Converting Sunlight into Chemical Energy

Harnessing sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into high energy chemicals using systems made of engineered materials – artificial photosynthesis – has enormous potential as a scalable approach for generating renewable fuels, thereby replacing fossil resources. Research in this field has greatly intensified and scientific progress accelerated since the start of the Gordon Research Conference series on "Renewable Energy: Solar Fuels" in 2007, especially in the area of light absorbers and catalysts for splitting water into hydrogen oxygen.

A central theme of the 2016 GRC will be the recent progress and scientific challenges of integrating the light absorbers and catalysts into subsystems and complete solar fuel assemblies, with the goal of achieving closed photosynthetic cycles in which only water (and CO₂) are consumed. Successful integration requires the detailed understanding of elementary energy, charge transfer and catalytic processes at every stage of the assembly to guide improvement of photon-to-fuel conversion efficiency. Advances in our knowledge, of mechanisms by which charges created by light absorption drive catalytic transformations, of charge-transfer processes across multiple interfaces and how they can be controlled, and of mitigating the high activation barriers of multistep catalytic reactions, are all critical for overcoming efficiency bottlenecks of the complex system. Novel physico-chemical methods of measuring these phenomena play a critical role for accelerating progress, as do rapid improvements in performance with abundant material resources that are readily and economically processed into components. Scale up of solar fuel generators encounters its own unique challenges that are receiving increased attention, while breakthroughs of molecular and solid light capture materials continue to expand the pool of components to choose from. Efforts by the research community on catalysts for carbon dioxide reduction are gaining momentum because of the need for renewable liquid transportation fuels, a formidable challenge that should benefit from lessons gleaned from microbial systems for hydrocarbon conversion. Participants, including younger scientists (the students and postdocs who may one day make the biggest breakthroughs) are encouraged to present their work in poster sessions, and some poster presenters will be selected for short talks.