Chairman: Ladies and gentlemen, young investigators, welcome to the panel discussion 'Chemical Energy Storage and Conversion'.
This morning we have had a very good and nice, almost everything covering introduction by Steven Chu on this topic.
Also in the past years
- you have not been there but I want to say that –
we had many discussions on this stage by Nobel Laureates.
These Nobel Laureates related to energy supply, shortage of fossil fuels
and the consequences of burning fossil fuels for the climate, for the life on our planet and human life in general.
So this time the focus will be a little different.
We would like to discuss what chemistry could do to solve the energy problem.
It is clear that the highest energy density, you have seen the slide from Steven Chu this morning, is achieved in chemical bonds.
So the best way to store energy, and this is for example done by photosynthesis, is in chemical bonds.
For example what we use for driving our cars or flying our planes, diesel, gasoline, kerosene.
And it is also clear that fuels are needed.
For example as I said for flying planes.
You cannot do that with sun panels.
Electricity is already available from renewable sources: from photovoltaics, from wind and from water power.
But electricity has to be stored also in some form.
We can use batteries, mechanical devices.
But again the best way would be to store it, if you don’t need it on the spot, in chemical bonds.
The replacement of liquid fossil fuels is still in far reach.
The use of the power of the sun as Walter Kohn who is unfortunately not coming because he is not feeling well,
to this panel discussion.
So Walter Kohn has a film called The Power of the Sun.
And I’m convinced that to use the sun is mandatory.
Furthermore we need non-toxic basic chemicals.
One example would be water which is abundant, not expensive for example for something like artificial photosynthesis.
So that this would be light induced water splitting to produce hydrogen
or to use photosynthesis in a similar way for CO2 reduction.
This requires large efforts in chemistry since all these processes are difficult to perform
and require for example the development of inexpensive non-toxic and highly efficient catalysts
before appropriate devices can become of practical use.
This is one of the big challenges for chemistry in this century.
Therefore we want to discuss this topic today in this panel discussion.
And now I would like to start this discussion by giving the word to our panellists.
One after the other should make a statement about his opinion on chemical storage and conversion of energy.
So I think we could start with Gerhard Ertl please.
Gerhard Ertl: Thank you very much.
As you mentioned it’s not essentially the problem of energy conversion.
There is enough energy in the sun light,
less than 1% of sun light would be needed to serve the needs of the whole population of the world.
But the energy has to be stored and transported.
And electricity of course can be used to split water electrolytically.
Or it can also be used to convert the electrical energy, the chemical energy for example in batteries.
There are still many, many problems to be solved.
For example fuel cells are considered to be the future source for driving cars.
But fuel cells are not so far advanced that you can have a routine use of fuel cells in cars.
And batteries, of course, are very heavy and their lifetime is also not very long.
So these are other demands.
And apart from this fact you can convert hydrogen into other chemicals like organic molecules.
This also needs a catalysis.
So catalysis will be the key technique for solving these problems in the future.
Chairman: Thank you very much.
Professor Grubbs.
Robert Grubbs: So the big problem is energy storage as was indicated.
And it’s a very, especially batteries is a really interesting chemical problem.
In batteries there’s the whole issue of the electrodes, the chemistry, the basic chemistry that takes place.
And then you get into the electrolytes and the separators.
And so there’s a phenomenal amount of really good material science that’s associated with batteries.
And we still have a very long way to go to be able to make cars that you can plug in and drive long distances etc.
So this is an area which I think a lot of chemists really need to work on.
There are tons of people there but it provides some really interesting problems.
I’m associated with a company that’s trying to develop a new chemistry for batteries.
And it’s very challenging but lots and lots of fun.
So I think that’s going to be one of the key things once one learns how to do the energy conversion, is how you store it.
How you keep power over night.
How you put it into an automobile and drive etc.
So that’s one of the key features that I think will be coming along.
Chairman: Thank you.
Richard.
Richard Schrock: Thank you.
Well, I tell my wife sometimes that everything is chemistry.
And I don’t think everything is chemistry in terms of energy conversion and sustainability and the like.
But certainly as you just heard a lot of it is.
And of course it’s natural.
Also it’s true.
Photo system 2, water splitting.
Ok that’s good inorganic chemistry and I’m an inorganic chemist.
And a lot of it involves metals, transition metals.
And none of that is going to go away.
Whether it’s heterogeneous or homogeneous, catalysis with transition metals, that already does fantastic things.
Is going to be called upon to do yet even more fantastic things.
And so there’s a lot of scope out there.
Whether it's batteries, water splitting, whatever it is.
And also interdisciplinary, very much so as you also heard, certainly material scientists and chemists
and electrochemists and organic chemists - everyone has an opportunity here to work together
to really solve these big, big problems.
I was surprised to hear some of the things that are being considered these days.
And I was contacted by the Department of Energy - there might be somebody here from the department of energy,
I know there is somewhere.
And one of their ideas is of course how to store hydrogen.
Now that’s not a problem that people haven’t addressed.
They’ve been considering various ways to store hydrogen because it’s so difficult to store as a gas and use it in your automobile.
But one of the ways that they considered or are considering to store it, believe it or not, is to make ammonia.
And then to get hydrogen back from ammonia by just reversing that process.
All catalytic processes are reversible.
And each of those, especially making ammonia which is something I’m interested in, is an enormous challenge.
So these are 20, 25, who knows how many years in the future.
And of course they’re not all going to pay off.
So there will be many of them that just never go anywhere.
But if one, if 10% of them pay off or even 5% of them pay off, it can be very, very important to us all.
And I expect that but unfortunately I won’t be around to see that.
Chairman: Thank you.
Hartmut.
Hartmut Michel: My advice would be to try to stay electric as long as you can.
Of course photovoltaic cells, thermo solar plants and wind mills give you electric energy.
And so the basic problem is how to store the energy.
And it’s very clear for me, the prime goal has to be to get batteries which are 10,000 times rechargeable.
And which have a higher energy density as at the present today.
And as outlined by Steve Chu, if you increase the energy density by a factor of 4 and the batteries are already there,
that you can get, you can produce cars which cover the same distance without refuelling, as cars with current ignition engines.
So this would be really an ultimate goal.
Of course you also need to store energy in other instances.
Electricity you can store, I would think also when the battery problem is solved in your home.
And I was pretty much impressed travelling once to Bangalore, to the Indian Institute of Science.
In Bangalore you have power failures 5 times a day.
What they did was actually they had 2 rooms full of car batteries.
They charged, in 1 room the batteries were charged and the other room they were used for the extra generator.
So they only could use extra generator powered by car batteries.
So if we would have to store energy we can have the whole thing distributed all over the house.
And each house could have a room in the basement where you store batteries and have this supply for that.
Without having that of course we still have to go the way to produce energy rich chemicals.
And we live in an oxidised world so we have to get energy by reducing something.
And the difficult thing is if you have enough electricity, you electrolyse water, produce hydrogen.
Hydrogen you use to convert carbon dioxide from a nearby power plant into methane or methanol.
You also can convert it by chemical synthesis up to kerosene and use it then for powering jets, for jets.
This is how it has to happen so these are the changes which we have to see.
We have to make these processes more important.
And as Professor Ertl said catalysts are the key for the chemical conversions and I completely agree on that.
Chairman: Thank you.
Maybe there is immediately one question from my side.
2 of you said batteries, the development of batteries is very important.
Is charging the battery not a problem?
If you want to be mobile, you drive longer distances.
Even Steve Chu said this morning 300 miles is no problem.
But charging it, like we are going to a gas station, filling in the gasoline and then we go on.
It would certainly take some time.
And if you do it very quickly the battery will probably degrade faster.
So this is one of the problems.
Or is that problem solved?
I don’t know.
Gerhard Ertl: I think we should not concentrate on a single source of energy.
It will be a mixture, a mixture of different sources.
And the first step I think would be to save energy.
That you could save energy asking the industry to build smaller cars and to introduce a speed limit
on the freeways which you don’t have here in Germany.
You could save a lot here.
So these are essentially political decisions which are necessary.
And science then can help to accomplish these issues.
But first of all we must have regulations from politics which save our energy consumption.
Chairman: And certainly also public transport.
In Germany we are not even able to reduce the speed on the freeway,
to tell people that probably not everybody should drive a car anymore.
That would be very difficult, I see that too.
So in general it’s a toy of all the Germans and maybe many others, many other people in the world.
You wanted to say something on the battery problem?
Robert Grubb: Yeah the speed of recharging and there’s all kinds of crazy schemes that people are developing.
I think Tesla in California is setting up battery exchange programmes.
So you drive up and you exchange batteries.
And there’s lots, that’s probably not going to be an effective way in the end.
So I think again it’s just a materials problem, how fast you can charge, how you can deal with the heat,
how you can deal with all of the other issues.
And it’s a very interesting engineering problem which, there’s progress being made but we have a long way to go.
Chairman: There is one question maybe I can, directly have to find, we have not too many but a few.
That was related to the problem of batteries.
It was on lithium, let me see if I can find that:
"How can we tackle the possible shortage of elements that are needed for the production of batteries,
like lithium or possibly other rare elements?
Isn’t there as well a problem that mining destroys nature?“
An example is the impressive salt lake in Bolivia, that is now used to get the lithium out.
I mean this is a general problem I believe that we will have in many places,
do we have enough lithium to make all these batteries?
Robert Grubb: Probably not.
But also there’s now a lot of other sort of chemistries that people are looking at.
So I think lithium is probably going to be one of those but there are many other chemistries
that people are looking at which will replace lithium.
Those are going to be the next generation batteries, I think.
Gerhard Ertl: About 10 years ago the car industry propagated very strongly the use of fuel cells.
And Mercedes claimed that within 5 years all cars from Mercedes would be fuelled by fuel cells.
About 5 years ago I met a representative from Volvo and he told, the future will be lithium ion batteries,
just wait 5 years and all cars will be equipped with lithium ion batteries.
So there are fashions coming and going again.
We cannot know what will be the final solution to that.
Chairman: Hartmut
Hartmut Michel: Yeah I wanted to say according to the information I have there is no shortage of lithium.
There is no shortage of lithium.
Richard Schrock: I am not a geologist but I didn’t know we were running out of lithium.
And certainly there are alternatives, of course sodium get more bang for their buck, so that would be better.
There are a few problems associated with sodium like all other alternatives, even lithium.
We are running out of elements, that’s true.
I hear we only have, I don’t know what the estimate is, but phosphorus is in danger in fact.
Hartmut Michel: That is right.
Richard Schrock: I don’t think it pertains to batteries but I’m not sure.
But yeah, ok you don’t run out of elements but you run out of concentrated forms of them.
So if you dilute the elements then you’ve got to put in a lot of energy to get them back in concentrated form.
So this is a problem neither created nor destroyed.
But certainly they become less concentrated.
So that is a problem in the long run but I feel that there are probably, you know, unknown sources of,
that would be more expensive to extract what we need from the unknown sources but unknown sources are unconsidered sources.
I mean like everything else we take elements from the most available source and the cheapest one.
And then when that is depleted, if it is depleted we move on to the next most available source.
And certainly if you count all the lithium and sodium and potassium and so on in sea water, it’s a very large number.
So I don’t think we’re going to run out right away.
Chairman: Good, I think we should stay a little longer with electricity.
There is another question here and I will reformulate it a little bit.
"Go electrical is one possibility but we need grids, smart grids to distribute it or store it.“
I mean it’s almost impossible to use it on the spot.
We need to store it.
Either in batteries, we have discussed that, or in chemical bonds or pumping up water or other devices.
And in Germany for example this is quite a large problem.
So we have wind power at the North Sea, at the Baltic Sea.
Not enough power lines to serve the rest of the country.
And a similar situation is certainly found with photovoltaics.
So this is a big problem, for the rest of the world the same way, I believe.
Do you want to make any comments how to solve the problem?
It’s again political and also personal.
And you don’t want to have a power line through your garden.
Gerhard Ertl: There is a hot debate about creating new power lines, of course.
This is really a political issue.
Science cannot provide a solution to that.
You have to build some.
And of course if you have electricity, the most convenient way to convert it into chemical bonds is to form hydrogen.
And then use the hydrogen to transform it into other chemicals.
There are techniques available.
Sufficient processes have been well known for decades.
So it is just a question but what do you want to do and how to achieve this.
But in principle it’s possible.
Chairman: Professor Ertl you mentioned that there could be a conversion using CO2.
And there are quite a few questions concerning that.
Maybe I read one from Jacob Kennedy from Caltech,
"How important do you see carbon dioxide sequestration for an alternative energy future?
Do you think it is necessary?
Is it a necessary bridge between fossil and alternative fuels?
Is storage enough, for example as a carbonate mineral, or transformation to value added products,
necessary to make it economically viable?“
So that goes also in some other directions,
but I think the main topic is CO2 reduction.
Gerhard Ertl: It’s a way to emphasise sustainable energy supply.
You first burn something, it creates CO2 and then restore CO2 and transform it back.
It’s always a question of the balance between input and output.
So in principle it can be done.
And there are several attempts to do this work along these lines.
Chairman: Is there still something to do for CO2 reduction, conversion on the catalytic side?
How far is this?
You know you mentioned ...
(inaudible 21.23) but this is a huge, very dirty process.
Richard Schrock: There is definitely something to do because.
I mean you know CO2 and water are at the end of the road.
So thermodynamically they’re way down there.
And of course people talk casually about converting CO2 but you’ve got to put energy in to do that.
You can’t, no process - I shouldn’t say there are no processes.
I think you sit and look at some of the things that have been proposed.
There might be a couple that are exothermic but almost all of them are endothermic.
So that means you’ve got to put energy in.
And this is, it’s a zero sum game I think in the end to talk about converting CO2 catalytically or storing CO2.
I mean you have to look at the numbers in terms of the amount of CO2 that man is putting up there and do the calculations.
And then you find out that there’s just almost no way for man, and again this involves energy,
to store that amount of CO2 in some element or some compound like carbonate in order to get rid of it.
It’s just, I’m very pessimistic, and again I’m not an expert, but the numbers that we’re talking about,
if you want to reduce CO2 are just absolutely enormous.
The Haber Bosch process uses hydrogen.
And they get the hydrogen from really methane and water to give CO2 and hydrogen.
So they produce, the Haber Bosch process, along with everything else, produces a huge amount of CO2.
And they use nitrogen of course.
And I’ve forgotten the number.
Well they consume enough nitrogen to make 10^8 tonnes or so of ammonia per year.
But the amount of nitrogen that is available is like 10^15 tones.
So 10^8 tones is nothing.
Of course that has nothing to do with our storing of energy and so forth.
It’s just, I’m just trying to impress you with the numbers.
The amount of CO2 that you have to sequester or do something with in order to reduce it,
given the fact that it’s being formed all the time in huge quantities.
And there’s a lot of it there.
Just extremely large.
Chairman: So there are a few more questions concerning the CO2.
Maybe you have already answered but try to answer the first question.
"Is carbon capture and storage an alternative to converting CO2?“
The enormous amount that we see from, also from factories is certainly very difficult to convert.
Richard Schrock: If you just look at the number of planes that are flying around
and add the number of automobiles flying around and the number of Haber Bosch scale processes
that are producing CO2 and burning of methane in oil fields and everything.
It’s very, it's staggering the amount that is being produced.
And it’s casual to talk about, well not casual but 400 parts per million doesn’t sound like much.
But throughout all over the earth it amounts to a huge amount of CO2 that we’re putting in there.
Hartmut Michel: Of course we normally forget that a major source of CO2 is cement production
and also steel production, that’s enormous.
Chairman: That is right.
We just had a discussion with people from ThyssenKrupp in Duisburg and they told us the amount of CO2 that they are storing.
They have a very big storage tank in Duisburg where you can put in 300,000 m3 of gas.
And they said they can fill 150 of these tanks per day with the steel production that is available.
But the interesting point, this is highly enriched.
So if there would be a method to convert it, certainly we need a good catalyst,
hydrogen from non-fossil fuels, to convert that to methane or to methanol or to some other valuable product.
That would be excellent.
So, Robert Schlögl, our institute will probably work on that.
But as a success, depends on catalysis again.
Richard Schrock: The most optimistic thing would be to actually come up with a catalytic process
that would use solar as its ultimate energy source.
Whether it produces hydrogen or whatever.
And a catalyst to combine CO2 to make whatever you want to make.
Along with water that would be a good product.
We know that’s safe.
It’s going to be very, very difficult.
And it will be, in terms of energy this is an endothermic catalytic reaction almost certainly.
So one way or other you’ve got to put in some energy to use CO2.
Sorry to sound so pessimistic.
But it’s a big, big problem.
Chairman: There was one question, this is kind of related.
The CO2 problem we have probably now finished.
There is still a lot to do for chemistry to develop a process that can convert CO2 to something useful
that we can use in an energy cycle.
Here is one question, "Why developing batteries instead of a possible methanol economy?“
So there has been the book by Ola some years ago that made some suggestions.
In the meantime there has been a discussion again, problems with methanol.
What is your opinion about that?
This is kind of related to this question.
Hartmut Michel: It’s very clear cut, that the best is to stay electric when you are electric.
The point is that of course you always lose energy when you do the chemical conversion.
And the end, the major point is that an ignition engine, for which you’d use methanol or kerosene or whatever,
is very in efficient.
Only 20% of the energy in the fuel is used at the end to drive the car, to drive the wheels.
And if you stay electric it's 80% of the energy in the battery is used to drive the car.
And that’s a very clear point in favour of staying electric.
Always the efficiency of electrolysing water is not 100%.
And in all these processes you lose energy at the end.
To stay electric is the best thing.
And in my opinion electricity generation,
electricity supply would be the best if we would have superconducting cables which would connect photovoltaic fields,
areas in Arizona, Mexico, in the Sahara, in China and Australia.
Because the sun is shining somewhere everywhere.
And if we have superconducting cables connecting the fields and supplying the electricity to consumers
we would not have to store electricity.
We simply can use the energy here in the night which is at the same time produced in Australia.
So producing superconducting cables would be the best thing to do.
Gerhard Ertl: This again is a question of the costs.
(laughter).
Gerhard Ertl: You shouldn’t forget that.
Chairman: That is right.
Gerhard Ertl: Building up such a net would be very expensive and maintenance would be even more expensive.
So I am not very optimistic with this solution.
Chairman: Astrid
Astrid Gräslund: So I am more of a bystander here because I am not an expert in these fields.
But I would like to just raise a question and that is, Can you have a vision of a fossil fuel world, what would that look like?
Is that a science fiction world or is it something that we could have in our, at least not too distant future?
That would maybe use fossil oils for maybe raw material for certain productions but not really use it up for just burning.
Is there such a possibility or is this just...
Gerhard Ertl: Methanol technology was just mentioned.
You can produce methanol from CO2 and hydrogen by catalytic processes.
And then use methanol as energy source in a fuel cell.
So the methanol fuel cell is a clear option.
There are again serious problems with poisoning.
You need very, very clean materials, otherwise electrodes and catalysts are poisoned.
So these problems, as long as they are not solved, this will not be a solution of our long-term problems.
Astrid Gräslund: I guess that because this would cost a lot of money, so it would change our lifestyle quite considerably.
We cannot live the way that we do now.
So it’s difficult to foresee perhaps and for of course the rest of the world even more so.
Chairman: That’s a general problem.
I mean in many electrolysers, fuel cells, there are expensive materials, precious metals.
Many of the catalysts that work really well also for splitting water,
they contain ruthenium, iridium, rhodium, platinum, metals that are very expensive.
And we don’t have enough of them.
So that seems to be a problem and I believe that this is also a place where chemistry has to do something.
You have mentioned that several times in your talk.
Even try to replace a ruthenium catalyst by iron or something, unsuccessfully.
Robert Grubb: But there is a large programme going on in the US now.
It's run by Harry Gray at our place, who is trying to find non-rare metals as a source for hydrogen splitting.
And they’re making some progress.
And Dan Nocera who is at MIT making progress at using non-nobles for making oxygen
as part of the splitting process.
And so these are things that I think people are working on very hard right now.
And I’m pretty optimistic about that area.
Chairman: Very good.
So I think this block, electricity and a few other aspects, we have now more or less covered.
I think there is a good way and Hartmut is convinced that we should go more electric and this is certainly right.
At the moment I don’t know the numbers, maybe 25/30% is electricity of our energy demand,
the rest is fuels for heating, for driving cars.
And this has to be replaced.
And at the moment I don’t see any good and direct way to create a renewable liquid fuel for example or gaseous fuel
that we can use.
And certainly we can drive a car with electricity, that’s no problem, but to fly a plane with electricity,
with sun panels, will be difficult.
Or even these big ships that we are using for transport, that is also not so easy.
So there is a demand to find a solution for that.
Richard Schrock: Just 2 things: if you want energy quickly and everywhere, in ships, maybe not planes.
I know this probably isn’t popular in Germany but there is something called nuclear energy.
Which you know in terms of bang for your buck, quickly and a lot of it, it’s available, it works.
And 75% of France is run on nuclear energy.
That’s probably not very well known.
But ultimately we have to put in energy in some way in all of these things.
And of course the way it’s done now is that big ball in the sky.
I mean we’re really 98.5% nuclear because the sun provides everything except what you get from radio activity
through natural decay in the ground.
So we’ve got to use solar power some way in the end, I think, because there’s really no way around it,
unless it’s nuclear, at least in the short time.
But ultimately the sun is going to be around a long time and that’s why we’re all here and surviving.
So that’s what we got to plan on in the future.
Chairman: You are certainly right but you know in Germany the decision has been made after Fukushima,
also in some other countries.
And I believe it is very difficult to do something also against the will of the majority of the population in a country.
That’s a political issue.
But certainly it would make sense.
Richard Schrock: Now I hear some people are opposed to windmills because they’re ugly.
(laughter).
Richard Schrock: They make noise, whoof, whoof, whoof, so they don’t want to live near them.
(laughter).
Chairman: Astrid
Astrid Gräslund: Joking aside.
I would say that here of course one has to consider time scales.
So what you are deciding now in Germany about windmills and nuclear power and so on, it is now.
And maybe not 40 years ago what would be the situation then when we had the global warming perhaps being very noticeable.
I mean we really had to do something.
Chairman: That is right.
Astrid Gräslund: Then there will be a completely different situation, I think, also for the political decision makers.
So I think for now we will have to struggle on.
And of course we should, as you indicate here, do our research so that we have the methodologies, technologies available.
But I don’t think we should expect any politician to make us, make them go into technologies in large scale yet.
Chairman: Astrid you are completely right.
But you know I am not pro-nuclear.
But I just want to say also for the young people here.
I mean if I ask you who is for or who is against nuclear power, I think there will be a minority to be pro nuclear power.
But on the other hand I think it is important to keep the knowledge
and to further develop the technology to make safe nuclear power plants.
And nobody in Germany, almost nobody I know of one place,
and in particular the young people, they don’t go in this field, to work in this field anymore.
So within one generation this will be lost.
And that is a danger.
We had the case with Chernobyl and other just-across-the-border power plants that have a problem.
And we are feeling these problems.
And you cannot avoid it, it’s a global problem.
And we have to think along these lines and really find a solution also for this problem, I believe.
Gerhard Ertl: What you mentioned concerns existing power plants.
Chairman: Also new ones.
Gerhard Ertl: But I think what is even more serious is what to do with the waste, the nuclear waste.
And this problem has not been solved so far.
You know in Germany we have a strong debate about a place where we could deposit the nuclear waste.
This is of course also a problem for chemistry in some respects.
Chairman: Exactly.
Gerhard Ertl: But very often it’s just swept under the carpet.
Chairman: That is one of the major problems.
It’s also the reason that I’m really.
We have to solve this problem in some way.
And there is no good solution yet.
Robert Grubb: And so in the US, there were a lot of solutions proposed.
And we have lots of open land and area but the people nearby of course didn’t want it in their back yard.
So there’s always, always this issue.
But the other part, I think you raised a really important issue, is that I was on another panel,
an advisory group which was considering nuclear power.
And finding experts in the field is really difficult now because no one is going into the field over the last number of years.
And so as you say if we’re forced into it it’s going to have to be, how are we going to restart the field.
Chairman: That is right.
Okay, so there was not a single question about nuclear power here.
But let us go into some other questions.
This is concerning using biology.
There was one question, what can we learn from biology for the process?
That is pretty clear.
Everybody of us will agree, I think, that one can learn from it.
And maybe chemistry has to find different solutions, you cannot use the same systems.
But we can perhaps use the biological system.
And there are many questions concerning that.
And maybe you can try to answer some of them.
One was concerning photosynthesis.
"What is the efficiency of photosynthesis?
Is it feasible to solve the energy needs by harvesting the energy from the sun and store it in fuels?
What are the expected energy numbers, expected from this method?“
And quite a number of other questions related to that.
For example, Can sugar cane be an effective source of bio fuels, this is Brazil?
Are bio fuels economically viable and environmentally friendly?“
And so on.
Hartmut.
...
He already made a statement, but this was on Saturday and you were not there, so he will repeat.
Hartmut Michel: Okay.
The overall process of photosynthesis has a pretty low efficiency.
Starting from the beginning only about 47% of the sunlight, energy wise, is absorbed by the plants.
And then we have, because you know there is much more energy in the light quanta.
Of course there is more energy in the blue quanta than in the red quanta.
And there already is only about 40% of the energy in the light quanta is then stored in the primary reaction.
And the losses go on.
You need about 9.4 photons to produce 2 molecules of fixed hydrogen which you then could use to produce,
which you then use to produce carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide fixation in the plants is another problem
because the enzyme cannot discriminate accurately enough between oxygen O2 and carbon dioxide CO2.
And in every third cycle it incorporates an O2 instead of a CO2 into the sugar, into the C5 sugar.
And this leads to loss of energy of 30 to 40%.
Another point is that photosynthesis is optimised for low light intensities.
So even here in Germany if you have full sunlight, 80% of the sunlight is not used.
The electron flow through the reaction centres is limiting that.
And you get damage of the reaction centre.
And nature has partly solved the damage by exchanging the central subunit of the photo system to 3 times an hour.
It gets probably photo-oxidised with the subunit and has to be replaced.
And this is what the plants manage to do.
But I don’t think we can do that in a kind of technological solution.
Taking together all these limiting factors the theoretical upper limit for photosynthesis
is continued to be 5% for use of the plants.
But actually when you measure the biomass which you produce, which you get under optimal conditions
with various plants, then this value is about 1%.
Then you go further to production of bio fuels.
You have to invest in say tractor fuels.
You have to collect the stuff, you have to put energy to produce the fertiliser.
And then more than 50% of the energy in the bio fuel you have to put in from fossil fuels.
So that’s another point.
And when you consider German bio diesel then it’s less than 0.1% of the sun’s energy which is in the German bio diesel.
So the overall process is extremely inefficient.
And when you do further simple calculations to find out how much area
you would need to substitute Germany’s consumption for car petrol and car diesel.
Then you end up that all agricultural land of Germany would just be sufficient to supply 8 to 10% of Germany’s gasoline and diesel.
So this is nothing.
On the other hand we, already in Germany we use 20% of the land for growing corn/maize
in order to supply the material for biogas production.
And as a result of that food price went up, but the income of the farmers increased.
And the farmer lobby is a strong lobby in favour of producing bio fuels because they really have lots of profits from that.
There can be no doubt about that.
And it’s difficult against the farmer’s lobby, they have support by politician to argue against that.
What makes me most negative against bio fuels is the palm oil production in the tropics.
And this clearly leads to the clearing of the rain forest in order to start up oil palm plantations.
And you may have read about the hazing in Singapore which is due to the illegal cutting, burning of rain forest in Sumatra Island.
And this of course has to be stopped.
And I don’t think there is any political solution for that.
We simply should not use palm oil as a diesel source.
And we should not import this kind of bio fuel to Europe or to the US.
Chairman: Good.
Thank you.
Also the situation in Brazil.
I think using sugar cane is, the calculation, I heard, is a few percent at least, storage of the sun energy.
Hartmut Michel: No, it's 0.2%, it’s very easy to calculate.
0.2% of the sunlight is stored in the...
But the advantage of Brazil is that sugar cane is, that you use,
they squeeze the stems to burn and use this energy for distillation of the fermentation product, to get the alcohol.
For that reason the energy input and bio ethanol production in Brazil is pretty low.
And it's economically possible.
Chairman: I think in America there is a similar situation with corn.
Richard Schrock: A similar situation with corn.
I think some estimates were that it's actually, you have to put in more energy than you get out.
If you count everything in terms of fertiliser, making the fertiliser and growing the corn, and processing the corn,
and fermenting the corn, and distilling all of the, you know, to get out the ethanol and so on.
And purifying it and so on.
In the end it costs more than you get.
So that’s definitely not what we want.
And I don’t know if you’ve heard those numbers Bob, but, or maybe you have too,
but there’s no longer a lot of enthusiasm for corn, at least in the US.
Chairman: This is changing the situation, which is good.
Robert Grubb: The other thing that’s happened over the last couple of years:
A few years ago there was a whole green tech movement and venture capitalists.
And so there were a large number of companies started which were going to use enzymes
and various modified enzymes for making butanol and making all kinds of fuels.
Those companies then went public.
Their market caps were huge.
Now their market caps are very small.
Because there’s a whole issue about scaling: How do you scale biological processes on a large scale,
how do you keep from contamination, etc, etc.
Richard Schrock: I mean earth does a pretty good job of scaling, it covers the earth with green plants.
But man has a hard time dealing with that.
That’s certainly a problem, a big problem, scaling.
Gerhard Ertl: So even 0.5% only efficiency would in principle be no problem.
There is enough energy available from the sun.
But the problems arise mainly from the influence on the environment.
And the competition between food production and energy production, fuel production.
It’s a very, very difficult issue.
And that’s why the only possibility I think which is reasonable is to use waste, waste from biological products to form fuel.
But not to grow, growing the plants for transforming it into fuels.
But from waste you can do it.
Chairman: Yes, as a side product, you will not solve the whole problem with it but maybe a tiny bit, sure.
And that’s what is also done particularly in Bavaria I believe, if I remember that right.
Richard Schrock: It's really coming down to, there’s really no one solution.
There are many solutions and many of the many solutions are difficult solutions.
But I wish we had a magic sun that we can all use somehow on earth.
But we don’t.
I suppose fusion is still being researched but they always say they’re almost there and I don’t think they ever really are.
But that’s a pipe dream to have a sun on earth, unfortunately.
Chairman: Astrid
Astrid Gräslund: I would just like to comment one thing about that.
And that is that a couple of years ago I was travelling in northern Germany.
And I was really struck by that almost every single one family house had solar panels on the roof.
Which is the only place in this world where I have seen that.
Obviously this was some kind of political move.
Chairman: Yes or subsidised strongly.
Astrid Gräslund: So it was heavily subsidised.
But I mean it doesn’t take more than that obviously.
And then people could afford it, states could probably afford it.
I don’t know if they continue to do it but the need is maybe less.
Richard Schrock: I don’t know, maybe you have the numbers or you have the numbers.
That if solar panels were available, if they fell out of the sky, that would be one thing.
But we have to make silicon, we have to make the solar panels.
And I don’t know what the break-even point is in terms of energy and cost and so on.
When do we go positive in the energy game with solar panels?
Hartmut Michel: Actually the thing is that in Germany of course it’s not actually subsidies by the government.
But the point is that the local power company has to buy your electricity which you produce from photovoltaic cells.
Currently, I think, for newly installed photovoltaic cells at about just below 30 Euro cents per kWh.
And that’s of course really high.
And if you install these photovoltaic cells on your roof you have a guaranteed profit of 8% every year for the next 20 years.
And even insurance companies go into that.
This has caused other problems because now in order for paying this energy to these investors,
the price of the kWh for the general consumer, even for the cleaning lady, went up by 6 cent per kWh.
And as a result of that also the production costs are going up in Germany for the industry.
And lots of industry are now thinking of cutting down production in Germany.
And setting up the production in the US because energy is very cheap in the US, primarily to the gas fracking.
So this has economical consequences and one clearly has to think about that when you do that.
Also within Germany there are consequences.
Most of the photovoltaic cells in Germany are installed in Bavaria, if you look around, not in Lower Saxony.
The point is in Germany that Bavaria makes a surplus of 2 billion Euro each year.
So the people in Bavaria get 2 billion Euro from people in North Rhine-Westphalia.
There’s not much instalment of photovoltaic cells in the Ruhr area.
So the people in the Ruhr area pay the people in Bavaria money for using that electricity.
So these of course are internal consequences which have not been thought about when these laws were introduced.
Also one has to say I think the breakeven point, the real breakeven point in Italy certainly is about 13 Euro cent per kWh.
And this is already in reach, within this year or next year we will have that.
So it will be economically valuable in the Mediterranean space, in Spain, Italy and Greece
to produce the electricity by using photovoltaic cells.
Then of course we can import that electricity from there by, not by superconducting
but by these high voltage direct current cables - which were mentioned also by Steve Chu in his talk this morning.
Robert Grubb: Yes, that is a possibility.
Chairman: I have one more biological question.
It’s kind of clear that hydrogen is an important central chemical for Haber Bosch,
for maybe also driving cars, for other processes.
So we have to make it in some way.
So there was a question, "What is the best way to make hydrogen?“
And related to the biological side there are also efforts to use algae or cyanobacteria to directly make hydrogen.
Maybe you can comment on that, too.
And what are your ideas to get the hydrogen.
I mean one way is clearly electrolysis of water.
If we want to do that on a very large scale we have to develop also new catalyst for the electrolysis,
for the electrolysers and so on.
But that is probably in reach.
But is there also a direct method like sunlight and use water splitting in plants?
Richard Schrock: Would anybody have an answer to the bio question, I don’t know, algae?
Hartmut Michel: I still think the yield would be very, very low and you still have the problem about damage for the system.
And also it's biology and biology will die.
And so it’s not as stable as the chemical means are.
And economically I do not see any future for biohydrogen.
Gerhard Ertl: I think electrolysis will certainly be the solution of this problem.
And you have to pay for it because there is an O voltage in the cell which costs energy.
So the main problem is to find proper electrodes which reduce the O voltage.
And it’s mainly the oxygen electrode which causes this problem, not the hydrogen electrode.
So as soon as we have a solution for that it will become much more efficient also to split water through electrolysis.
Chairman: There was an interesting question, coating of electrodes for water splitting both ways.
In electrolysers, also fuel cells, there is a problem that is exactly related to what you are saying.
So there is still some need for chemical work.
The question here was if nano technology can contribute, carbon nano tubes, things like that.
I mean people are trying that, to coat electrodes, to bring the over voltage down.
Gerhard Ertl: The catalysis has been a nano technology since it was invented, long before this...
Chairman: Sure, I'm only quoting.
Gerhard Ertl: So by inventing a new name it doesn’t solve the problems.
(laughter)
Chairman: Very good.
So we are doing quite well on the questions.
So what is the best way to obtain hydrogen then?
Some more ideas, except for electrolysis.
I mean is there not something like...
Richard Schrock: You have to get it by, you have solar source of water splitting, I think that’s the only way.
You’re taking energy from the sun and you’re producing something that you can use to burn to give water.
I mean I might be sounding like Dan Nocera here.
(laughter).
Richard Schrock: But you know it’s good in a way.
I mean people talk about hydrogen this and hydrogen that.
But you can’t go out and buy it except in a small tank.
I mean we need huge, huge amounts.
And the only way you're going to get it is from water and most chemists know that you have to do something to get H2 out of water.
Chairman: I think so too.
I mean all the solutions that we have discussed are only partial solutions on a rather small scale.
Except for the electricity problem that looks quite okay now.
There are solutions but for making direct solar fuels there is no good solution yet.
And I also don’t see at the moment a good solution for replacing fossil fuels.
And they are running out.
I mean there are still, you mentioned the fracking, there are resources still.
But let’s project into the next 100 years or 200 years.
We need a solution to replace the fossil fuels
because they will eventually be eaten up by us for driving cars, flying planes, heating our rooms, our houses, all that.
And then we must have a solution.
And the only possible at the moment seems to be to use water, non-toxic, abundant, cheap.
And sun light.
So I don’t see anything else.
So I think we need all of you to think about it and to go into this field and find a solution.
It will be very difficult to do it like plants outside.
The catalyst is awfully complicated.
Professor Michel has mentioned that the lifetime of the major enzyme that is doing the water splitting is only 20 or 30 minutes.
So to make something like that chemically is extremely difficult.
Chemistry cannot yet do that.
I mean Jean-Marie Lehn in his talk, he was a little bit in this adaptive chemistry: self-repair, self-replication,
all these problems but we are still far away from that.
And for that reason I also think that there is still room for chemistry, for new chemistry,
for good chemistry to do something in this direction.
Richard Schrock: Fortunately a lot of those problems are inorganic chemistry problems, so I’m pleased to hear that in a way.
And all you inorganic chemists go to it.
Because we’re going to need transition metal chemistry for many of the things that we’re talking about:
coating electrodes, doing this, doing that, splitting water and so on.
It’s not going to go away and we have to move, as Bob mentioned, more towards earth abundant metals.
Because there just aren’t possibilities of scaling with some metals, on the scale that we would have to scale.
That’s not going to happen.
Chairman: Yes.
Okay.
Gerhard Ertl: I just want to make a comment concerning predictions.
When I was a student nuclear fusion was just coming into consideration.
And there was a prediction in 50 years we will have reactors for nuclear fusion.
Now that’s 60 years ago and we are still waiting for solutions to that.
Now they say in 50 years we will be able to build a reactor.
And the same thing is with fossil fuels.
When I was a student there was also a prediction by Club of Rome which said in 20 years
there will be no resource available anymore.
This was 50 years ago again.
So we still have resources.
And optimists of course claim we will find new sources.
But this is not a solution to the problem.
You are right in some decades or centuries all these resources will be exhausted.
So we will be forced to find alternative solutions for that.
No other way.
Chairman: Astrid.
Astrid Gräslund: If I may comment, I think you are quite right, that there have to come solutions.
And of course it's just the necessity that will force them to come.
And at the moment we don’t see them.
However, personally at least, I see not the lack of fossil fuel to be the serious problem
but what we are doing while we are burning it and that this is causing too bad consequences for everything around us.
Not maybe for myself but for my great-grandchildren or your grandchildren.
That is, I think, the serious part for me.
But it will, of course, only future can tell how bad this will be, we won’t see it.
Chairman: Yes, thank you.
There were a few more questions of a very general kind.
I think we should not go into that, it’s more politics and money for research and all that.
It is certainly very important to do that.
So I think principle, is there some urgent question from you.
We are listening.
Any statement from ...
yes okay.
(question from the floor).
Question: Going to predictions.
Do you think that really like in 1,000 years we’re going to look back and see this as a really strange blip in history?
Where, I mean in a 1,000 years we’re going to have renewable energy from solar sources
in such abundant quantities that this time is going to be seen really, really strange in retrospect.
I mean we’re going to have huge problems with climate crisis but it’s going to be reversible at some point.
What do you think?
Richard Schrock: What do you think the population of the earth will be in a 1,000 years?
(laughter).
Question: It’s probably going to stabilise.
Richard Schrock: Nature is going to unfortunately take care of a lot of these overpopulation problems eventually.
Sorry to say, but it's inevitable (laugh).
Hartmut Michel: Maybe in 100 years we know when it is already sorted out.
Richard Schrock: It's sorted within 100 years.
Gerhard Ertl: If you look back 100 years the world was completely different,
so nobody would have predicted how the world would look like in 100 years from 1930.
So it’s almost impossible to make any prediction, what will happen in the next 100 years in the future.
No chance.
Hartmut Michel: Let me also add that you have seen this morning this ice age cycle in Steve Chu’s talk.
And there is some likelihood that we will have another ice age in the not so distant future.
And so we have to cope with that also.
And then of course if we have the same ice ages, then Berlin will be under the ice.
And we will not be sitting here because there’s a few 100 metres of ice up here.
Richard Schrock: And that will last for how many years, 100 years?
Hartmut Michel: No that will last for the next 80/90,000 years.
Richard Schrock: 80/90,000 years?!
(laughter).
Hartmut Michel: Yes.
Richard Schrock: Okay, problem solved.
(laughter).
So let's going to have a party.
Astrid Gräslund: From being Swedish I can tell you that of course we have had a rather recent ice age there.
And only about 10,000 years ago did it start to really go away.
And now we can see, again look forward to that we are now probably in the middle of an interglacial period.
So it will be a few thousand years.
And then it will come back, no matter what.
I mean we could maybe counteract it by heating a lot but it won’t help I think in the long run.
So certainly these very long periods of time are something completely different.
And the glacial periods have come and gone as we saw this morning.
And that is the time frame that we have really no insight into.
However I would say that that shouldn’t stop us from, I mean we should solve problems here and now, that is our job.
And maybe for our grandchildren.
But we don’t ...
Chairman: It’s also a great chance for science and mankind in general to find solutions for these problems.
I mean to use up the fossil fuels that have been collected by photosynthesis over millions of years.
We used them up within 100 or 200 years.
And maybe we should not have done that, but it was a great time.
Richard Schrock: If this ice age actually arrives and there are some humans who survive,
you might consider what kind of human being will come out the other side.
I don’t know.
You don’t see any dinosaurs walking around, there are sort of birds, so...
Robert Grubb: But in the short term there are many problems to solve.
And the nice future about it is, a lot of them are chemistry
but a lot of them are going to require a lot of good fundamental new sciences being developed.
And so in the process of doing this we actually are going to have a good time.
Chairman: Good.
Question: Hi my name is Nil from Chualongkom University in Thailand.
It is my great pleasure to be here and to meet all of you.
Thank you so much for your time.
So my question is related to electric vehicles.
So in order to have an advancement in this field, do you think it’s possible
that it might cause another problem of electric production?
Like when you produce electricity.
Would it be possible that if you want to produce in a huge amount you might need to do it from coal?
Or you might destroy other, you might raise other issues about environment?
Chairman: Difficult to understand.
I could not understand.
Maybe you could repeat the main point.
Question: Sure, so the question that I have is that if you wanted to produce electric vehicles
you might want to use a lot of electricity.
And in order to do that would it be possible that you might raise another issue,
like you might need to have more coal power plant and that could raise another environment problem.
Chairman: I think we try to avoid that.
We try to avoid to use coal.
I think it’s certainly a problem.
To go electric will certainly require more electricity.
And we should not use for example burning coal and power plants and not capturing the CO2, if we want to do that.
It should be from renewable sources.
That would be the right way to go I believe.
Hartmut Michel: I am pretty much convinced that coal will still be the major source
for production of kerosene for jets in the future, unfortunately.
Robert Grubb: There was an interesting article in the Washington Post by Zachariah who suggested that the best thing
that could be done for CO2 control would be for the US to teach China how to do fracking properly.
So they could switch their coal plants to natural gas.
And that drops 10’s of percents of the CO2 emission, up to 30/40%.
That’s an interesting extreme view but I think it’s an interesting one.
Chairman: There is certainly also some, there will be some questions about the fracking I believe.
We had that in the past and we had an interesting discussion on that on Saturday.
I don’t know if somebody wants to repeat the point here.
And discuss it with you, what kind of danger.
Astrid Gräslund: I think even explain what it is.
Chairman: Okay, so there is a way to pressurise with chemicals or water the holes,
the drilling holes and then get in a more efficient way and more of natural gas and also oil out of the wells.
This is called fracking, fracturing.
And this has been done...
Richard Schrock: Isn’t it banned?
I thought it was banned in some countries, even now, France, I don’t know about Germany.
Chairman: It is done in many countries.
Richard Schrock: People do not like others going underground and you know doing things that they don’t understand.
And at their own homes.
Gerhard Ertl: We should not forget that this has serious influence on the environment, just the consumption of water.
There was a joke in Germany: "Let us do fracking and then we become independent from the oil import from Russia.“
And then the answer was , "But then we don’t have any water.
Then let us import the water from Russia."
(laughter).
Chairman: Good, I saw one more question here, was that right?
Can you come to the front, otherwise you don’t get the microphone.
Question: I wanted to get back at the very beginning of the panel discussion and Mr. Ertl.
He mentioned that it’s not only about conversion, it’s also about saving energy.
Maybe the panel could comment on that.
Because that is something we can do right away and not in the future.
Chairman: This is a broad field.
Professor Ertl.
Gerhard Ertl: I think everybody will agree that energy will be not as cheap as it is at the moment, in the future.
So energy will become more expensive.
And this automatically forces you to save energy.
It’s against the economy which has a regulation power in this.
Of course there are many different ways to save power: to reduce the heating of your buildings, to reduce the air conditioning,
to build smaller cars - there are many, many possibilities.
As long as energy is so cheap there is no pressure on you to do it.
So make it more expensive.
At such a meeting a couple of years ago I proposed to increase the price of gasoline to €3 and there was a large outcry.
We are nearly as far now, jaja.
Chairman: Do you want to comment on that?
Robert Grubb: It’s just that a good chunk of the energy goes into housing and buildings and stuff.
So that’s a very easy place to do saving.
So that’s a place that I think has been ignored.
Because part of the problem is in an individual house, because of very large capital cost you have immediately.
And so you weigh that against paying a few extra bucks a month over a long period of time.
So there’s probably going to have to be some legislative things that sort of force these issues.
Richard Schrock: I think a lot of ...
at MIT we have, every place has buildings that were built some time ago.
And they’re all single pane windows and there are a lot of them.
And it costs an enormous amount of money to run the university just in terms of heating.
But it also costs an enormous amount of money to replace all those windows with more energy efficient windows –
and that all takes energy.
So I don’t know what the economists have decided as to how worthwhile this is and how that all plays out.
But retrofitting buildings and houses and so on to become really energy efficient is very expensive in itself,
very wasteful in energy or uses energy in many ways.
But if that’s the way to go then that’s what we’ll have to do.
Chairman: On the other hand in the last 20/30 years in particular in Germany
there have been enormous efforts to bring down the gas mileage ...
or to bring it up.
And I remember when I bought my first car, a VW or something like that,
it was taking 10/12, it was a small engine, 10/12 litres for 100 kilometres.
Now the same car would probably take 3 or 4, and with diesel and all the technology.
It also cost money but there are systems that work.
And a lot has been done.
Also insulating houses, windows, all that, everywhere.
Robert Grubb: I point out, I’ve sat on a number of panels where people are talking about saving energy.
And I look around and we’re all sitting around in wool suits.
You know it’s really bad that we chose northern European clothing as sort of the standard around the world.
We should be dressing so we don’t have to.
So you get the air conditioner cranked way up so you can wear a suit.
(laughter).
Chairman: That’s right.
Okay good, please microphone, you, we have a few more minutes.
Question: Hi.
I have a question about the earlier part of the discussion.
It was mentioned that nuclear energy is falling out of favour with the public.
And certainly there have been plenty of examples in the last few years of the potential consequences,
the negative consequences of when there is failure with nuclear power.
Do you think that this negative reputation is deserved or is perhaps the risk worth any potential benefits?
Or do the negatives outweigh the positives for nuclear energy?
Chairman: Good question, not easy to answer.
Richard Schrock: Are we on the record here or...
(laughter).
Richard Schrock: We may read about this tomorrow in the newspapers.
Anybody want to take a shot at that one?
Robert Grubb: The perception has changed.
I was on some committees where there were lots of discussions about nuclear power and everything was going along.
And countries were talking about doing it which one wouldn’t suspect would do it.
And then Japan happened and all those discussions ended, so.
Astrid Gräslund: I could comment again about the situation in Sweden because we have had it over quite a long time.
50% of all our electricity is nuclear, +30% is hydroelectric and then a small amount,
which is not from those more or less renewable or non-fossil sources.
And in the meantime of course the public opinion has swayed back and forth and mostly one way.
But for instance we had for a certain number of years a law forbidding further development
or even planning new power plants by nuclear power.
That has been removed.
So now you can actually both plan and, well construct if you like.
But of course nobody is yet buying.
But I at least can see that in the small rather we’ll say pragmatic country of Sweden.
This is not going to be a big problem in the future.
This is my guess.
I mean we will keep our nuclear power.
We will probably renovate it when the time comes.
We may not increase it a lot maybe but who knows.
Depending on the needs.
And certainly there is no movement that we should somehow turn things down prematurely right now.
That is a non-issue.
Other Swedes here could correct me if I am wrong.
Maybe I don’t hear what young people talk about.
But this is certainly the overall idea I get.
Chairman: What is your opinion?
Question: I’m certainly not qualified to express mine here.
(laughter).
Chairman: But that is an opinion.
(laughter, applause).
There was one more last question.
I think.
You, please.
Question: Professor Grubbs mentioned earlier that he’s associated to a company producing I think batteries.
And I wonder at what stage during the development of a new technology
it makes sense to use subsidies from the state to make the new technology available to a broader audience
or to make it viable in the sense of economic way?
Or whether we should wait for technology to mature first and then bring it to the market?
Chairman: Germany is a very good example for that.
Question: I think that Germany is a good example in heavily subsidising.
Chairman: There is this renewable energy law in Germany and that was causing the massive shift to renewable energy,
photovoltaics and wind in particular.
It was heavily subsidised and had some outbursts as professor Michel already explained.
The tax payer in the end is paying for it.
If they are willing to do so it's fine because I believe
that there are new ideas, new developments - hopefully in the right direction - and employment in this field.
So I think it’s a good idea to do that in the right way.
But the government has to decide and the decision has to be made in a clever way.
Batteries - I don’t know, I don’t know the situation how that is.
You ask to subsidise the development of batteries.
Question: Not exactly only batteries, it was just a general question.
Chairman: General.
Question: But we could just as well take the same money that we use for subsidies
and invest it directly into research or more target oriented development.
Chairman: That’s right.
That’s another possibility.
Richard Schrock: It would be nice to have politicians who knew something about science.
I don’t know...
(applause).
Chairman: It’s not so bad in Germany.
Richard Schrock: At least in the US there isn’t a large percentage that know much about science
and what should or should not be supported with subsidies and so on.
I don’t know who they listen to but they don’t seem to themselves have much knowledge in science.
Maybe that’s going to be in the papers too, I don’t know.
(laughter).
Chairman: Our chancellor is a physicist, that helps.
Okay good, thank you very much.
I think we should slowly come to the end.
I thank everybody on the panel.
I will maybe shortly wrap up what we have heard here.
And what we have done.
I think biofuels, we agree more or less on that, are problematic.
Although for example in Germany we have 5 or 10% ethanol in our gasoline.
We have biodiesel and this is going on.
Maybe it will be stopped, I don’t know.
There is also renewable energy law and that is the same source for that development.
But it is seen as a problematic thing also by politicians now I think worldwide.
Maybe with an exception of Brazil and others who pursue that still.
That we have to go more electric in a way that is certainly right.
In particular because we have no solution to replace fossil fuels that we are using for driving our cars,
flying our planes and all that.
There is no good solution for that.
So the move to electricity that can be produced in a renewable way
- at least to some extent and more and more –
is certainly the right decision in the moment.
And I hope there will be development in the battery sector, in the car sector and so on.
We have to save energy, that is very clear.
I mentioned that there is also a good development in several countries.
Some points are under discussion.
We were just buying a house and we heard that it would be better to not insulate it for various reasons of climate and so on.
So we have to think about that.
And the third point we discussed quite a bit was nuclear power.
And we had a split opinion in a way.
I think some people say we have to use what we have and we have to continue.
And we have to also invest in the technology and teaching people so that we don’t lose the knowledge in this field.
And the people who know about the technology and can help, in case we have to go back to it in the future.
And clearly the storage problem, long time storage of the waste, is not solved yet.
And it’s not completely safe.
Fukushima was a good example, it’s not completely safe.
Okay.
Another point?
And the last and most important point and for all of you, we don’t have as I mentioned a solution to make solar fuels.
So we need the input of chemistry to develop a catalytic, better catalysts and devices.
For example for light induced water splitting to make hydrogen or to directly make carbon-containing compounds like in photosynthesis for that by some way.
Either looking at what photosynthesis and what nature is teaching us or to go completely different new ways
that smart chemists like you have to come up with in the near future, I hope.
So I think that is closing the panel now and I thank everybody on the stage for a great one and a half hours.
Thank you for coming and thank you for listening.