$9 million to fund climate research

To support research in fuel-cell technology, fuel efficiency and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, Stanford’s Global Climate Energy Project, or GCEP, recently awarded research grants totaling $9 million to faculty members at the University and their collaborators at other institutions.

“GCEP is working on the underlying science and engineering that will make possible ways to reduce greenhouse emissions,” said Petroleum Engineering Prof. Franklin Orr, director of GCEP. “With the new projects, we will have 31 research groups funded to do research on a variety of energy topics.”

Founded in 2002, GCEP’s major objectives are to research strategies for cutting emissions of harmful gases, to find ways to create and maintain a high-efficiency energy supply and to assess the barriers that stand between hypothetical technologies and practical applications, according to its Web site.

“Our mission is to conduct fundamental research on technologies that will permit the development of global energy systems with significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions,” said Maxine Lym, the project’s communication manager.

According to Orr, the distribution of new funds is not related to any domestic or international political issues.

The new research efforts will be funded over a span of three years and will apply to seven GCEP projects involving faculty from a range of departments, from chemistry to genetics.

“We have research underway on photovoltaics that will be less expensive to manufacture, on fuel cells that will allow more efficient electricity production, on advanced combustion that will allow more efficient use of fuels, on hydrogen production from biological systems and so on,” Orr said. “Somewhere around 80 graduate students and 15 post-docs are involved in the research.”

The funds will be distributed to researchers on other campuses. Support will go to researchers at the Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands, the Delft University of Technology, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the University of Montana.

One of GCEP’s highest priorities is to apply new technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on a global scale. According to GCEP, developing countries will be responsible for about 80 percent of the growth in greenhouse emissions in the next 15 years.

GCEP has obtained a lot of its funding from private companies. ExxonMobil, General Electric, Schlumberger and Toyota have committed up to $225 million to the project over a period of about ten years. Currently, the GCEP has $26 million invested in 22 projects.

One research project receiving funds is collaborative effort by Chemistry Profs. Chris Chidsey, Robert Waymouth and Dan Stack, who are all analyzing how to best catalyze chemical reactions in fuel cells. According to Chidsey, the results of the study could potentially reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fuel used in mobile applications like cars.

“Reduction, rather than elimination, of carbon-dioxide releases should be the goal for mobile applications,” Chidsey said. “Hydrocarbon fuel cells could greatly contribute to reducing carbon-dioxide emissions.”

However, while the research is extremely promising, people working on the project emphasized that GCEP is a long-term venture and immediate results should not be expected.

“New approaches are almost inevitably risky and long-term, so concrete results in the reduction of greenhouse gases are not to be expected from GCEP in the short time it has been running,” said Chidsey.

According to Orr, immediate results are not as high a priority as implementing a solid academic base for future research.

“Another early concrete benefit will be a flow of talented students who are deeply knowledgeable about the fundamentals of energy conversions,” he said. “That group of highly trained people will be needed to make the energy transformations that are going to take place in this century.”