Stakeholders from academia, national laboratories and industry from major corporations to startups gathered on Aug. 16 for a soft launch of a new collaboration to transition the globe off fossil fuels in a safe, fast and cost-effective way.
The Energy Transition Network, based at the University of Chicago and led by UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Professors Shirley Meng and Laura Gagliardi, will connect fundamental research to early-stage startups and major corporations that can translate knowledge and innovations into climate solutions and well-paid jobs.
“As an engineering school, the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering has a responsibility and duty to enable our students to be ready for an ever-changing society,” Meng said. “As a university professor, I have emphasized many times that talent and ideas are our core products. We should serve as an incubator for entrepreneurs so that our students have a fourth career pathway beyond academia, industry, and national laboratories.”
At Friday’s event, Meng announced the ETN’s first three industry partner groups — Thermo Fisher Scientific, SES AI, and MTI Corporation — who will join the effort to make Chicago a global hub of energy innovation.
“Thermo Fisher Scientific is mostly known as a life sciences company, but there's a generous part of the business that's focused on material science applications, and the overarching mission of the company is to make the world healthier, cleaner, and safer,” said Director of Market and Business Development Brandon Van Leer. “A consortium like this plays well into that mission.”
UChicago and ETN member companies will work together to scope and facilitate research projects, host thematic workshops and events, foster workforce development through internships and career opportunities as well as engage in other collaborative ideation around enabling the clean energy transition.
UChicago PME Dean Nadya Mason compared the effort to UChicago PME’s work as a catalyst for Chicago’s ecosystem around quantum technologies, and the subsequent successes that initiative has seen.
“Humanity needs game-changing ideas and strong commitments to clean energy, and it's not enough to do this individually or in a vacuum,” Mason said. “We can only solve these problems by working together, by bridging across science and technology and bringing together the best of industry, academia, and national labs. We need to jointly develop vision, strategy, and implementation, and we need to do it now.”
Part of a larger Energy Technologies Initiative
The ETN itself is just the beginning. The Network will be a driver for industry connections as part of a larger Energy Technologies Initiative — one of the three pillars of a new climate and energy institute the university plans to unveil on Oct. 30.
“At a high level, the goal of this flagship climate and energy institute is to unite and to bring together the university's greatest resources — world-leading faculty, field-defining research, and a transformational educational experience — under one roof, and bring those assets to bear on solving what we think is the greatest challenge facing society today,” said Sam Ori, Executive Director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC).
The climate and energy institute will leverage Chicago’s existing resources to forge the region into a central hub of education, innovation, and startups centered on environmental issues.
“We have the nation's largest cluster of energy technology researchers here, between UChicago PME and Argonne,” Ori said. “The Energy Policy Institute at UChicago is a world leader in developing policy frameworks and thinking about addressing energy environmental problems in a cost-effective way. All of those pieces going under one institute is a pretty powerful stake in the ground.”
Some of the political and logistical issues hindering the transition off fossil fuels are as complex as the scientific ones, said Sean Jones, Deputy Laboratory Director for Science and Technology at Argonne. The new coalition, he said, was designed to tackle all these challenges.
“Scarce resources, difficult overseas suppliers, and increasing costs are all obstacles to a clean energy future. We also need basic energy science to achieve fundamental breakthroughs for real transformation,” Jones said. “We hope that these new transformations will lead to new business opportunities in the energy economy of the future.”
Molecular insights, social change
ETN co-director Gagliardi, who holds a joint appointment with UChicago PME and the Chemistry Department, said the work will involve taking molecular engineering insights into new arenas.
“The molecular scale is very important because it is needed to understand the chemistry of these materials so they can be designed to be more effective for the application of interest,” Gagliardi said. “But then to solve societal problems like lack of water and excess of carbon dioxide, one has to go from the molecular scale to the macro scale and system scale. This needs scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, industry people, and policy people to work together.”
Xiao Ping Jiang, founder of ETN industry partner MTI Corporation, said that this type of academic partnership is not only beneficial for the planet, but for any company’s bottom line.
“Industry is a lot of things, but the number one thing is the people,” he said. “Universities send their students to industry, so partnering with universities is an investment in the long term.”
Kang Xu, Chief Scientist of SES AI, said university-industry partnerships can strengthen both sides — but only with the right partners.
“SES is excited to be a partner and founding member of ETN, because we believe that the strong leadership and the excellent scientific/engineering talents at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering will significantly catalyze the science and societal efforts to mitigate the existential threat of climate change,” he said. “Partnering with ETN also benefits SES in making better batteries because it brings the accessibility to the excellent research results of the faculty members, the high-quality students as potential recruiting source, and some of UChicago’s top facilities.”
The challenges are great, but the stakes for the future are greater still.
“We did not get out of the stone age because we ran out of rocks,” said Argonne Associate Laboratory Director Claus Daniel. “And we should get out of the fossil age long before we run out of fossil fuels.”
This will require UChicago, Argonne and private-sector companies each to focus on what they do best.
“The idea is really to build this ecosystem where the University's true products are people and ideas. Argonne National Laboratory has the ability to help with the scaling, with the manufacturing, science and data,” Meng said. “We hope that establishing this ‘mind to line’ concept will help our industrial partners solve the industry-relevant challenges they face as we transition to our renewable future.”