What if we could make high-energy, nonpolluting fuel from water, and common items like clothing, shoes, cell phones and tires from grass and trees?
That’s the world Paul Dauenhauer is building, using his expertise in chemical engineering. In such a world, we would greatly reduce carbon dioxide production from fossil fuel burning and cut the demand for fossil fuels even more by no longer making many everyday products—like plastics—out of petroleum or natural gas.
All it takes is an imaginative new approach to carbon-based chemistry—an approach that just earned Dauenhauer one of 21 MacArthur fellowships for 2020 from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The $625,000, no-strings-attached fellowships reward exceptional creativity and the potential for further creative work.
Dauenhauer holds the Lanny Schmidt Honorary Professorship in the U of M Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, College of Science and Engineering. Schmidt, who died in March 2020, was a Regents Professor, a National Academy of Engineering member, and Dauenhauer’s academic adviser when he was a graduate student.
Timing is everything
Dauenhauer focuses on catalysts, the substances that “broker” chemical reactions by speeding them up immensely without being permanently altered themselves. One of his goals is to use (along with catalysts) electricity from solar arrays and wind turbines to split water molecules into their components, oxygen and hydrogen. This stores the electrical energy chemically as hydrogen gas, a clean and potent fuel.
But today that electricity is supplied in high-voltage, energy-wasting inputs. While Dauenhauer works with common metal or metal-based catalysts, he replaces the high voltages with low-voltage electrical pulses in a rhythm and amplitude that match pulsations of energy within the catalysts. Thus “tuned,” the catalysts drive reactions to speeds thousands of times faster.
“I use the analogy of pushing children on a swing set,” Dauenhauer says. “If you time your pushing just right, the child will swing higher and higher. If you push at the wrong time, then it does not work.”
Trading fossil carbon for renewable
Another focus for the Dauenhauer lab is using glucose from plants to make biodegradable building blocks for plastics and other materials. Among these “feedstock” chemicals are paraxylene, used to make polyester for plastics, clothing, auto parts and other materials; isoprene, for the rubber in car tires; and oleo-furan surfactant, a key component of detergents. This surfactant may find its way into consumer products in a year or two, he says.
None of this can come too soon.
“I think we’re in a race against time before we flood the oceans and the landscape with waste plastic, but also before we fill the atmosphere with carbon dioxide,” Dauenhauer warns. “So we need to move as quickly as possible to develop technologies that we can implement on a large scale. Renewable resources like grasses and trees are incredibly low cost, and there’s no reason we can’t manufacture all the materials we use today using the trees, grasses, and agricultural products around us.
“My work is to build a refinery that uses these natural products to make the chemicals and materials and energies that we use every day. … I think we could build an entirely new infrastructure of renewable materials that are sustainable, but also drive local economies.”
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