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      Manufacturing a cleaner future

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      Manufacturing had a big summer. The CHIPS and Science Act, signed into law in August, represents a massive investment in U.S. domestic manufacturing. The act aims to drastically expand the U.S. semiconductor industry, strengthen supply chains, and invest in R&D for new technological breakthroughs. According to John Hart, professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity at MIT, the CHIPS Act is just the latest example of significantly increased interest in manufacturing in recent years.

      “You have multiple forces working together: reflections from the pandemic’s impact on supply chains, the geopolitical situation around the world, and the urgency and importance of sustainability,” says Hart. “This has now aligned incentives among government, industry, and the investment community to accelerate innovation in manufacturing and industrial technology.”

      Hand-in-hand with this increased focus on manufacturing is a need to prioritize sustainability.

      Roughly one-quarter of greenhouse gas emissions came from industry and manufacturing in 2020. Factories and plants can also deplete local water reserves and generate vast amounts of waste, some of which can be toxic.

      To address these issues and drive the transition to a low-carbon economy, new products and industrial processes must be developed alongside sustainable manufacturing technologies. Hart sees mechanical engineers as playing a crucial role in this transition.

      “Mechanical engineers can uniquely solve critical problems that require next-generation hardware technologies, and know how to bring their solutions to scale,” says Hart.

      Several fast-growing companies founded by faculty and alumni from MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering offer solutions for manufacturing’s environmental problem, paving the path for a more sustainable future.

      Gradiant: Cleantech water solutions

      Manufacturing requires water, and lots of it. A medium-sized semiconductor fabrication plant uses upward of 10 million gallons of water a day. In a world increasingly plagued by droughts, this dependence on water poses a major challenge.

      Gradiant offers a solution to this water problem. Co-founded by Anurag Bajpayee SM ’08, PhD ’12 and Prakash Govindan PhD ’12, the company is a pioneer in sustainable — or “cleantech” — water projects.

      As doctoral students in the Rohsenow Kendall Heat Transfer Laboratory, Bajpayee and Govindan shared a pragmatism and penchant for action. They both worked on desalination research — Bajpayee with Professor Gang Chen and Govindan with Professor John Lienhard.

      Inspired by a childhood spent during a severe drought in Chennai, India, Govindan developed for his PhD a humidification-dehumidification technology that mimicked natural rainfall cycles. It was with this piece of technology, which they named Carrier Gas Extraction (CGE), that the duo founded Gradiant in 2013.

      The key to CGE lies in a proprietary algorithm that accounts for variability in the quality and quantity in wastewater feed. At the heart of the algorithm is a nondimensional number, which Govindan proposes one day be called the “Lienhard Number,” after his doctoral advisor.

      “When the water quality varies in the system, our technology automatically sends a signal to motors within the plant to adjust the flow rates to bring back the nondimensional number to a value of one. Once it’s brought back to a value of one, you’re running in optimal condition,” explains Govindan, who serves as chief operating officer of Gradiant.

      This system can treat and clean the wastewater produced by a manufacturing plant for reuse, ultimately conserving millions of gallons of water each year.

      As the company has grown, the Gradiant team has added new technologies to their arsenal, including Selective Contaminant Extraction, a cost-efficient method that removes only specific contaminants, and a brine-concentration method called Counter-Flow Reverse Osmosis. They now offer a full technology stack of water and wastewater treatment solutions to clients in industries including pharmaceuticals, energy, mining, food and beverage, and the ever-growing semiconductor industry.

      “We are an end-to-end water solutions provider. We have a portfolio of proprietary technologies and will pick and choose from our ‘quiver’ depending on a customer’s needs,” says Bajpayee, who serves as CEO of Gradiant. “Customers look at us as their water partner. We can take care of their water problem end-to-end so they can focus on their core business.”

      Gradiant has seen explosive growth over the past decade. With 450 water and wastewater treatment plants built to date, they treat the equivalent of 5 million households’ worth of water each day. Recent acquisitions saw their total employees rise to above 500.

      The diversity of Gradiant’s solutions is reflected in their clients, who include Pfizer, AB InBev, and Coca-Cola. They also count semiconductor giants like Micron Technology, GlobalFoundries, Intel, and TSMC among their customers.

      “Over the last few years, we have really developed our capabilities and reputation serving semiconductor wastewater and semiconductor ultrapure water,” says Bajpayee.

      Semiconductor manufacturers require ultrapure water for fabrication. Unlike drinking water, which has a total dissolved solids range in the parts per million, water used to manufacture microchips has a range in the parts per billion or quadrillion.

      Currently, the average recycling rate at semiconductor fabrication plants — or fabs — in Singapore is only 43 percent. Using Gradiant’s technologies, these fabs can recycle 98-99 percent of the 10 million gallons of water they require daily. This reused water is pure enough to be put back into the manufacturing process.

      “What we’ve done is eliminated the discharge of this contaminated water and nearly eliminated the dependence of the semiconductor fab on the public water supply,” adds Bajpayee.

      With new regulations being introduced, pressure is increasing for fabs to improve their water use, making sustainability even more important to brand owners and their stakeholders.

      As the domestic semiconductor industry expands in light of the CHIPS and Science Act, Gradiant sees an opportunity to bring their semiconductor water treatment technologies to more factories in the United States.

      Via Separations: Efficient chemical filtration

      Like Bajpayee and Govindan, Shreya Dave ’09, SM ’12, PhD ’16 focused on desalination for her doctoral thesis. Under the guidance of her advisor Jeffrey Grossman, professor of materials science and engineering, Dave built a membrane that could enable more efficient and cheaper desalination.

      A thorough cost and market analysis brought Dave to the conclusion that the desalination membrane she developed would not make it to commercialization.

      “The current technologies are just really good at what they do. They’re low-cost, mass produced, and they worked. There was no room in the market for our technology,” says Dave.

      Shortly after defending her thesis, she read a commentary article in the journal Nature that changed everything. The article outlined a problem. Chemical separations that are central to many manufacturing processes require a huge amount of energy. Industry needed more efficient and cheaper membranes. Dave thought she might have a solution.

      After determining there was an economic opportunity, Dave, Grossman, and Brent Keller PhD ’16 founded Via Separations in 2017. Shortly thereafter, they were chosen as one of the first companies to receive funding from MIT’s venture firm, The Engine.

      Currently, industrial filtration is done by heating chemicals at very high temperatures to separate compounds. Dave likens it to making pasta by boiling all of the water off until it evaporates and all you are left with is the pasta noodles. In manufacturing, this method of chemical separation is extremely energy-intensive and inefficient.

      Via Separations has created the chemical equivalent of a “pasta strainer.” Rather than using heat to separate, their membranes “strain” chemical compounds. This method of chemical filtration uses 90 percent less energy than standard methods.

      While most membranes are made of polymers, Via Separations’ membranes are made with graphene oxide, which can withstand high temperatures and harsh conditions. The membrane is calibrated to the customer’s needs by altering the pore size and tuning the surface chemistry.

      Currently, Dave and her team are focusing on the pulp and paper industry as their beachhead market. They have developed a system that makes the recovery of a substance known as “black liquor” more energy efficient.

      “When tree becomes paper, only one-third of the biomass is used for the paper. Currently the most valuable use for the remaining two-thirds not needed for paper is to take it from a pretty dilute stream to a pretty concentrated stream using evaporators by boiling off the water,” says Dave.

      This black liquor is then burned. Most of the resulting energy is used to power the filtration process.

      “This closed-loop system accounts for an enormous amount of energy consumption in the U.S. We can make that process 84 percent more efficient by putting the ‘pasta strainer’ in front of the boiler,” adds Dave.

      VulcanForms: Additive manufacturing at industrial scale

      The first semester John Hart taught at MIT was a fruitful one. He taught a course on 3D printing, broadly known as additive manufacturing (AM). While it wasn’t his main research focus at the time, he found the topic fascinating. So did many of the students in the class, including Martin Feldmann MEng ’14.

      After graduating with his MEng in advanced manufacturing, Feldmann joined Hart’s research group full time. There, they bonded over their shared interest in AM. They saw an opportunity to innovate with an established metal AM technology, known as laser powder bed fusion, and came up with a concept to realize metal AM at an industrial scale.

      The pair co-founded VulcanForms in 2015.

      “We have developed a machine architecture for metal AM that can build parts with exceptional quality and productivity,” says Hart. “And, we have integrated our machines in a fully digital production system, combining AM, postprocessing, and precision machining.”

      Unlike other companies that sell 3D printers for others to produce parts, VulcanForms makes and sells parts for their customers using their fleet of industrial machines. VulcanForms has grown to nearly 400 employees. Last year, the team opened their first production factory, known as “VulcanOne,” in Devens, Massachusetts.

      The quality and precision with which VulcanForms produces parts is critical for products like medical implants, heat exchangers, and aircraft engines. Their machines can print layers of metal thinner than a human hair.

      “We’re producing components that are difficult, or in some cases impossible to manufacture otherwise,” adds Hart, who sits on the company’s board of directors.

      The technologies developed at VulcanForms may help lead to a more sustainable way to manufacture parts and products, both directly through the additive process and indirectly through more efficient, agile supply chains.

      One way that VulcanForms, and AM in general, promotes sustainability is through material savings.

      Many of the materials VulcanForms uses, such as titanium alloys, require a great deal of energy to produce. When titanium parts are 3D-printed, substantially less of the material is used than in a traditional machining process. This material efficiency is where Hart sees AM making a large impact in terms of energy savings.

      Hart also points out that AM can accelerate innovation in clean energy technologies, ranging from more efficient jet engines to future fusion reactors.

      “Companies seeking to de-risk and scale clean energy technologies require know-how and access to advanced manufacturing capability, and industrial additive manufacturing is transformative in this regard,” Hart adds.

      LiquiGlide: Reducing waste by removing friction

      There is an unlikely culprit when it comes to waste in manufacturing and consumer products: friction. Kripa Varanasi, professor of mechanical engineering, and the team at LiquiGlide are on a mission to create a frictionless future, and substantially reduce waste in the process.

      Founded in 2012 by Varanasi and alum David Smith SM ’11, LiquiGlide designs custom coatings that enable liquids to “glide” on surfaces. Every last drop of a product can be used, whether it’s being squeezed out of a tube of toothpaste or drained from a 500-liter tank at a manufacturing plant. Making containers frictionless substantially minimizes wasted product, and eliminates the need to clean a container before recycling or reusing.

      Since launching, the company has found great success in consumer products. Customer Colgate utilized LiquiGlide’s technologies in the design of the Colgate Elixir toothpaste bottle, which has been honored with several industry awards for design. In a collaboration with world- renowned designer Yves Béhar, LiquiGlide is applying their technology to beauty and personal care product packaging. Meanwhile, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted them a Device Master Filing, opening up opportunities for the technology to be used in medical devices, drug delivery, and biopharmaceuticals.

      In 2016, the company developed a system to make manufacturing containers frictionless. Called CleanTanX, the technology is used to treat the surfaces of tanks, funnels, and hoppers, preventing materials from sticking to the side. The system can reduce material waste by up to 99 percent.

      “This could really change the game. It saves wasted product, reduces wastewater generated from cleaning tanks, and can help make the manufacturing process zero-waste,” says Varanasi, who serves as chair at LiquiGlide.

      LiquiGlide works by creating a coating made of a textured solid and liquid lubricant on the container surface. When applied to a container, the lubricant remains infused within the texture. Capillary forces stabilize and allow the liquid to spread on the surface, creating a continuously lubricated surface that any viscous material can slide right down. The company uses a thermodynamic algorithm to determine the combinations of safe solids and liquids depending on the product, whether it’s toothpaste or paint.

      The company has built a robotic spraying system that can treat large vats and tanks at manufacturing plants on site. In addition to saving companies millions of dollars in wasted product, LiquiGlide drastically reduces the amount of water needed to regularly clean these containers, which normally have product stuck to the sides.

      “Normally when you empty everything out of a tank, you still have residue that needs to be cleaned with a tremendous amount of water. In agrochemicals, for example, there are strict regulations about how to deal with the resulting wastewater, which is toxic. All of that can be eliminated with LiquiGlide,” says Varanasi.

      While the closure of many manufacturing facilities early in the pandemic slowed down the rollout of CleanTanX pilots at plants, things have picked up in recent months. As manufacturing ramps up both globally and domestically, Varanasi sees a growing need for LiquiGlide’s technologies, especially for liquids like semiconductor slurry.

      Companies like Gradiant, Via Separations, VulcanForms, and LiquiGlide demonstrate that an expansion in manufacturing industries does not need to come at a steep environmental cost. It is possible for manufacturing to be scaled up in a sustainable way.

      “Manufacturing has always been the backbone of what we do as mechanical engineers. At MIT in particular, there is always a drive to make manufacturing sustainable,” says Evelyn Wang, Ford Professor of Engineering and former head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. “It’s amazing to see how startups that have an origin in our department are looking at every aspect of the manufacturing process and figuring out how to improve it for the health of our planet.”

      As legislation like the CHIPS and Science Act fuels growth in manufacturing, there will be an increased need for startups and companies that develop solutions to mitigate the environmental impact, bringing us closer to a more sustainable future. More

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      Decarbonization amid global crises

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      A global pandemic. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Inflation. The first-ever serious challenge to the peaceful transfer of power in the United States.

      Forced to face a seemingly unending series of once-in-a-generation crises, how can the world continue to focus attention on goals around carbon emissions and climate change? That was the question posed by Philip R. Sharp, the former president of Resources for the Future and a former 10-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Indiana, during his MIT Energy Initiative Fall Colloquium address, entitled “The prospects for decarbonization in America: Will global and domestic crises disrupt our plans?”

      Perhaps surprisingly, Sharp sounded an optimistic note in his answer. Despite deep political divisions in the United States, he noted, Congress has passed five major pieces of legislation — under both presidents Donald Trump and Joseph Biden — aimed at accelerating decarbonization efforts. Rather than hampering movement to combat climate change, Sharp said, domestic and global crises have seemed to galvanize support, create new incentives for action, and even unify political rivals around the cause.

      “Almost everybody is dealing with, to some degree, the absolutely profound, churning events that we are amidst now. Most of them are unexpected, and therefore [we’re] not prepared for [them], and they have had a profound shaking of our thinking,” Sharp said. “The conventional wisdom has not held up in almost all of these areas, and therefore it makes it much more difficult for us to think we know how to predict an uncertain future, and [it causes us to] question our own ability as a nation — or anywhere — to actually take on these challenges. And obviously, climate change is one of the most important.”

      However, Sharp continued, these challenges have, in some instances, spurred action. The war in Ukraine, he noted, has upset European energy markets, but it has also highlighted the importance of countries achieving a more energy-independent posture through renewables. “In America,” he added, “we’ve actually seen absolutely stunning … behavior by the United States Congress, of all places.”

      “What we’ve witnessed is, [Congress] put out incredible … sums of money under the previous administration, and then under this administration, to deal with the Covid crisis,” Sharp added later in his talk. “And then the United States government came together — red and blue — to support the Ukrainians against Russia. It saddens me to say, it seems to take a Russian invasion or the Chinese probing us economically to get us moving. But we are moving, and these things are happening.”

      Congressional action

      Sharp cautioned against getting “caught up” in the familiar viewpoint that Congress, in its current incarnation, is fundamentally incapable of passing meaningful legislation. He pointed, in particular, to the passage of five laws over the previous two years:

      The 2020 Energy Act, which has been characterized as a “down payment on fighting climate change.”
      The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (sometimes called the “bipartisan infrastructure bill”), which calls for investments in passenger rail, electric vehicle infrastructure, electric school buses, and other clean-energy measures;
      The CHIPS and Science Act, a $280 billion effort to revitalize the American semiconductor industry, which some analysts say could direct roughly one-quarter of its funding toward accelerating zero-carbon industries and conducting climate research;
      The Inflation Reduction Act (called by some “the largest climate legislation in U.S. history”), which includes tax credits, incentives, and other provisions to help private companies tackle climate change, increase investments in renewable energy, and enhance energy efficiency; and
      The Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, ratified by the Senate to little fanfare in September, under which the United States agreed to reduce the consumption and production of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs).
      “It is a big deal,” Sharp said of the dramatic increase in federal climate action. “It is very significant actions that are being taken — more than what we would expect, or I would expect, out of the Congress at any one time.”

      Along with the many billions of dollars of climate-related investments included in the legislation, Sharp said, these new laws will have a number of positive “spillover” effects.

      “This enables state governments, in their policies, to be more aggressive,” Sharp said. “Why? Because it makes it cheaper for some of the investments that they will try to force within their state.” Another “pretty obvious” spillover effect, Sharp said, is that the new laws will enhance U.S. credibility in international negotiations. Finally, he said, these public investments will make the U.S. economy more competitive in international markets for clean-energy technology — particularly as the United States seeks to compete against China in the space.

      “[Competition with China] has become a motivator in American politics, like it or not,” Sharp said. “There is no question that it is causing and bringing together [politicians] across blue [states] and red [states].”

      Holding onto progress

      Even in an uncertain political climate in which Democrats and Republicans seem unable to agree on basic facts, recent funding commitments are likely to survive, no matter which party controls Congress and the presidency, Sharp said. That’s because most of the legislation relies on broadly popular “carrots” that reward investments in decarbonization, rather than less popular “sticks” that create new restrictions or punishments for companies that fail to decarbonize.

      “Politically, the impact of this is very significant,” Sharp said. “It is so much easier in politics to give away tax [credits] than it is to penalize or put requirements onto people. The fact is that these tax credits are more likely to be politically sustained than other forms of government intervention. That, at least, has been the history.”

      Sharp stressed the importance of what he called “civil society” — institutions such as universities, nonprofits, churches, and other organizations that are apart from government and business — in promoting decarbonization efforts. “[Those groups] can act highly independently, and therefore, they can drive for things that others are not willing to do. Now this does not always work to good purposes. Partly, this diversity and this decentralization in civil society … led to deniers and others being able to stop some climate action. But now my view is, this is starting to all move in the right direction, in a very dynamic and a very important way. What we have seen over the last few years is a big uptick in philanthropy related to climate.”

      Looking ahead

      Sharp’s optimism even extended to the role of social media. He suggested that the “Wild West” era of social platforms may be ending, pointing to the celebrities who have recently lost valuable business partnerships for spreading hate speech and disinformation. “We’re now a lot more alert to the dangers,” he said.

      Some in the audience questioned Sharp about specific paths toward decarbonization, but Sharp said that progress will require a number of disparate approaches — some of which will inevitably have a greater impact than others. “The current policy, and the policy embedded in this [new] legislation … is all about doing both,” he said. “It’s all about advancing [current] technologies into the marketplace, and at the same time driving for breakthroughs.”

      Above all, Sharp stressed the need for continued collective action around climate change. “The fact is, we’re all contributors to some degree,” he said. “But we also all can do something. In my view, this is clearly not a time for hand-wringing. This is a time for action. People have to roll up their sleeves, and go to work, and not roll them down anytime soon.” More

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      A healthy wind

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      Nearly 10 percent of today’s electricity in the United States comes from wind power. The renewable energy source benefits climate, air quality, and public health by displacing emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants that would otherwise be produced by fossil-fuel-based power plants.

      A new MIT study finds that the health benefits associated with wind power could more than quadruple if operators prioritized turning down output from the most polluting fossil-fuel-based power plants when energy from wind is available.

      In the study, published today in Science Advances, researchers analyzed the hourly activity of wind turbines, as well as the reported emissions from every fossil-fuel-based power plant in the country, between the years 2011 and 2017. They traced emissions across the country and mapped the pollutants to affected demographic populations. They then calculated the regional air quality and associated health costs to each community.

      The researchers found that in 2014, wind power that was associated with state-level policies improved air quality overall, resulting in $2 billion in health benefits across the country. However, only roughly 30 percent of these health benefits reached disadvantaged communities.

      The team further found that if the electricity industry were to reduce the output of the most polluting fossil-fuel-based power plants, rather than the most cost-saving plants, in times of wind-generated power, the overall health benefits could quadruple to $8.4 billion nationwide. However, the results would have a similar demographic breakdown.

      “We found that prioritizing health is a great way to maximize benefits in a widespread way across the U.S., which is a very positive thing. But it suggests it’s not going to address disparities,” says study co-author Noelle Selin, a professor in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT. “In order to address air pollution disparities, you can’t just focus on the electricity sector or renewables and count on the overall air pollution benefits addressing these real and persistent racial and ethnic disparities. You’ll need to look at other air pollution sources, as well as the underlying systemic factors that determine where plants are sited and where people live.”

      Selin’s co-authors are lead author and former MIT graduate student Minghao Qiu PhD ’21, now at Stanford University, and Corwin Zigler at the University of Texas at Austin.

      Turn-down service

      In their new study, the team looked for patterns between periods of wind power generation and the activity of fossil-fuel-based power plants, to see how regional electricity markets adjusted the output of power plants in response to influxes of renewable energy.

      “One of the technical challenges, and the contribution of this work, is trying to identify which are the power plants that respond to this increasing wind power,” Qiu notes.

      To do so, the researchers compared two historical datasets from the period between 2011 and 2017: an hour-by-hour record of energy output of wind turbines across the country, and a detailed record of emissions measurements from every fossil-fuel-based power plant in the U.S. The datasets covered each of seven major regional electricity markets, each market providing energy to one or multiple states.

      “California and New York are each their own market, whereas the New England market covers around seven states, and the Midwest covers more,” Qiu explains. “We also cover about 95 percent of all the wind power in the U.S.”

      In general, they observed that, in times when wind power was available, markets adjusted by essentially scaling back the power output of natural gas and sub-bituminous coal-fired power plants. They noted that the plants that were turned down were likely chosen for cost-saving reasons, as certain plants were less costly to turn down than others.

      The team then used a sophisticated atmospheric chemistry model to simulate the wind patterns and chemical transport of emissions across the country, and determined where and at what concentrations the emissions generated fine particulates and ozone — two pollutants that are known to damage air quality and human health. Finally, the researchers mapped the general demographic populations across the country, based on U.S. census data, and applied a standard epidemiological approach to calculate a population’s health cost as a result of their pollution exposure.

      This analysis revealed that, in the year 2014, a general cost-saving approach to displacing fossil-fuel-based energy in times of wind energy resulted in $2 billion in health benefits, or savings, across the country. A smaller share of these benefits went to disadvantaged populations, such as communities of color and low-income communities, though this disparity varied by state.

      “It’s a more complex story than we initially thought,” Qiu says. “Certain population groups are exposed to a higher level of air pollution, and those would be low-income people and racial minority groups. What we see is, developing wind power could reduce this gap in certain states but further increase it in other states, depending on which fossil-fuel plants are displaced.”

      Tweaking power

      The researchers then examined how the pattern of emissions and the associated health benefits would change if they prioritized turning down different fossil-fuel-based plants in times of wind-generated power. They tweaked the emissions data to reflect several alternative scenarios: one in which the most health-damaging, polluting power plants are turned down first; and two other scenarios in which plants producing the most sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide respectively, are first to reduce their output.

      They found that while each scenario increased health benefits overall, and the first scenario in particular could quadruple health benefits, the original disparity persisted: Communities of color and low-income communities still experienced smaller health benefits than more well-off communities.

      “We got to the end of the road and said, there’s no way we can address this disparity by being smarter in deciding which plants to displace,” Selin says.

      Nevertheless, the study can help identify ways to improve the health of the general population, says Julian Marshall, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of Washington.

      “The detailed information provided by the scenarios in this paper can offer a roadmap to electricity-grid operators and to state air-quality regulators regarding which power plants are highly damaging to human health and also are likely to noticeably reduce emissions if wind-generated electricity increases,” says Marshall, who was not involved in the study.

      “One of the things that makes me optimistic about this area is, there’s a lot more attention to environmental justice and equity issues,” Selin concludes. “Our role is to figure out the strategies that are most impactful in addressing those challenges.”

      This work was supported, in part, by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and by the National Institutes of Health. More

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      A breakthrough on “loss and damage,” but also disappointment, at UN climate conference

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      As the 2022 United Nations climate change conference, known as COP27, stretched into its final hours on Saturday, Nov. 19, it was uncertain what kind of agreement might emerge from two weeks of intensive international negotiations.

      In the end, COP27 produced mixed results: on the one hand, a historic agreement for wealthy countries to compensate low-income countries for “loss and damage,” but on the other, limited progress on new plans for reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet.

      “We need to drastically reduce emissions now — and this is an issue this COP did not address,” said U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres in a statement at the conclusion of COP27. “A fund for loss and damage is essential — but it’s not an answer if the climate crisis washes a small island state off the map — or turns an entire African country to desert.”

      Throughout the two weeks of the conference, a delegation of MIT students, faculty, and staff was at the Sharm El-Sheikh International Convention Center to observe the negotiations, conduct and share research, participate in panel discussions, and forge new connections with researchers, policymakers, and advocates from around the world.

      Loss and damage

      A key issue coming in to COP27 (COP stands for “conference of the parties” to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, held for the 27th time) was loss and damage: a term used by the U.N. to refer to harms caused by climate change — either through acute catastrophes like extreme weather events or slower-moving impacts like sea level rise — to which communities and countries are unable to adapt. 

      Ultimately, a deal on loss and damage proved to be COP27’s most prominent accomplishment. Negotiators reached an eleventh-hour agreement to “establish new funding arrangements for assisting developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change.” 

      “Providing financial assistance to developing countries so they can better respond to climate-related loss and damage is not only a moral issue, but also a pragmatic one,” said Michael Mehling, deputy director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, who attended COP27 and participated in side events. “Future emissions growth will be squarely centered in the developing world, and offering support through different channels is key to building the trust needed for more robust global cooperation on mitigation.”

      Youssef Shaker, a graduate student in the MIT Technology and Policy Program and a research assistant with the MIT Energy Initiative, attended the second week of the conference, where he followed the negotiations over loss and damage closely. 

      “While the creation of a fund is certainly an achievement,” Shaker said, “significant questions remain to be answered, such as the size of the funding available as well as which countries receive access to it.” A loss-and-damage fund that is not adequately funded, Shaker noted, “would not be an impactful outcome.” 

      The agreement on loss and damage created a new committee, made up of 24 country representatives, to “operationalize” the new funding arrangements, including identifying funding sources. The committee is tasked with delivering a set of recommendations at COP28, which will take place next year in Dubai.

      Advising the U.N. on net zero

      Though the decisions reached at COP27 did not include major new commitments on reducing emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels, the transition to a clean global energy system was nevertheless a key topic of conversation throughout the conference.

      The Council of Engineers for the Energy Transition (CEET), an independent, international body of engineers and energy systems experts formed to provide advice to the U.N. on achieving net-zero emissions globally by 2050, convened for the first time at COP27. Jessika Trancik, a professor in the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and a member of CEET, spoke on a U.N.-sponsored panel on solutions for the transition to clean energy.

      Trancik noted that the energy transition will look different in different regions of the world. “As engineers, we need to understand those local contexts and design solutions around those local contexts — that’s absolutely essential to support a rapid and equitable energy transition.”

      At the same time, Trancik noted that there is now a set of “low-cost, ready-to-scale tools” available to every region — tools that resulted from a globally competitive process of innovation, stimulated by public policies in different countries, that dramatically drove down the costs of technologies like solar energy and lithium-ion batteries. The key, Trancik said, is for regional transition strategies to “tap into global processes of innovation.”

      Reinventing climate adaptation

      Elfatih Eltahir, the H. M. King Bhumibol Professor of Hydrology and Climate, traveled to COP27 to present plans for the Jameel Observatory Climate Resilience Early Warning System (CREWSnet), one of the five projects selected in April 2022 as a flagship in MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges initiative. CREWSnet focuses on climate adaptation, the term for adapting to climate impacts that are unavoidable.

      The aim of CREWSnet, Eltahir told the audience during a panel discussion, is “nothing short of reinventing the process of climate change adaptation,” so that it is proactive rather than reactive; community-led; data-driven and evidence-based; and so that it integrates different climate risks, from heat waves to sea level rise, rather than treating them individually.

      “However, it’s easy to talk about these changes,” said Eltahir. “The real challenge, which we are now just launching and engaging in, is to demonstrate that on the ground.” Eltahir said that early demonstrations will happen in a couple of key locations, including southwest Bangladesh, where multiple climate risks — rising sea levels, increasing soil salinity, and intensifying heat waves and cyclones — are combining to threaten the area’s agricultural production.

      Building on COP26

      Some members of MIT’s delegation attended COP27 to advance efforts that had been formally announced at last year’s U.N. climate conference, COP26, in Glasgow, Scotland.

      At an official U.N. side event co-organized by MIT on Nov. 11, Greg Sixt, the director of the Food and Climate Systems Transformation (FACT) Alliance led by the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab, provided an update on the alliance’s work since its launch at COP26.

      Food systems are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions — and are increasingly vulnerable to climate impacts. The FACT Alliance works to better connect researchers to farmers, food businesses, policymakers, and other food systems stakeholders to make food systems (which include food production, consumption, and waste) more sustainable and resilient. 

      Sixt told the audience that the FACT Alliance now counts over 20 research and stakeholder institutions around the world among its members, but also collaborates with other institutions in an “open network model” to advance work in key areas — such as a new research project exploring how climate scenarios could affect global food supply chains.

      Marcela Angel, research program director for the Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI), helped convene a meeting at COP27 of the Afro-InterAmerican Forum on Climate Change, which also launched at COP26. The forum works with Afro-descendant leaders across the Americas to address significant environmental issues, including climate risks and biodiversity loss. 

      At the event — convened with the Colombian government and the nonprofit Conservation International — ESI brought together leaders from six countries in the Americas and presented recent work that estimates that there are over 178 million individuals who identify as Afro-descendant living in the Americas, in lands of global environmental importance. 

      “There is a significant overlap between biodiversity hot spots, protected areas, and areas of high Afro-descendant presence,” said Angel. “But the role and climate contributions of these communities is understudied, and often made invisible.”    

      Limiting methane emissions

      Methane is a short-lived but potent greenhouse gas: When released into the atmosphere, it immediately traps about 120 times more heat than carbon dioxide does. More than 150 countries have now signed the Global Methane Pledge, launched at COP26, which aims to reduce methane emissions by at least 30 percent by 2030 compared to 2020 levels.

      Sergey Paltsev, the deputy director of the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and a senior research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative, gave the keynote address at a Nov. 17 event on methane, where he noted the importance of methane reductions from the oil and gas sector to meeting the 2030 goal.

      “The oil and gas sector is where methane emissions reductions could be achieved the fastest,” said Paltsev. “We also need to employ an integrated approach to address methane emissions in all sectors and all regions of the world because methane emissions reductions provide a near-term pathway to avoiding dangerous tipping points in the global climate system.”

      “Keep fighting relentlessly”

      Arina Khotimsky, a senior majoring in materials science and engineering and a co-president of the MIT Energy and Climate Club, attended the first week of COP27. She reflected on the experience in a social media post after returning home. 

      “COP will always have its haters. Is there greenwashing? Of course! Is everyone who should have a say in this process in the room? Not even close,” wrote Khotimsky. “So what does it take for COP to matter? It takes everyone who attended to not only put ‘climate’ on front-page news for two weeks, but to return home and keep fighting relentlessly against climate change. I know that I will.” More

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      Reversing the charge

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      Owners of electric vehicles (EVs) are accustomed to plugging into charging stations at home and at work and filling up their batteries with electricity from the power grid. But someday soon, when these drivers plug in, their cars will also have the capacity to reverse the flow and send electrons back to the grid. As the number of EVs climbs, the fleet’s batteries could serve as a cost-effective, large-scale energy source, with potentially dramatic impacts on the energy transition, according to a new paper published by an MIT team in the journal Energy Advances.

      “At scale, vehicle-to-grid (V2G) can boost renewable energy growth, displacing the need for stationary energy storage and decreasing reliance on firm [always-on] generators, such as natural gas, that are traditionally used to balance wind and solar intermittency,” says Jim Owens, lead author and a doctoral student in the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering. Additional authors include Emre Gençer, a principal research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), and Ian Miller, a research specialist for MITEI at the time of the study.

      The group’s work is the first comprehensive, systems-based analysis of future power systems, drawing on a novel mix of computational models integrating such factors as carbon emission goals, variable renewable energy (VRE) generation, and costs of building energy storage, production, and transmission infrastructure.

      “We explored not just how EVs could provide service back to the grid — thinking of these vehicles almost like energy storage on wheels — but also the value of V2G applications to the entire energy system and if EVs could reduce the cost of decarbonizing the power system,” says Gençer. “The results were surprising; I personally didn’t believe we’d have so much potential here.”

      Displacing new infrastructure

      As the United States and other nations pursue stringent goals to limit carbon emissions, electrification of transportation has taken off, with the rate of EV adoption rapidly accelerating. (Some projections show EVs supplanting internal combustion vehicles over the next 30 years.) With the rise of emission-free driving, though, there will be increased demand for energy. “The challenge is ensuring both that there’s enough electricity to charge the vehicles and that this electricity is coming from renewable sources,” says Gençer.

      But solar and wind energy is intermittent. Without adequate backup for these sources, such as stationary energy storage facilities using lithium-ion batteries, for instance, or large-scale, natural gas- or hydrogen-fueled power plants, achieving clean energy goals will prove elusive. More vexing, costs for building the necessary new energy infrastructure runs to the hundreds of billions.

      This is precisely where V2G can play a critical, and welcome, role, the researchers reported. In their case study of a theoretical New England power system meeting strict carbon constraints, for instance, the team found that participation from just 13.9 percent of the region’s 8 million light-duty (passenger) EVs displaced 14.7 gigawatts of stationary energy storage. This added up to $700 million in savings — the anticipated costs of building new storage capacity.

      Their paper also described the role EV batteries could play at times of peak demand, such as hot summer days. “V2G technology has the ability to inject electricity back into the system to cover these episodes, so we don’t need to install or invest in additional natural gas turbines,” says Owens. “The way that EVs and V2G can influence the future of our power systems is one of the most exciting and novel aspects of our study.”

      Modeling power

      To investigate the impacts of V2G on their hypothetical New England power system, the researchers integrated their EV travel and V2G service models with two of MITEI’s existing modeling tools: the Sustainable Energy System Analysis Modeling Environment (SESAME) to project vehicle fleet and electricity demand growth, and GenX, which models the investment and operation costs of electricity generation, storage, and transmission systems. They incorporated such inputs as different EV participation rates, costs of generation for conventional and renewable power suppliers, charging infrastructure upgrades, travel demand for vehicles, changes in electricity demand, and EV battery costs.

      Their analysis found benefits from V2G applications in power systems (in terms of displacing energy storage and firm generation) at all levels of carbon emission restrictions, including one with no emissions caps at all. However, their models suggest that V2G delivers the greatest value to the power system when carbon constraints are most aggressive — at 10 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour load. Total system savings from V2G ranged from $183 million to $1,326 million, reflecting EV participation rates between 5 percent and 80 percent.

      “Our study has begun to uncover the inherent value V2G has for a future power system, demonstrating that there is a lot of money we can save that would otherwise be spent on storage and firm generation,” says Owens.

      Harnessing V2G

      For scientists seeking ways to decarbonize the economy, the vision of millions of EVs parked in garages or in office spaces and plugged into the grid for 90 percent of their operating lives proves an irresistible provocation. “There is all this storage sitting right there, a huge available capacity that will only grow, and it is wasted unless we take full advantage of it,” says Gençer.

      This is not a distant prospect. Startup companies are currently testing software that would allow two-way communication between EVs and grid operators or other entities. With the right algorithms, EVs would charge from and dispatch energy to the grid according to profiles tailored to each car owner’s needs, never depleting the battery and endangering a commute.

      “We don’t assume all vehicles will be available to send energy back to the grid at the same time, at 6 p.m. for instance, when most commuters return home in the early evening,” says Gençer. He believes that the vastly varied schedules of EV drivers will make enough battery power available to cover spikes in electricity use over an average 24-hour period. And there are other potential sources of battery power down the road, such as electric school buses that are employed only for short stints during the day and then sit idle.

      The MIT team acknowledges the challenges of V2G consumer buy-in. While EV owners relish a clean, green drive, they may not be as enthusiastic handing over access to their car’s battery to a utility or an aggregator working with power system operators. Policies and incentives would help.

      “Since you’re providing a service to the grid, much as solar panel users do, you could be paid for your participation, and paid at a premium when electricity prices are very high,” says Gençer.

      “People may not be willing to participate ’round the clock, but if we have blackout scenarios like in Texas last year, or hot-day congestion on transmission lines, maybe we can turn on these vehicles for 24 to 48 hours, sending energy back to the system,” adds Owens. “If there’s a power outage and people wave a bunch of money at you, you might be willing to talk.”

      “Basically, I think this comes back to all of us being in this together, right?” says Gençer. “As you contribute to society by giving this service to the grid, you will get the full benefit of reducing system costs, and also help to decarbonize the system faster and to a greater extent.”

      Actionable insights

      Owens, who is building his dissertation on V2G research, is now investigating the potential impact of heavy-duty electric vehicles in decarbonizing the power system. “The last-mile delivery trucks of companies like Amazon and FedEx are likely to be the earliest adopters of EVs,” Owen says. “They are appealing because they have regularly scheduled routes during the day and go back to the depot at night, which makes them very useful for providing electricity and balancing services in the power system.”

      Owens is committed to “providing insights that are actionable by system planners, operators, and to a certain extent, investors,” he says. His work might come into play in determining what kind of charging infrastructure should be built, and where.

      “Our analysis is really timely because the EV market has not yet been developed,” says Gençer. “This means we can share our insights with vehicle manufacturers and system operators — potentially influencing them to invest in V2G technologies, avoiding the costs of building utility-scale storage, and enabling the transition to a cleaner future. It’s a huge win, within our grasp.”

      The research for this study was funded by MITEI’s Future Energy Systems Center. More

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      3 Questions: Robert Stoner unpacks US climate and infrastructure laws

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      This month, the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) takes place in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, bringing together governments, experts, journalists, industry, and civil society to discuss climate action to enable countries to collectively sharply limit anthropogenic climate change. As MIT Energy Initiative Deputy Director for Science and Technology Robert Stoner attends the conference, he takes a moment to speak about the climate and infrastructure laws enacted in the last year in the United States, and about the impact these laws can have in the global energy transition.

      Q: COP27 is now underway. Can you set the scene?

      A: There’s a lot of interest among vulnerable countries about compensation for the impacts climate change has had on them, or “loss and damage,” a topic that the United States refused to address last year at COP26, for fear of opening up a floodgate and leaving U.S. taxpayers exposed to unlimited liability for our past (and future) emissions. This is a crucial issue of fairness for developed countries — and, well, of acknowledging our common humanity. But in a sense, it’s also a sideshow, and addressing it won’t prevent a climate catastrophe — we really need to focus on mitigation. With the passage of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the United States is now in a strong position to twist some arms. These laws are largely about subsidizing the deployment of low-carbon technologies — pretty much all of them. We’re going to do a lot in the United States in the next decade that will lead to dramatic cost reductions for these technologies and enable other countries with fewer resources to adopt them as well. It’s exactly the leadership role the United States has needed to assume. Now we have the opportunity to rally the rest of the world and get other countries to commit to more ambitious decarbonization goals, and to build practical programs that take advantage of the investable pathways we’re going to create for public and private actors.

      But that alone won’t get us there — money is still a huge problem, especially in emerging markets and developing countries. And I don’t think the institutions we rely on to help these countries fund infrastructure — energy and everything else — are adequately funded. Nor do these institutions have the right structures, incentives, and staffing to fund low-carbon development in these countries rapidly enough or on the necessary scale. I’m talking about the World Bank, for instance, but the other multilateral organizations have similar issues. I frankly don’t think the multilaterals can be reformed or sufficiently redirected on a short enough time frame. We definitely need new leadership for these organizations, and I think we probably need to quickly establish new multilaterals with new people, more money, and a clarity of purpose that is likely beyond what can be achieved incrementally. I don’t know if this is going to be an active public discussion at COP27, but I hope it takes place somewhere soon. Given the strong role our government plays in financing and selecting the leadership of these institutions, perhaps this is another opportunity for the United States to demonstrate courage and leadership.

      Q: What “investable pathways” are you talking about?

      A: Well, the pathways we’re implicitly trying to pursue with the Infrastructure Act and IRA are pretty clear, and I’ll come back to them. But first let me describe the landscape: There are three main sources of demand for energy in the economy — industry (meaning chemical production, fuel for electricity generation, cement production, materials and manufacturing, and so on), transportation (cars, trucks, ships, planes, and trains), and buildings (for heating and cooling, mostly). That’s about it, and these three sectors account for 75 percent of our total greenhouse gas emissions. So the pathways are all about how to decarbonize these three end-use sectors. There are a lot of technologies — some that exist, some that don’t — that will have to be brought to bear. And so it can be a little overwhelming to try to imagine how it will all transpire, but it’s pretty clear at a high level what our options are:

      First, generate a lot of low-carbon electricity and electrify as many industrial processes, vehicles, and building heating systems as we can.
      Second, develop and deploy at massive scale technologies that can capture carbon dioxide from smokestacks, or the air, and put it somewhere that it can never escape from — in other words, carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS.
      Third, for end uses like aviation that really need to use fuels because of their extraordinary energy density, develop low-carbon alternatives to fossil fuels.
      And fourth is energy efficiency across the board — but I don’t really count that as a separate pathway per se.
      So, by “investable pathways” I mean specific ways to pursue these options that will attract investors. What the Infrastructure Act and the IRA do is deploy carrots (in the form of subsidies) in a variety of ways to close the gap between what it costs to deploy technologies like CCS that aren’t yet at a commercial stage because they’re immature, and what energy markets will tolerate. A similar situation occurs for low-carbon production of hydrogen, one of the leading low-carbon fuel candidates. We can make it by splitting water with electricity (electrolysis), but that costs too much with present-day technology; or we can make it more cheaply by separating it from methane (which is what natural gas mainly is), but that creates CO2 that has to be transported and sequestered somewhere. And then we have to store the hydrogen until we’re ready to use it, and transport it by pipeline to the industrial facilities where it will be used. That requires infrastructure that doesn’t exist — pipelines, compression stations, big tanks! Come to think of it, the demand for all that hydrogen doesn’t exist either — at least not if industry has to pay what it actually costs.

      So, one very important thing these new acts do is subsidize production of hydrogen in various ways — and subsidize the creation of a CCS industry. The other thing they do is subsidize the deployment at enormous scale of low-carbon energy technologies. Some of them are already pretty cheap, like solar and wind, but they need to be supported by a lot of storage on the grid (which we don’t yet have) and by other sorts of grid infrastructure that, again, don’t exist. So, they now get subsidized, too, along with other carbon-free and low-carbon generation technologies — basically all of them. The idea is that by stimulating at-scale deployment of all these established and emerging technologies, and funding demonstrations of novel infrastructure — effectively lowering the cost of supply of low-carbon energy in the form of electricity and fuels — we will draw out the private sector to build out much more of the connective infrastructure and invest in new industrial processes, new home heating systems, and low-carbon transportation. This subsidized build-out will take place over a decade and then phase out as costs fall — hopefully, leaving the foundation for a thriving low-carbon energy economy in its wake, along with crucial technologies and knowledge that will benefit the whole world.

      Q: Is all of the federal investment in energy infrastructure in the United States relevant to the energy crisis in Europe right now?

      A: Not in a direct way — Europe is a near-term catastrophe with a long-term challenge that is in many ways more difficult than ours because Europe doesn’t have the level of primary energy resources like oil and gas that we have in abundance. Energy costs more in Europe, especially absent Russian pipelines. In a way, the narrowing of Europe’s options creates an impetus to invest in low-carbon technologies sooner than otherwise. The result either way will be expensive energy and quite a lot of economic suffering for years. The near-term challenge is to protect people from high energy prices. The big spikes in electricity prices we see now are driven by the natural gas market disruption, which will eventually dissipate as new sources of electricity come online (Sweden, for example, just announced a plan to develop new nuclear, and we’re seeing other countries like Germany soften their stance on nuclear) — and gas markets will sort themselves out. Meanwhile governments are trying to shield their people with electricity price caps and other subsidies, but that’s enormously burdensome.

      The EU recently announced gas price caps for imported gas to try to eliminate price-gouging by importers and reduce the subsidy burden. That may help to lower downstream prices, or it may make matters worse by reducing the flow of gas into the EU and fueling scarcity pricing, and ultimately adding to the subsidy burden. A lot people are quite reasonably suggesting that if electricity prices are subject to crazy behavior in gas markets, then why not disconnect from the grid and self-generate? Wouldn’t that also help reduce demand for gas overall and also reduce CO2 emissions? It would. But it’s expensive to put solar panels on your roof and batteries in your basement — so for those rich enough to do this, it would lead to higher average electricity costs that would live on far into the future, even when grid prices eventually come down.

      So, an interesting idea is taking hold, with considerable encouragement from national governments — the idea of “energy communities,” basically, towns or cities that encourage local firms and homeowners to install solar and batteries, and make some sort of business arrangement with the local utility to allow the community to disconnect from the national grid at times of high prices and self-supply — in other words, use the utility’s wires to sell locally generated power locally. It’s interesting to think about — it takes less battery storage to handle the intermittency of solar when you have a lot of generators and consumers, so forming a community helps lower costs, and with a good deal from the utility for using their wires, it might not be that much more expensive. And of course, when the national grid is working well and prices are normal, the community would reconnect and buy power cheaply, while selling back its self-generated power to the grid. There are also potentially important social benefits that might accrue in these energy communities, too. It’s not a dumb idea, and we’ll see some interesting experimentation in this area in the coming years — as usual, the Germans are enthusiastic! More

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      Methane research takes on new urgency at MIT

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      One of the most notable climate change provisions in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act is the first U.S. federal tax on a greenhouse gas (GHG). That the fee targets methane (CH4), rather than carbon dioxide (CO2), emissions is indicative of the urgency the scientific community has placed on reducing this short-lived but powerful gas. Methane persists in the air about 12 years — compared to more than 1,000 years for CO2 — yet it immediately causes about 120 times more warming upon release. The gas is responsible for at least a quarter of today’s gross warming. 

      “Methane has a disproportionate effect on near-term warming,” says Desiree Plata, the director of MIT Methane Network. “CH4 does more damage than CO2 no matter how long you run the clock. By removing methane, we could potentially avoid critical climate tipping points.” 

      Because GHGs have a runaway effect on climate, reductions made now will have a far greater impact than the same reductions made in the future. Cutting methane emissions will slow the thawing of permafrost, which could otherwise lead to massive methane releases, as well as reduce increasing emissions from wetlands.  

      “The goal of MIT Methane Network is to reduce methane emissions by 45 percent by 2030, which would save up to 0.5 degree C of warming by 2100,” says Plata, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT and director of the Plata Lab. “When you consider that governments are trying for a 1.5-degree reduction of all GHGs by 2100, this is a big deal.” 

      Under normal concentrations, methane, like CO2, poses no health risks. Yet methane assists in the creation of high levels of ozone. In the lower atmosphere, ozone is a key component of air pollution, which leads to “higher rates of asthma and increased emergency room visits,” says Plata. 

      Methane-related projects at the Plata Lab include a filter made of zeolite — the same clay-like material used in cat litter — designed to convert methane into CO2 at dairy farms and coal mines. At first glance, the technology would appear to be a bit of a hard sell, since it converts one GHG into another. Yet the zeolite filter’s low carbon and dollar costs, combined with the disproportionate warming impact of methane, make it a potential game-changer.

      The sense of urgency about methane has been amplified by recent studies that show humans are generating far more methane emissions than previously estimated, and that the rates are rising rapidly. Exactly how much methane is in the air is uncertain. Current methods for measuring atmospheric methane, such as ground, drone, and satellite sensors, “are not readily abundant and do not always agree with each other,” says Plata.  

      The Plata Lab is collaborating with Tim Swager in the MIT Department of Chemistry to develop low-cost methane sensors. “We are developing chemiresisitive sensors that cost about a dollar that you could place near energy infrastructure to back-calculate where leaks are coming from,” says Plata.  

      The researchers are working on improving the accuracy of the sensors using machine learning techniques and are planning to integrate internet-of-things technology to transmit alerts. Plata and Swager are not alone in focusing on data collection: the Inflation Reduction Act adds significant funding for methane sensor research. 

      Other research at the Plata Lab includes the development of nanomaterials and heterogeneous catalysis techniques for environmental applications. The lab also explores mitigation solutions for industrial waste, particularly those related to the energy transition. Plata is the co-founder of an lithium-ion battery recycling startup called Nth Cycle. 

      On a more fundamental level, the Plata Lab is exploring how to develop products with environmental and social sustainability in mind. “Our overarching mission is to change the way that we invent materials and processes so that environmental objectives are incorporated along with traditional performance and cost metrics,” says Plata. “It is important to do that rigorous assessment early in the design process.”

      Play video

      MIT amps up methane research 

      The MIT Methane Network brings together 26 researchers from MIT along with representatives of other institutions “that are dedicated to the idea that we can reduce methane levels in our lifetime,” says Plata. The organization supports research such as Plata’s zeolite and sensor projects, as well as designing pipeline-fixing robots, developing methane-based fuels for clean hydrogen, and researching the capture and conversion of methane into liquid chemical precursors for pharmaceuticals and plastics. Other members are researching policies to encourage more sustainable agriculture and land use, as well as methane-related social justice initiatives. 

      “Methane is an especially difficult problem because it comes from all over the place,” says Plata. A recent Global Carbon Project study estimated that half of methane emissions are caused by humans. This is led by waste and agriculture (28 percent), including cow and sheep belching, rice paddies, and landfills.  

      Fossil fuels represent 18 percent of the total budget. Of this, about 63 percent is derived from oil and gas production and pipelines, 33 percent from coal mining activities, and 5 percent from industry and transportation. Human-caused biomass burning, primarily from slash-and-burn agriculture, emits about 4 percent of the global total.  

      The other half of the methane budget includes natural methane emissions from wetlands (20 percent) and other natural sources (30 percent). The latter includes permafrost melting and natural biomass burning, such as forest fires started by lightning.  

      With increases in global warming and population, the line between anthropogenic and natural causes is getting fuzzier. “Human activities are accelerating natural emissions,” says Plata. “Climate change increases the release of methane from wetlands and permafrost and leads to larger forest and peat fires.”  

      The calculations can get complicated. For example, wetlands provide benefits from CO2 capture, biological diversity, and sea level rise resiliency that more than compensate for methane releases. Meanwhile, draining swamps for development increases emissions. 

      Over 100 nations have signed onto the U.N.’s Global Methane Pledge to reduce at least 30 percent of anthropogenic emissions within the next 10 years. The U.N. report estimates that this goal can be achieved using proven technologies and that about 60 percent of these reductions can be accomplished at low cost. 

      Much of the savings would come from greater efficiencies in fossil fuel extraction, processing, and delivery. The methane fees in the Inflation Reduction Act are primarily focused on encouraging fossil fuel companies to accelerate ongoing efforts to cap old wells, flare off excess emissions, and tighten pipeline connections.  

      Fossil fuel companies have already made far greater pledges to reduce methane than they have with CO2, which is central to their business. This is due, in part, to the potential savings, as well as in preparation for methane regulations expected from the Environmental Protection Agency in late 2022. The regulations build upon existing EPA oversight of drilling operations, and will likely be exempt from the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that limits the federal government’s ability to regulate GHGs. 

      Zeolite filter targets methane in dairy and coal 

      The “low-hanging fruit” of gas stream mitigation addresses most of the 20 percent of total methane emissions in which the gas is released in sufficiently high concentrations for flaring. Plata’s zeolite filter aims to address the thornier challenge of reducing the 80 percent of non-flammable dilute emissions. 

      Plata found inspiration in decades-old catalysis research for turning methane into methanol. One strategy has been to use an abundant, low-cost aluminosilicate clay called zeolite.  

      “The methanol creation process is challenging because you need to separate a liquid, and it has very low efficiency,” says Plata. “Yet zeolite can be very efficient at converting methane into CO2, and it is much easier because it does not require liquid separation. Converting methane to CO2 sounds like a bad thing, but there is a major anti-warming benefit. And because methane is much more dilute than CO2, the relative CO2 contribution is minuscule.”  

      Using zeolite to create methanol requires highly concentrated methane, high temperatures and pressures, and industrial processing conditions. Yet Plata’s process, which dopes the zeolite with copper, operates in the presence of oxygen at much lower temperatures under typical pressures. “We let the methane proceed the way it wants from a thermodynamic perspective from methane to methanol down to CO2,” says Plata. 

      Researchers around the world are working on other dilute methane removal technologies. Projects include spraying iron salt aerosols into sea air where they react with natural chlorine or bromine radicals, thereby capturing methane. Most of these geoengineering solutions, however, are difficult to measure and would require massive scale to make a difference.  

      Plata is focusing her zeolite filters on environments where concentrations are high, but not so high as to be flammable. “We are trying to scale zeolite into filters that you could snap onto the side of a cross-ventilation fan in a dairy barn or in a ventilation air shaft in a coal mine,” says Plata. “For every packet of air we bring in, we take a lot of methane out, so we get more bang for our buck.”  

      The major challenge is creating a filter that can handle high flow rates without getting clogged or falling apart. Dairy barn air handlers can push air at up to 5,000 cubic feet per minute and coal mine handlers can approach 500,000 CFM. 

      Plata is exploring engineering options including fluidized bed reactors with floating catalyst particles. Another filter solution, based in part on catalytic converters, features “higher-order geometric structures where you have a porous material with a long path length where the gas can interact with the catalyst,” says Plata. “This avoids the challenge with fluidized beds of containing catalyst particles in the reactor. Instead, they are fixed within a structured material.”  

      Competing technologies for removing methane from mine shafts “operate at temperatures of 1,000 to 1,200 degrees C, requiring a lot of energy and risking explosion,” says Plata. “Our technology avoids safety concerns by operating at 300 to 400 degrees C. It reduces energy use and provides more tractable deployment costs.” 

      Potentially, energy and dollar costs could be further reduced in coal mines by capturing the heat generated by the conversion process. “In coal mines, you have enrichments above a half-percent methane, but below the 4 percent flammability threshold,” says Plata. “The excess heat from the process could be used to generate electricity using off-the-shelf converters.” 

      Plata’s dairy barn research is funded by the Gerstner Family Foundation and the coal mining project by the U.S. Department of Energy. “The DOE would like us to spin out the technology for scale-up within three years,” says Plata. “We cannot guarantee we will hit that goal, but we are trying to develop this as quickly as possible. Our society needs to start reducing methane emissions now.”  More

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      in Environment

      Coordinating climate and air-quality policies to improve public health

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      As America’s largest investment to fight climate change, the Inflation Reduction Act positions the country to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. But as it edges the United States closer to achieving its international climate commitment, the legislation is also expected to yield significant — and more immediate — improvements in the nation’s health. If successful in accelerating the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy alternatives, the IRA will sharply reduce atmospheric concentrations of fine particulates known to exacerbate respiratory and cardiovascular disease and cause premature deaths, along with other air pollutants that degrade human health. One recent study shows that eliminating air pollution from fossil fuels in the contiguous United States would prevent more than 50,000 premature deaths and avoid more than $600 billion in health costs each year.

      While national climate policies such as those advanced by the IRA can simultaneously help mitigate climate change and improve air quality, their results may vary widely when it comes to improving public health. That’s because the potential health benefits associated with air quality improvements are much greater in some regions and economic sectors than in others. Those benefits can be maximized, however, through a prudent combination of climate and air-quality policies.

      Several past studies have evaluated the likely health impacts of various policy combinations, but their usefulness has been limited due to a reliance on a small set of standard policy scenarios. More versatile tools are needed to model a wide range of climate and air-quality policy combinations and assess their collective effects on air quality and human health. Now researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and MIT Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS) have developed a publicly available, flexible scenario tool that does just that.

      In a study published in the journal Geoscientific Model Development, the MIT team introduces its Tool for Air Pollution Scenarios (TAPS), which can be used to estimate the likely air-quality and health outcomes of a wide range of climate and air-quality policies at the regional, sectoral, and fuel-based level. 

      “This tool can help integrate the siloed sustainability issues of air pollution and climate action,” says the study’s lead author William Atkinson, who recently served as a Biogen Graduate Fellow and research assistant at the IDSS Technology and Policy Program’s (TPP) Research to Policy Engagement Initiative. “Climate action does not guarantee a clean air future, and vice versa — but the issues have similar sources that imply shared solutions if done right.”

      The study’s initial application of TAPS shows that with current air-quality policies and near-term Paris Agreement climate pledges alone, short-term pollution reductions give way to long-term increases — given the expected growth of emissions-intensive industrial and agricultural processes in developing regions. More ambitious climate and air-quality policies could be complementary, each reducing different pollutants substantially to give tremendous near- and long-term health benefits worldwide.

      “The significance of this work is that we can more confidently identify the long-term emission reduction strategies that also support air quality improvements,” says MIT Joint Program Deputy Director C. Adam Schlosser, a co-author of the study. “This is a win-win for setting climate targets that are also healthy targets.”

      TAPS projects air quality and health outcomes based on three integrated components: a recent global inventory of detailed emissions resulting from human activities (e.g., fossil fuel combustion, land-use change, industrial processes); multiple scenarios of emissions-generating human activities between now and the year 2100, produced by the MIT Economic Projection and Policy Analysis model; and emissions intensity (emissions per unit of activity) scenarios based on recent data from the Greenhouse Gas and Air Pollution Interactions and Synergies model.

      “We see the climate crisis as a health crisis, and believe that evidence-based approaches are key to making the most of this historic investment in the future, particularly for vulnerable communities,” says Johanna Jobin, global head of corporate reputation and responsibility at Biogen. “The scientific community has spoken with unanimity and alarm that not all climate-related actions deliver equal health benefits. We’re proud of our collaboration with the MIT Joint Program to develop this tool that can be used to bridge research-to-policy gaps, support policy decisions to promote health among vulnerable communities, and train the next generation of scientists and leaders for far-reaching impact.”

      The tool can inform decision-makers about a wide range of climate and air-quality policies. Policy scenarios can be applied to specific regions, sectors, or fuels to investigate policy combinations at a more granular level, or to target short-term actions with high-impact benefits.

      TAPS could be further developed to account for additional emissions sources and trends.

      “Our new tool could be used to examine a large range of both climate and air quality scenarios. As the framework is expanded, we can add detail for specific regions, as well as additional pollutants such as air toxics,” says study supervising co-author Noelle Selin, professor at IDSS and the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, and director of TPP.    

      This research was supported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and its Science to Achieve Results (STAR) program; Biogen; TPP’s Leading Technology and Policy Initiative; and TPP’s Research to Policy Engagement Initiative. More