together as one group,” he said and added:
“Denmark is well positioned to do it all, because the country has a very sophisticated environment where the industry and the scientific community work together. In the US, we have not had the same tradition, but there is no time to waste. Moreover, working together we can rely on each other’s empirical research, said the Berkeley professor.
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Industry reaching out
One of the leading industry providers of catalysts is the Danish company Haldor Topsoe, which has worked closely with the academic community in Denmark. Director of research at Haldor Topsoe, Bjerne Clausen, demonstrated at the conference how the company uses catalytic coatings in diesel exhaust cleaning, which is a rapidly expanding research area that Haldor Topsoe initiated.
“Looking at catalysts used in the clean tech field, I think that what Denmark brings to the table is key knowledge within all three important areas: heterogeneous and homogeneous catalysis and fuel cells,” he said.
Co-sponsor of the conference was the Danish company Atomistix, which is a leading provider of commercially available software for nanoscale modeling. At the conference, Atomistix was also reaching out to academic colleagues by using the opportunity to invite scientific partners to participate in a catalysis consortium. The consortium would extend the company’s current products to make them more useful for those developing catalysis and electrocatalysis materials.
“We see a specific need for better simulation tools on the nanoscale in catalysis. So it makes sense to extend our software platform into this area” explained General Manager of Atomistix, Anthony Waitz.

Not at a glacial pace
That scientists need all tools they can get was made crystal clear by director Steven Chu as he ended his presentation with a famous picture of an earth rise taken from the dark side of the moon:
“We really have to take note of what we have”, he said after showing data predicting that 78 percent of all pine forest in British Columbia will have died in 2013 due to bug infestation caused by warmer climates. Today, 40 percent of the forest is already gone.

“Glaciers no longer move at a glacial pace. If the sea levels rise three meters, 140 million people in Bangladesh alone will be displaced,” said the professor who chose to end his presentation on a positive note taken from William Faulkner:

“I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”
After which Chu added:

“With these virtues, the world can and will prevail over this great energy challenge.”