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    J-WAFS: Supporting food and water research across MIT

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    MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) has transformed the landscape of water and food research at MIT, driving faculty engagement and catalyzing new research and innovation in these critical areas. With philanthropic, corporate, and government support, J-WAFS’ strategic approach spans the entire research life cycle, from support for early-stage research to commercialization grants for more advanced projects.Over the past decade, J-WAFS has invested approximately $25 million in direct research funding to support MIT faculty pursuing transformative research with the potential for significant impact. “Since awarding our first cohort of seed grants in 2015, it’s remarkable to look back and see that over 10 percent of the MIT faculty have benefited from J-WAFS funding,” observes J-WAFS Executive Director Renee J. Robins ’83. “Many of these professors hadn’t worked on water or food challenges before their first J-WAFS grant.” By fostering interdisciplinary collaborations and supporting high-risk, high-reward projects, J-WAFS has amplified the capacity of MIT faculty to pursue groundbreaking research that addresses some of the world’s most pressing challenges facing our water and food systems.Drawing MIT faculty to water and food researchJ-WAFS open calls for proposals enable faculty to explore bold ideas and develop impactful approaches to tackling critical water and food system challenges. Professor Patrick Doyle’s work in water purification exemplifies this impact. “Without J-WAFS, I would have never ventured into the field of water purification,” Doyle reflects. While previously focused on pharmaceutical manufacturing and drug delivery, exposure to J-WAFS-funded peers led him to apply his expertise in soft materials to water purification. “Both the funding and the J-WAFS community led me to be deeply engaged in understanding some of the key challenges in water purification and water security,” he explains.Similarly, Professor Otto Cordero of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) leveraged J-WAFS funding to pivot his research into aquaculture. Cordero explains that his first J-WAFS seed grant “has been extremely influential for my lab because it allowed me to take a step in a new direction, with no preliminary data in hand.” Cordero’s expertise is in microbial communities. He was previous unfamiliar with aquaculture, but he saw the relevance of microbial communities the health of farmed aquatic organisms.Supporting early-career facultyNew assistant professors at MIT have particularly benefited from J-WAFS funding and support. J-WAFS has played a transformative role in shaping the careers and research trajectories of many new faculty members by encouraging them to explore novel research areas, and in many instances providing their first MIT research grant.Professor Ariel Furst reflects on how pivotal J-WAFS’ investment has been in advancing her research. “This was one of the first grants I received after starting at MIT, and it has truly shaped the development of my group’s research program,” Furst explains. With J-WAFS’ backing, her lab has achieved breakthroughs in chemical detection and remediation technologies for water. “The support of J-WAFS has enabled us to develop the platform funded through this work beyond the initial applications to the general detection of environmental contaminants and degradation of those contaminants,” she elaborates. Karthish Manthiram, now a professor of chemical engineering and chemistry at Caltech, explains how J-WAFS’ early investment enabled him and other young faculty to pursue ambitious ideas. “J-WAFS took a big risk on us,” Manthiram reflects. His research on breaking the nitrogen triple bond to make ammonia for fertilizer was initially met with skepticism. However, J-WAFS’ seed funding allowed his lab to lay the groundwork for breakthroughs that later attracted significant National Science Foundation (NSF) support. “That early funding from J-WAFS has been pivotal to our long-term success,” he notes. These stories underscore the broad impact of J-WAFS’ support for early-career faculty, and its commitment to empowering them to address critical global challenges and innovate boldly.Fueling follow-on funding J-WAFS seed grants enable faculty to explore nascent research areas, but external funding for continued work is usually necessary to achieve the full potential of these novel ideas. “It’s often hard to get funding for early stage or out-of-the-box ideas,” notes J-WAFS Director Professor John H. Lienhard V. “My hope, when I founded J-WAFS in 2014, was that seed grants would allow PIs [principal investigators] to prove out novel ideas so that they would be attractive for follow-on funding. And after 10 years, J-WAFS-funded research projects have brought more than $21 million in subsequent awards to MIT.”Professor Retsef Levi led a seed study on how agricultural supply chains affect food safety, with a team of faculty spanning the MIT schools Engineering and Science as well as the MIT Sloan School of Management. The team parlayed their seed grant research into a multi-million-dollar follow-on initiative. Levi reflects, “The J-WAFS seed funding allowed us to establish the initial credibility of our team, which was key to our success in obtaining large funding from several other agencies.”Dave Des Marais was an assistant professor in the Department of CEE when he received his first J-WAFS seed grant. The funding supported his research on how plant growth and physiology are controlled by genes and interact with the environment. The seed grant helped launch his lab’s work addressing enhancing climate change resilience in agricultural systems. The work led to his Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the NSF, a prestigious honor for junior faculty members. Now an associate professor, Des Marais’ ongoing project to further investigate the mechanisms and consequences of genomic and environmental interactions is supported by the five-year, $1,490,000 NSF grant. “J-WAFS providing essential funding to get my new research underway,” comments Des Marais.Stimulating interdisciplinary collaborationDes Marais’ seed grant was also key to developing new collaborations. He explains, “the J-WAFS grant supported me to develop a collaboration with Professor Caroline Uhler in EECS/IDSS [the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science/Institute for Data, Systems, and Society] that really shaped how I think about framing and testing hypotheses. One of the best things about J-WAFS is facilitating unexpected connections among MIT faculty with diverse yet complementary skill sets.”Professors A. John Hart of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Benedetto Marelli of CEE also launched a new interdisciplinary collaboration with J-WAFS funding. They partnered to join expertise in biomaterials, microfabrication, and manufacturing, to create printed silk-based colorimetric sensors that detect food spoilage. “The J-WAFS Seed Grant provided a unique opportunity for multidisciplinary collaboration,” Hart notes.Professors Stephen Graves in the MIT Sloan School of Management and Bishwapriya Sanyal in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) partnered to pursue new research on agricultural supply chains. With field work in Senegal, their J-WAFS-supported project brought together international development specialists and operations management experts to study how small firms and government agencies influence access to and uptake of irrigation technology by poorer farmers. “We used J-WAFS to spur a collaboration that would have been improbable without this grant,” they explain. Being part of the J-WAFS community also introduced them to researchers in Professor Amos Winter’s lab in the Department of Mechanical Engineering working on irrigation technologies for low-resource settings. DUSP doctoral candidate Mark Brennan notes, “We got to share our understanding of how irrigation markets and irrigation supply chains work in developing economies, and then we got to contrast that with their understanding of how irrigation system models work.”Timothy Swager, professor of chemistry, and Rohit Karnik, professor of mechanical engineering and J-WAFS associate director, collaborated on a sponsored research project supported by Xylem, Inc. through the J-WAFS Research Affiliate program. The cross-disciplinary research, which targeted the development of ultra-sensitive sensors for toxic PFAS chemicals, was conceived following a series of workshops hosted by J-WAFS. Swager and Karnik were two of the participants, and their involvement led to the collaborative proposal that Xylem funded. “J-WAFS funding allowed us to combine Swager lab’s expertise in sensing with my lab’s expertise in microfluidics to develop a cartridge for field-portable detection of PFAS,” says Karnik. “J-WAFS has enriched my research program in so many ways,” adds Swager, who is now working to commercialize the technology.Driving global collaboration and impactJ-WAFS has also helped MIT faculty establish and advance international collaboration and impactful global research. By funding and supporting projects that connect MIT researchers with international partners, J-WAFS has not only advanced technological solutions, but also strengthened cross-cultural understanding and engagement.Professor Matthew Shoulders leads the inaugural J-WAFS Grand Challenge project. In response to the first J-WAFS call for “Grand Challenge” proposals, Shoulders assembled an interdisciplinary team based at MIT to enhance and provide climate resilience to agriculture by improving the most inefficient aspect of photosynthesis, the notoriously-inefficient carbon dioxide-fixing plant enzyme RuBisCO. J-WAFS funded this high-risk/high-reward project following a competitive process that engaged external reviewers through a several rounds of iterative proposal development. The technical feedback to the team led them to researchers with complementary expertise from the Australian National University. “Our collaborative team of biochemists and synthetic biologists, computational biologists, and chemists is deeply integrated with plant biologists and field trial experts, yielding a robust feedback loop for enzyme engineering,” Shoulders says. “Together, this team will be able to make a concerted effort using the most modern, state-of-the-art techniques to engineer crop RuBisCO with an eye to helping make meaningful gains in securing a stable crop supply, hopefully with accompanying improvements in both food and water security.”Professor Leon Glicksman and Research Engineer Eric Verploegen’s team designed a low-cost cooling chamber to preserve fruits and vegetables harvested by smallholder farmers with no access to cold chain storage. J-WAFS’ guidance motivated the team to prioritize practical considerations informed by local collaborators, ensuring market competitiveness. “As our new idea for a forced-air evaporative cooling chamber was taking shape, we continually checked that our solution was evolving in a direction that would be competitive in terms of cost, performance, and usability to existing commercial alternatives,” explains Verploegen. Following the team’s initial seed grant, the team secured a J-WAFS Solutions commercialization grant, which Verploegen say “further motivated us to establish partnerships with local organizations capable of commercializing the technology earlier in the project than we might have done otherwise.” The team has since shared an open-source design as part of its commercialization strategy to maximize accessibility and impact.Bringing corporate sponsored research opportunities to MIT facultyJ-WAFS also plays a role in driving private partnerships, enabling collaborations that bridge industry and academia. Through its Research Affiliate Program, for example, J-WAFS provides opportunities for faculty to collaborate with industry on sponsored research, helping to convert scientific discoveries into licensable intellectual property (IP) that companies can turn into commercial products and services.J-WAFS introduced professor of mechanical engineering Alex Slocum to a challenge presented by its research affiliate company, Xylem: how to design a more energy-efficient pump for fluctuating flows. With centrifugal pumps consuming an estimated 6 percent of U.S. electricity annually, Slocum and his then-graduate student Hilary Johnson SM ’18, PhD ’22 developed an innovative variable volute mechanism that reduces energy usage. “Xylem envisions this as the first in a new category of adaptive pump geometry,” comments Johnson. The research produced a pump prototype and related IP that Xylem is working on commercializing. Johnson notes that these outcomes “would not have been possible without J-WAFS support and facilitation of the Xylem industry partnership.” Slocum adds, “J-WAFS enabled Hilary to begin her work on pumps, and Xylem sponsored the research to bring her to this point … where she has an opportunity to do far more than the original project called for.”Swager speaks highly of the impact of corporate research sponsorship through J-WAFS on his research and technology translation efforts. His PFAS project with Karnik described above was also supported by Xylem. “Xylem was an excellent sponsor of our research. Their engagement and feedback were instrumental in advancing our PFAS detection technology, now on the path to commercialization,” Swager says.Looking forwardWhat J-WAFS has accomplished is more than a collection of research projects; a decade of impact demonstrates how J-WAFS’ approach has been transformative for many MIT faculty members. As Professor Mathias Kolle puts it, his engagement with J-WAFS “had a significant influence on how we think about our research and its broader impacts.” He adds that it “opened my eyes to the challenges in the field of water and food systems and the many different creative ideas that are explored by MIT.” This thriving ecosystem of innovation, collaboration, and academic growth around water and food research has not only helped faculty build interdisciplinary and international partnerships, but has also led to the commercialization of transformative technologies with real-world applications. C. Cem Taşan, the POSCO Associate Professor of Metallurgy who is leading a J-WAFS Solutions commercialization team that is about to launch a startup company, sums it up by noting, “Without J-WAFS, we wouldn’t be here at all.”  As J-WAFS looks to the future, its continued commitment — supported by the generosity of its donors and partners — builds on a decade of success enabling MIT faculty to advance water and food research that addresses some of the world’s most pressing challenges. More

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      in Security

      Pivot Bio is using microbial nitrogen to make agriculture more sustainable

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      The Haber-Bosch process, which converts atmospheric nitrogen to make ammonia fertilizer, revolutionized agriculture and helped feed the world’s growing population, but it also created huge environmental problems. It is one of the most energy-intensive chemical processes in the world, responsible for 1-2 percent of global energy consumption. It also releases nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas that harms the ozone layer. Excess nitrogen also routinely runs off farms into waterways, harming marine life and polluting groundwater.In place of synthetic fertilizer, Pivot Bio has engineered nitrogen-producing microbes to make farming more sustainable. The company, which was co-founded by Professor Chris Voigt, Karsten Temme, and Alvin Tamsir, has engineered its microbes to grow on plant roots, where they feed on the root’s sugars and precisely deliver nitrogen in return.Pivot’s microbial colonies grow with the plant and produce more nitrogen at exactly the time the plant needs it, minimizing nitrogen runoff.“The way we have delivered nutrients to support plant growth historically is fertilizer, but that’s an inefficient way to get all the nutrients you need,” says Temme, Pivot’s chief innovation officer. “We have the ability now to help farmers be more efficient and productive with microbes.”Farmers can replace up to 40 pounds per acre of traditional nitrogen with Pivot’s product, which amounts to about a quarter of the total nitrogen needed for a crop like corn.Pivot’s products are already being used to grow corn, wheat, barley, oats, and other grains across millions of acres of American farmland, eliminating hundreds of thousands of tons of CO2 equivalent in the process. The company’s impact is even more striking given its unlikely origins, which trace back to one of the most challenging times of Voigt’s career.A Pivot from despairThe beginning of every faculty member’s career can be a sink-or-swim moment, and by Voigt’s own account, he was drowning. As a freshly minted assistant professor at the University of California at San Francisco, Voigt was struggling to stand up his lab, attract funding, and get experiments started.Around 2008, Voigt joined a research group out of the University of California at Berkeley that was writing a grant proposal focused on photovoltaic materials. His initial role was minor, but a senior researcher pulled out of the group a week before the proposal had to be submitted, so Voigt stepped up.“I said ‘I’ll finish this section in a week,’” Voigt recalls. “It was my big chance.”For the proposal, Voigt detailed an ambitious plan to rearrange the genetics of biologic photosynthetic systems to make them more efficient. He barely submitted it in time.A few months went by, then the proposal reviews finally came back. Voigt hurried to the meeting with some of the most senior researchers at UC Berkeley to discuss the responses.“My part of the proposal got completely slammed,” Voigt says. “There were something like 15 reviews on it — they were longer than the actual grant — and it’s just one after another tearing into my proposal. All the most famous people are in this meeting, future energy secretaries, future leaders of the university, and it was totally embarrassing. After that meeting, I was considering leaving academia.”A few discouraging months later, Voigt got a call from Paul Ludden, the dean of the School of Science at UC Berkeley. He wanted to talk.“As I walk into Paul’s office, he’s reading my proposal,” Voigt recalls. “He sits me down and says, ‘Everybody’s telling me how terrible this is.’ I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God.’ But then he says, ‘I think there’s something here. Your idea is good, you just picked the wrong system.’”Ludden went on to explain to Voigt that he should apply his gene-swapping idea to nitrogen fixation. He even offered to send Voigt a postdoc from his lab, Dehua Zhao, to help. Voigt paired Zhao with Temme, and sure enough, the resulting 2011 paper of their work was well-received by the nitrogen fixation community.“Nitrogen fixation has been a holy grail for scientists, agronomists, and farmers for almost a century, ever since somebody discovered the first microbe that can fix nitrogen for legumes like soybeans,” Temme says. “Everybody always said that someday we’ll be able to do this for the cereal crops. The excitement with Pivot was this is the first time that technology became accessible.”Voigt had moved to MIT in 2010. When the paper came out, he founded Pivot Bio with Temme and another Berkeley researcher, Alvin Tamsir. Since then, Voigt, who is the Daniel I.C. Wang Professor at MIT and the head of the Department of Biological Engineering, has continued collaborating with Pivot on things like increasing nitrogen production, making strains more stable, and making them inducible to different signals from the plant. Pivot has licensed technology from MIT, and the research has also received support from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS).Pivot’s first goals were to gain regulatory approval and prove themselves in the marketplace. To gain approval in the U.S., Pivot’s team focused on using DNA from within the same organism rather than bringing in totally new DNA, which simplified the approval process. It also partnered with independent corn seed dealers to get its product to farms. Early deployments occurred in 2019.Farmers apply Pivot’s product at planting, either as a liquid that gets sprayed on the soil or as a dry powder that is rehydrated and applied to the seeds as a coating. The microbes live on the surface of the growing root system, eating plant sugars and releasing nitrogen throughout the plant’s life cycle.“Today, our microbes colonize just a fraction of the total sugars provided by the plant,” Temme explains. “They’re also sharing ammonia with the plant, and all of those things are just a portion of what’s possible technically. Our team is always trying to figure out how to make those microbes more efficient at getting the energy they need to grow or at fixing nitrogen and sharing it with the crop.”In 2023, Pivot started the N-Ovator program to connect companies with growers who practice sustainable farming using Pivot’s microbial nitrogen. Through the program, companies buy nitrogen credits and farmers can get paid by verifying their practices. The program was named one of the Inventions of the Year by Time Magazine last year and has paid out millions of dollars to farmers to date.Microbial nitrogen and beyondPivot is currently selling to farmers across the U.S. and working with smallholder farmers in Kenya. It’s also hoping to gain approval for its microbial solution in Brazil and Canada, which it hopes will be its next markets.”How do we get the economics to make sense for everybody — the farmers, our partners, and the company?” Temme says of Pivot’s mission. “Because this truly can be a deflationary technology that upends the very expensive traditional way of making fertilizer.”Pivot’s team is also extending the product to cotton, and Temme says microbes can be a nitrogen source for any type of plant on the planet. Further down the line, the company believes it can help farmers with other nutrients essential to help their crops grow.“Now that we’ve established our technology, how can Pivot help farmers overcome all the other limitations they face with crop nutrients to maximize yields?” Temme asks. “That really starts to change the way a farmer thinks about managing the entire acre from a price, productivity, and sustainability perspective.” More

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      in Energy

      Puzzling out climate change

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      Shreyaa Raghavan’s journey into solving some of the world’s toughest challenges started with a simple love for puzzles. By high school, her knack for problem-solving naturally drew her to computer science. Through her participation in an entrepreneurship and leadership program, she built apps and twice made it to the semifinals of the program’s global competition.Her early successes made a computer science career seem like an obvious choice, but Raghavan says a significant competing interest left her torn.“Computer science sparks that puzzle-, problem-solving part of my brain,” says Raghavan ’24, an Accenture Fellow and a PhD candidate in MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. “But while I always felt like building mobile apps was a fun little hobby, it didn’t feel like I was directly solving societal challenges.”Her perspective shifted when, as an MIT undergraduate, Raghavan participated in an Undergraduate Research Opportunity in the Photovoltaic Research Laboratory, now known as the Accelerated Materials Laboratory for Sustainability. There, she discovered how computational techniques like machine learning could optimize materials for solar panels — a direct application of her skills toward mitigating climate change.“This lab had a very diverse group of people, some from a computer science background, some from a chemistry background, some who were hardcore engineers. All of them were communicating effectively and working toward one unified goal — building better renewable energy systems,” Raghavan says. “It opened my eyes to the fact that I could use very technical tools that I enjoy building and find fulfillment in that by helping solve major climate challenges.”With her sights set on applying machine learning and optimization to energy and climate, Raghavan joined Cathy Wu’s lab when she started her PhD in 2023. The lab focuses on building more sustainable transportation systems, a field that resonated with Raghavan due to its universal impact and its outsized role in climate change — transportation accounts for roughly 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.“If we were to throw all of the intelligent systems we are exploring into the transportation networks, by how much could we reduce emissions?” she asks, summarizing a core question of her research.Wu, an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, stresses the value of Raghavan’s work.“Transportation is a critical element of both the economy and climate change, so potential changes to transportation must be carefully studied,” Wu says. “Shreyaa’s research into smart congestion management is important because it takes a data-driven approach to add rigor to the broader research supporting sustainability.”Raghavan’s contributions have been recognized with the Accenture Fellowship, a cornerstone of the MIT-Accenture Convergence Initiative for Industry and Technology. As an Accenture Fellow, she is exploring the potential impact of technologies for avoiding stop-and-go traffic and its emissions, using systems such as networked autonomous vehicles and digital speed limits that vary according to traffic conditions — solutions that could advance decarbonization in the transportation section at relatively low cost and in the near term.Raghavan says she appreciates the Accenture Fellowship not only for the support it provides, but also because it demonstrates industry involvement in sustainable transportation solutions.“It’s important for the field of transportation, and also energy and climate as a whole, to synergize with all of the different stakeholders,” she says. “I think it’s important for industry to be involved in this issue of incorporating smarter transportation systems to decarbonize transportation.”Raghavan has also received a fellowship supporting her research from the U.S. Department of Transportation.“I think it’s really exciting that there’s interest from the policy side with the Department of Transportation and from the industry side with Accenture,” she says.Raghavan believes that addressing climate change requires collaboration across disciplines. “I think with climate change, no one industry or field is going to solve it on its own. It’s really got to be each field stepping up and trying to make a difference,” she says. “I don’t think there’s any silver-bullet solution to this problem. It’s going to take many different solutions from different people, different angles, different disciplines.”With that in mind, Raghavan has been very active in the MIT Energy and Climate Club since joining about three years ago, which, she says, “was a really cool way to meet lots of people who were working toward the same goal, the same climate goals, the same passions, but from completely different angles.”This year, Raghavan is on the community and education team, which works to build the community at MIT that is working on climate and energy issues. As part of that work, Raghavan is launching a mentorship program for undergraduates, pairing them with graduate students who help the undergrads develop ideas about how they can work on climate using their unique expertise.“I didn’t foresee myself using my computer science skills in energy and climate,” Raghavan says, “so I really want to give other students a clear pathway, or a clear sense of how they can get involved.”Raghavan has embraced her area of study even in terms of where she likes to think.“I love working on trains, on buses, on airplanes,” she says. “It’s really fun to be in transit and working on transportation problems.”Anticipating a trip to New York to visit a cousin, she holds no dread for the long train trip.“I know I’m going to do some of my best work during those hours,” she says. “Four hours there. Four hours back.” More

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      in Environment

      Cleaning up critical minerals and materials production, using microwave plasma

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      The push to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. is running up against an unfortunate truth: The processes for making many critical materials today create toxic byproducts and other environmental hazards. That’s true for commonly used industrial metals like nickel and titanium, as well as specialty minerals, materials, and coatings that go into batteries, advanced electronics, and defense applications.Now 6K, founded by former MIT research scientist Kamal Hadidi, is using a new production process to bring critical materials production back to America without the toxic byproducts.The company is actively scaling its microwave plasma technology, which it calls UniMelt, to transform the way critical minerals are processed, creating new domestic supply chains in the process. UniMelt uses beams of tightly controlled thermal plasma to melt or vaporize precursor materials into particles with precise sizes and crystalline phases.The technology converts metals, such as titanium, nickel, and refractory alloys, into particles optimized for additive manufacturing for a range of industrial applications. It is also being used to create battery materials for electric vehicles, grid infrastructure, and data centers.“The markets and critical materials we are focused on are important for not just economic reasons but also U.S. national security, because the bulk of these materials are manufactured today in nonfriendly countries,” 6K CEO Saurabh Ullal says. “Now, the [U.S. government] and our growing customer base can leverage this technology invented at MIT to make the U.S. less dependent on these nonfriendly countries, ensuring supply chain independence now and in the future.”Named after the 6,000-degree temperature of its plasma, 6K is currently selling its high-performance metal powders to parts manufacturers as well as defense, automotive, medical, and oil and gas companies for use in applications from engine components and medical implants to rockets. To scale its battery materials business, 6K is also building a 100,000-square-foot production facility in Jackson, Tennessee, which will begin construction later this year.A weekend projectBetween 1994 and 2007, Hadidi worked at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PFSC), where he developed plasma technologies for a range of applications, including hydrogen production, fuel reforming, and detecting environmental toxins. His first company was founded in 2000 out of the PFSC to detect mercury in coal-fired power plants’ smokestacks.“I loved working at MIT,” Hadidi says. “It’s an amazing place that really challenges you. Just being there is so stimulating because everyone’s trying to come up with new solutions and connect dots between different fields.”Hadidi also began using high-frequency microwave plasmas to create nanomaterials for use in optical applications. He wasn’t a materials expert, so he collaborated with Professor Eric Jordan, a materials synthesis expert from the University of Connecticut, and the researchers started working on nights and weekends in the PSFC to develop the idea further, eventually patenting the technology.Hadidi officially founded the company as Amastan in 2007, exploring the use of his microwave plasma technology, later named UniMelt for “uniform melt state process,” to make a host of different materials as part of a government grant he and Jordan received.The researchers soon realized the microwave plasma technology had several advantages over traditional production techniques for certain materials. For one, it could eliminate several high-energy steps of conventional processes, reducing production times from days to hours in some cases. For batteries and certain critical minerals, the process also works with recycled feedstocks. Amastan was renamed 6K in 2019.Early on, Hadidi produced metal powders used in additive manufacturing through a process called spheroidization, which results in dense, spherical powders that flow well and make high-performance 3D-printed parts.Following another grant, Hadidi explored methods for producing a type of battery cathode made from lithium, nickel, manganese, and cobalt (NMC). The standard process for making NMCs involved chemical synthesis, precipitation, heat treatment, and a lot of water. 6K is able to reduce many of those steps, speeding up production and lowering costs while also being more sustainable.“Our technology completely eliminates toxic waste and recycles all of the byproducts back through the process to utilize everything, including water,” Ullal says.Scaling domestic productionToday, 6K’s additive manufacturing arm operates out of a factory in Pennsylvania. The company’s critical minerals processing, refining, and recycling systems can produce about 400 tons of material per year and can be used to make more than a dozen types of metal powders. The company also has 33,000-square-foot battery center in North Andover, Massachusetts, where it produces battery cathode materials for its energy storage and mobility customers.The Tennessee facility will be used to produce battery cathode materials and represents a massive step up in throughput. The company says it will be able to produce 13,000 tons of material annually when construction is complete next year.“I’m happy if what I started brings something positive to society, and I’m extremely thankful to all the people that helped me,” says Hadidi, who left the company in 2019. “I’m an entrepreneur at heart. I like to make things. But that doesn’t mean I always succeed. It’s personally very satisfying to see this make an impact.”The 6K team says its technology can also create a variety of specialty ceramics, advanced coatings, and nanoengineered materials. They say it may also be used to eliminate PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” though that work is at an early stage.The company recently received a grant to demonstrate a process for recycling critical materials from military depots to produce aerospace and defense products, creating a new value stream for these materials that would otherwise deteriorate or go to landfill. That work is consistent with the company’s motto, “We take nothing from the ground and put nothing into the ground.”The company’s additive division recently received a $23.4 Defense Production Act grant “that will enable us to double processing capacity in the next three years,” Ullal says. “The next step is to scale battery materials production to the tens of thousands of tons per year. At this point, it’s a scale-up of known processes, and we just need to execute. The idea of creating a circular economy is near and dear to us because that’s how we’ve built this company and that’s how we generate value: addressing our U.S. national security concerns and protecting the planet as well.” More

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      in Energy

      MIT spinout Gradiant reduces companies’ water use and waste by billions of gallons each day

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      When it comes to water use, most of us think of the water we drink. But industrial uses for things like manufacturing account for billions of gallons of water each day. For instance, making a single iPhone, by one estimate, requires more than 3,000 gallons.Gradiant is working to reduce the world’s industrial water footprint. Founded by a team from MIT, Gradiant offers water recycling, treatment, and purification solutions to some of the largest companies on Earth, including Coca Cola, Tesla, and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. By serving as an end-to-end water company, Gradiant says it helps companies reuse 2 billion gallons of water each day and saves another 2 billion gallons of fresh water from being withdrawn.The company’s mission is to preserve water for generations to come in the face of rising global demand.“We work on both ends of the water spectrum,” Gradiant co-founder and CEO Anurag Bajpayee SM ’08, PhD ’12 says. “We work with ultracontaminated water, and we can also provide ultrapure water for use in areas like chip fabrication. Our specialty is in the extreme water challenges that can’t be solved with traditional technologies.”For each customer, Gradiant builds tailored water treatment solutions that combine chemical treatments with membrane filtration and biological process technologies, leveraging a portfolio of patents to drastically cut water usage and waste.“Before Gradiant, 40 million liters of water would be used in the chip-making process. It would all be contaminated and treated, and maybe 30 percent would be reused,” explains Gradiant co-founder and COO Prakash Govindan PhD ’12. “We have the technology to recycle, in some cases, 99 percent of the water. Now, instead of consuming 40 million liters, chipmakers only need to consume 400,000 liters, which is a huge shift in the water footprint of that industry. And this is not just with semiconductors. We’ve done this in food and beverage, we’ve done this in renewable energy, we’ve done this in pharmaceutical drug production, and several other areas.”Learning the value of waterGovindan grew up in a part of India that experienced a years-long drought beginning when he was 10. Without tap water, one of Govindan’s chores was to haul water up the stairs of his apartment complex each time a truck delivered it.“However much water my brother and I could carry was how much we had for the week,” Govindan recalls. “I learned the value of water the hard way.”Govindan attended the Indian Institute of Technology as an undergraduate, and when he came to MIT for his PhD, he sought out the groups working on water challenges. He began working on a water treatment method called carrier gas extraction for his PhD under Gradiant co-founder and MIT Professor John Lienhard.Bajpayee also worked on water treatment methods at MIT, and after brief stints as postdocs at MIT, he and Govindan licensed their work and founded Gradiant.Carrier gas extraction became Gradiant’s first proprietary technology when the company launched in 2013. The founders began by treating wastewater created by oil and gas wells, landing their first partner in a Texas company. But Gradiant gradually expanded to solving water challenges in power generation, mining, textiles, and refineries. Then the founders noticed opportunities in industries like electronics, semiconductors, food and beverage, and pharmaceuticals. Today, oil and gas wastewater treatment makes up a small percentage of Gradiant’s work.As the company expanded, it added technologies to its portfolio, patenting new water treatment methods around reverse osmosis, selective contaminant extraction, and free radical oxidation. Gradiant has also created a digital system that uses AI to measure, predict, and control water treatment facilities.“The advantage Gradiant has over every other water company is that R&D is in our DNA,” Govindan says, noting Gradiant has a world-class research lab at its headquarters in Boston. “At MIT, we learned how to do cutting-edge technology development, and we never let go of that.”The founders compare their suite of technologies to LEGO bricks they can mix and match depending on a customer’s water needs. Gradiant has built more than 2,500 of these end-to-end systems for customers around the world.“Our customers aren’t water companies; they are industrial clients like semiconductor manufacturers, drug companies, and food and beverage companies,” Bajpayee says. “They aren’t about to start operating a water treatment plant. They look at us as their water partner who can take care of the whole water problem.”Continuing innovationThe founders say Gradiant has been roughly doubling its revenue each year over the last five years, and it’s continuing to add technologies to its platform. For instance, Gradiant recently developed a critical minerals recovery solution to extract materials like lithium and nickel from customers’ wastewater, which could expand access to critical materials essential to the production of batteries and other products.“If we can extract lithium from brine water in an environmentally and economically feasible way, the U.S. can meet all of its lithium needs from within the U.S.,” Bajpayee says. “What’s preventing large-scale extraction of lithium from brine is technology, and we believe what we have now deployed will open the floodgates for direct lithium extraction and completely revolutionized the industry.”The company has also validated a method for eliminating PFAS — so-called toxic “forever chemicals” — in a pilot project with a leading U.S. semiconductor manufacturer. In the near future, it hopes to bring that solution to municipal water treatment plants to protect cities.At the heart of Gradiant’s innovation is the founders’ belief that industrial activity doesn’t have to deplete one of the world’s most vital resources.“Ever since the industrial revolution, we’ve been taking from nature,” Bajpayee says. “By treating and recycling water, by reducing water consumption and making industry highly water efficient, we have this unique opportunity to turn the clock back and give nature water back. If that’s your driver, you can’t choose not to innovate.” More

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      MIT Climate and Energy Ventures class spins out entrepreneurs — and successful companies

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      In 2014, a team of MIT students in course 15.366 (Climate and Energy Ventures) developed a plan to commercialize MIT research on how to move information between chips with light instead of electricity, reducing energy usage.After completing the class, which challenges students to identify early customers and pitch their business plan to investors, the team went on to win both grand prizes at the MIT Clean Energy Prize. Today the company, Ayar Labs, has raised a total of $370 million from a group including chip leaders AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA, to scale the manufacturing of its optical chip interconnects.Ayar Labs is one of many companies whose roots can be traced back to 15.366. In fact, more than 150 companies have been founded by alumni of the class since its founding in 2007.In the class, student teams select a technology or idea and determine the best path for its commercialization. The semester-long project, which is accompanied by lectures and mentoring, equips students with real-world experience in launching a business.“The goal is to educate entrepreneurs on how to start companies in the climate and energy space,” says Senior Lecturer Tod Hynes, who co-founded the course and has been teaching since 2008. “We do that through hands-on experience. We require students to engage with customers, talk to potential suppliers, partners, investors, and to practice their pitches to learn from that feedback.”The class attracts hundreds of student applications each year. As one of the catalysts for MIT spinoffs, it is also one reason a 2015 report found that MIT alumni-founded companies had generated roughly $1.9 trillion in annual revenues. If MIT were a country, that figure that would make it the 10th largest economy in the world, according to the report.“’Mens et manus’ (‘mind and hand’) is MIT’s motto, and the hands-on experience we try to provide in this class is hard to beat,” Hynes says. “When you actually go through the process of commercialization in the real world, you learn more and you’re in a better spot. That experiential learning approach really aligns with MIT’s approach.”Simulating a startupThe course was started by Bill Aulet, a professor of the practice at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. After serving as an advisor the first year and helping Aulet launch the class, Hynes began teaching the class with Aulet in the fall of 2008. The pair also launched the Climate and Energy Prize around the same time, which continues today and recently received over 150 applications from teams from around the world.A core feature of the class is connecting students in different academic fields. Each year, organizers aim to enroll students with backgrounds in science, engineering, business, and policy.“The class is meant to be accessible to anybody at MIT,” Hynes says, noting the course has also since opened to students from Harvard University. “We’re trying to pull across disciplines.”The class quickly grew in popularity around campus. Over the last few years, the course has had about 150 students apply for 50 spots.“I mentioned Climate and Energy Ventures in my application to MIT,” says Chris Johnson, a second-year graduate student in the Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) Program. “Coming into MIT, I was very interested in sustainability, and energy in particular, and also in startups. I had heard great things about the class, and I waited until my last semester to apply.”The course’s organizers select mostly graduate students, whom they prefer to be in the final year of their program so they can more easily continue working on the venture after the class is finished.“Whether or not students stick with the project from the class, it’s a great experience that will serve them in their careers,” says Jennifer Turliuk, the practice leader for climate and energy artificial intelligence at the Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship, who helped teach the class this fall.Hynes describes the course as a venture-building simulation. Before it begins, organizers select up to 30 technologies and ideas that are in the right stage for commercialization. Students can also come into the class with ideas or technologies they want to work on.After a few weeks of introductions and lectures, students form into multidisciplinary teams of about five and begin going through each of the 24 steps of building a startup described in Aulet’s book “Disciplined Entrepreneurship,” which includes things like engaging with potential early customers, quantifying a value proposition, and establishing a business model. Everything builds toward a one-hour final presentation that’s designed to simulate a pitch to investors or government officials.“It’s a lot of work, and because it’s a team-based project, your grade is highly dependent on your team,” Hynes says. “You also get graded by your team; that’s about 10 percent of your grade. We try to encourage people to be proactive and supportive teammates.”Students say the process is fast-paced but rewarding.“It’s definitely demanding,” says Sofie Netteberg, a graduate student who is also in the LGO program at MIT. “Depending on where you’re at with your technology, you can be moving very quickly. That’s the stage that I was in, which I found really engaging. We basically just had a lab technology, and it was like, ‘What do we do next?’ You also get a ton of support from the professors.”From the classroom to the worldThis fall’s final presentations took place at the headquarters of the MIT-affiliated venture firm The Engine in front of an audience of professors, investors, members of foundations supporting entrepreneurship, and more.“We got to hear feedback from people who would be the real next step for the technology if the startup gets up and running,” said Johnson, whose team was commercializing a method for storing energy in concrete. “That was really valuable. We know that these are not only people we might see in the next month or the next funding rounds, but they’re also exactly the type of people that are going to give us the questions we should be thinking about. It was clarifying.”Throughout the semester, students treated the project like a real venture they’d be working on well beyond the length of the class.“No one’s really thinking about this class for the grade; it’s about the learning,” says Netteberg, whose team was encouraged to keep working on their electrolyzer technology designed to more efficiently produce green hydrogen. “We’re not stressed about getting an A. If we want to keep working on this, we want real feedback: What do you think we did well? What do we need to keep working on?”Hynes says several investors expressed interest in supporting the businesses coming out of the class. Moving forward, he hopes students embrace the test-bed environment his team has created for them and try bold new things.“People have been very pragmatic over the years, which is good, but also potentially limiting,” Hynes says. “This is also an opportunity to do something that’s a little further out there — something that has really big potential impact if it comes together. This is the time where students get to experiment, so why not try something big?” More

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      Toward sustainable decarbonization of aviation in Latin America

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      According to the International Energy Agency, aviation accounts for about 2 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, and aviation emissions are expected to double by mid-century as demand for domestic and international air travel rises. To sharply reduce emissions in alignment with the Paris Agreement’s long-term goal to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) has set a goal to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Which raises the question: Are there technologically feasible and economically viable strategies to reach that goal within the next 25 years?To begin to address that question, a team of researchers at the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (CS3) and the MIT Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment has spent the past year analyzing aviation decarbonization options in Latin America, where air travel is expected to more than triple by 2050 and thereby double today’s aviation-related emissions in the region.Chief among those options is the development and deployment of sustainable aviation fuel. Currently produced from low- and zero-carbon sources (feedstock) including municipal waste and non-food crops, and requiring practically no alteration of aircraft systems or refueling infrastructure, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) has the potential to perform just as well as petroleum-based jet fuel with as low as 20 percent of its carbon footprint.Focused on Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru, the researchers assessed SAF feedstock availability, the costs of corresponding SAF pathways, and how SAF deployment would likely impact fuel use, prices, emissions, and aviation demand in each country. They also explored how efficiency improvements and market-based mechanisms could help the region to reach decarbonization targets. The team’s findings appear in a CS3 Special Report.SAF emissions, costs, and sourcesUnder an ambitious emissions mitigation scenario designed to cap global warming at 1.5 C and raise the rate of SAF use in Latin America to 65 percent by 2050, the researchers projected aviation emissions to be reduced by about 60 percent in 2050 compared to a scenario in which existing climate policies are not strengthened. To achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, other measures would be required, such as improvements in operational and air traffic efficiencies, airplane fleet renewal, alternative forms of propulsion, and carbon offsets and removals.As of 2024, jet fuel prices in Latin America are around $0.70 per liter. Based on the current availability of feedstocks, the researchers projected SAF costs within the six countries studied to range from $1.11 to $2.86 per liter. They cautioned that increased fuel prices could affect operating costs of the aviation sector and overall aviation demand unless strategies to manage price increases are implemented.Under the 1.5 C scenario, the total cumulative capital investments required to build new SAF producing plants between 2025 and 2050 were estimated at $204 billion for the six countries (ranging from $5 billion in Ecuador to $84 billion in Brazil). The researchers identified sugarcane- and corn-based ethanol-to-jet fuel, palm oil- and soybean-based hydro-processed esters and fatty acids as the most promising feedstock sources in the near term for SAF production in Latin America.“Our findings show that SAF offers a significant decarbonization pathway, which must be combined with an economy-wide emissions mitigation policy that uses market-based mechanisms to offset the remaining emissions,” says Sergey Paltsev, lead author of the report, MIT CS3 deputy director, and senior research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative.RecommendationsThe researchers concluded the report with recommendations for national policymakers and aviation industry leaders in Latin America.They stressed that government policy and regulatory mechanisms will be needed to create sufficient conditions to attract SAF investments in the region and make SAF commercially viable as the aviation industry decarbonizes operations. Without appropriate policy frameworks, SAF requirements will affect the cost of air travel. For fuel producers, stable, long-term-oriented policies and regulations will be needed to create robust supply chains, build demand for establishing economies of scale, and develop innovative pathways for producing SAF.Finally, the research team recommended a region-wide collaboration in designing SAF policies. A unified decarbonization strategy among all countries in the region will help ensure competitiveness, economies of scale, and achievement of long-term carbon emissions-reduction goals.“Regional feedstock availability and costs make Latin America a potential major player in SAF production,” says Angelo Gurgel, a principal research scientist at MIT CS3 and co-author of the study. “SAF requirements, combined with government support mechanisms, will ensure sustainable decarbonization while enhancing the region’s connectivity and the ability of disadvantaged communities to access air transport.”Financial support for this study was provided by LATAM Airlines and Airbus. More

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      The multifaceted challenge of powering AI

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      Artificial intelligence has become vital in business and financial dealings, medical care, technology development, research, and much more. Without realizing it, consumers rely on AI when they stream a video, do online banking, or perform an online search. Behind these capabilities are more than 10,000 data centers globally, each one a huge warehouse containing thousands of computer servers and other infrastructure for storing, managing, and processing data. There are now over 5,000 data centers in the United States, and new ones are being built every day — in the U.S. and worldwide. Often dozens are clustered together right near where people live, attracted by policies that provide tax breaks and other incentives, and by what looks like abundant electricity.And data centers do consume huge amounts of electricity. U.S. data centers consumed more than 4 percent of the country’s total electricity in 2023, and by 2030 that fraction could rise to 9 percent, according to the Electric Power Research Institute. A single large data center can consume as much electricity as 50,000 homes.The sudden need for so many data centers presents a massive challenge to the technology and energy industries, government policymakers, and everyday consumers. Research scientists and faculty members at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) are exploring multiple facets of this problem — from sourcing power to grid improvement to analytical tools that increase efficiency, and more. Data centers have quickly become the energy issue of our day.Unexpected demand brings unexpected solutionsSeveral companies that use data centers to provide cloud computing and data management services are announcing some surprising steps to deliver all that electricity. Proposals include building their own small nuclear plants near their data centers and even restarting one of the undamaged nuclear reactors at Three Mile Island, which has been shuttered since 2019. (A different reactor at that plant partially melted down in 1979, causing the nation’s worst nuclear power accident.) Already the need to power AI is causing delays in the planned shutdown of some coal-fired power plants and raising prices for residential consumers. Meeting the needs of data centers is not only stressing power grids, but also setting back the transition to clean energy needed to stop climate change.There are many aspects to the data center problem from a power perspective. Here are some that MIT researchers are focusing on, and why they’re important.An unprecedented surge in the demand for electricity“In the past, computing was not a significant user of electricity,” says William H. Green, director of MITEI and the Hoyt C. Hottel Professor in the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering. “Electricity was used for running industrial processes and powering household devices such as air conditioners and lights, and more recently for powering heat pumps and charging electric cars. But now all of a sudden, electricity used for computing in general, and by data centers in particular, is becoming a gigantic new demand that no one anticipated.”Why the lack of foresight? Usually, demand for electric power increases by roughly half-a-percent per year, and utilities bring in new power generators and make other investments as needed to meet the expected new demand. But the data centers now coming online are creating unprecedented leaps in demand that operators didn’t see coming. In addition, the new demand is constant. It’s critical that a data center provides its services all day, every day. There can be no interruptions in processing large datasets, accessing stored data, and running the cooling equipment needed to keep all the packed-together computers churning away without overheating.Moreover, even if enough electricity is generated, getting it to where it’s needed may be a problem, explains Deepjyoti Deka, a MITEI research scientist. “A grid is a network-wide operation, and the grid operator may have sufficient generation at another location or even elsewhere in the country, but the wires may not have sufficient capacity to carry the electricity to where it’s wanted.” So transmission capacity must be expanded — and, says Deka, that’s a slow process.Then there’s the “interconnection queue.” Sometimes, adding either a new user (a “load”) or a new generator to an existing grid can cause instabilities or other problems for everyone else already on the grid. In that situation, bringing a new data center online may be delayed. Enough delays can result in new loads or generators having to stand in line and wait for their turn. Right now, much of the interconnection queue is already filled up with new solar and wind projects. The delay is now about five years. Meeting the demand from newly installed data centers while ensuring that the quality of service elsewhere is not hampered is a problem that needs to be addressed.Finding clean electricity sourcesTo further complicate the challenge, many companies — including so-called “hyperscalers” such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon — have made public commitments to having net-zero carbon emissions within the next 10 years. Many have been making strides toward achieving their clean-energy goals by buying “power purchase agreements.” They sign a contract to buy electricity from, say, a solar or wind facility, sometimes providing funding for the facility to be built. But that approach to accessing clean energy has its limits when faced with the extreme electricity demand of a data center.Meanwhile, soaring power consumption is delaying coal plant closures in many states. There are simply not enough sources of renewable energy to serve both the hyperscalers and the existing users, including individual consumers. As a result, conventional plants fired by fossil fuels such as coal are needed more than ever.As the hyperscalers look for sources of clean energy for their data centers, one option could be to build their own wind and solar installations. But such facilities would generate electricity only intermittently. Given the need for uninterrupted power, the data center would have to maintain energy storage units, which are expensive. They could instead rely on natural gas or diesel generators for backup power — but those devices would need to be coupled with equipment to capture the carbon emissions, plus a nearby site for permanently disposing of the captured carbon.Because of such complications, several of the hyperscalers are turning to nuclear power. As Green notes, “Nuclear energy is well matched to the demand of data centers, because nuclear plants can generate lots of power reliably, without interruption.”In a much-publicized move in September, Microsoft signed a deal to buy power for 20 years after Constellation Energy reopens one of the undamaged reactors at its now-shuttered nuclear plant at Three Mile Island, the site of the much-publicized nuclear accident in 1979. If approved by regulators, Constellation will bring that reactor online by 2028, with Microsoft buying all of the power it produces. Amazon also reached a deal to purchase power produced by another nuclear plant threatened with closure due to financial troubles. And in early December, Meta released a request for proposals to identify nuclear energy developers to help the company meet their AI needs and their sustainability goals.Other nuclear news focuses on small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), factory-built, modular power plants that could be installed near data centers, potentially without the cost overruns and delays often experienced in building large plants. Google recently ordered a fleet of SMRs to generate the power needed by its data centers. The first one will be completed by 2030 and the remainder by 2035.Some hyperscalers are betting on new technologies. For example, Google is pursuing next-generation geothermal projects, and Microsoft has signed a contract to purchase electricity from a startup’s fusion power plant beginning in 2028 — even though the fusion technology hasn’t yet been demonstrated.Reducing electricity demandOther approaches to providing sufficient clean electricity focus on making the data center and the operations it houses more energy efficient so as to perform the same computing tasks using less power. Using faster computer chips and optimizing algorithms that use less energy are already helping to reduce the load, and also the heat generated.Another idea being tried involves shifting computing tasks to times and places where carbon-free energy is available on the grid. Deka explains: “If a task doesn’t have to be completed immediately, but rather by a certain deadline, can it be delayed or moved to a data center elsewhere in the U.S. or overseas where electricity is more abundant, cheaper, and/or cleaner? This approach is known as ‘carbon-aware computing.’” We’re not yet sure whether every task can be moved or delayed easily, says Deka. “If you think of a generative AI-based task, can it easily be separated into small tasks that can be taken to different parts of the country, solved using clean energy, and then be brought back together? What is the cost of doing this kind of division of tasks?”That approach is, of course, limited by the problem of the interconnection queue. It’s difficult to access clean energy in another region or state. But efforts are under way to ease the regulatory framework to make sure that critical interconnections can be developed more quickly and easily.What about the neighbors?A major concern running through all the options for powering data centers is the impact on residential energy consumers. When a data center comes into a neighborhood, there are not only aesthetic concerns but also more practical worries. Will the local electricity service become less reliable? Where will the new transmission lines be located? And who will pay for the new generators, upgrades to existing equipment, and so on? When new manufacturing facilities or industrial plants go into a neighborhood, the downsides are generally offset by the availability of new jobs. Not so with a data center, which may require just a couple dozen employees.There are standard rules about how maintenance and upgrade costs are shared and allocated. But the situation is totally changed by the presence of a new data center. As a result, utilities now need to rethink their traditional rate structures so as not to place an undue burden on residents to pay for the infrastructure changes needed to host data centers.MIT’s contributionsAt MIT, researchers are thinking about and exploring a range of options for tackling the problem of providing clean power to data centers. For example, they are investigating architectural designs that will use natural ventilation to facilitate cooling, equipment layouts that will permit better airflow and power distribution, and highly energy-efficient air conditioning systems based on novel materials. They are creating new analytical tools for evaluating the impact of data center deployments on the U.S. power system and for finding the most efficient ways to provide the facilities with clean energy. Other work looks at how to match the output of small nuclear reactors to the needs of a data center, and how to speed up the construction of such reactors.MIT teams also focus on determining the best sources of backup power and long-duration storage, and on developing decision support systems for locating proposed new data centers, taking into account the availability of electric power and water and also regulatory considerations, and even the potential for using what can be significant waste heat, for example, for heating nearby buildings. Technology development projects include designing faster, more efficient computer chips and more energy-efficient computing algorithms.In addition to providing leadership and funding for many research projects, MITEI is acting as a convenor, bringing together companies and stakeholders to address this issue. At MITEI’s 2024 Annual Research Conference, a panel of representatives from two hyperscalers and two companies that design and construct data centers together discussed their challenges, possible solutions, and where MIT research could be most beneficial.As data centers continue to be built, and computing continues to create an unprecedented increase in demand for electricity, Green says, scientists and engineers are in a race to provide the ideas, innovations, and technologies that can meet this need, and at the same time continue to advance the transition to a decarbonized energy system. More

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      For clean ammonia, MIT engineers propose going underground

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      Ammonia is the most widely produced chemical in the world today, used primarily as a source for nitrogen fertilizer. Its production is also a major source of greenhouse gas emissions — the highest in the whole chemical industry.Now, a team of researchers at MIT has developed an innovative way of making ammonia without the usual fossil-fuel-powered chemical plants that require high heat and pressure. Instead, they have found a way to use the Earth itself as a geochemical reactor, producing ammonia underground. The processes uses Earth’s naturally occurring heat and pressure, provided free of charge and free of emissions, as well as the reactivity of minerals already present in the ground.The trick the team devised is to inject water underground, into an area of iron-rich subsurface rock. The water carries with it a source of nitrogen and particles of a metal catalyst, allowing the water to react with the iron to generate clean hydrogen, which in turn reacts with the nitrogen to make ammonia. A second well is then used to pump that ammonia up to the surface.The process, which has been demonstrated in the lab but not yet in a natural setting, is described today in the journal Joule. The paper’s co-authors are MIT professors of materials science and engineering Iwnetim Abate and Ju Li, graduate student Yifan Gao, and five others at MIT.“When I first produced ammonia from rock in the lab, I was so excited,” Gao recalls. “I realized this represented an entirely new and never-reported approach to ammonia synthesis.’”The standard method for making ammonia is called the Haber-Bosch process, which was developed in Germany in the early 20th century to replace natural sources of nitrogen fertilizer such as mined deposits of bat guano, which were becoming depleted. But the Haber-Bosch process is very energy intensive: It requires temperatures of 400 degrees Celsius and pressures of 200 atmospheres, and this means it needs huge installations in order to be efficient. Some areas of the world, such as sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, have few or no such plants in operation.  As a result, the shortage or extremely high cost of fertilizer in these regions has limited their agricultural production.The Haber-Bosch process “is good. It works,” Abate says. “Without it, we wouldn’t have been able to feed 2 out of the total 8 billion people in the world right now, he says, referring to the portion of the world’s population whose food is grown with ammonia-based fertilizers. But because of the emissions and energy demands, a better process is needed, he says.Burning fuel to generate heat is responsible for about 20 percent of the greenhouse gases emitted from plants using the Haber-Bosch process. Making hydrogen accounts for the remaining 80 percent.  But ammonia, the molecule NH3, is made up only of nitrogen and hydrogen. There’s no carbon in the formula, so where do the carbon emissions come from? The standard way of producing the needed hydrogen is by processing methane gas with steam, breaking down the gas into pure hydrogen, which gets used, and carbon dioxide gas that gets released into the air.Other processes exist for making low- or no-emissions hydrogen, such as by using solar or wind-generated electricity to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, but that process can be expensive. That’s why Abate and his team worked on developing a system to produce what they call geological hydrogen. Some places in the world, including some in Africa, have been found to naturally generate hydrogen underground through chemical reactions between water and iron-rich rocks. These pockets of naturally occurring hydrogen can be mined, just like natural methane reservoirs, but the extent and locations of such deposits are still relatively unexplored.Abate realized this process could be created or enhanced by pumping water, laced with copper and nickel catalyst particles to speed up the process, into the ground in places where such iron-rich rocks were already present. “We can use the Earth as a factory to produce clean flows of hydrogen,” he says.He recalls thinking about the problem of the emissions from hydrogen production for ammonia: “The ‘aha!’ moment for me was thinking, how about we link this process of geological hydrogen production with the process of making Haber-Bosch ammonia?”That would solve the biggest problem of the underground hydrogen production process, which is how to capture and store the gas once it’s produced. Hydrogen is a very tiny molecule — the smallest of them all — and hard to contain. But by implementing the entire Haber-Bosch process underground, the only material that would need to be sent to the surface would be the ammonia itself, which is easy to capture, store, and transport.The only extra ingredient needed to complete the process was the addition of a source of nitrogen, such as nitrate or nitrogen gas, into the water-catalyst mixture being injected into the ground. Then, as the hydrogen gets released from water molecules after interacting with the iron-rich rocks, it can immediately bond with the nitrogen atoms also carried in the water, with the deep underground environment providing the high temperatures and pressures required by the Haber-Bosch process. A second well near the injection well then pumps the ammonia out and into tanks on the surface.“We call this geological ammonia,” Abate says, “because we are using subsurface temperature, pressure, chemistry, and geologically existing rocks to produce ammonia directly.”Whereas transporting hydrogen requires expensive equipment to cool and liquefy it, and virtually no pipelines exist for its transport (except near oil refinery sites), transporting ammonia is easier and cheaper. It’s about one-sixth the cost of transporting hydrogen, and there are already more than 5,000 miles of ammonia pipelines and 10,000 terminals in place in the U.S. alone. What’s more, Abate explains, ammonia, unlike hydrogen, already has a substantial commercial market in place, with production volume projected to grow by two to three times by 2050, as it is used not only for fertilizer but also as feedstock for a wide variety of chemical processes.For example, ammonia can be burned directly in gas turbines, engines, and industrial furnaces, providing a carbon-free alternative to fossil fuels. It is being explored for maritime shipping and aviation as an alternative fuel, and as a possible space propellant.Another upside to geological ammonia is that untreated wastewater, including agricultural runoff, which tends to be rich in nitrogen already, could serve as the water source and be treated in the process. “We can tackle the problem of treating wastewater, while also making something of value out of this waste,” Abate says.Gao adds that this process “involves no direct carbon emissions, presenting a potential pathway to reduce global CO2 emissions by up to 1 percent.” To arrive at this point, he says, the team “overcame numerous challenges and learned from many failed attempts. For example, we tested a wide range of conditions and catalysts before identifying the most effective one.”The project was seed-funded under a flagship project of MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges program, the Center for the Electrification and Decarbonization of Industry. Professor Yet-Ming Chiang, co-director of the center, says “I don’t think there’s been any previous example of deliberately using the Earth as a chemical reactor. That’s one of the key novel points of this approach.”  Chiang emphasizes that even though it is a geological process, it happens very fast, not on geological timescales. “The reaction is fundamentally over in a matter of hours,” he says. “The reaction is so fast that this answers one of the key questions: Do you have to wait for geological times? And the answer is absolutely no.”Professor Elsa Olivetti, a mission director of the newly established Climate Project at MIT, says, “The creative thinking by this team is invaluable to MIT’s ability to have impact at scale. Coupling these exciting results with, for example, advanced understanding of the geology surrounding hydrogen accumulations represent the whole-of-Institute efforts the Climate Project aims to support.”“This is a significant breakthrough for the future of sustainable development,” says Geoffrey Ellis, a geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, who was not associated with this work. He adds, “While there is clearly more work that needs to be done to validate this at the pilot stage and to get this to the commercial scale, the concept that has been demonstrated is truly transformative.  The approach of engineering a system to optimize the natural process of nitrate reduction by Fe2+ is ingenious and will likely lead to further innovations along these lines.”The initial work on the process has been done in the laboratory, so the next step will be to prove the process using a real underground site. “We think that kind of experiment can be done within the next one to two years,” Abate says. This could open doors to using a similar approach for other chemical production processes, he adds.The team has applied for a patent and aims to work towards bringing the process to market.“Moving forward,” Gao says, “our focus will be on optimizing the process conditions and scaling up tests, with the goal of enabling practical applications for geological ammonia in the near future.”The research team also included Ming Lei, Bachu Sravan Kumar, Hugh Smith, Seok Hee Han, and Lokesh Sangabattula, all at MIT. Additional funding was provided by the National Science Foundation and was carried out, in part, through the use of MIT.nano facilities. More