GCEP Fourth Symposium
Posted by Max Dunn Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:45:00 GMT
The Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) held its fourth annual energy research symposium at the beginning of October.
GCEP is an interesting group based at Stanford University that seeks new solutions to one of the grand challenges of this century: supplying energy to meet the changing needs of a growing world population in a way that protects the environment. With funding of $225 million from Exxon, GE, Schlumberger and Toyota, GCEP supports a lot of diverse high-risk and high-reward projects in areas such as solar energy, batteries, cellulosic ethanol, hydrogen, CO2 capture and storage, advanced combustion and more
This was a fantastic symposium where researchers from Stanford and around the world discussed GCEP’s projects. Some of the highlights for me were:
- Burning coal in super-critical water to capture all CO2 and other emissions
- The benefits of using miscanthus for cellulosic ethanol (which is better than switchgrass)
- Using nano structures to improve photovoltaics
- Using biological organisms to split hydrogen
- Various techniques to make fermenting cellulosic ethanol a reality
- Improvements in lithium-ion battery cathodes
For more information, see my notes of the symposium presentations..