Stanford’s GCEP Makes Progress with Energy Research

STANFORD, Calif. — In early March, Stanford University’s Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) awarded $6.6 million to advance research on clean-burning fuels and technologies for capturing carbon dioxide emissions. Seven research teams — six from Stanford and one from Carnegie Mellon University, located in Pittsburgh — will share the funding.

The total number of GCEP-supported research programs is now 104, with funding totaling about $125 million since the project launched in 2002.

Three of the Stanford research teams will use the funding to develop carbon-neutral technologies that produce electricity or clean-burning hydrogen fuel. The projects include:

• Steam-carbon fuel cells, with a goal to design a fuel cell that uses coal and water to generate hydrogen, water and a stream of carbon dioxide gas, which can be captured and sequestered.
• High-efficiency thin-film solar cells, in which researchers plan to create a low-cost silicon or gallium-based solar cell that is more than twice as efficient as conventional ones.
• Advanced water-splitting, with a goal of developing corrosion-resistant electrodes for devices that use sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.

Two other Stanford teams will test new electrochemical catalysts that convert carbon dioxide into liquid fuels and chemicals, which involves:

• Electrohydrogenation, using science for renewable fuels.
• Energy-efficient electrocatlysts for renewable fuels and chemicals.

In addition to the lab-oriented projects, the other two research teams will use the funding to create computer models that evaluate the effectiveness of various technologies for capturing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, such as:

• Carbon-capture systems analysis.
• Advanced power plant carbon technologies.

The GCEP currently has more than 40 research efforts taking place at Stanford and at external institutions. In mid-March, one such project made progress in solar-energy research. GCEP scientists working at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences found a way to improve an solar-energy device to be about 100 times more efficient than its previous design by converting the sun’s light and heat into electricity. The new device is based on the photon-enhanced thermionic emission (PETE) process first established in 2010, and the group reported that they improved the device’s efficiency from a few hundredths of a percent to nearly 2 percent, hoping to achieve at least another 10-fold gain in the future.