Inspired by Nature: The Chemistry That Powers our Planet--Dr. Jenny Yang, UC Irvine

Our planet has always been powered by sunlight.  Plants use light and water and air to grow through the process of photosynthesis.  Dr. Jenny Yang, Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Irvine proposes that we imitate plants to produce fuel through artificial photosynthesis.  That fuel would be carbon neutral because we would be pulling CO2 out ot the air to manufacture it.  She says this would be part of a portfolio of green solutions to man-made climate change that threatens the future of our planet.  Dr Yang spoke at a "town talk" sponsored by Telluride Science.  Moderators: Judy Muller and George Lewis. Additional comments by Telluride Science Executive Director Mark Kozak.

Transcript

Science Straight Up

Season 5, episode 3

“Inspired by Nature: Understanding the Chemistry That Powers our Planet”

Dr Jenny Yang, University of California, Irvine

Moderators: Judy Muller and George Lewis

Comments: Mark Kozak

(THEME)

(JUDY) From Telluride Science…this is “Science Straight Up.”

(GEORGE) And on this episode…

(JENNY FROM TALK) We have an energy storage problem. Right, because you know, we can't just keep expanding solar and expect everything to be fine.

(GEORGE) Solar energy. It’s almost unlimited, it’s green, it’s great.  But it only works when the sun is shining.  And sometimes, in daylight, we generate more of it than some utility companies can handle. How best can we store that energy for times when we really need it. Think of being home at night, chilling with the AC on, watching Netflix. I’m George Lewis

(JUDY) And I’m Judy Muller. Batteries are one answer, but Dr. Jenny Yang of the University of California, Irvine, says we need to look beyond batteries and imitate the way nature uses sunlight to grow plants. Photosynthesis.

(GE0RGE) Dr. Yang was one of the speakers appearing at a series of “Town Talks” produced by Telluride Science.  Each year, hundreds of scientists gather in Telluride to exchange ideas and participate in workshops focused on the cutting edge of scientific research.  They also share some of their findings with the community.  Dr. Yang’s appearance was recorded before a live audience at the Telluride Conference Center in Mountain Village, Colorado.

(APPLAUSE) 

(JUDY FROM TOWN TALK) Tonight we're going to be looking at something that affects us all the warming of the planet, and how to cool things down before it's too late. And we are really pleased to have with us Jenny Yang, a professor of chemistry at UC Irvine, where she is the director of Four “C,” the Center for Closing the Carbon Cycle.

(GEORGE) Dr. Yang and her team are working on a rather radical idea for countering climate change. Simply put, we humans need to mimic plants and the process of photosynthesis. 

(JUDY) When it comes to taking sunlight and making storable fuel, as in carbon capture. Nobody does it better than nature. So the stakes are very high. As we know, the planet is warming up heating up summers not the same. As I'm sure you've probably noticed, the heatwave season has grown from about 24 days in the 1960s to 73 days today.

(GEORGE) And, any time we hear about science finding ways to avert this calamity. It's welcome news indeed. So we welcome Jenny Yang.

(APPLAUSE)

(JENNY) First, I'll just start out with a very, very basic question. How do we power ourselves? We power ourselves by eating food, right? So we basically have these beautiful forms of chemical energy where we can eat this food, and then we get energy so that we can walk here, we could go about our daily lives. The second question is, how do we power human civilization? We basically use fossil fuels at this point. And that's the dominant source of energy so far, in order to power human civilization. And this is a problem. Right now, our global energy use, at least as of two years ago, was 25 terawatts a year. So that's a really, really high burn rate for energy use.

(JUDY) She’s talking about terawatts…a trillion watts. 25 terawatts is enough energy to illuminate 250 billion one-hundred watt lightbulbs.  But wait, there’s more.

(JENNY) In 2050, there's a lot of there's a very large range of estimates. But the very lowest range of that estimate is 50 terawatts, so almost double what we're using now in energy. So it's an enormous amount of energy that we want to keep using and growing as a civilization.

(GEORGE) Solar power can help meet that demand in an environmentally friendly way, but there’s the problem that it works only intermittently.  If we want a steady supply of power, we have to store the energy that we collect from the sun.

(JENNY) We can't just keep expanding solar and expect everything to be fine. Because of this intermittency problem that we have. 10:13 When we think about energy storage, we almost always think of batteries first, because that's what you use on our cell phones and all of our devices. 

(JUDY) But there are places where batteries just won’t do the job.  They’re too bulky for most ships and way too heavy for planes.

(JETLINER SOUND)

(GEORGE) A flight from New York to Los Angeles can generate 133 thousand pounds of CO2. But there’s no great substitute right now for good old jet fuel, because it packs a lot of energy into every drop. But what if you could make jet fuel and gasoline and diesel through photosynthesis?  Pulling carbon dioxide out of the air, combining it with water and powering the whole process with photovoltaic solar panels, PV’s.

(JENNY) This is artificial photosynthesis. This is what we want to try to do. Right. So we basically want to take what plants do which is take sunlight, they oxidize water to O2 to get protons electrons to take CO2 to fuel. And you can envision doing that with a synthetic system using photovoltaics and then a fuel, basically an electrolyzer to run these exact reactions. 

(JUDY). There are pilot plants turning out fuels through this process. As the Washington Post reported, a gallon of artificial diesel now costs about nine dollars to produce.  The challenge for researchers like Dr. Yang is how to get it more price competitive versus old fashioned fossil fuels.  It all raises lots of questions and we had a few for Dr Yang.

(GEORGE) I want to see if I understand what you're doing here. You're you're trying to mimic the process of photosynthesis, and make artificial fuels as a result. And these fuels will put more co2 into the atmosphere. But since you're taking co2 out of the atmosphere, these are guilt free hydrocarbons, right?

(JENNY) It is carbon neutral. Yeah. Okay to be carbon neutral. Right

(GEORGE) But aren’t your buddies in climate science saying is not enough to be carbon neutral anymore? We got to pull carbon out of the atmosphere.

(JUDY) Cause we've gone too far.

(GEORGE) We’ve gone too far. 

(JENNY) Yes, we absolutely have. 

(JUDY) Among the pilot projects to capture CO2 from the atmosphere is Orca, in Iceland run by a company called Climeworks. (MUSIC UNDER) Here’s how Climeworks promotes it.

(FROM CLIMEWORKS VIDEO) The air is drawn into a collector with a fan.  And CO2 is captured on the surface of a highly selective filter material that sits inside the collector. Next, once the filter material is full of CO2, the collector closes and is heated to 100 degrees Celsius. Using the carbfix method, the captured CO2 is mixed with water and pumped deep underground where it mineralizes and can be stored for thousands of years.

(GEORGE) An Orca installation can capture about 4000 tons of CO2 per year. Jenny Yang says we need to do a whole lot more.

 (JENNY) So we need to pull out starting in five or 10 years, gigatons a year is the estimates that I read, which is an absurd number. If you think about the pilot plants like orca in Iceland, and it's, it is actually staggering. So yes, I agree with you. So this what I talked about today is trying to make those carbon neutral fuels so that we can keep storing energy and driving cars and taking airplanes and things and be able to do that using renewable sources of energy. But we also work on carbon capture as a way to put things back in the ground because we have to.  At the gigaton scale.

(JUDY) Do you feel pressure on this in terms of time?

(JENNY) It is it is becoming very urgent. And I think if you follow the news, and if any more almost anyone lives you notice it right. So it is a very urgent issue. The good thing is that, I would say that probably the most consequential legislation that's been passed my lifetime, the IRA inflation Reduction Act, they really put their money where their mouth is when it comes to really investing in infrastructure and research, and how do we how do we get things off the ground? They're all about deployment, like we, you know, at some level, we have to start building plants while we innovate, like we can't wait.

(JUDY) You told me that you thought that the Biden administration's inflation Reduction Act is the most consequential legislation in decades. You added that that could change with a change of administration, what could happen?

(JENNY) So yeah, I mean, it's been really critical, right? They've, the amount of money that's been put in is really accelerated development. Like you can see projects springing up all over the US, there's hydrogen, there's CO2 sequestration. So I was fortunate enough to go to a meeting in DC where I met a congressional staffer who got she was probably in his under 30. And they basically said that when they drafted this very complex legislation, they made it so integrated and complex, that it could not easily be repealed. Because, you know, it benefits farmers in Iowa and people in West Virginia. And so any kind of blanket tried to repeal would make everybody unhappy. And so they tried to tie as many things in together to make it as difficult to undo as possible. And so, I hope that is…

(JUDY) Fingers crossed.

(JENNY) Yes.

(JUDY) Okay. When people hear about the need to move away from carbon emission fuels to say solar. Often they think of those giant solar arrays. I have covered stories about Ivanpah out in the anybody who's driven from LA to Las Vegas has seen this huge solar array farm out there. Is that the answer? Just use the desert giant solar array farms. And you told me that there are some problems with it, I think.

(JENNY) Yeah, there are I mean, there are environmental problems, because, you know, the out in the Mojave Desert, obviously the impacts the local ecosystems. And then I think one problem that they started to see when they put these larger rays out in the desert is that a lot of migratory birds that stopped by water sources think that looks like water, and they'll land and they can't get off again without water are present. Right? And so then they die. So it's a real problem for migratory birds. I think they've noticed in this at least in the desert in Southern California, so there aren’t  a lot of easy answers there. I am a proponent of distributed energy generation and storage. So what that means is that instead of like you'd always think about having a big power plant that you know, might be a couple city blocks square far away, you know, piping the energy, you know, solar on the roof, and battery in the garage can serve that purpose and basically decentralize that grid.

(JUDY)Because of the demand and the urgency, I would think that companies, corporations would be really excited about getting into this. Is that something you're seeing?

(JENNY) There's a lot of startups that are really making headway. I think part of it is that the there's been so in the end, right, they have to make money. And the aviation industry has said that they will pay a premium for sustainable fuel. And so that has really driven again, a lot of these companies that were working in the CO2 area, to to, you know, basically pivot toward aviation fuel, because they, you know, if people are willing to pay for it, the customers willing to pay for it. companies willing to pay for it, they will, they'll make it.

(JUDY)  So you will still have a planet to fly around. It’ll just cost you more.

(JENNY) Yeah.

(GEORGE) Jenny, you’re a mom…your kids are here. What kind of legacy do you think we're going to leave young people of that generation in terms of our, our climate and our planet?

(JENNY)Gosh, I, I mean, you know, I go to meetings. And some of those meetings are sort of mixed meetings where there's also climate scientists, and it's very sobering, to listen to what they have to say, right? I'm not a climate scientist, when you hear about the projections, and what they say could happen with these different, you know, one degree two degree, it's, it is very sobering. I think. Because of that, I mean, I can tell you that there's a lot of interest in, you know, I teach at a university, undergraduates, graduate students in really like, how do I do this? How do I apply my scientific interest in trying to solve these problems? And what, what can I do? And so there's a lot of, I think the investment that plus the investment has really been very encouraging in the last two or three years.

(JUDY) What worries you most? Pick something.

(JENNY) We talked a little bit about…I think there are fewer people that deny climate change. Now, there used to be, what, what is the prevailing thought now, for people who don't want to make these changes? Is that Yes, it's happening. Yes. We cause it, it's too expensive. We'll just it would be cheaper, just to like, live with it. And I think that's, that I see that a lot.

(JUDY) Live with it, but..

(JENNY) Yeah, like, like, well, you know, move our cities, to higher ground, we'll move north. You know, with a little cooler places, we'll get air conditioning. I would like to hear from other people actually. Because I, you know, like I said, I'm not a climate scientist. 

(GEORGE) We’re going to get comments from the audience but we want you to use the microphone.

(JUDY) Anybody?  Yes…

(AUDIENCE MEMBER)  Jenny, thank you very much. So I live in Tucson, and we have 360 days a year of Sun pretty hot. I've had solar since ’07,  batteries since last year from Tesla. And I think baby steps, we ought to take baby steps here to get to where you are. It's gonna be a while.

(JENNY) Most people will not do something that costs a lot of money, just because it has some benefit in the environment. So I think in California, they keep adding to the incentives to adding batteries into your garage, right? Or you can use a hybrid car or electric car as basically effectively the battery right, you can run off your solar off of that.

(AUDIENCE MEMBER) So I've had solar since ‘07. Yeah, I'm a financial advisor. I'm in fourth round trip. I'm paying for it. So it is economically valuable. 

(JENNY) Absolutely. Like we paid off our solar in three years. I mean, there were some incentives that we got a tax break on it also. So they give us money every year for the site    we over-generate..

(JUDY) Oh, really?

(JENNY) Although it isn’t much.

(GEORGE) One thing that occurred to me is that it seems like in energy, there's no free lunch, you drive an electric car, you've got rare metals, there is an environmental consequence to mining them. What were the environmental consequences of artificial photosynthesis?

(JENNY) I Think that you know, the PV’s, right, that we use to collect energy, right, there is a cost because those also sometimes they have an environmental costs for regeneration and pollution, depending on what you use. Some of the metals that are still being used to do, some of that are rare metals as well. I mean, I think they're trying to get better at recycling is effectively what it is to recycle these and basically processing with lower energy. I don't think there's a free lunch in the sense that everything that we produce and make is going to have an environmental footprint.

(JUDY) Yes…

(SECOND AUDIENCE MEMBER) Hi, I'm curious about your thoughts about instead of batteries using a hydrogen collection system, and then running your house off the hydrogen at night. And when it's cloudy. I know some people that are doing that, and they're also getting their electrolyzers to not use rare metals.

(JUDY)How does that work? 

(JENNY) So there are alkaline electrolyzers that use nickel and iron. They're also caustic and more expensive and have a larger footprint.  Like I said, there's a lot of creative solutions to this. 

I like the Hoover Dam one because I think it's you know, pushing water uphill there. 

(SOUND OF HOOVER DAM ELECTRIC TURBINES)

(GEORGE) Side trip to Hoover Dam, with its humming generators. The L.A. Department of Water and Power has proposed a three billion dollar project that would take surplus solar and wind power and pump downstream Colorado River water uphill to Lake Mead, behind the dam. There, it could generate hydropower any time it’s needed, in effect, turning the dam into a giant battery.

(JENNY) I think there are a dozen solutions that you know, just thinking about the physics that we know, and engineering that we know that we can use right now.

(THIRD AUDIENCE MEMBER) Hi. I'm curious about the technology gap. Because like when I talk to people about the problems we're facing, one of the biggest complaints is that what we have like solar panels like to mine the metals to manufacture them, to ship them across the world, all costs so much so like, How far away are we from technology that you're striving for? That can be made of materials that are easy enough to get made and simple enough processes that we're not just digging the hole deeper as we try to get out of it? Like where is our current technology level at how long to that point? and where we can…

(JUDY) Great question. 

(JENNY) So, solar is pretty affordable now and the production is increasing. I think that's doubling every year or so. So it's going quite a bit. And I think when people first started talking about artificial photosynthesis, 20 years ago, everyone was like, we're just going to convert all fossil systems into the solar fuels. And then people will realize that it's hard, it's too hard, too expensive to do it. And so you know, it's gonna have to be a mix. It's a portfolio, right? So, you know, for airplanes, we need to have some kind of liquid fuel. And there's no way to get around that, at least right now from everything that we know. But they're, you know, for stationary storage, right, we can do all these other solutions, batteries, pump, hydro, molten salts, thermo compressed gas, like, you know, there's even ways that you can compress gas, if you have a basement or you know, and then just run a flywheel or you know, sorry, you can run it the other way at night. Or you can run a flywheel there's a lot of ways of storing energy. And I think in the end, it's gonna depend on the application, there's gonna have to build a portfolio of them. There's no one solution. I think that will fit all the needs.

(GEORGE ) As Dr. Yang says, young people are taking an interest in solutions. Judy noticed a teenager in our audience, Gabe Waldor, who’s been coming to these science talks since he was a little boy.

(JUDY) May I ask if you are the young lad who used to come here when you were this big? Oh, my gosh! I'm so glad you're still here coming. That's great. Are you studying science? 

(GABE) I'm going to school in Vermont, but I'm hopefully going to go to a science college. We'll see. 

(JUDY) Great, great. Well, I'm so glad to see you here.

(GEORGE) And a shout-out from Telluride Science Executive Director Mark Kozak.

(MARK) Gabe gave us his Bar Mitzvah money for the Telluride Science Innovation  center…

(GEORGE) Oh wow! (applause)

(JUDY) Got to put that in the podcast. 

(GEORGE) You cited some numbers about our demand for electricity…what was it…twenty uh…

(JENNY) 25 terawatts..

(GEORGE) and doubling in the next…

(JENNY) Next at least 50. That's a low end of the estimate by 2050.

(GEORGE) We understand that artificial intelligence is is causing a huge demand on electricity, yes, computers have power sucking the grid dry. 

(JENNY) When I first gave a talk like this seven or eight years ago, it was 2050. That was the number now they're like saying, oh, probably 75 actually is more accurate. And I think it's because a lot of these changes that, you know, powering data centers, and, you know, the all the other things that are associated with that they think the energy demand will go up quite a bit. 

(JUDY) Conversely…Couldn’t A.I. get us to a solution faster?

(JENNY) (laughter) Yes, yes. I am not an expert. There's experts in our workshop that do exactly that. So I'm hoping to talk to them this week and learn more about that, 

(GEORGE) That cross-pollination you get here at Telluride Science?

(JENNY) Yes, yes, absolutely.

(JUDY) Tell us a little bit about that. Because Mark will love this question. What do you get? I mean, what what are the things that you go home buzzing about? Because you were here, that wouldn't have happened if you hadn't been here?

So I think the biggest thing is that the work that we do, we do not have the right expertise to do everything, right. Like Like I said, we're we make molecules and we study them. We studied how they run these reactions. If we want to learn about how enzymes do this, I have talked to people who do that for a living, right, because I'm not an expert. So I asked them, What have you learned recently about how this works? And you know what it does impact? I talked to people who studied molecules, and you've actually learned theater. And they told me like, well, this is what it looks like. It's a lower energy pathway. Why don't you try it this way? So I think all that needs to happen, because I cannot sit in my lab and do this by myself. We need all that expertise.

(GEORGE) But given the severity of the problem, it’s gotta be all hands on deck, right?

(JENNY) Yeah. So I think a lot of the work in the last couple years have mobilized and actually the foundation's have been really, I think, instrumental about trying to get people together in the same room. So I've been a couple of meetings, I've been sponsored by various foundations, and last year that try to get the climate scientists in the geologic sequestration and the capture in the ocean Capri air capture points, just capture people the same place, which I think is really valuable.

(JUDY) When you first had the topic, you know, we need to be more like plants. It made me think Barbara Walters actually she was misquoted asking Katharine Hepburn, what kind of a tree would you be? And she said, she said an oak, because if she were an elm, she'd have Dutch elm disease, but that is really not relevant.

(GEORGE) Judy, I, I've got a question for you. If you've got a really sad plant, what do the other plants around it do?

(JUDY) What, George?

(GEORGE) They photosympathize.

(LAUGHTER)

(GEORGE) Should I leaf that one alone?

(JUDY NARR) We ended our discussion on a more serious note, about all the raw material that will be needed to get us to cleaner energy.  For instance, fuel cell cars that run on hydrogen but use rare metals inside those cells.

(JENNY) I think, one thing that hasn't happened in this area until recently, and one thing that I think the funding sources have emphasized is the lifecycle analysis of like, we're not just gonna think about like doing the research on this and figuring out what the solution but what is the lifecycle of all the elements I've got in here? What happened to it after you know, it's not usable anymore? Is it going to contaminate the environment? Can you recycle these things? And I think that's something that it's a very important component to go along with the research.

(JUDY) Mark, would you like a question?

(MARK) On the lifecycle comment, which is a very foundational thing in our understanding of environmental impact. The person that created that was Stephen Berry, our founder. Oh, yeah,

(JENNY) I didn't know that. That's cool. Yeah.

(JUDY) Wow. That is bringing it full circle. 

(GEORGE) Indeed. Well, that's about all the time we have for this evening. So let's give a big hand to our speaker tonight. Professor Jenny Yang.

(APPLAUSE) 

(JUDY) And a big thank you to our sponsors the Telluride Mountain Village Homeowners Association and Alpine Bank and thanks of course, to Telluride Science.

(APPLAUSE)

(THEME) 

(GEORGE) And to all the scientific researchers out there working on solutions to climate change, thank YOU for your service.  Our audio engineer for this Town Talk was Tuck Gilette.  Mark Kozak is Executive Director of Telluride Science and Cindy Fusting is Managing Director.

(JUDY) JUDY: Annie Carlson runs donor relations and Sara Friedberg is lodging and operations manager. For more information, to hear all our podcasts, and if you want to donate to the cause, go to telluride science-dot-o.r.g.  I’m Judy Muller.

JUDY: And I’m George Lewis, inviting you to join us next time on Science Straight Up. (THEME MUSIC UP AND THEN FADE OUT)