Imagine the following scenario. It is 2030. You and your loved ones live in a house that is virtually energy sufficient. Artificial photosynthetic membranes on the roof combine sunlight, carbon dioxide sequestered from the air, and water to generate methane, the main component in natural gas. The methane is pumped into tanks and available when needed to fuel your gas stove or furnace. It also supplies all of your household electricity needs after being run through a fuel cell or combusted in a generator. Although you are still connected to the electrical and natural gas grids, these are mainly used as back-ups for when there is insufficient sunlight (and stored methane) to meet your energy needs.
Before leaving the house, you notice that your car’s fuel gauge is a bit low. No problem. Using your home filling station, you pump your car full of methanol – also generated by rooftop solar units – and away you go. Have a fondness for vintage 2013 cars designed to burn gas? Go right ahead and buy one. Virtually any internal combustion engine can be modified at low cost to burn methanol. And if you have a hankering for a spanking new 2030 model, it will automatically adjust the air-fuel mix (just as the Lotus Exige already does) and the compression ratio to burn methanol, gasoline, ethanol, or any combination of the above.
Sound like science fiction? It just so happens that in the past few years, artificial photosynthesis (AP) has burst onto the scientific radar screen like a flying Rock of Gibraltar. The U.S. Department of Energy has pumped $120 million into an ambitious program called the “Joint Centre for Artificial Photosynthesis” headquartered at Cal Tech. The project will ultimately fund research by 200 top-drawer scientists. Other countries are following suit, and the scientific journals and energy conferences are all abuzz about what is increasingly being regarded as the Holy Grail of renewable energy technologies. It might not happen tomorrow, or even by 2030, but the likelihood is that it will happen. And when it does, it will be a truly transformational energy technology that will reshape human destiny and give us a more than fighting chance of saving our planet from the predations and limitations of current energy technologies.
Consider the advantages. Sunlight is free, and it’s everywhere. It doesn’t have to be extracted from the earth, with all the concomitant expense and environmental issues. Nor does it have to be shipped through pipelines or processed in billion dollar refineries. The risk of events such as derailed oil-carrying trains (à la Lac-Mégantic), ruptured pipelines (such as the million gallon Kalamazoo River oil spill in 2010), and oil tanker mishaps (such as the 11 million gallon Exxon Valdez spill in 1989) will be vastly reduced.
Moreover, AP is carbon neutral. The CO2 released when the methane or methanol is burned or converted to electricity in a fuel cell is no more than the CO2 that was sequestered from the air to make the stuff in the first place.
This is no small advantage. The burning of fossil fuels, which AP would replace, accounts for the lion’s shares of the 29 billion tonnes of CO2 per year that we dump into the atmosphere each year. Some 57% of this is absorbed by nature’s primary CO2 sinks – the plants and the oceans. But the other 43% simply accumulates in the atmosphere. In fact, since the start of the industrial revolution, CO2 levels in the atmosphere have risen from 280 ppm (parts per million) to 400 ppm. This is a level not seen for millions of years. The past 50 years alone account for 71% of this build up – a rate of increase that is utterly unprecedented in the history of the planet.
Increasing CO2 levels have many ramifications. One is ocean acidification, which puts all manner of ocean creatures at risk. Already 20% of all coral reefs have been wiped out, and some forecasts suggest that the rest may succumb in the next few decades. Coral reefs are home to untold numbers of fish and other species. If the reefs die, then finding Nemo will become an exercise in futility.
Another product of elevated CO2 is global warming. CO2 is the most notorious of the so-called greenhouse gases, and the likelihood is very high that the increased level of atmospheric CO2 will result in a continuation of the trend toward higher global temperatures. While no one knows how much, the consensus view is that we are headed for an increase of 2-5° C (or more) by 2070. This raises the spectre of massive changes in global climate and weather patterns, threatening mass starvations and species extinctions. The melting of polar ice caps, sea ice, and glaciers may raise sea levels as much as 20 feet. Perhaps more. Low-lying nations such as Bangladesh would effectively be wiped out. It’s not a pretty picture.
AP’s carbon neutrality puts it in the driver’s seat so far as renewable energy technologies are concerned. This is not the say that there are no other carbon-neutral technologies. Wind power neither takes in nor gives off CO2. However, a practical upper limit on the amount of wind power that we can generate is about 2-3 tW (terawatts). Current global energy consumption is 14 tW, and as India and China strive to match the affluence of the western industrialized economies, this is projected to double by 2050. For this reason, wind power will never grace the top of the renewable energy marquee.
Photovoltaic (PV) cells, which also use the sun as their primary energy source, have an important roll to play. However, PV cells produce only electricity, which is notoriously difficult (and expensive) to store, especially over long periods of time. PV power thus tends to be available only when the sun is shining. By contrast, AP produces both electricity and liquid fuels. The latter are much easier and less expensive to store, suffering no long-term degradation in energy content. This makes AP the more versatile technology, especially in the poorest nations where back-up power sources are not available to supply energy overnight.
Another avenue of attack on the problems caused by fossil fuels is the production of biofuels from plants, such as ethanol made from fermented corn. In theory, such biofuels are carbon neutral (since atmospheric CO2 is a basic plant feedstock). However, the reality is quite different. The processes necessary for the production of biofuels - farming, fertilizing, harvesting, and processing - are highly carbon-intensive. Thus, in net, biofuels are carbon positive.
There are other strikes against biofuels. One is that biofuels are subject to what is known as the “food/fuel tradeoff”. When food crops like corn are used to produce biofuels, this drives up the price of arable land and, derivatively, that of food products. The production of corn ethanol has already driven world corn prices to record levels. Unfortunately, corn is an ingredient in the vast majority of processed food products on the market. It is also an important food staple in poor countries around the world. It would be unfortunate, to say the least, if we were to starve the world’s most vulnerable poor in order to solve our energy woes. Luckily, AP suffers from no such food/fuel tradeoff.
Another problem is that the natural photosynthetic process is not very efficient, using only 3-6% of the incident solar radiation (with a theoretical upper bound of 11%). This means that a great deal of land must be put under cultivation to produce the required energy. Suppose, for example, that we attempt to dodge the food/fuel tradeoff by using non-arable land to make biofuels from algae or other non-food flora. If we covered every square foot of available space on earth, we would still only generate about 5 tW of biofuel energy – far less than needed to replace fossil fuels or to accommodate the additional 14tW that we’ll need by 2050. Once the bugs are ironed out, AP will be a much more efficient energy converter, and thus in a far better position to supply the clean energy that we need to make it through to the next century without global economic collapse.
AP is also the most poor-nation friendly of all renewable energy technologies. Many of the world’s poorest countries lie on or near the equator, where solar energy is most abundant and AP is thus cheapest and most efficient. While water is needed to make the process work, AP is nonetheless stingy on water when compared to fossil fuels, nuclear energy, and biofuels.
In short, AP is probably the most effective way of supplying the world’s burgeoning energy needs while keeping CO2 levels under wraps, addressing the pressing problem of global warming, economizing on scarce water resources, and providing the world’s poor with food and energy.
The advantages don’t stop there. One is energy sufficiency. Should AP become a reality, neither Canada nor any other nation in the world need rely on geopolitically risky oil from the Middle East or Latin America. Nor will the world’s economy be held hostage to dizzying gyrations in oil prices resulting from political machinations entirely beyond the control of any local government.
AP is also highly scalable. That is, you can not only use it to generate electricity or liquid fuels at a large scale, but at a small scale as well – such as rooftop AP units similar to PV cells. This could one day allow homes and businesses to go “off-grid” and produce their own power. Imagine a world in which there is no risk of a blackout, whether from equipment failure, human error, terrorist attacks, or powerful bursts of sun spot activity.
Some have suggested that the world should move in the direction of a hydrogen-based economy. However, hydrogen is expensive to produce. Moreover, a hydrogen-based economy would require massive investment in new infrastructure. Hydrogen is difficult and expensive to store, requiring a major rejigging of the trucks that transport fuel, the filling stations that dispense it, and the cars and other vehicles that use it. By comparison, AP is highly infrastructure-friendly. Since natural gas is nothing more than methane with a variety of unwanted contaminants, AP-generated methane can instantly be used in any application in which natural gas is currently used, including large-scale production of electricity, home heating, and home cooking. And, as indicated above, AP-generated methanol could readily replace gasoline in automobiles with modest modifications to the fuel system, engine, and distribution infrastructure, yielding a cleaner burning fuel that could be generated at home.
As fate would have it, a team of scientists at the University of Toronto is right at the edge of the AP envelope – indeed, as close to unmasking the closely guarded secrets of AP as anyone else in the world. The leader of the team, Professor Ozin, is the Canada Research Chair in Materials Chemistry. He is also one of the founding fathers of nanochemistry and one of Canada’s genuine superstars of science. Professor Ozin has won more awards than there are hairs on a Cocker Spaniel, including the prestigious Albert Einstein Award of Science, awarded for scientific and technological research that has brought benefit to humanity. The AP team is rounded out by a number of other world-class U of T academics, and a host of post-docs, graduate students, and undergrads. Even hard-bitten Los Vegas gamesters are slapping down their spare change on Canada’s homegrown team.
The first round of funding for the AP project at the University of Toronto was the direct result of the vision and foresight of one man – Glen Murray, then Tsar of Ontario’s Ministry of Research and Development. Whether further rounds of government support are on the cards, however, is an open question. Following a recommendation by the federally commissioned Jenkins Committee in 2012, and continuing a process that had already begun, much of the federal government’s largesse for scientific research requires the applicant to have secured a private or industry co-sponsor. Many of the provinces are going the same route. The good news about this approach is that it effectively puts the decision of who should be funded in the hands of knowledgeable and motivated individuals in the private sector. The bad news, however, is that a single-minded focus on funding projects that are already commercializable means that a great deal of what our best and brightest are doing will fall through the cracks, possibly depriving Canada of the next generation of hot commercial projects.
For pre-commercial R&D, it is a labour of Hercules to track down an industry sponsor. Nor are other sources of funds readily available. Angel investors and venture capitalists funding do not generally touch “seed” or “early stage” businesses, let alone pre-commercial projects in the “basic” or “applied” stages of research. Government funding plays a critical role in this domain.
The U.S. Department of Energy has tackled this problem with uncompromising zeal. Its “Advanced Research Projects Administration – Energy” (ARPA-E) was created precisely to support potentially groundbreaking projects that are not privately fundable. Aggressively investing in potentially “disruptive” technologies, ARPA-E is prepared to accept a failure rate as high as 99% in the hopes of finding that one diamond in the rough. It is led by a combination of people with real world experience in the commercialization game and some of the brightest academics on the planet. A number of ARPA-E funded projects have already gone on to secure private venture capital funding. Canadian provincial and federal governments should seriously consider expanding their array of programs to target potentially disruptive technologies that are in the pre-commercialization stage.
Our embattled oil companies, particularly those with a footprint in the oil sands, should also consider funding pre-commercial research such as AP. There are a number of potentially big payoffs. One is showing concern for the environment, and shedding some of the tarry black residue that follows our oil companies around the world like a devoted spaniel. Another, and potentially more important payoff, is to end up with an ownership interest in a technology that might ultimately eat their lunch. Oil company executives might do well to reflect on that one.
Canada’s utilities have similar reasons for supporting research into AP. A recent report by American electricity giant Edison warns that increasingly decentralized power generation associated with renewable technologies will put existing utility business models under pressure. Many U.S. utilities have already made aggressive investments in the renewable energy space – and a visionary handful are supporting basic research, rather than merely investing in proven technologies such as wind and solar power. In fact, AP is a particularly good fit with existing utility assets. If AP-generated methane becomes a reality, existing gas-plant generation facilities could be retrofitted at modest cost to burn solar methane manufactured from their very own waste CO2. In this way, existing fossil fuel assets can be melded with the ultimate renewable energy technology (AP) to produce zero-net-emissions electrical generation. Talk about infrastructure-friendly renewable technology. It doesn’t get much better than that.
So, will Canada sit on the sidelines and watch as others develop world-changing technologies such as AP? Or will we put our cutting-edge human capital in harness and give it our best shot? Stay tuned.
