DOE awards $100M to produce fuels from sunlight

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) awarded $100 million over five years to two organizations that produce fuels from sunlight through artificial photosynthesis.

“Sunlight is the world’s most basic energy source, and an ability to generate fuels directly from sunlight has the potential to revolutionize the U.S. energy economy,” DOE Under Secretary for Science Paul Dabbar said. “This effort will keep America at the forefront of artificial photosynthesis research, a field of great challenge but also huge promise.”

One of the organizations is the Liquid Sunlight Alliance (LiSA), led by the California Institute of Technology in close partnership with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It is pursuing an approach called “co-design,” which is an effort to make the many complex steps in converting sunlight to fuels that work more efficiently.

The other is the Center for Hybrid Approaches in Solar Energy to Liquid Fuels (CHASE), led by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It seeks to develop hybrid photoelectrodes for fuel production that combine semiconductors for light absorption with molecular catalysts for conversion and fuel production.

The total planned funding is $100 million over five years, with $20 million starting in Fiscal Year 2020.

This is part of the DOE established the Fuels from Sunlight Energy Innovation Hub in 2010. LiSA and CHASE will look to build on the efforts of the DOEʻs Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP).