Chemistry is at the heart of the very controversial world of energy.
One Nobel laureate who has been considering biofuels as one important solution for the world is Steven Chu,
who advises the White House.
Chu is quite amazing.
He got the Nobel Prize for Physics, for being able to cool down atoms using energy.
And then he put his energy into renewable energy.
And then he became a policy maker under Barak Obama as a Secretary of Energy for the United States,
managing everyone who works in renewables.
But a laureate who on the other hand sees biofuels as a relatively trivial factor is Hartmut Michel.
So I hear Michel, he is sceptic about biofuels.
He thinks we should use nature to build more complicated things.
But he does say that nature is good at making things.
I think we can harness that.
Biofuels is making a liquid fuel that is not made from petroleum.
Petroleum comes from the ground.
And when you burn it you’re taking carbon from the ground and putting it into the air.
And that is a problem in terms of climate change because it’s a greenhouse gas.
If we can instead use plants to take CO2 from the air,
put it into plants and then if we can convert that into a liquid fuel - that is a biofuel.
And then when you burn it you’ll get CO2 again.
But it will just go right back into the air.
The plant will take it again and we can turn it into a fuel.
So we have a renewable process.
Half of the energy in the biofuel comes actually from fossil fuels, because you need fertiliser,
you need tractor fuel and everything costs energy.
If all the agricultural land of Germany is used for producing biofuel
we only can substitute maybe 8 to 10% of the German diesel and gasoline used by cars.
If we want to have a car powered by a renewal fuel we can use the biomass in existing technology.
Like we have a car right here.
We do not have to scrap all the cars and build a brand new one with a huge battery pack that won’t work everywhere.
And I’m not saying that biofuels need to replace 100% of our current petroleum needs.
But I think there are times when we need the energy density.
And there is efficiency in being able to use current infrastructure like this car.
I have to argue against that.
If you use the biomass for heating purposes and you save heating oil.
Or when you use the biomass in power stations to generate electricity,
you are by effect of 3 better than when you go by biofuels in reducing the carbon dioxide.
You already have current technology which exists, which also drive on the road, battery cars or hydrogen cars,
they also exist, right.
It’s not like it's technology that needs to be invented, it’s already there.
And for sure the technology is not now going to change within a day.
So you’re saying going to scrap all the cars - nobody is talking about scrapping all the cars.
But if we invest into that, then, eventually, step-by-step,
it’s going to be changing from standard gasoline car into hydrogen cars or battery cars.
We don’t have to invest anything to teach the grass to sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
It can do that right now.
Yeah but we can do better and we’re working on it.
Very low efficiency.
Your only...
less than 1% of the world’s energy is in the grass.
But in terms of return on investment I don’t have to do anything to get that to take in CO2.
The grass has to keep itself alive.
You wouldn’t get enough of that.
In Europe, Western Europe you don’t have a lot of grasslands to spare.
For sure.
Much of the bio mass research and biofuels research we’re doing is to use, to coexist with agriculture.
So the corn will be used for feed for humans, feed for animals.
And the corncobs, the corn stover - if you can economically convert that,
you still have the sum cost of the tillage and the fertiliser and all those other things.
And so under that perspective you have agricultural residues.
If you can make it commercially viable then the conflict between food and fuel begins to diminish a lot.
It’s kind of like a band aid, right now we’re using natural photosynthesis and that’s what we have is technology
and we’re trying to make an artificial photosynthetic system
that we will eventually be able to make fuel at a higher efficiency than nature can.
But until we get there we have to use the band aid of biofuels.
Well that’s another possibility.
That if you can use direct sunlight to fuels, if you can very efficiently use renewable electricity to fuels,
to convert something, you know to liquid fuel.
Liquid fuel we all concede will be with us for a while, especially with aeroplanes.
There is no debate, you need liquid fuel.
Let’s not fixate only on biofuels particularly.
You know, how do you make liquid transportation fuel in a renewable way?
In this case what I would do is, you would simply use photovoltaic cells,
electrolyse water, take the hydrogen, take the carbon dioxide for a power station and convert the CO2 into methane or methanol.
With methanol you have a liquid which you can directly use in an ignition engine.
And that’s the way in the future I think.
Methanol can be a starting point.
Ultimately I think for airplanes you need higher density.
And methanol, ethanol are too low density.
So biofuels use natural photosynthesis to get energy in the same way that oil does.
But artificial photosynthesis is a manmade alternative to natural photosynthesis.
And the way that we make artificial photosynthetic systems is: we have 2 reactions that we use to split water into hydrogen,
which we can use as fuel - that’s what they use as jet fuel.
And we also have to oxidise the water.
And one of the major problems that we’re having right now is we need to find a suitable artificial photosynthetic system
that can make fuel cheaply.
And this can be coupled to photovoltaic systems.
And a lot of the research that Hen and I do is related to that.
In an artificial photosynthetic system you’d have to have for example water oxidising reaction.
And then you’d have to have a fuel producing reaction of the cathode.
And that fuel producing reaction could create hydrogen.
But there’s also research being done trying to make liquid fuels of the cathode rather than hydrogen.
And I think that that is probably the way of the future.
But there are a lot of basic research steps we have to take before we can realise a fully,
a highly efficient artificial photosynthetic system.
If you use a system mimicking a natural photosynthesis you need too many photons for producing hydrogen.
And the overall energy of the process is very low, it’s lower than the electrolysis of water combined to a photovoltaic cell.
Yeah but the trouble with electrolysis of water the way we currently know
how to do it efficiently is you use very expensive catalysts.
But there are many, many people working on catalysts and I am pretty optimistic that this is solved soon.
We are working on photo catalytic process.
We are working on a photovoltaic chemical cell, which we are able to make both electricity and fuel.
And what do you think about hydrogen economy or hydrogen based fuelling system.
Basically transforming from a carbon base directly to the hydrogen.
Because we can produce the hydrogen and we are more and more able to produce it more efficiently.
You know, I would test the scientist.
If you’re working on this every day.
What’s the price for it in the production of hydrogen per kilogram?
If they say I don’t have any idea, then say you should think about that.
(laughter).
I think $4 to $6 per ...
It's $3.
$3? Ok.
$6 is hopeless, it’s not going to get started.
It’s like if I produce biofuels at $6 a gallon, you’re never going to get started.
If you don’t know that you should start knowing that.
It’s the economic drivers: people make choices, countries make choices, companies make choices - because of the economics of it.
You’re not going to ask them to spend twice as much money to do something.
Some consumers will do that, a very small fraction.
But most people say what’s the bottom line is the bottom line.
I’m willing to pay the same, maybe a teensy more but not hugely different.
But the thing is technology can do this.
You can make clean energy as inexpensive as fossil energy.
I’m still a proponent for the purely electrical way.
So use the electricity for photovoltaics or say also from thermo solar energy conversion, generate electricity
and then you charge better batteries.
Of course the weak point is the batteries.
The energy density of the battery is too low.
But it can be increased by a factor of 10.
In addition, you have to consider that the ignition engines are really inefficient.
Only 20% of the energy of the fuel is used to drive the wheel.
80% of the energy of the battery, stored in the battery, is used to drive the wheel.
So we have an additional factor of 4 in favour of the purely electrical scheme.
Well, fuel cells can solve that issue.
But you also have the energy of...
a chemical bond will always be better, ultimately, theoretically you can always store more energy in a chemical bond
rather than you could in for example lithium ion battery.
Particularly at this meeting, people have been emphasising various...
Lithium is not so abundant, we don’t have so much of it, it's pollution again.
If you don’t consider the cost for the battery: driving your car by a factor of 10 cheaper
if you simply use electricity than when you go to the gasoline station.
But the cost of the batteries come down 2-fold and it's going to come down another 2-fold.
I don’t fully buy the argument that we don’t have enough lithium because...
I don’t buy that at all.
And it’s not even clear that lithium will be the end point technology of the battery.
I find this fascinating because we are looking very closely at all the technology
that everyone has mentioned in the Department of Energy.
And if we knew for sure that we could get a battery
that’s 4 times higher density and works at a wide temperature range
- that’s one quarter of the cost –
that would change everything.
If we knew all these things, you know 2 or 3 of them, you can change a lot of things.
But what’s fascinating is, and everything that I’m hearing said: we do not know for sure.
Although I agree cost is a significant issue, I don’t think that we as scientists have the ability to estimate
how much it will cost to produce it on a large scale.
And only once it reaches the industry then you can have some assessment of whether or not it’s effective or not.
It starts in the lab: using first row transition metals, staying away from very expensive elements.
And then it gradually makes its way to industry.
You cannot know until you go to large scale.
No, you tell me you have a system you can economically scale to hydrolyse water now and make hydrogen.
I would say you should be selling it as a business.
There’s price points in hydrogen that are well known.
You can sell that to petroleum refining companies.
You can sell that to fuel cells.
And you should be making lots of money.
It does not exist.
And if it does, you know, at least, at very least get a grant from the Department of Energy.
(laughter).
But now with shale gas will this all be mute, will we not be able to reach those price points to make these renewable fuels real.
I think we will.
The shale gas is actually gone into oil.
There’s much more, the production of oil in the United States has gone up 800,000 barrels a day.
It’s going to go up another 800,000.
We’re the second biggest oil producer in the world now because of shale oil.
Despite that it’s not a big enough wrinkle to alter the world oil prices, which is an international price.
But what about altering people,
like in the United States our congressmen’s opinion
of whether or not to fund renewable research?
That might be for a different reasons
(laughter).
We as scientists can get the technology.
I think the governments...
I have faith at least that the governments will be able to enact the policies if the technology is there.
And maybe that’s a naïve scientist, maybe that’s a totally naïve scientist point of view.
I used to think like that.
(laughter).
Actually what my dream would be, if we have super conducting cables to be spanning the globe.
Then we need a few photovoltaic fields worldwide distributed all over the globe.
One in Australia, one in China, one in Sahara, one in Arizona, Mexico…
(speaking over each other).
With the Sahara and Europe - if you can even have DC under water cables.
We do that, we will get there.
We started already with that in Greece and we know that in Morocco there is a cable being built between Morocco and Spain,
and there will be another one between Tunisia and Italy.
And so undersea cables.
Undersea cables, that’s going to be done, no doubt.
I have more faith that we’re going to find a good artificial photosynthetic system
before we find a room temperature superconductor that’s really cheap.
(laughter).
And that can have high current.
But you need high TC.
So your challenge as scientists is to make it look good enough for the companies or the government to invest.
I think you have to look at how technology gets developed.
First of all it gets developed not because there is some magical research done in a university or a national lab or something,
and then voilà you have it.
It’s something that gets established and then you learn from it.
It evolves and evolves - over 10’s of years to a half a century it’s evolving.
There’s not a single thing that’s happening.
What kind of damage do you think we’ll do to our environment while we’re waiting for all this?
We’re doing a lot of things in the meantime.
The battery is improving, the price of batteries went down 2-fold in the last 4 or 5 years.
The price of solar modules went down 4-fold in the last 4 years, ok.
The electronics that are needed for DC transmission are coming down dramatically.
All these things are happening.
And you just accelerate it, you just accelerate that technology development.
The solar cells, they went down because they become on the large scale.
But do you know what the first silicon efficiencies were? And solar photovoltaics? About 1 or 2%.
Now you have in both mass production, 16% going to 20%.
20% is the standard for crystallised cells.
Ok, 2 to 20%, you’ve got 10-fold in production.
The cost is dropped several hundred-fold in production from the ‘50’s and ‘60’s to now.
This is huge.
It’s not clear where the solution is going to come from.
And there won’t be a single solution.
We will need many solutions.
We will need solutions we talked about in transmission, in energy storage.
Better solutions in the generation of clean energy.
And energy efficiency, which we haven’t talked about.
You know dramatic improvements are waiting actually to just be used - but also invented.
So all these things are real need.
And if, you know to paraphrase myself, if necessity is the mother of all inventions,
we’ve got the mother of all necessities in climate change.
As I told my students and post docs over the last 25 years:
‘The greatest danger for most of us, lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short;
but in setting our aim too low and achieving our mark.’
That was said by Michelangelo.
So you students remember that, fail, fail fast, move on, but set your aim high.
So if I dedicate my life to working on renewable energy, do you think that I’m serving the country and the world?
Yes absolutely, especially if you succeed.
(laughter).
This is my first time at Lindau.
Just had lunch with the Mars fellows and I think I’m beginning to get some sort of perspective on what this is all about.
You’re all young scientists in the making.
I think it’s very important that you remember 2 things.
First that you’re going very, very deeply into something.
You’re becoming part of the world’s experts.
And it’s important that you do become very deep.
But the knowledge that something else is happening in a different field, or a new technology is happening over here
and you can import that into your problem, is a very powerful concept.
It actually helps you do better science.
So why does science matter to Mars?
It’s the foundation of everything we do,: engineering in the factory; how do we make our products; raw material supply chain;
flavour chemistry - everything I can think of builds a strong foundation,
which allows every other aspect of our company to thrive.
45 trillion, if you can imagine a number as big as 45 trillion gallons of water are wasted every year on food that is spoiled.
It equals about a billion and a quarter tons of food.
The water issue is beyond the notion of sitting in your laboratory and working on a very small piece of information.
That’s critically important.
But when I look around this room - and you’re from many different places
and many different institutions, from every country, 78 countries.
Imagine what would happen if you all collaborated in an uncommon way to solve some of these world problems.
I don’t know, do you have the feeling that maybe the younger generation
is now more willing to go into this kind of international cooperation? So maybe it’s now easier?
The reality is that everyone has to do it, young, middle aged, old.
There is no way to do it otherwise.
Pablo, how is it for a scientist to work with Mars?
In my case working in the University of California, I think it’s a great experience.
We have different collaborations.
They are doing research in many departments.
I work with the Plant Sciences department but also with the Genome Center.
And also I know people from the Veterinary school, from the Nutrition Department - all of them are receiving funding from Mars.
And there are different topics.
And everything happens really fast, you know, in that way the decision making is fast.
I really like it.
We look across the university.
At every department that might have insight to what we’re trying to solve and we use them all.
And we collaborate and we talk to each other.
And it’s an ongoing intensive discussion and dialogue.
We’re not bound by in any way, shape or form mediocrity; we’re bound by excellence.
That’s why we’re here: for us to be able to reach out and talk to these young scientists, these great scientists of the future.
And encourage them to, firstly to stay in science - that’s job number 1.
And everything that we can do through the Lindau relationship
to put the great young scientists of the future in touch with - you know clearly these guys who are Nobel laureates,
some of the great, great scientists in the world today, and have some of the great Mars scientists here as well –
to put them into this kind of melting pot to try and catalyse this interest,
this enthusiasm, this commitment to do great things in science.
End.