Jaramillo Group @ Stanford —Airminers Log 002

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AirMiners

5 min readDec 19, 2017

“The interesting thing is in the last 12–18 months, I have seen a bigger shift in thinking among corporations than I ever have in this space.”

The Jaramillo Group at Stanford was founded in 2007 and is led by Dr. Tom Jaramillo, a professor of Chemical Engineering and Photon Science.

He says, “One of the most important technical problems facing humanity is the development of a long-term, sustainable energy economy. In our research group, we develop clean energy technologies. We conduct fundamental research into the chemistry and physics of materials and engineer their surface and bulk properties to ultimately improve the efficiency of chemical transformations in renewable energy.” (1)

Jaramillo Group alumni includes the startup Opus12 (2), a Bay Area darling and early mover, working on transforming atmosphere into carbon monoxide and other fuels. Opus12 is an alumni of the Cyclotron Road accelerator (3) at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (4). Co-founder Dr. Etosha Cave (10) was profiled last month as one of twenty “Perennial Bay Area Innovators” on the annual 7x7.com Bay Area’s Hot 20. (5)

We caught up with Dr. Tom Jaramillo to learn about the past, present, and future, are proud to share it with you now.

Disclaimer: This post is an interview transcription, so please accept any typos or grammatical errors as a result of that process.

What is your lab’s approach, and why is it the thing we need?

Our mission is to transform energy into a more storable form. Solar and wind are variable resources. There’s the entire chemical industry out there, including the fuels industry and the energy industry, that operates in its own way. How can we develop technologies that make all of this work together? Carbon dioxide is one of these reactions we focus on extensively in the laboratory. When we talk about carbon dioxide an obvious target we’re at 400 ppm and climbing. How can we grab that carbon dioxide, whether out of the atmosphere, out of a cement factory, a biorefinery or a natural gas reservoir? How can we convert that into something more valuable using renewable energy? When I say we want to come up with new sustainable processes to do these chemical transformations, at the heart of this is making better catalysts. If you come up with a good catalyst, you can do that chemical transformation a million times faster, or a billion times faster, or a trillion times faster. That’s what you need to get these technologies in place.

Are there any global challenges that inspire your work?

As we know there are billions of people on earth who live on one or two dollars a day. A lot of those communities are going to be most impacted if something happens really terribly to the climate and the environment. The developing world is where you’ll see the biggest increases in carbon dioxide emissions as well. And the biggest cost constraints. That’s also an opportunity to develop technologies that can be ultra low cost, maybe not as efficient as they need to be cranking out things by the megaton, but villages don’t need a megaton of product. We work to develop technologies that are decentralizeable, small scale, and can have an impact to a very important population. I really want to see the things we’re working on now have that impact so that our world is better. It might take 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, there’s going to be a long ramp on this, but we’re going to get there and that’s the only reason we pick the problems we’re going to work on.

How did the Jaramillo Group start?

I started my faculty position here at Stanford in the fall of 2007. The big picture was sustainability. How can we come up with fully sustainable processes that can allow us to do everything our society does in a sustainable, environmentally friendly fashion. These processes must be good for our society, good for the globe, good for the entire population not just those in the wealthy countries. We want to benefit humankind. We saw the opportunity in terms of energy and the chemical industry.

What are your biggest challenges?

Our biggest scientific challenge is control over the selectivity of the chemical process. Carbon dioxide in and you want to make the one and only desired product you’re after. If you end up with a mix of products, you have to spend energy separating them. From a business standpoint, big oil and gas companies have been around for a really long time, and energy is their core business. There’s been a lot of skepticism that I’ve seen over the years on how they view these types of new technologies. The interesting thing is in the last 12–18 months, I have seen a bigger shift in thinking among corporations than I ever have in this space. There are a lot of companies now investing in what we’re doing here including Exxon Mobile, Shell, Chevron, Total. These are very big oil and gas companies that have shown an interest that I did not see so many years ago. So that’s a really good trend, I think they’re starting to recognize things are changing.

What would be a big win in the next five years?

A big win would be transforming carbon dioxide into some sort of liquid fuel under low temperatures, relatively low pressures, with high selectivity and activity. That would be checking off many of the boxes we’re thinking of in terms of carbon dioxide transformation. Another big win would be building a contraption that can do that full process in an economically viable way. It can be something you can hold in your hand, or the size of a washing machine, or the size of a Mack truck. It must make the desired product where somebody is willing to buy the product from that device instead of obtaining it from conventional commercial processes.

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