Monday, July 10, 2017, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT

Craig Hill,  Goodrich C. White Professor, Department of Chemistry

“Artificial Photosynthesis:  Tackling both Global Energy Needs and Climate Change”

“Globally, our energy requirements are expected to double in the next 30 to 40 years, maybe less.  This and the remarkable international consensus (174 signatory countries to the 2016 Paris convention) that fossil fuel use is already changing the global climate in deeply worrisome ways constitute a research challenge as great as any.” So says Emory’s Goodrich C. White Professor of Chemistry, Craig Hill, who has spent years now consulting and collaborating with experts in many disciplines working on ways to solve these problems.  As most acknowledge, fossil fuels, wind power, biofuels, geothermal power, and nuclear energy are all means to that end.  But an undeniable fact remains: the only energy source that can come close to sustainably powering our long-term needs is sunlight. We have made real advances in tapping that resource. The solar power industry, which converts sunlight into electricity, is booming and continues to grow, but it has (and will continue to have) severe limitations.  We’re at the point now where we have solar powered buildings and electric cars, but we are never going to run airplanes, ships and most other forms of transportation on electricity.  The solution to both these dual crises of energy availability and climate protection, as Craig will explain, is learning to do what plants do, only better—that is, learning to make fuel from sunlight—by artificial photosynthesis, a process in which we’ll use solar energy to split water and/or reverse combustion (photosynthesis) to generate carbon-neutral fuels without pollution.  “Making artificial photosynthesis a reality is a tremendous challenge,” Craig says, “but it’s also tremendously exciting.”