Tag: NCE

Collaboration with Stanford University and Biofuels Research at the Joint BioEnergy Institute

By C. Chambon, Research Postgraduate, Department of Chemistry

As part of a group of six Imperial students who visited California, I travelled to San Francisco to work on two projects: the New Climate Economy project, and a research collaboration with the Joint BioEnergy Institute.

The New Climate Economy project is a government-commissioned project looking at how economic goals can be achieved in a way that also addresses climate change. The Innovation stream, led by Stanford University and the Grantham Institute at Imperial, is focused on the potential economic and environmental impact of disruptive technologies. Beginning in January, a group of six Imperial students each focused on a different technology for the project, researching and preparing case studies for our weekly teleconferences. The topics researched were as varied as solar PV, nanomaterials, customer segmentation and the smart grid. My focus was on carbon capture and storage or utilisation (CCUS) technologies, and the policies needed to support them.

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The Imperial team at Stanford University

In Palo Alto, we worked together with Stanford students to construct a business model for each of our technology clusters. Our research findings were presented to NRG Energy’s newly formed Station A, a kind of skunkworks for energy resilience within NRG, a wholesale power company. The collaboration was a successful and a productive one, and several of us will continue to work with the New Climate Economy project to publish our research. The work will contribute to the UNFCCC COP negotiations in Paris in 2015.

During the latter half of the trip, I combined visits to Stanford with research for my PhD at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab across the bay. The San Francisco Bay Area is well-renowned as a bioscience and biotech hub, and is home to over 200 bioscience companies, start-ups and research institutes. One of these is the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), a branch of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in the Berkeley hills. JBEI is a U.S. Department of Energy bioenergy research center dedicated to developing second-generation biofuels. These are advanced liquid fuels derived from the solar energy stored in plant biomass. The cellulosic biomass of non-food plants and agricultural waste can be converted to petrol, diesel and jet fuel, whilst the non-cellulosic part is a promising candidate to replace aromatic chemicals.

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The Joint BioEnergy Research Center in Emeryville, California

My project at JBEI looked at the upgrading of lignin, extracted from the non-cellulosic part of woody biomass, into aromatic building-blocks. This experience was a valuable addition to my PhD project, which looks at the valorisation of lignin from pine wood to improve the economics of the biorefinery.  A highlight of my stay was a visit to the scaled-up biorefining facilities at LBNL, where a one-of-a-kind reactor is used to convert biofeedstocks into fuels. It was a very inspiring glance into the future of biorefining and I look forward to working closely with LBNL researchers and others working in the field of bioenergy.

New Climate Economy Collaboration with Stanford University

By Phil Sandwell, Research postgraduate, Department of Physics and Grantham Institute for Climate Change

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This March, six Imperial students travelled to Palo Alto, California, to work with Stanford University students on the innovation stream of the New Climate Economy.

The Global Commission on the Economy and Climate was established to investigate the economic benefits and costs associated with climate change mitigation and adaptation. The flagship project of this is the New Climate Economy, a worldwide collaboration of internationally renowned research institutions. One such stream, focusing on innovation, was spearheaded by Stanford University and the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London.

The aim of this part of the project was to analyse how disruptive technologies, techniques or methods could develop, overtake their incumbent (and generally environmentally damaging) predecessors and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. These ranged from carbon capture and storage to 3D printing, with my focus being concentrated photovoltaics (CPV).

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Beginning in January, we held weekly video conferences with the two Stanford professors facilitating the course. Using their guidance and experience, we established the current limitations of our chosen technologies, how they are likely to advance and the conditions under which their development can be accelerated.

After travelling to Palo Alto, we were divided into groups with the Stanford students based on the themes of our research, for example electric vehicles and car sharing. We then integrated our findings, investigating the synergies and similar themes, and together built models to quantify the potential for greenhouse gas emissions reduction and how it could become achievable.

My research led to the conclusion that CPV can become economically competitive with the most common solar technology, flat-­‐plate crystalline silicon cells, in the near future. Given the correct conditions being met (for example the cost per Watt continuing to decline as currently projected) CPV would compare favourably in regions with high direct normal irradiance, such as the Atacama Desert in Chile, the Australian outback and South Africa. One possible application of CPV would be supplying these countries’ mining industries, displacing their current fossil fuel-­‐intensive electricity generation and providing an environmentally responsible alternative – with even less embedded carbon and energy than silicon cells.

This project was a valuable addition to my PhD project, the focus of which is to investigate how several different photovoltaic technologies can mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Collaborating on this project introduced me to interesting new ways of approaching my work, as well as identifying parallels between my research and that of others in the field of renewable energy technology.