When McCormick Prof. Sossina Haile started working at the Paula M. Trienens Institute for Sustainability and Energy 30 years ago, the world was not facing a climate crisis, she said. But it is today.

Now, the institute works on sustainability projects, such as developing fuel usable without adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, rather, creating water as the only byproduct. This is just one of the sustainability marvels that the institute aims to make possible. 

The institute includes more than 120 faculty affiliates and is organized around five research and development pillars: Generate, Store, Deploy, Transform and Capture. 

The “Generate” pillar focuses on solar power innovation, while the “Store” pillar focuses on long-term grid storage on a large scale. The “Deploy” and “Transform” pillars both aim to decarbonize energy production, and the “Capture” pillar aims to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Clean hydrogen production

Haile, who is “Deploy” pillar Co-Chair, said those working in modern energy production should consider the carbon footprint left by production mechanisms.

“We need energy abundance. We need to be able to meet the growing needs of the whole world, not just us in the developed world, without overloading our carbon in the atmosphere,” Haile said.

The institute is investigating several approaches to reducing carbon emissions, like substituting hydrogen for carbon as a fuel source. Carbon in fuels like gasoline combusts, resulting in carbon dioxide as one product — on the other hand, hydrogen forms water vapor when burned in oxygen.

Although hydrogen is an appealing energy source, it is expensive to work with and transport. 

As a potential solution, the “Deploy” pillar is looking into ammonia, which is cheaper to transport than pure hydrogen because it requires lower pressure and more established shipping pipelines, Haile said. The pillar is investigating how ammonia can be dissociated to form gaseous hydrogen and nitrogen, a less harmful byproduct than carbon.

Research groups across Trienens are collaborating with the “Deploy” pillar to develop low-cost methods to produce clean hydrogen. According to McCormick Prof. Jeffrey Lopez, a group led by McCormick Prof. David Dunand is investigating a fuel cell that can be run at a high temperature to generate either clean hydrogen or electricity. 

“It’s a really novel kind of combination of a couple of different technologies, and put together, it’s a system that has the potential to store electrical energy very, very efficiently at a very, very low cost on the grid,” Lopez said.

Haile also spoke about the potential of reversible hydrogen cells, which are single-unit cells capable of generating either hydrogen from energy or energy from hydrogen, making them a valuable source of renewable energy. 

The size of the electrochemical compared to the smaller storage component of the battery-like cell helps to bypass the issue of transporting hydrogen altogether. Because hydrogen can be easily stored on-site in these cells, having an electrochemical cell that functions as a battery allows for hydrogen production through charging and discharging, Haile said.

Current electrolysers cannot be used reversibly, so lab work done by Haile’s group involves trial and error for a variety of cells, measuring their voltage behavior. The group also studies individual cell components, taking a more direct approach to characterize the effectiveness of specific materials.

“It’s always easy to make a lousy device, so any material will work for a lousy device,” Haile said. “Making a device takes a lot more steps than characterizing the material itself. I’m always a fan of doing the fundamental characterization before you try to make a device, and you don’t learn anything about it because you don’t know which component is failing.”

Cross-pillar connections

Research at the institute is highly fluid, allowing for collaboration between the pillars and various educational disciplines. 

The institute brings together a wide range of perspectives around a shared goal of sustainability, with professors ranging from chemical and biological engineering to Latina and Latino studies. 

Haile’s work has brought her together with “Generate” pillar Co-Chair and chemistry Prof. Dayne Swearer, whose background includes extensive work with plasma. Together, they aim to use plasma excitations to catalyze ammonia formation from nitrogen within electrochemical cells, Swearer said.

For Swearer, plasma chemistry is particularly interesting because it involves a very reactive landscape and dynamic environment that produces challenging reactions. 

One of the bigger challenges in his work is controlling catalyst development and reaction engineering in a way that makes better use of very reactive gas-phase plasmas, Swearer said.  

Northwestern professors tend to work very well with both colleagues and research groups, according to Swearer. Quoting chemistry Prof. Joseph Hupp, Swearer said, “Wildcats hunt in packs.”

Work from different pillars of the institute can support other pillars, Swearer added. He said his own work supports others, including the “Transform” and “Capture” pillars.

Within the “Generate” pillar, Swearer works to harness solar energy and aims to find effective ways to produce it, since according to the U.S. Department of Energy, enough sunlight reaches Earth in an hour and a half to handle the entire world’s energy consumption for a year.

An evolving problem: artificial intelligence data centers

Even as researchers pursue solutions that could theoretically produce a very large amount of energy, the world’s evolving energy crisis continues to demand new, innovative solutions.

“If you would have asked me five years ago if AI data centers were going to be consuming this vast amount of electricity, I would have probably said, ‘Eh, no, that seems a little bit far-fetched or science fiction,’” Swearer said. “But today, when you think about the energy transition, almost everybody is thinking about not developing capacity for electrochemical reactors, but rather data centers.” 

Research Assistant Prof. Mohammadreza Heidari said data centers in the U.S. use roughly 120 terawatt-hours of electricity each year, a number expected to rise in the coming years. 

With a Trienens project focused on modeling energy systems for data centers, Heidari’s work is motivated by a recent increase in their energy consumption.

“Currently, we are expecting unprecedented AI load growth in the next few years that can affect many of us from different perspectives,” Heidari said.

He sees promise in integrating solar panels and other energy-generating technologies to supply data center energy consumption, he said. He also emphasized the importance of energy storage, as generated energy is essentially useless without adequate storage methods, he added.

The “Store” pillar, co-led by Lopez, focuses on electrifying transportation and large-scale grid storage systems. The pillar also investigates the manufacturing techniques of existing technologies, attempting to make production cheaper and more effective.

Lopez’s group has a wide focus, from synthesizing materials to building and testing full batteries. For Lopez, the data analysis that follows experimentation is often the most interesting component of his work.

“We think that storage offers a path towards a much more resilient grid — a grid that not only performs better but also performs better at lower cost,” Lopez said. “And so, (it) delivers electricity to people for less money and allows you to integrate new data centers to the grid, allows you to have homes and businesses and communities that are resilient to blackouts.”

Ultimately, the institute’s sustainability goals are not simple ones to achieve. According to Swearer, in order to have a lower-carbon future, a suite of technologies that all work together is needed. No single research group, company or individual will solve the entirety of the energy transition problem, he said. 

“It requires active efforts from people with different skill sets and backgrounds, not just technical on the science and the engineering side, but also sociologists and lawyers and policymakers,” Swearer said. “This is a very big problem, and one that requires a lot of people with a lot of different expertise to be able to tackle.”

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