my name is Leah tuck I am the director of development at Cornell ainson and I am simply here just to welcome you and give you a quick two second blurb about what Cornell ainson is um the Cornell ainson Center for sustainability is a mission-driven organization within Cornell where we're really trying to drive the knowledge of Cornell's amazing academic enterpr to impact outside of the academy in the real world so you will hear a bunch about that in our presentation um and I'm going to hand it over to Ben furnace who's the executive director of the 2030 project which is Cornell's climate initiative um and then we are going to hear from a wonderful panelist of Faculty if you could all make sure to sign in we have a signin sheet at the front and please feel free to help yourselves to pastry and coffee throughout the free we're pretty casual group so don't be shy about getting up in the middle of the talk thank you and here's Ben good morning everyone good morning everyone I'm going to come up to the podium um and I'll actually have our um our panelists can come up up and sit down um so my name is Ben Fus I'm the executive director of the 2030 project uh a university-wide climate research initiative based out of the Cornell ainson Center for sustainability and we're here this morning to talk about Cornell's work uh to accelerate a technology colloquially known it's a little bit of a mountable as capture utilization and storage uh and so I thought I'd start by talking a little bit about landscape this technology why we sort of see it as an interesting tool in the toolkit to address the threat of of global climate change uh and and talk a little bit about the the work that's happening among among our faculty to accelerate innovation area um so to get started a little bit about the 2030 project um this was a a a university-wide climate research initiative launched two years ago uh to support and accelerate impact oriented climate work across all of Cornell's uh diverse colleges and units were based out of the Cornell ainon Center for sustainability not affiliated with any individual college so it means we can support great work that's happening anywhere across Cornell uh we have four themes that we use to organize our work and think about the ways in which we can be addressing the challenge of global climate change uh one as you all know we have a very active set of folks thinking about food and Farms the way Humanity eats in the future how we can both be preparing our food systems for the changes to come and how we can reduce the greenhouse gas emissions the climate pollution associated with our food systems and how we can think about getting far farmers in on the game of being part of the climate solution we're also thinking about the future of our Energy Systems uh where the energy comes from the electricity that we uh use when we turn on our lights or or drive around in our vehicles um from electricity to heating to Transportation we're thinking about ways of what the next generation of energy will look like and how we can be a part of the solution um we also think about the materials of the future so all of the different physical objects that we use how they're produced and thinking about ways in which new materials can help us to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prepare for the changes to come uh we also work very closely with a whole range of social scientists uh and other types of policy and Labor uh experts uh thinking about the societies of the future the policies business and and movements that will help us address the challenge of global climate change this uh set of folks here and and a lot of the the carbon capture and utilization work uh fits fairly comfortably in in the materials of the future box so we're thinking about new materials and new ways of making things that will help to either capture greenhouse gas emissions uh reduce the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the production of all the things that make up our material lives and how we can reduce the impacts of a uh of a decarbonized world um to start I'll talk a little bit about the magnitude of of the challenge um across the world about uh 2/3 or 3/4 of our greenhouse gas emissions come from the production of various types of energy to make things uh to do things to get around to keep our Interiors comfortable um and uh another major Set uh comes from various types of chemical processes that uh that are involved in the making of certain things particularly steel concrete other types of plastics uh so so the name of the game in in addressing global climate change which threatens all of us in in in various ways but particularly affects the most vulnerable people on the planet um is to do a combination of things uh one is to dramatically reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that Humanity generates and also it it means removing greenhouse gas emissions that have accumulated in the atmosphere that are contributing to Global Climate Change um so this uh this graph sort of uh articulates the pretty classic way of talking about this challenge um we need to dramatically reduce the greenhouse gas emissions associated with a lot of the way um we we we operate as a as a species and then remove historical greenhouse gas emissions that have accumulate in the atmosphere um the the Target that um at least has been articulated by the International Panel on climate change and others is that by the year 2050 we'll we'll ideally be removing 10 gigons of carbon dioxide or its equivalence every year from the atmosphere now that's a a huge amount it's more than most materials we have on the planet and to give you a a sense of the gigaton scale we're talking about um one kiloton so 1,000 tons is about the mass of 500 Cars 1 million tons one Megaton is about the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza and one gigaton is this big rectangular prism stuck on top of a city and you're like what I have no sense of the scale of that but this little vertical vertical Spike this little sliver right there that is the Washington Monument um so we're talking about a huge amount of of material that will need to be removing from the atmosphere and reducing from the pollution that is generated by all the ways in which we uh we produced our stuff and and use energy and get around um this is a really both challenging time because of the daunting scale of the problem but also an incredibly exciting time in both the United States of America and the world um in the past couple of years there's been a huge amount of new federal legislation designed to make major investments in all sorts of decarbonization Technologies but including carbon capture utilization and storage so capturing greenhouse gas emissions and using that carbon both in products or storing it underground to keep it from heating the planet um the three major laws that people will often talk about in this context are the chips and science Act passed in 2022 the infrastructure investment and jobs Act passed in 2021 the inflation reduction act which also passed in 2022 and this um these bills in in in in combination helps and are helping to accelerate both research and development into all of these things helping companies adopt these new technologies and accelerating them across integrating into brand new uh ways of doing things so you sort of see all the way on on the left here research and development there's resources available for that for companies to adopt these new practices for uh consumers to adopt uh these new technologies and to expand them into into the marketplace so we at Cornell are thinking about how we can position our our experts and our researchers to both you know be at The Cutting Edge with the new technologies that are being developed but also how we can position ourselves to help these social Transformations that are happening across the public and the private sectors and these um these projects are are sprouting up all over the place so so this is a map showing projects where there's both um carbon removal so removing greenhouse gases directly from the atmosphere or different types of carbon capture projects which are capturing carbon uh or other greenhouse gases from ongoing operational industrial PL so you see a huge amount of new um new projects being invested in direct air capture power generation uh Industrials with the making of different of of products um and storing this green this these greenhouse gas uh under the ground in geologic storage um there's a lot more to to say about any one of these projects but just to give you a sense of the scale of transformation that's happening as we speak and how we're thinking about um positioning Cornell's researchers to take advantage of this really exciting and important moment um so now to to hear a little bit about how Cornell is helping to meet this challenge uh I want to talk a little bit about a um a new project that we have recently invested in and I'm going to turn it over to to Professor Phil Milner who will talk a little bit about um a project that we recently funded uh with some resources as part of something we called the climate Solutions fund so we supported a wide range of impact oriented projects uh from uh nearly $1.5 million we we raised from uh the dead and Co so the Grateful Dead came to Cornell University's campus uh to to to relive the glory of their 1977 uh Barton Hall Show I had a religious experience at the concert and it's also been it's also been a lot of fun to think about how to use those resources uh to help accelerate the great work that's happening across Cornell one of the things that we invested in is some new facilities to help this great work happen and I'll turn it over to Phil to talk a little bit about that Phil hello everybody I'm hello everybody can you hear me I'm Professor Phil Milner from chemistry I'm going to tell you a little bit about um really exciting project that we were going to get off the ground here called the capture lab so U it's been mentioned about uh 2/3 of all Global greenhouse gas emissions come from the combustion of fossil fuels for things like energy production or or to make electricity and so uh if you look at projections for what we can do about that um like how we can prevent uh uh climate climate change from occurring on a massive scale we have to do carbon capture from these power plants we can't switch over quickly enough to solar and wind and other sustainable fuel sources we have to do Post combustion carbon capture it's called and so what we need to do is design new types of of uh materials or Catalyst that can capture that CO2 that can convert it into useful chemicals but uh there's a lot of of uh contaminants in this these emissions from power plants and so sometimes it can be really difficult to test if your material can work well with those actual gas it's very hard to get your hands on it you could imagine trying to negotiate with oil or gas companies to try to get samples of their flu gas so we have a really unique resource here at Cornell Cornell is powered by a a natural gas fire power plant and they have given us samples of their flu gas in the past so we've tested it with new materials we've developed in our lab and that gave us this great idea why don't we make this a sort of permanent testing station we could put a trailer right next to the power plant and anybody across the world could come and bring their zorbit or their uh materials or catalysts and test them on actual flu gas with no strings attached really and so that led us to to propose this to the climate solution fund and and we have gotten this uh supported now and so we're going to try to put this together and make this this is really a unique resource no other university uh in the US has something like this that we can allow people to actually test out um their new materials with actual emissions from our power plant so we're really excited about the directions that this could enable uh and again this is something that no other university really has I think not even in the US but maybe in the world nobody has this so I think it really fits perfectly into Cornell's view of trying to make the university a living laboratory to to actually do experiments with with our our thanks so much Phil uh next I'd love to hear a little bit about um the work of of Professor grishma gadikota um Gish you want to talk a little bit about your work and and how it fits into this big picture thanks um hi everyone H thanks so much for being here this afternoon it's really a pleasure warm thanks to Cornell Atkinson for putting this event together um and I have many reasons to be grateful to Cornell ainson Beyond just this event they've actually helped seed some important projects in the area of CO2 capture and conversion but have really helped us develop some solutions including high impact solutions that you're looking to scale so this afternoon I'm going to take some time to talk about how that came to be and the kind of impact that we having in the world around us today um so I've been at fornell about 5 years now and when I first came in um there was a fund called um the rrf fund and we were able to secure some funds and through that we were able to raise some money from Department of energy to the order of close to5 to10 million at this point in time and what that has really helped us to do is to devel energy efficient CO2 capture and conversion Solutions so what we mean by that is we're actually taking CO2 and converting that into high value products high value products that we can integrate into the materials so that can you all hear me in the yes so great you can all hear me in the back now okay perfect is that better yes oh perfect great U getting closer and closer to what it really needs to be right um yeah so like I was saying earlier um it's really been a pleasure being here at Cornell and being able to develop Technologies at the lab scale having graduate students in posts actually develop these Solutions go through the patenting process and actually work with industry Partners in trying to get these solutions to scale so one of those Solutions has been being able to take CO2 and turn it into inorganic carbonates like calcium and these carbonet in very energy efficient um Pathways and what this allows us to do is to actually make uh sustainable cements we're now able to reduce the carbon footprint of cement anywhere our estimate is that conservatively we can reduce the CO2 footprint of cements by 30 to 40% using some of our Technologies which is quite significant so we now working with several industry Partners here in the US in helping decarbonize the cement indust indry another example is also yes yes another example um is how we helping decarbonize the iron steel industry so we recently received grants from arpa to a reduce the CO2 emissions from Iron and Steel making but also capture those hard to uh Abate CO2 emissions so one example is how we using ammonia as a reducing agent as opposed to Coke or other carbon based resources sources for producing that reduced ion oxide but then for some of these hard to obate CO2 emissions we have Technologies for Co for for capturing the CO2 and converting it into carbonates so now we can take these carbonates and then Supply them into the cement industry so it's taken us quite a bit of R&D in the lab quite a few graduate students who whose species have basically contributed to this technology development uh if there was somebody from cornal technology licensing here I would happily acknowledge them but they've been really instrumental in helping us licenses technology so there's a startup that came about from this effort is called carbon to Stone they've raised close to $2 million in non-diluted funds from doe just to get this technology uh across from the valley of death and into translation so we've really been incredibly grateful to Cornell as well as our industry Partners in in helping us uh manage CO2 emissions from very very hard to evate sectors our our conservative estimate is that electrification particularly using renewable energy resources will really help cut down CO2 emissions but then there's going to be the CO2 emissions from H to aate sectors so our Technologies are intended to help manage those emissions as well um and so if you have any questions or if you have if you have any follow on comments if you'd like to learn more about our Technologies just feel free to drop me a note and happy to share more details to that effect thank you [Applause] everyone there all right uh thank you everybody for coming out here you already heard a little spel from me already but um uh I'm uh in the Department of Chemistry here and so our our goal is to figure out better chemical Pathways by which we can remove carbon dioxide from these um hard to evate sectors uh like cre referred to and also directly from Air uh what I usually say is that for a lot of these com um post combustion carbon capture and direct air capture we rely on basically a century old technology to do this using molecules that are called amines that can really selectively pull CO2 carbon dioxide out of these streams but they're very prone to degradation especially by oxygen which is of course one of the major components of and so we're trying to use essentially air sensitive materials to pull CO2 out of the air um and so you know that really compromises the long-term stability these materials and things like that so our kind of running tenant in our group has been how do we come up with fundamentally new Chemistry by which we can selectively remove carbon dioxide from these kinds of streams uh one of the big areas we have researched in uh is to switch from these amines which are very uh which are based on nitrogen to oxygen based nucleophile it's actually very similar to the work that grishma does uh with uh H what we call hydroxides and embedding these into porous sponges we've been able to embed them into different kinds of materials including even uh charcoal essentially and and been able to make materials that can pull CO2 out of the air and are much more oxidatively stable but um and also we've made some other kind of molecules that operate in a similar way but something we've really been interested in as well is the way you traditionally do carbon capture is you flow the stream over some sort of absorbent or what we call a material that that can pull the gas out at low temperature and then you have to heat it up to very high temperatures sometimes over 900° C to release the CO2 and that's most of the energy cost of carbon capture that's why we can't really do it on massive scale right now and so we've been trying to think about how do we replace that high temperature heating step with other uh uh ways of of putting the energy in so something we're really excited about that we've been doing is actually using solar light to drive directly a carbon capture and release process where we can actually essentially run it without having to do any energy input it's just from the Sun uh can actually pull CO2 and for that we did use samples of the flu gas from cornal power plant so it did work with that so I think there's a lot of room to think about you know I think we needed to be doing carbon capture about 30 years ago we we really need to get started now but we also have to think about you know the the Technologies we have now have significant limitations so what can we do fundamentally to improve those Technologies for the Next Generation the next to do this really sustainably for the the next you know few centuries that's what we really think about um yeah that that pretty much covers what we have done uh in this the space of carbon dioxide capture and again um if anybody has questions or would like to learn more feel free to email me or um come me after this is over thanks thank [Applause] you 30 minut yeah okay cool hi I'm T ham I'm in chemical engineering um I usually like to try to start out with the why right so one question is why Cornell um sorry why Cornell and one of the uh um reasons for that you you can see on the slide on on the right it's the people right the the uh exceptionally talented and and driven uh students and and faculty and colleagues that you get to work with the sort of resources um in terms of um characterization uh and the capture app and um support from the Atkinson Center and things like that that make um I think a pretty compelling place for why this is the place to to do um this type of research so what what shown in uh the slide on the B as an example is something that started in the basement of Olen Hall which is where um my lab is located at sort of a tiny prototype um photoother memic reactor and then we went through some um technology transfer and commercialization uh competitions and and it's now been transferred as a a startup company dimensional energy that is engaged in converting CO2 into sustainable Aviation fuels I can't talk much about um the details of it in the time now I happy to talk more about it um uh later if if you're interested the other important one is from a personal perspective um to put some of the numbers that that Ben talked about earlier in in perspective when my grandpa was young so a little over 100 years ago CO2 levels were around 300 parts per million when I was young not quite a 100 years ago but let's say sometime around the 80s um CO2 levels were at 340 PPM today they're at 425 PPM and that's in hisan of two generations so I think there's there's a lot of reason to be worried about what will this look like in two generations from now right you can think about people in in your family who would be impacted by that and to me personally that's a that's a really compelling driver if I sit down someday and have my grandkids ask me what did you do or what didn't you do um to have a compelling answer for that um but so that's uh that's I think a pretty strong personal motiv ation for this but the other thing that's that's absolutely critical in this is to put some of the numbers that Ben mentioned in in context right it's a it's a huge challenge to to remove all of this CO2 and I think one of the one of the things that that we have to be very clear ey about is no matter how cool your technology might be or no matter how enthusiastic you might be but I'm really committed to doing this unless it generates value it's not going to happen not at this scale right so that introduces is the question of who benefits who benefits from high CO2 levels all you have to do for that is look outside everything that you see outside that is green benefits from high CO2 levels right so in a greenhouse you artificially have higher C2 levels because you have faster growth under those conditions um so I'm not just to be clear I'm not advocating that we we plant trees everywhere that's you know certainly component of it but um for us rather in in a sense of that as an as an inspiration for technology development and for for how to approach this kind of science right so from a both from a system level perspective if you think about how those things those green things outside are designed um in their sort of modular design characteristics uh and adaptable to a wide range of different environments I think that has a lot of Merit obviously successful technology in that sense but also from a from a molecular perspective if you think about how nature does this of converting SE CO2 into value the way nature approaches catalysis is very different than the way we as humans approach catalysis but if you think about the catalytic converter that's on your car if it's if it's an I not not an EB um it's essentially here's a piece of metal and some gas flows over it but the metal does nothing other than just being there if you contrast that to how nature does analysis is very different things are sort of squishy things move around so there's a dynamic component um The Catalyst itself moves around a bit and the Catalyst has much more complex structure than just you know a lot of platinum or or sort of fancing metals in your in your catalytic converter so we're trying to adopt those principles and do um these sort of chemical conversions of CO2 into something valuable but using something that we arguably as a as a species are better at than nature in terms of manipulating and that is electricity or electrons in general right so trying to do things that nature hasn't yet had an opportunity to optimize so um this is an example of doing it um photochemically essentially using light directly as as an input which is great um the challenge is it doesn't work so well at night unless you run it by an LED and but in that case you have electricity as as an input anyway um so we're trying to do essentially electrocatalysis um nature inspired electrocatalysis in these types of systems where you have hierarchial structures um that look very similar to the sort of main elements that you have in a natural Leaf but in a natural Leaf from a chemical engineering perspective you would look at and say ah you have to get gas transport in the CO2 you have to get light in you have to get liquid to flow around and all of this has to work defect tolerant um at at many different length scales right so those sort of design principles is what we're trying to do but um with an an electrolyzer technology that is in in many ways similar to what you would have in in a hydrogen fuel cell right where you where you essentially arrange your components at at different length scales and then activate them um also with with different um time profiles similar to what um nature would do in a in a in a leaf outside but so that's what's happening in the in the lab and then as as Phil mentioned a critical translational aspect of it is is to say does this actually work does this work at scale it's one thing to write a paper on it and say Here's a great electrochemical reactor and it works under these conditions and it's better than whatever our competitors might be doing out there and you advance the field a little bit but but to translate it from the lab to the quote unquote real world a critical aspect is to demonstrate does it actually work if you feed it not CO2 from an ultra high Purity cylinder but CO2 from a power plant for example right so the ability to to walk over literally walk over and set up your electrolyzer or whatever your technology is there and and run it with flu gas is a is a critical unmet need and as as Phil said there is no other place in the world that has that especially at this field right if you you can you can go to plac there's a setup for example in Canada and other places but that's at much much larger scales so there's a a scale Gap from having interesting technology that's developed in the lab to then being able to demonstrate that yes it works with clue best yes it works under these conditions that's that's absolutely critical to to translate that and to also attract uh support from from doe and and RP and and um private sector and other investors to to really move this forward and to really have impact um and and and to do that now so I think it's it's a wonderful platform we don't have it set up yet but uh hopefully at the uh next year's reunion we can include that as a as a tour walk over to the to the power plant and you can see the capture at there so um lots of details in there I'm happy to talk more about if anyone's interested but I'll I'll stop here [Applause] we actually can you hear me so we do have some time set aside for any questions or thoughts that this uh this panel brings up and and would love to to open this up to the to the room yeah sure and and please introduce yourself in class year and what you're all about I work in the co industry my entire and I was wondering if you wanted to bring back the co fiber power plant you're I guess I can address that which is probably to say no but um so in the US uh CO2 emissions from burning natural gas have already surpassed that from burning coal because the US is in is part of a huge switch over from coal to natural gas um so I believe this is projected worldwide that natural gas will overtake coal some point in the 2030s uh it is wild that right now the biggest source of CO2 emissions in the world still is burning coal even though we think of it maybe you know we don't really use it as much in us so that's why I think it would yeah coal is a great one that if we could do it that's what a lot of people have focused on and I think what where we should we should absolutely start there but natural gas is kind of the one that we're going to probably have for a lot longer I feel like um and it's actually a more difficult separation as well the Natural Gas combustion produces less carbon dioxide which already makes it better for you know climate change risk but the reason why is that there's less there's a lower paral pressure CO2 in the spe which is good for that reason but it actually makes it more difficult to pull it out so that's where we really need to start pushing Technologies to that more challenging it's actually closer I would say when you start to get into the air challenge too that's order mag harder but uh very dilute carbon dioxide from natural gas emissions and from Air so so that's kind of been our motivation while we focused on things like natural gas and then cement and steel are not going away in the US coal is sort of um you know tapering off a bit but one thing to think about in the world is I think something like 90% of energy in China is from burning Cole so uh we're still going to need to do it because they don't have natural gas resources really at all so I think we're going that's why we get into this thing like I think Ben said we need many solutions there's not one side it'ss all in the US you can do this but in China they can't do that and in Europe they can't do that or Africa or whatever right so we need a lot of solutions that can be deployed all over uh to to tackle this huge challenge sorry really long answer question is what is the current cost per ton of carbon removal uh from the a you might answer to this better than than me so the doe has a target for direct capture of CO2 and they are very supportive with Advanced Technologies that cost $100 or less so they consider that to be the C off point $100 so if we have a technology that can CO2 and cost $100 or less they consider that to be viable now in terms of where certain companies are in the technology development cycle most companies are in the range of about $300 to $400 per ton of CO2 removed right so they need to bring their cost down at least three to four times compared to what their costs are right now so there's an enormous amount of Technology development that needs to go in to make that happen to follow up on your on China um what do you what's the uh car generation of sa India which is now bigger than China much younger is their technology significantly I believe India is also very dominant by coal as well um it's just uh we are very lucky I mean the whole Shale gas Revolution that happened in the US to have realized that we actually had a ton of you know uh of fossil fuel that's a little bit less bad than Co I want to be careful to say that it's good but it is better than than coal so I think that both India and China they arecas dominated by coal and it's much more difficult for them to do the switch over that the US is kind of doing right now from cool to Natural Gas uh because they don't have the same resources so I think uh you know I have been part of collaborative projects in the past to think about carbon capture from power plants with um uh University in China and they're pretty set on they're very focused on coal because that I think the same is true to you as well yeah I can add sense to that so here in the US there is a lot of interest of course in sh gas for all these reasons but then there's also an interest in what one can do with coal other than using it as an energy resource right so now the there's a lot of money coming from Poe and reimagining turning coal into other solid products such as or graphity carbon so if we can do that we can actually use the graphity carbon as an input into B right and not rely on M gra so there is this whole new set of technologies that are being promoted from within doe to turn coal into other solid products and in fact my group just we just rather pacing carbonous resources including biomass and coal inter graph carbons that use that as an input and B materials and if you look at it from a social perspective it makes sense right so there's a lot of communities that work in the coal industry have a legacy of working in the coal industry and now if they abandon that industry what else are they going to do how do they reimagine societies so they can make a living so now be imaginate the way we can turn coal into other products that don't generate gases but it's still needed for the energy transition is something that is catching on in a big way particularly here in the US but one can make that translational argument in places like India to right not only is India rich in Coal but it's also one of the largest of and which is a hard to so how can we now get away from Co from burning coal most speciic but instead try and harest coal other High noticed you talk a lot about building value added products from carbon capure is that usually the approach that you're taking otherwise who pays for it talking about the how do we get it to be scalable your ideas of value added products are brilliant taking something awful and turning it into something positive I think that's just I mean fundamentally so there's there's a sort of thing that could happen at a University campus where there's a great fundamental science and and some engineering but ultimately for it to have any traction impact outside of it it has to work economically but it has to generate value otherwise you know the sort of things that you that you can run through optimism and incentives are limited and it's not to to address challenges at that scale so it it has to generate value and it has to close the department cycle the same way that that nature essentially doesn't right they look at they look at CO2 as a valuable input and you know for them the value generated is internally I think we can we can use those s design principles both from a from a system level perspective as well as small um a basic El of the understanding which is that the reason we Fu and low energy State we talking about but it's already low energy State how do you turn into something solid without adding of energy you might to do that if you're like PL like you're try to or a power PL a caride and you don't have where's the energy that's a great question um and that's why we do what we do right problem to solve um so you're absolutely right CO2 the carbon form in CO2 is in its most oxidized state it has no electrons to give right so what do you do with that material so there's a couple of ways we can turn it into an even lower thermodynamic State and that lower damic stage is that of a calcium carbonate and that's why nature calcium carbonate carent so that's why if you leave a lme solution out on a day like this it's slowly going to start turning into C it's aerody we just try to make of but what are we going to do you get it where you get I I can give another example in terms so you're right as far as if you think about it in terms of fuel has a high energy content and CO2 has a low energy content and find material lower content but as far as um how do you get the CO2 from here back up there in terms of energy content you can do that with Renewables and in fact you can think about it CO2 as as a beat stop for um as as a medium for energy storage which is exactly what those Bean things are doing right they they use the CO2 use uh rals as as an and then undergo chemical transformation and then store that energy exactly so in their case it's it's some sort not to be disrespectful but um in in in the plant's case it's essentially it's it's a chemical conversion into something that that for that cycle works but for us we can do the same thing you can you can store in fact you can use um CO2 as as a medium if you have for example Renewables that would otherwise been stranded use those Renewables to transform CO2 into a liquid product and then soid one of the examples would be and this is especially development for for New York State agricultural facilities biog gas it's about 50/50 CO2 in methane methane incidentally is about 50 times worse than CO2 in terms of greenhouse gas emissions so one thing is take this manure and just you know get green gas emissions from that or you can take the biogas mean and CO2 electrochemically convert that generate value for the Farms into methanol as just as an example as as a liquid product um and then you can you basically have renewable energy that would otherwise be lost stored energy to 100% 150% to get access en used Department um not doable yeah no I'm not I'm not going I'm not going um that far I'm I'm thinking more in in the sense of even for currently installed Renewables if if um and there's that situation is already happening here as as well as in in Europe where have excess generating capacity like if if Supply is exceeds demand it gets lost unless you have energy sorage and you could say yeah we're just going to sell a whole bunch of fing L batteries it's just not POS one solution going on right now I work in solar and we use something called virtual power plants in order where we have um residential sto solar all around the country that's linked together via software and in doing that we're able to take that excess energy uh from the home send it back to the grid um cities in California have actually downgraded they're Cal fired or other power plants as a result of that by linking Renewables like you said I'm mores can I he your elevator speeech to a Critic of carbon capture and storage in terms of it being a technology viewed by some as reflecting delaying um stronger action on on on yeah yeah iess I want that um so I think it's uh there's two sides to it so that just so everybody knows what we're talking about um there are many who say we should not to carbon capture and sequestration from fossil fuel fire power plants because it's it's the distraction from the energy transition and uh uh that we should just go all in on uh for example for a capture and rals which I understand I think that when you look at in the depth of the projections people have made like ipcc and other experts we if you want to reach the goals of the par support which we are in already pretty close to failing honestly um probably by 2030 we will have gone past 1.5c which is the we're supposed to do that by 2100 so 70 years early um you have to do we cannot switch energy sources over quickly enough so you can let those power plants just keep burning and it will make it much worse than if we do uh post combustion capture and fade some of that over the next 7 years as we transition away from all fossil FS the second thing I will say it's come up a few times here and uh is um there are still sectors that produce carbon you will never get rid of or it's very difficult to imagine how you would steel production I think it's it's like 10 or 20% of CO2 emissions uh cement these are things that produce a lot of carbon dioxide and they are not going the way by 2100 right I don't know you know what we're going to make buildings out of not cement and concrete right yeah we've been you know so I think that um that's the the actual physical process of doing the capture and all these things we're talking about what to do with the CO2 it works theun fundamental concept is the same for those sectors as it is for power point so there's a lot of synergy there too um so that's kind of what then my motivation is just really holding to the um I wish we could switch completely to removal tomorrow but it's not going to happen and it's definitely not going to happen in a lot of the world the US may be on a faster track to do it but in some places of the world they're nowhere near close to the high renewable percentage we have so that's what I think we should have been doing post combusion capture all along but now we have to pay kind of for the sins of the past right so we have to be doing it and uh there are now rules in place the us is going to start trying to do it on new natural gas power plants for example um so I think that that's kind of the the motivator there um I I guess my feeling is andbe it's been a theme of today we we need about there's not one solution to climate change there's going to be 100 Solutions we need to be multifaceted we need to stop emitting from all the industrial sectors which fuel comus skels big ones transportation is another big one we need to switch you know we need better energy storage that's kind of what uh was referring to right like we need better energy storage grid storage better Renewables all of this is going to be needed together to to move work so I guess that's my philosophy and one thing I'd add just as a sort of University Wide Point of View you know we support and cultivate a really wide range of Faculty with lots of different technological interests and with really different points of view on this question and something I love working about at Cornell is there's all these really thoughtful interesting people many of whom really disagree with each other about the best ways of going about this but we are sort of in the business of cultivating this academic atmosphere of all these smart people trying to Grapple with this really big and tough challenge um I just want to double check our our time how are we doing good 10 minutes 10 more minutes thank kind on a similar note I was kind of curious about Beyond Cornell and looking and like the network of universities how does coordinating solving each of these pieces of the problem work like is there some higher body that like goes to all the universities like hey these universities have these people working on this these will have this one working on this like try to coate so that not everyone's just living Sil I think you have hit on one the green pieces of Academia we we try of course probably all of us have collaborators universities but that's on individual basis um Academia is not the best at all coordinating together to try to solve a challenge um it's something that would be great to kindy to address but I would say um you know only as directed Maybe by you know funding availabilities and things and kind of push everybody in certain direction but by it's difficult to get two universities to team up well there isn't a formal structure collaboration but every once in a while there are Center like Ms and we've WR a couple bill in the capture La is other example that brought of us together within an institution but then there are funding opportunities that are you know that actually require us to bring in collaborators from other institutions and one of the examples of that context is that most of the Department of energy and grants that we need to put in actually require us to partner with the min institution in the interest of actually developing and cultivating the Next Generation Workforce so these forced collaborations if you would are really intended to help us diversify the workforce if you will uh in the area of not just dep management but also in the v area of energy and resource conversion and recovery and just one thing to add to that in in principle there's there's an arching entity so things like the department of energy that would say you know we're going to support this Center focusing on that and this Center focusing on something else in from their perspective they avoid duplication like you don't want to have every University focuses on lithium batteries so there's there's um some overarching uh organization in that sense but the other thing to add to that is there needs to be just um sort of basic scientific uh progress always relies on on reproducing right so that's not exactly duplicating but some of it has to be has to be part of progresses with producibility so what are your thoughts on the advantages and disadvantages of once youve captured the carbon uh storing it somehow versus using it somehow I I I can take a stab of that question um so we live in a carbon economy we are carbon like forms carbon is everywhere um and so there is a huge huge amount for carbon based products antic carbon based products that is graphi for Batteries fuels carbonet You Name It We we need a lot of carbon to keep our life going both from a fuel standpoint but also from a quantity standpoint so that is the utilization segment right and it basically runs on an economic cycle I it somebody pays for it that helps we support a business and keep the economic cycle going and needs a critical in the world and then there is this other aspect that we produce so much more CO2 than what we can actually convert so what do we do with all of that so to that end especially in the southern parts of the United States like in places like Texas and lisiana they have these Mass geological formations where people have basically concluded that it's safe to actually store CO2 and lock that CO2 away so we need both we need to keep the carbon economy running and we also need to store that CO2 the geologic formation the challenge with geological storage is that it's cheap to do just stick the C2 on ground but it's challenging to monitor it for the course of 100 200 years we need to put sensors down we need to collect the the data on the pressure put that into a model and then assess if this geologic Reservoir is actually compant to standards [Music] that yes we've been woring many things we put a lot of dirty water in the subface environment right just for pressure management the only difference is that we put pressure on co2 and the bigger concern is that enabling this solution will actually as was mentioned earlier uh distract us from devoloping other climate so there tends to be push back but for the most part there is abundance of literature doe has now funded close to billion plus dollars in actually establishing the feasibility of geologic car storage uh there is data to support the environments where this works and also environments where this doesn't work so there's a lot can we do a back check or a a level set on the politicians are of course throwing all these terms around uh for decarbonization and somehow holding it up as something if we just believe in it it's going to take care of itself and you're laying out very clearly the scale issue you got to make sure the technology works and then build it up to scale what are realistic expectations of what we can do and we have this Arc of trying to reverse what Curr should we believe canang or make sure yeah I mean I think um you want oh five minutes five minutes five minutes yeah um I mean I I spent eight years in the New York City mayor's office colan n is the director of the office of climate and sustainability um and so I think a lot about the relationship between the goals politicians set the feasibility of achieving those goals and the roles of different institutions across the United States to help tackle this incredibly challenging problem um one reason I've got very excited about coming to a place like Cornell is because before decisions even reach politicians or businesses people need to fundamentally understand how hard it will be to make these transitions so politician can pass a law to make everybody do something but they're not going to be reelected if it's not an easy or or attractive thing to do and that and that rule is going to get reversed as soon as they come in so the notion of all of America's scientific resources and technological developers coming together to identify lower cost ways of making the transition and also accelerate the transitions that you know are are currently cost effective and I think there are a lot of them out there um I I personally am I'm like cautiously optimistic I I I like reading history and I know that Humanity has always sort of faced major challenges in every generation and this is kind of our big challenge it's not I I still probably rather live now than in most other times in human existence um I wouldn't know how to text my friends in most other times in human existence um but uh but that's that's sort of the role of of we in the university and policy makers to try to go as far and as fast as we as we can to try to attack list so um that's not a really precise answer to your question but that's sort of my my general caution optimism about this whole really challenging Endeavor yeah just one quick comment civil engineering you touched a little bit on it right at the end one of the things that's really going to be required this is measurement reporting and verification syst we need a way an agreed way of understanding how much burden we take now with the energy cost Associated doing it is the climate convention is still struggling to come up with article something like that will allow for measur of all these things across the entire time change not just how much pressure there is on the ground across everything and that's really really critical to understanding what bu I completely agree with that I mean if we don't have mrb so let's just say I'm I'm in the business of generating carbon removal credits right and somebody is only going to pay me to the extent that the carbon that I've removed is monitored and is verified and how much of put away is Quantified as well as the permanence and there are some solutions that people are talking about these days right like Distributing in soils and some of these are easy to implement but the mrv is challenging with a set of solutions that F theas and I are working on the engineering is challenging but the mrv is easy right because once you captured it we can go and measure it directly these are engineered systems so that is really I would say the distinguishing factor between natural solutions for managing where it's cheaper to implement a solution it's EAS to gr the tree but how do you verify how it's going to be great and what's going to happen to versus with our Solutions where the engineering is a challenge but mrv is super simple so it's um so so these are real challenges and there are companies that are coming up with way of doing mrb uh to support this I would say this growing ecosystem around har one last comment 10 seconds I completely agree with I think I heard every one of you say is we need not just 100 Solutions we need a thousand we we we scale this problem is so big that you can't rely on one thing one thing whatever it is is good but you're going to need hundreds of ways to capture recycle reuse store uh reduce all of those things put together it's going to be really critical and so having uh the AC incenter for sustainability looking at different things is really great yeah a very easy solution or explanation I give to what you just said we can have one solution to this is uh solar is not really going to work very well in itha New York but say out completely Sol right now it's you know is the Sun never shines here or sometimes you know you can you could manage it right but we need you know many solutions right things like geothermal and like that so I to need many many solutions that work all over world that's a great final sentiment so thank you everyone for being here [Applause]