Scialog: Negative Emissions Science Ends with Awards to 7 Teams
Top row: Fani Boukouvala, Kyriakos Stylianou, Liang Feng, Rachel Davidson, Michael Ross, Wen Song. 2nd row: Douglas Reed, Eva Nichols, Xin Xu, Ariel Furst, Joshua Jack, Zhe Qiang, Marc Porosoff. 3rd row: Yuan Yao, Benjamin Snyder, Caroline Saouma, Yuzhang Li, Rebecca Ciez, Michael McGuirk.
Research Corporation for Science Advancement, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and ClimateWorks Foundation have made awards to seven cross-disciplinary teams of early career scientists in the fourth and final year of Scialog: Negative Emissions Science, an initiative aiming to advance the underlying science needed to make technologies to capture and utilize greenhouse gases globally scalable.
The 20 individual awards of $50,000 in direct costs to each team member will go to 19 researchers from a variety of institutions in the United States and Canada. One researcher will receive two individual awards as a member of two awarded teams.
Scialog is short for “science + dialog.” Created in 2010 by RCSA, the Scialog format supports research by stimulating intensive interdisciplinary conversation and community building around a scientific theme of global importance. Scialog series usually run for three years, but Negative Emissions Science met four times: virtually in 2020 and 2021, and in person in 2022 and 2023.
In the first three years of the initiative, Scialog NES generated a host of productive partnerships and projects, which, coupled with the desire to allow researchers to meet at least twice in person, motivated the need for a fourth meeting.
"Holding four meetings on this theme is a reflection not just of the enthusiasm of our partners but of how much basic science still needs to be done to address this critically urgent problem,” said RCSA President & CEO Daniel Linzer. “It allowed us to continue to expand this community, which over just a few years has generated great new ideas that give us hope for the future.”
Including the 2023 awards, RCSA and its funding partners have made 82 individual awards totaling more than $4.1 million through the initiative.
The final meeting held November 15-18, 2023, in Tucson, Arizona, brought together 50 early career scientists from chemistry, physics, materials science, biology, engineering, and geophysics to network and brainstorm ideas for novel research to advance negative emissions technologies. Teams of two or three Fellows who had not previously collaborated wrote and pitched proposals for seed funding for innovative projects they developed at the conference.
Keynote speaker Christopher Jones, Georgia Institute of Technology, provided food for thought with his talk, “Direct Air Capture (DAC) of CO2 with Porous Sorbent Materials Coupled with Scalable Processes.”
He said research into negative emissions technologies must be prioritized to contribute to decarbonizing the energy system and to provide a new set of tools for combatting climate change.
He said population growth and rising energy demand mean a thorough techno-economic analysis of any direct air capture process is vital.
“Deciding how to deploy resources is not trivial,” he said. “The energy needs for large-scale direct air capture are huge. Do we use our energy sources to replace coal, or to power DAC? We must also consider the use of water.”
He discussed the key challenges that need to be solved to enable practical, large-scale, low-cost air capture, and the basic science his research group has done to try to develop these technologies.
In addition to Jones, other senior scientists guiding discussions at the meeting as Facilitators were Roger Aines, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Sarbajit Banerjee, Texas A&M University; Jordi Cabana, University of Illinois, Chicago & Argonne National Lab; Luis Campos, Columbia University; Nancy Haegel, National Renewable Energy Laboratory; Amy Landis, Colorado School of Mines; George Shields, Furman University; and Aleksandra Vojvodic, University of Pennsylvania.
The meeting included brief presentations by last year’s awardees, who reported surprising results, challenges, the development of new methods and tools, and new ideas for further research directions.
Rafael Santos, University of Guelph, said he and collaborators Anindita Das, Southern Methodist University, and Simona Liguori, Clarkson University, were busy working on a proof of concept. “What’s likely to happen is we’ll have some answers in a paper,” he said. “What’s more likely is that we’ll have even more questions.”
More than 100 Fellows participated in meetings throughout the four years of the initiative. One of them, Rachel Davidson, University of Delaware, was a postdoc in 2020 whose plans to start an independent academic career were put on hold due to COVID-19. Thanks to support through one of RCSA’s pandemic initiatives, the Cottrell Fellowships, she remained working in the Texas A&M University lab of Sarbajit Banerjee an extra year, which subsequently led to a faculty position at the University of Delaware in 2023.
"The Cottrell Fellowship really gave me the time and opportunity to explore a new area of research, machine learning and synthesis,” she said. “It turned a challenging time into something brilliant, which has enabled me to be a Scialog Fellow.”
The following Scialog: Negative Emissions Science teams will receive 2023 Scialog Collaborative Innovation Awards:
Fani Boukouvala, Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology 2
Kyriakos Stylianou, Chemistry, Oregon State University 2
Liang Feng, Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, Duke University 2
Understanding, Quantifying and Mitigating Adsorbent Degradation: From Fundamental Understanding to Techno-economic Analysis
Rachel Davidson, Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Delaware 2
Michael Ross, Chemistry, University of Massachusetts Lowell 2
Wen Song, Center for Subsurface Energy and the Environment, University of Texas at Austin 2
ML-ROCKS: Machine Learning Reaction Optimization of Carbonation KineticS
Douglas Reed, Chemistry, University of Washington 3
Eva Nichols, Chemistry, University of British Columbia 3
Xin Xu, The Polytechnic School, Arizona State University 3
Gas Capture by Tuning Electric Fields in Conductive MOFs
Michael Ross, Chemistry, University of Massachusetts Lowell 1
Ariel Furst, Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1
Joshua Jack, Civil & Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan 1
Cow Burps to Butanol: Bio-electrocatalytic Valorization of Methane to Butanol
Zhe Qiang, Polymer Science and Engineering, University of Southern Mississippi 2
Marc Porosoff, Chemical Engineering, University of Rochester 2
Yuan Yao, School of the Environment, Yale University 2
Modular Production of Aviation Fuel from Point Source Biogas Via Zoned Joule Heating
Benjamin Snyder, Chemistry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 1
Caroline Saouma, Chemistry, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University 1
Yuzhang Li, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles 1
Achieving Speed and Scale: Self-Amplifying Adsorbents for Negative Carbon Emissions
Rebecca Ciez, Mechanical Engineering & Environmental and Ecological Engineering, Purdue University 2
Michael McGuirk, Chemistry, Colorado School of Mines 1
Plastic Waste to DAC: A Study of the Chemical and Lifecycle Feasibility of Converting Polyolefin Waste to Aminopolymers for Direct Air Capture
1 Funded by RCSA
2 Funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
3 Funded by ClimateWorks Foundation
“Scialog NES is exactly the kind of initiative that we at the Sloan Foundation look to support: multidisciplinary, collaborative, and ambitious,” said Evan Michelson, Sloan Foundation Program Director. “Negative emissions is a growing and important research area, and the projects developed through Scialog NES have the potential to succeed on so many fronts, from encouraging connections among early career scholars to advancing novel insights that can transformative.”
In just four years, the Negative Emissions Science initiative has already helped catalyze impactful outcomes. Examples include:
- Barely a year after their 2020 Scialog award helped catalyze their collaboration, the team of Greeshma Gadikota, Cornell University, and Venkat Viswanathan, Carnegie Mellon University, started up a company to commercialize zero-carbon cement production powered by renewable electricity. They were also awarded a $2.5 million ARPA-E grant to further their research to integrate CO2 capture with recycling technologies.
- Later, Gadikota’s new startup company at Cornell, Carbon To Stone, was awarded a $500,000 pre-purchase agreement to use captured CO2 to produce carbonates for use in alternative cements.
- “Spotlight on Scialog: Negative Emissions Science” a collection of collaborative, forward-looking perspectives and research articles by multiple Scialog NES participants, curated by iScience Consulting Editor and NES Fellow Marta Hatzell, was published. It included an article by Wiener, Michelson, and RCSA Senior Program Director Andrew Feig, “Why a Scialog on Negative Emissions Science?”
- Awardee Simona Liguori, Clarkson University, received more than $500,000 in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy in October 2022 for a project to develop a potentially transformational approach to produce low-cost, carbon-neutral hydrogen from biomass gasification using hydrogen-selective membrane-assisted water-gas shift reactors. Although the idea was conceived outside of Scialog, the funding of her DOE proposal was made possible by a connection Simona made at Scialog with another NES Awardee, Andrea Hicks, University of Wisconsin – Madison, who is conducting life cycle assessment and environmental analysis as a critical component of the DOE project.
- A team whose 2021 collaborative Scialog project for a novel membrane to pair direct ocean capture of CO2 with desalination was awarded a $1.4M Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal Award from the Office of Naval Research through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Oceanographic Partnership Program. Katherine Hornbostel, University of Pittsburgh, will be PI of the two-year project, along with her Scialog collaborators Matthew Green, Arizona State University, and Jennifer Yang, University of California, Irvine.
Beyond funding and publications, Fellows who participated in the meetings said they appreciated the value of connections they made through the initiative.
“The science is great, but the human interaction at Scialog is absolutely fabulous,” said Oana Luca, University of Colorado Boulder, who credits an early-pandemic Zoom conversation at the initiative’s first meeting with changing the direction of her research. “I was asking some what I thought were kind of silly, dumb questions, but we ended up writing a paper answering some of the questions, and the student that helped with this became very passionate about carbon capture, and now I have an entire branch of my research program doing that.”
Now Luca is writing several proposals with Hicks and other collaborators.
In addition to receiving two Scialog awards herself, Hicks said her participation in all four meetings of the initiative led to multiple additional opportunities for collaboration.
“It's nice to be in this cohort of early career people with such different skill sets. When a call comes out, I’m like, ‘I don’t do that, but I met someone at Scialog who does.’ You can call and ask if they want to write a proposal together.”
“Scialog NES created a unique environment that allowed speculative projects to flourish,” said the Sloan Foundation’s Michelson. “The results they will achieve are crucial if we are to meet our national and global decarbonization goals.”
RCSA’s next partnership with the Sloan Foundation will be a new three-year series, Scialog: Sustainable Minerals, Metals, and Materials, which will hold its first meeting in September 2024.
