The Journey from Fossil Fuels to Sustainable Energy

TRANSCRIPT

Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering Mohammad Asadi: The overall goal is to replace fossil fuel. We are trying to develop energy efficient and economically feasible energy conversion and storage systems the target application for our technologies is aviation, and trains, and ships, and heavy-duty trucks.

I was working in oil and gas industry for a at least seven years. I was in a point that I thought maybe the things I'm working is not really sustainable and for the world, and I need to move on and find something beneficial for the community and society. I was actually thinking about the way of the carbon dioxide is released by burning fossil fuels and how much that can impact more down the road, and I thought maybe there is a way to get that carbon and add it with the water and make something useful.

The overall picture of my research is working in both materials development for those systems to make it efficient and effective, and also at the same time, we are trying to increase the efficiency in the system level by fabricating new devices and new processes.

I have three labs. One is material development, so we do a lot of material development like synthesizing, characterizing, and then analyzing the materials. And then I do have Battery Lab. It's mainly focused on finding the high energy density batteries, lithium batteries, or finding alternative for lithium.

The new generation of battery is needed because the current battery can deliver the certain amount of energy density. Energy density is the amount of energy can be stored in a certain rate or size. What we are trying to do is we are trying to minimize that size as much as possible so then you can pack them a large amount but in the lower weight.

CO2 Electrocatalysis Lab or CO2 Electroconversion Lab. The overall goal is to electrify chemical manufacturing, so we want to have green chemicals down the road. This is the process that can take the electricity and carbon dioxide and convert it to chemicals and then that can really reduce the carbon footprint for making those chemicals down the road.