Reach 2025: The Future of Energy
By Tyler Irving
CIFAR researchers are going beyond traditional sources to find sustainable solutions
The world needs energy. It powers everything we do, from transportation to manufacturing to simply heating and lighting our homes. As the global population grows and living standards continue to increase, demand for energy is expected to rise for the foreseeable future.
At the same time, many of our current sources of energy have big drawbacks. They pollute our air and water and produce the carbon dioxide that is driving climate change. Meeting both our needs and our emissions targets will require a major shift in how energy is produced, stored and used.
Through programs such as Earth 4D: Subsurface Science & Exploration and Accelerated Decarbonization, CIFAR researchers are going beyond existing paradigms – both to find new, more sustainable sources of energy, and to make better use of the ones we already have.
Hunting for hydrogen
Whether it's burned directly for heat or fed into a fuel cell to generate electricity on demand, hydrogen produces zero carbon emissions, making it very attractive as an alternative energy source.
Unfortunately, today, hydrogen is most commonly produced as a byproduct of the fossil fuel industry, with natural deposits of pure hydrogen thought to be rare. But that may be changing.
“We’ve known for a long time that in the deep ocean, water can seep down into cracks in volcanically active areas, where it reacts with rocks to produce hydrogen,” says Barbara Sherwood Lollar, a Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Toronto and Co-Director of the Earth 4D program.
“It emerges at hydrothermal vents, also known as ‘black smokers,’ and there are whole ecosystems that survive on the hydrogen produced there.
“But this same phenomenon happens with continental rocks as well. The rocks are cooler, so the rate [of hydrogen production] is different, but the reactions are the same.”
In 2014, Sherwood Lollar and her colleagues published a paper in Nature in which they estimated that globally, continental rocks, the types of rocks that make up the landmasses on Earth, produce about as much hydrogen as the ocean floor systems do. The question now is whether – and where – it may accumulate in the continental subsurface.
“Systems that are open and close to the surface can get lots of groundwater flushing them out, and they also get seeded with microbes that consume the hydrogen,” says Sherwood Lollar.
“If they are too deep, or hydrogeologically tight, then the water can’t get there in the first place. The sweet spot is somewhere in between, ideally with a cap rock to hold the hydrogen in.”
The discovery of large deposits of natural hydrogen could be transformative for our energy systems. In the short term, it could displace the use of hydrogen derived from fossil fuels, which is used in industries such as chemical production and oil refining. It could also be mixed with natural gas to lower its carbon footprint.
Sherwood Lollar is currently working with the Geological Survey of Canada to raise awareness of natural hydrogen and its many possibilities. If proven viable, natural hydrogen could become a game-changing clean energy source. For Canada, it’s an opportunity to build momentum for its Hydrogen Strategy and lead as a global supplier and producer of low-carbon hydrogen. She's also collaborating with the Royal Society of London to chair an expert report on the topic of global potential for natural hydrogen resources, to be released in the spring of 2025.
But for Earth 4D researchers, hydrogen is just the beginning. They're also looking at new ways of locating critical elements, such as lithium for batteries, as well as helium, which has a range of industrial and medical uses.
Photo: Barbara Sherwood Lollar, Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Toronto and Co-Director of the Earth 4D program
Capturing carbon
While potential new sources of energy are exciting, there is also plenty of room to improve the existing ones.
For example, we know that burning fossil fuels emits carbon dioxide, which drives climate change. But what if we could increase the amount of energy we gain for every tonne of carbon emitted, or even prevent those emissions altogether?
Those strategies, collectively known as carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) are among the key goals of CIFAR’s Accelerated Decarbonization program.
“We know how to capture CO2 from point sources quite well,” says Ah-Hyung “Alissa” Park, the Ronald and Valerie Sugar Dean of the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and a Fellow of the Accelerated Decarbonization program.
“The challenge is that right now, CCUS technologies are still costly, policies mandating them do not exist, and the market for captured carbon is at the beginning stage of creation.”
One possible use of captured carbon is to simply inject it underground, a process that has been employed for decades to squeeze oil out of wells.
But thanks to the latest research, new possibilities are emerging, such as using renewable energy to convert captured CO2 into carbon monoxide, methane, ethanol and other carbon-based chemicals, materials and fuels.
For their part, Park and her team are pursuing a promising synergy between carbon capture and the extraction of elements such as lithium, cobalt and so-called ‘rare earth’ elements – all of which are critical in clean energy technologies.
“Our carbon mineralization technology effectively extracts critical metals while converting the rest of the ore into solid carbonates by fixing captured CO2,” says Park.
“These solid carbonates can be used as sustainable construction materials, paper and plastic fillers, and more.”
Photo: Ah-Hyung “Alissa” Park, the Ronald and Valerie Sugar Dean of the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and a Fellow of the Accelerated Decarbonization program
While governments around the world have attempted to increase the monetary cost of emitting carbon into the atmosphere via taxes or cap-and-trade systems, today it remains the cheapest and easiest option. Significant improvements in CCUS technologies could reverse that dynamic, turning carbon from a waste product into a valuable resource – one that powers a circular carbon economy.
If successful, these advances could transform entire industries, making clean technologies more affordable and accelerating the transition to a global net-zero – and researchers in the Accelerated Decarbonization program, like Park, are working to make that future a reality.
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