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      in Environment

      Making steel with electricity

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      Steel is one of the most useful materials on the planet. A backbone of modern life, it’s used in skyscrapers, cars, airplanes, bridges, and more. Unfortunately, steelmaking is an extremely dirty process.The most common way it’s produced involves mining iron ore, reducing it in a blast furnace through the addition of coal, and then using an oxygen furnace to burn off excess carbon and other impurities. That’s why steel production accounts for around 7 to 9 percent of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, making it one of the dirtiest industries on the planet.Now Boston Metal is seeking to clean up the steelmaking industry using an electrochemical process called molten oxide electrolysis (MOE), which eliminates many steps in steelmaking and releases oxygen as its sole byproduct.The company, which was founded by MIT Professor Emeritus Donald Sadoway, Professor Antoine Allanore, and James Yurko PhD ’01, is already using MOE to recover high-value metals from mining waste at its Brazilian subsidiary, Boston Metal do Brasil. That work is helping Boston Metal’s team deploy its technology at commercial scale and establish key partnerships with mining operators. It has also built a prototype MOE reactor to produce green steel at its headquarters in Woburn, Massachusetts.And despite its name, Boston Metal has global ambitions. The company has raised more than $370 million to date from organizations across Europe, Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East, and its leaders expect to scale up rapidly to transform steel production in every corner of the world.“There’s a worldwide recognition that we need to act rapidly, and that’s going to happen through technology solutions like this that can help us move away from incumbent technologies,” Boston Metal Chief Scientist and former MIT postdoc Guillaume Lambotte says. “More and more, climate change is a part of our lives, so the pressure is on everyone to act fast.”To the moon and backThe origins of Boston Metal’s technology start on the moon. In the mid 2000s, Sadoway, who is the John F. Elliott Professor Emeritus of Materials Chemistry in MIT’s Department of Materials Science, received a grant from NASA to explore ways to produce oxygen for future lunar bases. Sadoway and other MIT researchers explored the idea of sending an electric current through the iron oxide rock on the moon’s surface, using rock from an old asteroid in Arizona for their experiments. The reaction produced oxygen, with metal as a byproduct.The research stuck with Sadoway, who noticed that down here on Earth, that metal byproduct would be of interest. To help make the electrolysis reaction he studied more viable, he joined forces with Allanore, who is a professor of metallurgy at MIT and the Lechtman Chair in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. The professors were able to identify a less expensive anode and partnered with Yurko, a former student, to found Boston Metal.“All of the fundamental studies and the initial technologies came out of MIT,” Lambotte says. “We spun out of research that was patented at MIT and licensed from MIT’s Technology Licensing Office.”Lambotte joined the company shortly after Boston Metal’s team published a 2013 paper in Nature describing the MOE platform.“That’s when it went from the lab, with a coffee cup-sized experiment to prove the fundamentals and produce a few grams, to a company that can produce hundreds of kilograms, and soon, tons of metal,” Lambotte says.

      Boston Metal’s process takes place in modular MOE cells the size of a school bus. Here is a schematic of the process.

      Boston Metal’s molten oxide electrolysis process takes place in modular MOE cells the size of a school bus. Iron ore rock is fed into the cell, which contains the cathode (the negative terminal of the MOE cell) and an anode immersed in a liquid electrolyte. The anode is inert, meaning it doesn’t dissolve in the electrolyte or take part in the reaction other than serving as the positive terminal. When electricity runs between the anode and cathode and the cell reaches around 1,600 degrees Celsius, the iron oxide bonds in the ore are split, producing pure liquid metal at the bottom that can be tapped. The byproduct of the reaction is oxygen, and the process doesn’t require water, hazardous chemicals, or precious-metal catalysts.The production of each cell depends on the size of its current. Lambotte says with about 600,000 amps, each cell could produce up to 10 tons of metal every day. Steelmakers would license Boston Metal’s technology and deploy as many cells as needed to reach their production targets.Boston Metal is already using MOE to help mining companies recover high-value metals from their mining waste, which usually needs to undergo costly treatment or storage. Lambotte says it could also be used to produce many other kinds of metals down the line, and Boston Metal was recently selected to negotiate grant funding to produce chromium metal — critical for a number of clean energy applications — in West Virginia.“If you look around the world, a lot of the feedstocks for metal are oxides, and if it’s an oxide, then there’s a chance we can work with that feedstock,” Lambotte says. “There’s a lot of excitement because everyone needs a solution capable of decarbonizing the metal industry, so a lot of people are interested to understand where MOE fits in their own processes.”Gigatons of potentialBoston Metal’s steel decarbonization technology is currently slated to reach commercial-scale in 2026, though its Brazil plant is already introducing the industry to MOE.“I think it’s a window for the metal industry to get acquainted with MOE and see how it works,” Lambotte says. “You need people in the industry to grasp this technology. It’s where you form connections and how new technology spreads.”The Brazilian plant runs on 100 percent renewable energy.“We can be the beneficiary of this tremendous worldwide push to decarbonize the energy sector,” Lambotte says. “I think our approach goes hand in hand with that. Fully green steel requires green electricity, and I think what you’ll see is deployment of this technology where [clean electricity] is already readily available.”Boston Metal’s team is excited about MOE’s application across the metals industry but is focused first and foremost on eliminating the gigatons of emissions from steel production.“Steel produces around 10 percent of global emissions, so that is our north star,” Lambotte says. “Everyone is pledging carbon reductions, emissions reductions, and making net zero goals, so the steel industry is really looking hard for viable technology solutions. People are ready for new approaches.” More

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      in Energy

      Offering clean energy around the clock

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      As remarkable as the rise of solar and wind farms has been over the last 20 years, achieving complete decarbonization is going to require a host of complementary technologies. That’s because renewables offer only intermittent power. They also can’t directly provide the high temperatures necessary for many industrial processes.

      Now, 247Solar is building high-temperature concentrated solar power systems that use overnight thermal energy storage to provide round-the-clock power and industrial-grade heat.

      The company’s modular systems can be used as standalone microgrids for communities or to provide power in remote places like mines and farms. They can also be used in conjunction with wind and conventional solar farms, giving customers 24/7 power from renewables and allowing them to offset use of the grid.

      “One of my motivations for working on this system was trying to solve the problem of intermittency,” 247Solar CEO Bruce Anderson ’69, SM ’73 says. “I just couldn’t see how we could get to zero emissions with solar photovoltaics (PV) and wind. Even with PV, wind, and batteries, we can’t get there, because there’s always bad weather, and current batteries aren’t economical over long periods. You have to have a solution that operates 24 hours a day.”

      The company’s system is inspired by the design of a high-temperature heat exchanger by the late MIT Professor Emeritus David Gordon Wilson, who co-founded the company with Anderson. The company integrates that heat exchanger into what Anderson describes as a conventional, jet-engine-like turbine, enabling the turbine to produce power by circulating ambient pressure hot air with no combustion or emissions — what the company calls a first in the industry.

      Here’s how the system works: Each 247Solar system uses a field of sun-tracking mirrors called heliostats to reflect sunlight to the top of a central tower. The tower features a proprietary solar receiver that heats air to around 1,000 Celsius at atmospheric pressure. The air is then used to drive 247Solar’s turbines and generate 400 kilowatts of electricity and 600 kilowatts of heat. Some of the hot air is also routed through a long-duration thermal energy storage system, where it heats solid materials that retain the heat. The stored heat is then used to drive the turbines when the sun stops shining.

      “We offer round-the-clock electricity, but we also offer a combined heat and power option, with the ability to take heat up to 970 Celsius for use in industrial processes,” Anderson says. “It’s a very flexible system.”

      The company’s first deployment will be with a large utility in India. If that goes well, 247Solar hopes to scale up rapidly with other utilities, corporations, and communities around the globe.

      A new approach to concentrated solar

      Anderson kept in touch with his MIT network after graduating in 1973. He served as the director of MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) between 1996 and 2000 and was elected as an alumni member of the MIT Corporation in 2013. The ILP connects companies with MIT’s network of students, faculty, and alumni to facilitate innovation, and the experience changed the course of Anderson’s career.

      “That was an extremely fascinating job, and from it two things happened,” Anderson says. “One is that I realized I was really an entrepreneur and was not well-suited to the university environment, and the other is that I was reminded of the countless amazing innovations coming out of MIT.”

      After leaving as director, Anderson began a startup incubator where he worked with MIT professors to start companies. Eventually, one of those professors was Wilson, who had invented the new heat exchanger and a ceramic turbine. Anderson and Wilson ended up putting together a small team to commercialize the technology in the early 2000s.

      Anderson had done his MIT master’s thesis on solar energy in the 1970s, and the team realized the heat exchanger made possible a novel approach to concentrated solar power. In 2010, they received a $6 million development grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. But their first solar receiver was damaged during shipping to a national laboratory for testing, and the company ran out of money.

      It wasn’t until 2015 that Anderson was able to raise money to get the company back off the ground. By that time, a new high-temperature metal alloy had been developed that Anderson swapped out for Wilson’s ceramic heat exchanger.

      The Covid-19 pandemic further slowed 247’s plans to build a demonstration facility at its test site in Arizona, but strong customer interest has kept the company busy. Concentrated solar power doesn’t work everywhere — Arizona’s clear sunshine is a better fit than Florida’s hazy skies, for example — but Anderson is currently in talks with communities in parts of the U.S., India, Africa, and Australia where the technology would be a good fit.

      These days, the company is increasingly proposing combining its systems with traditional solar PV, which lets customers reap the benefits of low-cost solar electricity during the day while using 247’s energy at night.

      “That way we can get at least 24, if not more, hours of energy from a sunny day,” Anderson says. “We’re really moving toward these hybrid systems, which work like a Prius: Sometimes you’re using one source of energy, sometimes you’re using the other.”

      The company also sells its HeatStorE thermal batteries as standalone systems. Instead of being heated by the solar system, the thermal storage is heated by circulating air through an electric coil that’s been heated by electricity, either from the grid, standalone PV, or wind. The heat can be stored for nine hours or more on a single charge and then dispatched as electricity plus industrial process heat at 250 Celsius, or as heat only, up to 970 Celsius.

      Anderson says 247’s thermal battery is about one-seventh the cost of lithium-ion batteries per kilowatt hour produced.

      Scaling a new model

      The company is keeping its system flexible for whatever path customers want to take to complete decarbonization.

      In addition to 247’s India project, the company is in advanced talks with off-grid communities in the Unites States and Egypt, mining operators around the world, and the government of a small country in Africa. Anderson says the company’s next customer will likely be an off-grid community in the U.S. that currently relies on diesel generators for power.

      The company has also partnered with a financial company that will allow it to access capital to fund its own projects and sell clean energy directly to customers, which Anderson says will help 247 grow faster than relying solely on selling entire systems to each customer.

      As it works to scale up its deployments, Anderson believes 247 offers a solution to help customers respond to increasing pressure from governments as well as community members.

      “Emerging economies in places like Africa don’t have any alternative to fossil fuels if they want 24/7 electricity,” Anderson says. “Our owning and operating costs are less than half that of diesel gen-sets. Customers today really want to stop producing emissions if they can, so you’ve got villages, mines, industries, and entire countries where the people inside are saying, ‘We can’t burn diesel anymore.’” More

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      in Environment

      Atmospheric observations in China show rise in emissions of a potent greenhouse gas

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      To achieve the aspirational goal of the Paris Agreement on climate change — limiting the increase in global average surface temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels — will require its 196 signatories to dramatically reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Those greenhouse gases differ widely in their global warming potential (GWP), or ability to absorb radiative energy and thereby warm the Earth’s surface. For example, measured over a 100-year period, the GWP of methane is about 28 times that of carbon dioxide (CO2), and the GWP of sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) is 24,300 times that of CO2, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report. 

      Used primarily in high-voltage electrical switchgear in electric power grids, SF6 is one of the most potent greenhouse gases on Earth. In the 21st century, atmospheric concentrations of SF6 have risen sharply along with global electric power demand, threatening the world’s efforts to stabilize the climate. This heightened demand for electric power is particularly pronounced in China, which has dominated the expansion of the global power industry in the past decade. Quantifying China’s contribution to global SF6 emissions — and pinpointing its sources in the country — could lead that nation to implement new measures to reduce them, and thereby reduce, if not eliminate, an impediment to the Paris Agreement’s aspirational goal. 

      To that end, a new study by researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, Fudan University, Peking University, University of Bristol, and Meteorological Observation Center of China Meteorological Administration determined total SF6 emissions in China over 2011-21 from atmospheric observations collected from nine stations within a Chinese network, including one station from the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE) network. For comparison, global total emissions were determined from five globally distributed, relatively unpolluted “background” AGAGE stations, involving additional researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and CSIRO, Australia’s National Science Agency.

      The researchers found that SF6 emissions in China almost doubled from 2.6 gigagrams (Gg) per year in 2011, when they accounted for 34 percent of global SF6 emissions, to 5.1 Gg per year in 2021, when they accounted for 57 percent of global total SF6 emissions. This increase from China over the 10-year period — some of it emerging from the country’s less-populated western regions — was larger than the global total SF6 emissions rise, highlighting the importance of lowering SF6 emissions from China in the future.

      The open-access study, which appears in the journal Nature Communications, explores prospects for future SF6 emissions reduction in China.

      “Adopting maintenance practices that minimize SF6 leakage rates or using SF6-free equipment or SF6 substitutes in the electric power grid will benefit greenhouse-gas mitigation in China,” says Minde An, a postdoc at the MIT Center for Global Change Science (CGCS) and the study’s lead author. “We see our findings as a first step in quantifying the problem and identifying how it can be addressed.”

      Emissions of SF6 are expected to last more than 1,000 years in the atmosphere, raising the stakes for policymakers in China and around the world.

      “Any increase in SF6 emissions this century will effectively alter our planet’s radiative budget — the balance between incoming energy from the sun and outgoing energy from the Earth — far beyond the multi-decadal time frame of current climate policies,” says MIT Joint Program and CGCS Director Ronald Prinn, a coauthor of the study. “So it’s imperative that China and all other nations take immediate action to reduce, and ultimately eliminate, their SF6 emissions.”

      The study was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China and Shanghai B&R Joint Laboratory Project, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and other funding agencies.   More

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      in Environment

      A new way to quantify climate change impacts: “Outdoor days”

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      For most people, reading about the difference between a global average temperature rise of 1.5 C versus 2 C doesn’t conjure up a clear image of how their daily lives will actually be affected. So, researchers at MIT have come up with a different way of measuring and describing what global climate change patterns, in specific regions around the world, will mean for people’s daily activities and their quality of life.

      The new measure, called “outdoor days,” describes the number of days per year that outdoor temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for people to go about normal outdoor activities, whether work or leisure, in reasonable comfort. Describing the impact of rising temperatures in those terms reveals some significant global disparities, the researchers say.

      The findings are described in a research paper written by MIT professor of civil and environmental engineering Elfatih Eltahir and postdocs Yeon-Woo Choi and Muhammad Khalifa, and published in the Journal of Climate.

      Eltahir says he got the idea for this new system during his hourlong daily walks in the Boston area. “That’s how I interface with the temperature every day,” he says. He found that there have been more winter days recently when he could walk comfortably than in past years. Originally from Sudan, he says that when he returned there for visits, the opposite was the case: In winter, the weather tends to be relatively comfortable, but the number of these clement winter days has been declining. “There are fewer days that are really suitable for outdoor activity,” Eltahir says.

      Rather than predefine what constitutes an acceptable outdoor day, Eltahir and his co-authors created a website where users can set their own definition of the highest and lowest temperatures they consider comfortable for their outside activities, then click on a country within a world map, or a state within the U.S., and get a forecast of how the number of days meeting those criteria will change between now and the end of this century. The website is freely available for anyone to use.

      “This is actually a new feature that’s quite innovative,” he says. “We don’t tell people what an outdoor day should be; we let the user define an outdoor day. Hence, we invite them to participate in defining how future climate change will impact their quality of life, and hopefully, this will facilitate deeper understanding of how climate change will impact individuals directly.”

      After deciding that this was a way of looking at the issue of climate change that might be useful, Eltahir says, “we started looking at the data on this, and we made several discoveries that I think are pretty significant.”

      First of all, there will be winners and losers, and the losers tend to be concentrated in the global south. “In the North, in a place like Russia or Canada, you gain a significant number of outdoor days. And when you go south to places like Bangladesh or Sudan, it’s bad news. You get significantly fewer outdoor days. It is very striking.”

      To derive the data, the software developed by the team uses all of the available climate models, about 50 of them, and provides output showing all of those projections on a single graph to make clear the range of possibilities, as well as the average forecast.

      When we think of climate change, Eltahir says, we tend to look at maps that show that virtually everywhere, temperatures will rise. “But if you think in terms of outdoor days, you see that the world is not flat. The North is gaining; the South is losing.”

      While North-South disparity in exposure and vulnerability has been broadly recognized in the past, he says, this way of quantifying the effects on the hazard (change in weather patterns) helps to bring home how strong the uneven risks from climate change on quality of life will be. “When you look at places like Bangladesh, Colombia, Ivory Coast, Sudan, Indonesia — they are all losing outdoor days.”

      The same kind of disparity shows up in Europe, he says. The effects are already being felt, and are showing up in travel patterns: “There is a shift to people spending time in northern European states. They go to Sweden and places like that instead of the Mediterranean, which is showing a significant drop,” he says.

      Placing this kind of detailed and localized information at people’s fingertips, he says, “I think brings the issue of communication of climate change to a different level.” With this tool, instead of looking at global averages, “we are saying according to your own definition of what a pleasant day is, [this is] how climate change is going to impact you, your activities.”

      And, he adds, “hopefully that will help society make decisions about what to do with this global challenge.”

      The project received support from the MIT Climate Grand Challenges project “Jameel Observatory – Climate Resilience Early Warning System Network,” as well as from the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab. More

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      in Energy

      Optimizing nuclear fuels for next-generation reactors

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      In 2010, when Ericmoore Jossou was attending college in northern Nigeria, the lights would flicker in and out all day, sometimes lasting only for a couple of hours at a time. The frustrating experience reaffirmed Jossou’s realization that the country’s sporadic energy supply was a problem. It was the beginning of his path toward nuclear engineering.

      Because of the energy crisis, “I told myself I was going to find myself in a career that allows me to develop energy technologies that can easily be scaled to meet the energy needs of the world, including my own country,” says Jossou, an assistant professor in a shared position between the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), where is the John Clark Hardwick (1986) Professor, and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

      Today, Jossou uses computer simulations for rational materials design, AI-aided purposeful development of cladding materials and fuels for next-generation nuclear reactors. As one of the shared faculty hires between the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and departments across MIT, his appointment recognizes his commitment to computing for climate and the environment.

      A well-rounded education in Nigeria

      Growing up in Lagos, Jossou knew education was about more than just bookish knowledge, so he was eager to travel and experience other cultures. He would start in his own backyard by traveling across the Niger river and enrolling in Ahmadu Bello University in northern Nigeria. Moving from the south was a cultural education with a different language and different foods. It was here that Jossou got to try and love tuwo shinkafa, a northern Nigerian rice-based specialty, for the first time.

      After his undergraduate studies, armed with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, Jossou was among a small cohort selected for a specialty master’s training program funded by the World Bank Institute and African Development Bank. The program at the African University of Science and Technology in Abuja, Nigeria, is a pan-African venture dedicated to nurturing homegrown science talent on the continent. Visiting professors from around the world taught intensive three-week courses, an experience which felt like drinking from a fire hose. The program widened Jossou’s views and he set his sights on a doctoral program with an emphasis on clean energy systems.

      A pivot to nuclear science

      While in Nigeria, Jossou learned of Professor Jerzy Szpunar at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, who was looking for a student researcher to explore fuels and alloys for nuclear reactors. Before then, Jossou was lukewarm on nuclear energy, but the research sounded fascinating. The Fukushima, Japan, incident was recently in the rearview mirror and Jossou remembered his early determination to address his own country’s energy crisis. He was sold on the idea and graduated with a doctoral degree from the University of Saskatchewan on an international dean’s scholarship.

      Jossou’s postdoctoral work registered a brief stint at Brookhaven National Laboratory as staff scientist. He leaped at the opportunity to join MIT NSE as a way of realizing his research interest and teaching future engineers. “I would really like to conduct cutting-edge research in nuclear materials design and to pass on my knowledge to the next generation of scientists and engineers and there’s no better place to do that than at MIT,” Jossou says.

      Merging material science and computational modeling

      Jossou’s doctoral work on designing nuclear fuels for next-generation reactors forms the basis of research his lab is pursuing at MIT NSE. Nuclear reactors that were built in the 1950s and ’60s are getting a makeover in terms of improved accident tolerance. Reactors are not confined to one kind, either: We have micro reactors and are now considering ones using metallic nuclear fuels, Jossou points out. The diversity of options is enough to keep researchers busy testing materials fit for cladding, the lining that prevents corrosion of the fuel and release of radioactive fission products into the surrounding reactor coolant.

      The team is also investigating fuels that improve burn-up efficiencies, so they can last longer in the reactor. An intriguing approach has been to immobilize the gas bubbles that arise from the fission process, so they don’t grow and degrade the fuel.

      Since joining MIT in July 2023, Jossou is setting up a lab that optimizes the composition of accident-tolerant nuclear fuels. He is leaning on his materials science background and looping computer simulations and artificial intelligence in the mix.

      Computer simulations allow the researchers to narrow down the potential field of candidates, optimized for specific parameters, so they can synthesize only the most promising candidates in the lab. And AI’s predictive capabilities guide researchers on which materials composition to consider next. “We no longer depend on serendipity to choose our materials, our lab is based on rational materials design,” Jossou says, “we can rapidly design advanced nuclear fuels.”

      Advancing energy causes in Africa

      Now that he is at MIT, Jossou admits the view from the outside is different. He now harbors a different perspective on what Africa needs to address some of its challenges. “The starting point to solve our problems is not money; it needs to start with ideas,” he says, “we need to find highly skilled people who can actually solve problems.” That job involves adding economic value to the rich arrays of raw materials that the continent is blessed with. It frustrates Jossou that Niger, a country rich in raw material for uranium, has no nuclear reactors of its own. It ships most of its ore to France. “The path forward is to find a way to refine these materials in Africa and to be able to power the industries on that continent as well,” Jossou says.

      Jossou is determined to do his part to eliminate these roadblocks.

      Anchored in mentorship, Jossou’s solution aims to train talent from Africa in his own lab. He has applied for a MIT Global Experiences MISTI grant to facilitate travel and research studies for Ghanaian scientists. “The goal is to conduct research in our facility and perhaps add value to indigenous materials,” Jossou says.

      Adding value has been a consistent theme of Jossou’s career. He remembers wanting to become a neurosurgeon after reading “Gifted Hands,” moved by the personal story of the author, Ben Carson. As Jossou grew older, however, he realized that becoming a doctor wasn’t necessarily what he wanted. Instead, he was looking to add value. “What I wanted was really to take on a career that allows me to solve a societal problem.” The societal problem of clean and safe energy for all is precisely what Jossou is working on today. More

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      in Energy

      Making the clean energy transition work for everyone

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      The clean energy transition is already underway, but how do we make sure it happens in a manner that is affordable, sustainable, and fair for everyone?

      That was the overarching question at this year’s MIT Energy Conference, which took place March 11 and 12 in Boston and was titled “Short and Long: A Balanced Approach to the Energy Transition.”

      Each year, the student-run conference brings together leaders in the energy sector to discuss the progress and challenges they see in their work toward a greener future. Participants come from research, industry, government, academia, and the investment community to network and exchange ideas over two whirlwind days of keynote talks, fireside chats, and panel discussions.

      Several participants noted that clean energy technologies are already cost-competitive with fossil fuels, but changing the way the world works requires more than just technology.

      “None of this is easy, but I think developing innovative new technologies is really easy compared to the things we’re talking about here, which is how to blend social justice, soft engineering, and systems thinking that puts people first,” Daniel Kammen, a distinguished professor of energy at the University of California at Berkeley, said in a keynote talk. “While clean energy has a long way to go, it is more than ready to transition us from fossil fuels.”

      The event also featured a keynote discussion between MIT President Sally Kornbluth and MIT’s Kyocera Professor of Ceramics Yet-Ming Chiang, in which Kornbluth discussed her first year at MIT as well as a recently announced, campus-wide effort to solve critical climate problems known as the Climate Project at MIT.

      “The reason I wanted to come to MIT was I saw that MIT has the potential to solve the world’s biggest problems, and first among those for me was the climate crisis,” Kornbluth said. “I’m excited about where we are, I’m excited about the enthusiasm of the community, and I think we’ll be able to make really impactful discoveries through this project.”

      Fostering new technologies

      Several panels convened experts in new or emerging technology fields to discuss what it will take for their solutions to contribute to deep decarbonization.

      “The fun thing and challenging thing about first-of-a-kind technologies is they’re all kind of different,” said Jonah Wagner, principal assistant director for industrial innovation and clean energy in the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy. “You can map their growth against specific challenges you expect to see, but every single technology is going to face their own challenges, and every single one will have to defy an engineering barrier to get off the ground.”

      Among the emerging technologies discussed was next-generation geothermal energy, which uses new techniques to extract heat from the Earth’s crust in new places.

      A promising aspect of the technology is that it can leverage existing infrastructure and expertise from the oil and gas industry. Many newly developed techniques for geothermal production, for instance, use the same drills and rigs as those used for hydraulic fracturing.

      “The fact that we have a robust ecosystem of oil and gas labor and technology in the U.S. makes innovation in geothermal much more accessible compared to some of the challenges we’re seeing in nuclear or direct-air capture, where some of the supply chains are disaggregated around the world,” said Gabrial Malek, chief of staff at the geothermal company Fervo Energy.

      Another technology generating excitement — if not net energy quite yet — is fusion, the process of combining, or fusing, light atoms together to form heavier ones for a net energy gain, in the same process that powers the sun. MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) has already validated many aspects of its approach for achieving fusion power, and the company’s unique partnership with MIT was discussed in a panel on the industry’s progress.

      “We’re standing on the shoulders of decades of research from the scientific community, and we want to maintain those ties even as we continue developing our technology,” CFS Chief Science Officer Brandon Sorbom PhD ’17 said, noting that CFS is one of the largest company sponsors of research at MIT and collaborates with institutions around the world. “Engaging with the community is a really valuable lever to get new ideas and to sanity check our own ideas.”

      Sorbom said that as CFS advances fusion energy, the company is thinking about how it can replicate its processes to lower costs and maximize the technology’s impact around the planet.

      “For fusion to work, it has to work for everyone,” Sorbom said. “I think the affordability piece is really important. We can’t just build this technological jewel that only one class of nations can afford. It has to be a technology that can be deployed throughout the entire world.”

      The event also gave students — many from MIT — a chance to learn more about careers in energy and featured a startup showcase, in which dozens of companies displayed their energy and sustainability solutions.

      “More than 700 people are here from every corner of the energy industry, so there are so many folks to connect with and help me push my vision into reality,” says GreenLIB CEO Fred Rostami, whose company recycles lithium-ion batteries. “The good thing about the energy transition is that a lot of these technologies and industries overlap, so I think we can enable this transition by working together at events like this.”

      A focused climate strategy

      Kornbluth noted that when she came to MIT, a large percentage of students and faculty were already working on climate-related technologies. With the Climate Project at MIT, she wanted to help ensure the whole of those efforts is greater than the sum of its parts.

      The project is organized around six distinct missions, including decarbonizing energy and industry, empowering frontline communities, and building healthy, resilient cities. Kornbluth says the mission areas will help MIT community members collaborate around multidisciplinary challenges. Her team, which includes a committee of faculty advisors, has begun to search for the leads of each mission area, and Kornbluth said she is planning to appoint a vice president for climate at the Institute.

      “I want someone who has the purview of the whole Institute and will report directly to me to help make sure this project stays on track,” Kornbluth explained.

      In his conversation about the initiative with Kornbluth, Yet-Ming Chiang said projects will be funded based on their potential to reduce emissions and make the planet more sustainable at scale.

      “Projects should be very high risk, with very high impact,” Chiang explained. “They should have a chance to prove themselves, and those efforts should not be limited by resources, only by time.”

      In discussing her vision of the climate project, Kornbluth alluded to the “short and long” theme of the conference.

      “It’s about balancing research and commercialization,” Kornbluth said. “The climate project has a very variable timeframe, and I think universities are the sector that can think about the things that might be 30 years out. We have to think about the incentives across the entire innovation pipeline and how we can keep an eye on the long term while making sure the short-term things get out rapidly.” More

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      in Energy

      Explained: Carbon credits

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      One of the most contentious issues faced at the 28th Conference of Parties (COP28) on climate change last December was a proposal for a U.N.-sanctioned market for trading carbon credits. Such a mechanism would allow nations and industries making slow progress in reducing their own carbon emissions to pay others to take emissions-reducing measures, such as improving energy efficiency or protecting forests.

      Such trading systems have already grown to a multibillion-dollar market despite a lack of clear international regulations to define and monitor the claimed emissions reductions. During weeks of feverish negotiations, some nations, including the U.S., advocated for a somewhat looser approach to regulations in the interests of getting a system in place quickly. Others, including the European Union, advocated much tighter regulation, in light of a history of questionable or even counterproductive projects of this kind in the past. In the end, no agreement was reached on the subject, which will be revisited at a later meeting.

      The concept seems simple enough: Offset emissions in one place by preventing or capturing an equal amount of emissions elsewhere. But implementing that idea has turned out to be far more complex and fraught with problems than many expected.

      For example, projects that aim to preserve a section of forest — which can remove carbon dioxide from the air and sequester it in the soil — face numerous issues. Will the preservation of one parcel just lead to the clearcutting of an adjacent parcel? Would the preserved land have been left uncut anyway? And what if it ends up being destroyed by wildfire, drought, or insect infestation — all of which are expected to become more likely with climate change?

      Similarly, projects that aim to capture carbon dioxide emissions and inject them into the ground are sometimes used to justify increasing the production of petroleum or natural gas, negating the intended climate mitigation of the process.

      Several experts at MIT now say that the system could be effective, at least in certain circumstances, but it must be thoroughly evaluated and regulated.

      Carbon removal, natural or mechanical

      Sergey Paltsev, deputy director of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, co-led a study and workshop last year that included policymakers, industry representatives, and researchers. They focused on one kind of carbon offsets, those based on natural climate solutions — restoration or preservation of natural systems that not only sequester carbon but also provide other benefits, such as greater biodiversity. “We find a lot of confusion and misperceptions and misinformation, even about how you define the term carbon credit or offset,” he says.

      He points out that there has been a lot of criticism of the whole idea of carbon offsets, “and that criticism is well-placed. I think that’s a very healthy conversation, to clarify what makes sense and what doesn’t make sense. What are the real actions versus what is greenwashing?”

      He says that government-mandated and managed carbon trading programs in some places, including British Columbia and parts of Europe, have been somewhat effective because they have clear standards in place, whereas unregulated carbon credit systems have often been abused.

      Charles Harvey, an MIT professor of civil and environmental engineering, should know, having been actively involved in both sides of the issue over the last two decades. He co-founded a company in 2008 that was the first private U.S. company to attempt to remove carbon dioxide from emissions on a commercial scale, a process called carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS. Such projects have been a major recipient of federal subsidies aimed at combatting climate change, but Harvey now says these are largely a waste of money and in most cases do not achieve their stated objective.

      In fact, he says that according to industry sources, as of 2021 more than 90 percent of CCS projects in the U.S. have been used for the production of more fossil fuels — oil and natural gas. Here’s how it works: Natural gas wells often produce methane mixed with carbon dioxide, which must be removed to produce a marketable natural gas. This carbon dioxide is then injected into oil wells to stimulate more production. So, the net effect is the creation of more total greenhouse gas emissions rather than less, explains Harvey, who recently received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to explore CCS projects and whether they can be made to contribute to true emissions reductions.

      What went wrong with the ambitious startup CCS company Harvey co-founded? “What happened is that the prices of renewables and energy storage are now incredibly cheap,” he says. “It makes no sense to do this, ever, on power plants because honestly, fossil fuel power plants don’t even really make economic sense anymore.”

      Where does Harvey see potential for carbon credits to work? One possibility is the preservation or restoration of tropical peatlands, which he has received another grant to study. These are vast areas of permanently waterlogged land in which dead plant matter —and the carbon it contains — remains in place because the water prevents the normal decomposition processes that would otherwise release the stored carbon back into the air.

      While it is virtually impossible to quantify the amount of carbon stored in the soil of forest or farmland, in peatlands that’s easy to do because essentially all of the submerged material is carbon-based. Simply measuring changes in the elevation of such land, which can be done remotely by plane or satellite, gives a precise measure of how much carbon has been stored or released. When a patch of peat forest that has been clear-cut to build plantations or roads is reforested, the amount of carbon emissions that were prevented can be measured accurately.

      Because of that potential for accurate documentation, protecting or restoring peat bogs can also be a good way to achieve meaningful offsets for carbon emissions elsewhere, Harvey says. Rewetting a previously drained peat forest can immediately counteract the release of its stored carbon and can keep it there as long as it is not drained again — something that can be verified using satellite data.

      Paltsev adds that while such nature-based systems for countering carbon emissions can be a key component of addressing climate change, especially in very difficult-to-decarbonize industries such as aviation, carbon credits for such programs “shouldn’t be a replacement for our efforts at emissions reduction. It should be in addition.”

      Criteria for meaningful offsets

      John Sterman, the Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has published a set of criteria for evaluating proposed carbon offset plans to make sure they would provide the benefits they claim. At present, “there’s no regulation, there’s no oversight” for carbon offsets, he says. “There have been many scandals over this.”

      For example, one company was providing what it claimed was certification for carbon offset projects but was found to have such lax standards that the claimed offsets were often not real. For example, there were multiple claims to protect the same piece of forest and claims to protect land that was already legally protected.

      Sterman’s proposed set of criteria goes by the acronym AVID+. “It stands for four principles that you have to meet in order for your offset to be legitimate: It has to be additional, verifiable, immediate, and durable,” he says. “And then I call it AVID+,” he adds, the “plus” being for plans that have additional benefits as well, such as improving health, creating jobs, or helping historically disadvantaged communities.

      Offsets can be useful, he says, for addressing especially hard-to-abate industries such as steel or cement manufacturing, or aviation. But it is essential to meet all four of the criteria, or else real emissions are not really being offset. For example, planting trees today, while often a good thing to do, would take decades to offset emissions going into the atmosphere now, where they may persist for centuries — so that fails to meet the “immediate” requirement.

      And protecting existing forests, while also desirable, is very hard to prove as being additional, because “that requires a counterfactual that you can never observe,” he says. “That’s where a lot of squirrely accounting and a lot of fraud comes in, because how do you know that the forest would have been cut down but for the offset?” In one well-documented case, he points out, a company tried to sell carbon offsets for a section of forest that was already an established nature preserve.

      Are there offsets that can meet all the criteria and provide real benefits in helping to address climate change? Yes, Sterman and Harvey say, but they need to be evaluated carefully.

      “My favorite example,” Sterman says, “is doing deep energy retrofits and putting solar panels on low-income housing.” These measures can help address the so-called landlord-tenant problem: If tenants typically pay the utility bills, landlords have little incentive to pay for efficiency improvements, and the tenants don’t have the capital to make such improvements on their own. “Policies that would make this possible are pretty good candidates for legitimate offsets, because they are additional — low-income households can’t afford to do it without assistance, so it’s not going to happen without a program. It’s verifiable, because you’ve got the utility bills pre and post.” They are also quite immediate, typically taking only a year or so to implement, and “they’re pretty durable,” he says.

      Another example is a recent plan in Alaska that allows cruise ships to offset the emissions caused by their trips by paying into a fund that provides subsidies for Alaskan citizens to install heat pumps in their homes, thus preventing emissions from wood or fossil fuel heating systems. “I think this is a pretty good candidate to meet the criteria, certainly a lot better than much of what’s being done today,” Sterman says.

      But eventually, what is really needed, the researchers agree, are real, enforceable standards. After COP28, carbon offsets are still allowed, Sterman says, “but there is still no widely accepted mandatory regulation. We’re still in the wild West.”

      Paltsev nevertheless sees reasons for optimism about nature-based carbon offset systems. For example, he says the aviation industry has recently agreed to implement a set of standards for offsetting their emissions, known as CORSIA, for carbon offsetting and reduction scheme for international aviation. “It’s a point for optimism,” he says, “because they issued very tough guidelines as to what projects are eligible and what projects are not.”

      He adds, “There is a solution if you want to find a good solution. It is doable, when there is a will and there is the need.” More

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      in Energy

      3 Questions: The Climate Project at MIT

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      MIT is preparing a major campus-wide effort to develop technological, behavioral, and policy solutions to some of the toughest problems now impeding an effective global climate response. The Climate Project at MIT, as the new enterprise is known, includes new arrangements for promoting cross-Institute collaborations and new mechanisms for engaging with outside partners to speed the development and implementation of climate solutions.

      MIT News spoke with Richard K. Lester, MIT’s vice provost for international activities, who has helped oversee the development of the project.

      Q: What is the Climate Project at MIT?

      A: In her inaugural address last May, President Kornbluth called on the MIT community to join her in a “bold, tenacious response” to climate change. The Climate Project at MIT is a response to that call. It aims to mobilize every part of MIT to develop, deliver, and scale up practical climate solutions, as quickly as possible.

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      At MIT, well over 300 of our faculty are already working with their students and research staff members on different aspects of the climate problem. Almost all of our academic departments and more than a score of our interdepartmental labs and centers are involved in some way. What they are doing is remarkable, and this decentralized structure reflects the best traditions of MIT as a “bottom up,” entrepreneurial institution. But, as President Kornbluth said, we must do much more. We must be bolder in our research choices and more creative in how we organize ourselves to work with each other and with our partners. The purpose of the Climate Project is to support our community’s efforts to do bigger things faster in the climate domain. We will have succeeded if our work changes the trajectory of global climate outcomes for the better.

      I want to be clear that the clay is still wet here. The Climate Project will continue to take shape as more members of the MIT community bring their excellence, their energy, and their ambition to bear on the climate challenge. But I believe we have a vision and a framework for accelerating and amplifying MIT’s real-world climate impact, and I know that President Kornbluth is eager to share this progress report with the MIT community now to convey the breadth and ambition of what we’re planning.

      Q: How will the project be organized?

      A: The Climate Project will have three core components: the Climate Missions; their offshoots, the Climate Frontier Projects; and Climate HQ. A new vice president for climate will lead the enterprise.

      Initially there will be six missions, which you can read about in the plan. Each will address a different domain of climate impact where new solutions are required and where a critical mass of research excellence exists at MIT. One such mission, of course, is to decarbonize energy and industry, an area where we estimate that about 150 of our faculty are already working.

      The mission leaders will build multidisciplinary problem-solving communities reaching across the Institute and beyond. Each of these will be charged with roadmapping and assessing progress toward its mission, identifying critical gaps and bottlenecks, and launching applied research projects to accelerate progress where the MIT community and our partners are well-positioned to achieve impactful results. These projects — the climate frontier projects — will benefit from active, professional project management, with clear metrics and milestones. We are in a critical decade for responding to climate change, so it’s important that these research projects move quickly, with an eye on producing real-world results.

      The new Climate HQ will drive the overall vision for the Climate Project and support the work of the missions. We’ve talked about a core focus on impact-driven research, but much is still unknown about the Earth’s physical and biogeochemical systems, and there is also much to be learned about the behavior of the social and political systems that led us to the very difficult situation the world now faces. Climate HQ will support fundamental research in the scientific and humanistic disciplines related to climate, and will promote engagement between these disciplines and the missions. We must also advance climate-related education, led by departments and programs, as well as policy work, public outreach, and more, including an MIT-wide student-centric Climate Corps to elevate climate-related, community-focused service in MIT’s culture.

      Q: Why are partners a key part of this project?

      A: It is important to build strong partners right from the very start for our innovations, inventions, and discoveries to have any prospect of achieving scale. And in many cases, with climate change, it’s all about scale.

      One of the aims of this initiative is to strengthen MIT’s climate “scaffolding” — the people and processes connecting what we do on campus to the practical world of climate impact and response. We can build on MIT’s highly developed infrastructure for translation, innovation, and entrepreneurship, even as we promote other important pathways to scale involving communities, municipalities, and other not-for-profit organizations. Working with all these different organizations will help us build a broad infrastructure to help us get traction in the world. On a related note, the Sloan School of Management will be sharing details in the coming days of an exciting new effort to enhance MIT’s contributions in the climate policy arena.

      MIT is committing $75 million, including $25 million from Sloan, at the outset of the project. But we anticipate developing new partnerships, including philanthropic partnerships, to increase that scope dramatically. More