WSU receives $4 million grant to support research converting renewable energy to liquids

A Washington State University research team has been selected to receive a $4 million US Department of Energy (DOE) grant for work in converting renewable energy to liquid fuels.

The project, funded by DOE Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), aims to address the biggest challenges in bringing renewable energy to the power grid - its intermittency and storage difficulties. As part of the $41 million Grid-free Renewable Energy Enabling New Ways to Economical Liquids and Long-term Storage (GREENWELLS) program, the 14 funded projects aim to use renewable power to produce sustainable fuels or chemicals that can be transported and stored easily as carbon-intensive liquids like gasoline or oil. The program's objective is to develop systems that can economically store at least 50% of incoming intermittent electrical energy in carbon-containing liquids.

"If we rely solely on the grid to store renewable electricity, current technology may not handle these intermittencies cost-effectively," said Hongfei Lin, the project leader and professor in the Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering at WSU. "This program seeks to address this challenge by synthesizing chemicals and liquid fuels that can be stored long-term."

Over the three-year project, the WSU research team will leverage advanced metal alloy catalysts, a novel reactor design, and renewable energy sources to convert hydrogen from water and captured carbon dioxide into liquid fuels. A critical element of the project is the use of rapid induction heating with precise temperature control, a contribution led by Stanford University, to optimize the chemical reactions involved in the process.

The team will use renewable energy to generate hydrogen from water, which will then be combined with carbon dioxide through catalytic conversion technologies to produce long-chain hydrocarbons, similar to liquid transportation fuels. As part of the research, they will assess the performance of these catalytic processes under real-world conditions, with the aim of advancing the technology from the laboratory to larger scales.

"Our focus is on solving renewable energy storage issues," Lin added. "By the end of this project, we hope to demonstrate a viable pathway for storing renewable energy, though further development will be needed before this technology is ready for commercialization."

The project is a collaborative effort involving researchers from Stanford University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Argonne National Laboratory, alongside the WSU team.