Fuel for the 21st century: programme 'CO2 neutral fuels'
"Storing clean energy in CO2-neutral fuels could solve the worldwide demand for sustainable energy storage," said professor Hans Geerlings from Shell Global Solutions on 27 November 2012 at Kasteel Woerden during the NWO/FOM workshop 'CO2 neutral fuels'. Workshop participants fine-tuned NWO's multidisciplinary CO2 neutral fuels research programme. From 2013 onwards this programme will further strengthen Dutch research into solar fuels as part of NWO's programming for the top sector Energy.
Energy storage
The new research programme 'CO2 neutral fuels' brings a diverse group of people together: chemists, solid-state physicists and biophysicists through to plasma physicists, technical scientists and of course representatives from industry. Besides NWO and FOM, Shell and Alliander are contributing to the programme budget. The scientific institutions and companies will jointly work on research into the production of clean fuel from water and CO2. Such solar fuels store the direct and indirect energy from the sun in a form that connects with the existing energy infrastructure.
Worldwide only 20% of energy is used in the form of electricity, said professor Richard van de Sanden during his presentation. Van de Sanden is director of FOM institute DIFFER, the coordinator of the new programme. Sustainable energy sources such as wind turbines and solar cells produce mainly electricity and this production is highly variable. A balance between production and use therefore requires an efficient storage and transport of energy. Due to their high energy density - ten times more than electrical or electrochemical solutions - chemical fuels are the most suitable option.
Multidisciplinary and scalable
Energy storage is very much a cross-disciplinary theme. That was clear from the four different parallel sessions about photocatalysis, smart matrices, non-equilibrium processes, and process and reactor development. The plenary speakers also focused on collaboration: DIFFER director Richard van de Sanden, Shell researcher Hans Geerlings, TNO's Egbert-Jan Sol and Jorg Gigler from the consortium Power2Gas/Gas2Energy (part of TKI Gas) each explained a different aspect of CO2-neutral fuels.
The speakers and participants at this workshop agreed that the ultimate goal of this research is a technology that can be used on a worldwide scale to store clean energy. Scarce materials such as platinum may not form part of the final solution, emphasised Van de Sanden. According to Geerlings, the fuel market is big enough to realise the desired annual turnover of 1 gigaton CO2, but only with widely available materials. 'CO2 neutral fuels' challenges researchers to develop the fundamental knowledge base required for this large-scale use.
Call for proposals
The results from the workshop are being incorporated in the final programme proposal. Based on this NWO will open a call for proposals at the start of 2013. The project proposals submitted will be assessed and the research projects granted funding will start in the third quarter of 2013. The CO2 neutral fuels programme is making 5.5 million euros available for this call for a period of 6 years. Besides the call for proposals, the infrastructure of DIFFER will be strengthened.
Contact
Dr. Jasper Reijnders.
Presentation and further information.