Time: Thursday, April 23, 2020 16:00-17:00
Venue: Zoom Cloud Meeting
Target audience：All teachers and students in school
Since 2015, the question is no longer whether renewable energies will power our future society, but when and how. In this talk, we put our current energy needs into context with the amount of different renewable energies. Although sufficient in principle, a daily and seasonal storage of solar energy is mandatory to bridge demand and production. This need adds significant cost to the relatively cheap solar electricity that is available today due to the falling costs of silicon-based photovoltaics. Although future battery technologies may be suitable for large scale energy storage over day/night cycles, fuels are really the only practical storage option for long term (e.g. seasonal) storage and for long haul transportation. In this talk, we will introduce the field of solar energy conversion to renewable synthetic fuels. Fundamental aspects of the production of renewable hydrogen from solar water splitting will be addressed, as well as their further conversion with biogenic carbon dioxide into carbon-based synthetic fuels. In a second part, we will discuss the practical challenges of an expeditiously wide-spread introduction of renewable fuels and thus significant reduction in CO2 emissions down to net zero by 2050. Key issues for a fast implementation are technical aspects such as compatibility with the existing energy infrastructure, ecological constraints, social factors, and economic considerations. And then, we will arrange a question and answer session.
Speaker Bio
David Tilley was born in the United States in 1980. He attended Cartersville High School, in a small town north of Atlanta, Georgia. In 2002, he received his Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from the University of Georgia, with a minor in Spanish. He then headed west to continue his studies, and in 2007 received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Prof. Matthew Francis. At Berkeley, he pioneered a new transition metal-catalyzed method for site-selective modification of the tyrosine residues of proteins, with the aim of fabricating new biomaterials based on viral capsids. Afterwards, he joined the laboratory of Prof. Erik Sorensen at Princeton University as a postdoctoral researcher (2007-2009) in order to further hone his synthetic skills, pursuing a total synthesis of the polycyclic anti-tubercular natural product hirsutellone B. At this stage, his burgeoning interest in the energy problem became so great that he chose to dive into a completely new field to learn how to generate hydrogen fuel from water. He received training in photoelectrochemistry as an NSF International Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Michael Gr?tzel at the EPFL in Switzerland, working on water oxidation catalysis on hematite photoanodes. Following this postdoctoral fellowship, he served as Group Leader for the water splitting subgroup in the Gr?tzel laboratory from 2011-2014, while also continuing research on copper oxide photocathodes for hydrogen evolution. Since February 2015, David Tilley has been engaged as Assistant Professor of Molecular Approaches to Renewable Energies with tenure track in the Department of Chemistry.
Dr. Andreas Borgschulte received his PhD in physics from TU Braunschweig (D) in 2002. After a Postdoc at the VU Amsterdam (NL) he coordinated the international research project on hydrogen storage FuncHy at the Helmholtzzentrum Geesthacht (D). Since 2006 he is group leader of the group Hydrogen Spectroscopy at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technol-ogy (Empa) with focus on applied spectroscopy for renewable energy storage. He is lecturer at the University Zürich and ETH Zürich teaching NanoChemistry and Chemical Analysis for Energy Tech-nology. He (co)-authored more than 150 papers with an H-index of 43 (google scholar). In addition to his expertise in the science and technology of energy conversion, he is interested in exciting new concepts shaping the mobility of the future.
Interested teachers and students are welcome to scan the QR code below and enter the group. Further notice will be given in the group.
