Insightful Interview on chemical energy
Technology Review Insightful Interview with Daniel Nocera
This is a very interesting interview in that it details, on a digestible level, a context for how alternative energy sources will need to take place. This is a refreshing dimension to Nocera’s style and it makes such a big, difficult problem seem possible. He has a video on MITWorld where he discusses the scope and scale necessary for really making a change to alternative forms of energy. But this is an interesting interview with him that touches on many similar thoughts.
Here’s a few points that Nocera makes:
TR: You’re studying photosynthesis to get ideas for how to convert sunlight into a chemical fuel–hydrogen–for use when the sun isn’t shining or in powering fuel-cell vehicles.
DN: You can use the electricity directly when the sun is out, in places that have sun. [But] you need storage. There’s absolutely no way around it. I am distilling the essence of photosynthesis down to be able to use it.
This is a critical point in that it illustrates that on a fundamental level, we will need to harness light and convert it into a more manageable chemical form. Not many other individuals are thinking this way. Plug-in Hybrids address this type of process, but electrical transfer is significantly inefficient. It’s strange that plants do this type of thing everyday, yet we cannot replicate it in the level of scale or efficiency. Yet.
The interview also states, as I have stated as well in other posts, that solutions will need to be driven by materials that are abundant and present in order to keep the costs low and provide the possibility for scalability:
TR: You’ve written that chemistry “will likely play the most central role of all the sciences” in addressing energy problems. How would you summarize the role of chemistry?
DN: For game changers, it’s really easy. There’s three.
Make photovoltaics cheap, which is a lot of chemistry. It’s inventing new materials to make PV cheap.
Replace noble metals–things like platinum–with abundant metals. Because there’s not enough stuff. When you’re talking about this much scale, you better be using things like iron and manganese. You better look at your book that says what are the most abundant elements on the face of the earth.
