Today I'll be writing a series of blogposts from the Falling Walls conference in Berlin. Each speaker is invited to discuss the ideas, inventions, and discoveries they believe will break down walls in their field.
Robert Schlögl: How Heterogeneous Catalysis Can Replace Fossil Fuels
Robert Schlögl is Director of the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, discussing our reliance on fossil fuels. The problem isn't simply that they are a fast-diminishing resource, but that fossil fuels still represent the world's best energy storage system. We need to find new ways of generating energy, but just as importantly, we need to find ways of storing it. Currently the only way of efficiently storing energy is inside a chemical bond.
Nature has its own storage molecule - sugar. But it is a difficult molecule to work with. Schlögl wants to design new artificial solar fuels, that are stable and easy to build. Collecting the light that falls on just 0.17% of the Earth's suface - an area 2.5x the size of Germany, is enough to meet global energy demand. Chemicals forged in a solar plant could then be manufactured into useful fuels in a solar refinery. The difficulty lies in designing something better than what nature produced in 4 billion years.
Generating hydrogen from water is one idea, but the platinum plates needed as a catalyst are not only expensive, but destroyed in the process. Schlögl says we need to develop new catalytic technologies. Nano-engineered materials that physically cradle the water molecules can help reduce the massive amount of energy needed to split them apart, and even operate as a production line for fuels, built molecule by molecule. (it's at this stage his slides start to look like something from SpaceChem). The discovery and development of these materials will drive the creation of synthetic fuels.
Who determines the price of energy? asks Schlögl, and here I think he's hinting at the massive subsidies fossil fuels enjoy that makes developing alternatives so difficult. To close, he challenges the audience to support the implementation of new energy options. "The starting point is here," he says. "Now is the Big Bang in our energy systems."
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Just wondering if Herr Schlögl identified any fuels/energy storage molecules that would make good candidates to replace our current fossil hydrocarbons, apart from Hydrogen that is.
I would hazard a guess that producing the same hydrocarbons directly from sunlight, CO2 and water that we currently mine and refine would be an ideal, if only because it obviates the need to build new infrastructure for transport and use. However, the current bleeding edge of solar => hydrocarbon technology AFAIK utilises oil-producing Algae and is not very efficient. Did he mention any progress in synthesising hydrocarbons directly without the fiddly algae?