The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will lead a $40 million Department of Energy project to research solar energy production.

The grant has been given to the North Carolina-based Center for Hybrid Approaches in Solar Energy to Liquid Fuels, otherwise known as CHASE, to accelerate fundamental research of the production of fuels from sunlight.

Dr. Jillian Dempsey is an inorganic chemist, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at UNC and the deputy director of CHASE – the network of investigators from six universities who earned the $40-million-dollar research grant. With more than 35 investigators partnered in the CHASE effort, UNC-Chapel Hill leads the group.

Their goal is to figure out how to harness solar energy as a clean and renewable energy resource. Dempsey said this means developing an artificial photosynthesis system.

“So to harness solar energy to its full capacity and make it part of our full global energy economy, we need to think about energy storage,” Dempsey said. “When thinking about that, CHASE has turned to the process of photosynthesis – which is what green plants do when they take sunlight, water and carbon dioxide and generate oxygen into carbohydrates or sugars, which are the plants chemical fuel.”

Right now, there are solar panels that take solar energy and convert it to electricity – but Dempsey said the main issue with solar panels is that when the sun sets every night, they are not actively generating electricity.

Dempsey said just as our current energy infrastructure is based on fuels like gasoline, oil and coal – which are stored forms of chemical energy – CHASE would be producing liquid fuels with their artificial photosynthesis systems.

“So what we’re trying to do is to take feedstock like water and carbon dioxide – which are energy-poor molecules – and use the energy from the sun to rearrange the atoms and the chemical bonds in those small molecules to create high-energy density molecules or fuels,” Dempsey said.

Simply put, Dempsey said this an opportunity to store the energy of the sun in a fuel.

However, there are significant scientific barriers to the development of such a system – requiring new discoveries and fundamental breakthroughs.

“The biggest barrier is to couple the light harvesting component of photosynthesis with the chemical fuel production component,” Dempsey said. “Both of those individually will be challenging research targets, but finding a way to integrate the science of light harvesting and solar energy capture with the fuel production chemistry is really our major challenge.”

Despite these fundamental challenges that the science community is currently facing in terms of transferring the natural process of photosynthesis into a man-made system, Dempsey and her team at CHASE hope to overcome these hurdles in the next five years.

After that, she said it’s about transferring these scientific advances into physical technology systems, which will most likely take 15 to 20 years to fully commercialize and implement into our everyday lives.

According to Dempsey, there’s no time to waste.

“I think what I’m most excited about is the opportunity for us to start stepping back our use of fossil fuels now that we’ll be able to provide solar fuels,” Dempsey said. “So we’ll be able to use solar fuels in a way that we currently use fossil fuels without having the environmental impact that fossil fuels have. This will really help us find the solution for our entire planet.”

Lead photo courtesy of UNC-Chapel Hill. 

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