Towards Solar Fuels and Fertilisers: Managing Proton and Electron Currency through Molecular Design
Life runs on electrons and protons. Together, or as hydrogen-atom equivalents, they allow plants to store solar energy, underpin the fuels that power society, and help make the fertilisers needed to sustain life.
Simply put, hydrogen atoms decorate many of the key molecular building blocks of our world. Chemists would like to harness this same basic currency to make fuels, fertilisers, and other useful molecules using renewable electricity or light.
The challenge is control. Protons and electrons readily combine to make hydrogen gas, often more easily than they can be directed toward other molecules. Learning how to steer them selectively is therefore a central problem in modern catalysis.
Professor Peters’ laboratory is developing new strategies to control this proton-and-electron currency using catalysts, electricity, and light. In this lecture, you will gain an understanding of the broader vision behind this work, emphasising one particularly demanding and consequential reaction: converting nitrogen from the air into ammonia.
Speaker bio:
Jonas C. Peters is Bren Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Resnick Sustainability Institute at the California Institute of Technology. His research focuses on new concepts for catalysis (including electro- and photocatalysis) with applications in renewable solar fuel technologies, distributed nitrogen fixation for fertilisers and fuels, and chemical transformations fundamental to the synthesis of organic molecules. Peters earned his BSc degree at the University of Chicago (’93), spent a year as a Marshall Scholar at the University of Nottingham (’94), did his PhD at MIT (’98), and a postdoc as a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley (’99). He has been on the faculty at Caltech since 1999, including a brief period on the faculty at MIT.
