Date: September 10, 2021
Time: 12:10 p.m. - 1:00 p.m.
Location: Architecture Department’s Embodied Computation Lab (ECL)
“Rethinking the carbon economy: A quest for decarbonization via hybrid CO2 valorization”
Joshua Jack, Postdoctoral Research Associate Principal Investigator: Dr. Jason Ren
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment
Abstract
Engineered CO2 reduction to high energy density fuels and chemicals presents an economically sound approach to mitigate climate change, yielding tremendous environmental and societal benefits as part of the water-energy-climate nexus. Due to the rapid decrease in cost of renewable energy, it is now practical to design devices that use renewable electrons to drive CO2 transformation into value-added products. The presentation will describe new hybrid bioelectrochemical systems that can serve as versatile platforms to produce fuels and chemicals from renewable electricity and waste CO2. Current lab scale experiments have demonstrated excellent production rates, titers, and energy efficiencies for a wide-variety of chemicals. Efforts towards improving scalability and expanding the product portfolio are on going.
Bio
Joshua Jack is a postdoctoral researcher in the CEE department at Princeton University and earned a doctoral degree in environmental engineering from the University of Colorado, Boulder. During his graduate research, he obtained extensive research experience at the DOE- National Renewable Energy Laboratory and NASA Langley Research Center. His current research focuses on energy and resource recovery as part of the water-energy-climate nexus with a special focus on process design of bioelectrochemical systems toward scalable CO2 valorization. Jack collaborates with many researchers from the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering as well as various DOE laboratories and private companies such as Shell Energy. Jack has recently published in highly cited journals such as Applied Energy and the National Science Review and plans to pursue a tenure-track academic position in the near future.