Climate Positive Energy Initiative

The U of T Engineering team working on optimizing electrochemical pathways recently published their findings and placed in the top 60 of the global XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition

A team from the University of Toronto's Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering has invented a device that leverages electrochemistry to increase the efficiency of direct air carbon capture. Their alternative strategy aims to accelerate the widespread adoption of this emerging technology.

“The technology required to pull carbon directly out of the air has been developing for decades, but the field is now accelerating with governments and industry investing in the infrastructure required to actually do this at scale,” says David Sinton, a professor in the faculty's department of mechanical and industrial engineering and senior author on a paper published in Joule that outlines the new technique.

“One key barrier is that current processes require a lot of energy, and indeed emit a fair amount of carbon themselves," says Sinton, who holds a Canada Research Chair in microfluidics and energy and is academic director of the Climate Positive Energy Initiative, one of U of T's Institutional Strategic Initiatives.

"If we can offer a more efficient strategy, we can make the case to scale this technology to climate-meaningful levels.”

The specific carbon capture technique that Sinton and his team are working to improve is known as a pH swing cycle. It begins when air is pumped through a liquid solution that is strongly alkaline, meaning that it has a high pH. CO2 in the air reacts with the alkaline solution and is captured in the form of carbonates.

To regenerate the capture liquids, chemicals are added to precipitate the carbonates as a solid salt. In the typical process, this salt is heated by burning natural gas to turn the carbonates back into CO2 gas which can be injected underground or upgraded into other carbon-based products.

U of T Engineering researchers have created devices that can rapidly switch between electrolyzer mode and fuel-cell mode, increasing their overall efficiency at regenerating the liquid solutions needed for carbon capture
(photo by Tyler Irving)

“If you conduct a life-cycle analysis of this entire process, you see that for every tonne of CO2 you capture, you generate the equivalent of around 300 to 500 kilograms of CO2,” says Yi (Sheldon) Xu, who worked on the project as a PhD candidate and a postdoctoral fellow in Sinton’s lab.

“You’re still coming out ahead, but the energy inputs – particularly the heating step – cost a lot in terms of overall carbon efficiency,” says Xu, who is now at Stanford University.

To overcome this challenge, the team turned to electrochemistry – electrolyzers use electricity to drive forward chemical reactions that would not happen otherwise. Fuel cells do the opposite, generating electricity from chemical reactions.

The team’s key insight was creating a single device that could operate in both directions – as both a fuel cell and an electrolyzer. This innovation enabled them to open up a new pathway to regenerating the alkaline solutions needed for carbon capture.

“Both electrolyzers and fuels cells have a positive electrode and a negative electrode,” says team member Jonathan Edwards, a PhD graduate in mechanical engineering.

“In our device, the positive electrode of the fuel cell and the electrolyzer are one and the same. We switch the mode of operation every second, so that two different reactions can happen at the surface of the same electrode.”

In the first of these two reactions, the electrolyzer uses electrical current to extract alkali metal ions and regenerate the strongly alkaline solution needed for air capture. The electrolyzer also produces hydrogen, which is recycled back to the fuel cell side of the device, where it reacts to produce electricity, which in turn is fed back into the electrolyzer.

(Graphical abstract from research paper in Joule)

The fuel cell produces an acidic solution, which reacts with carbonate salts from the air-capture unit to release CO2 gas. After the CO2 is released, the resulting solution is fed back to the electrolyzer, thus completing the cycle.

The process offers several advantages. First, it circumvents the energy-intensive heating step entirely. Second, it uses electricity as opposed to natural gas – this electricity could be obtained from low-carbon sources such as solar, wind or nuclear energy.

Finally, the fact that two reactions happen at a single electrode cuts down on what are known as mass-transfer limitations – bottlenecks in how fast the reactants can diffuse to the electrode surface – which increase the amount of energy needed to drive the reaction.

“When we ran the life-cycle analysis on our process, we saw that it only generates about 11 kg of CO2 equivalent per tonne of CO2 captured,” says Shijie Liu, a PhD candidate in mechanical and industrial engineering. “That’s about 40 times less than the current thermal process.”

The team's research has already attracted international interest: they placed in the top 60 of the global XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition held last year. Now that their work has been published, they are hoping that more researchers will join them to further optimize this electrochemical pathway.

“At the moment, we’re focusing on improving the capture fluid and further reducing process energy consumption – ensuring that it’s made of sustainable and low-cost substances, as well as scaling it up to industrial levels,” Xu says.

“But there are other places, such as electrode design, where there could be more innovations to discover. We’d love to see this become a viable new platform for carbon-capture plants that are less energy-intensive to build and operate than what we have today. That would give us a powerful new tool to mitigate the impacts of climate change.”

Researchers help youth get involved with Toronto’s net-zero carbon plan

siddiq22 — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 01:16:15 +0000

Researchers help youth get involved with Toronto’s net-zero carbon plan

siddiq22 Wed, 07/05/2023 - 21:16

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U of T researchers are working on ways to engage youth in the City of Toronto's ambitious plan to drastically reduce carbon emissions (photo by Unsplash)

Alexa Battler

Topic

Our Community

Institutional Strategic Initiatives

Subheadline

A new report co-authored by Laura Tozer, an assistant professor at U of T Scarborough, will guide researchers on a youth engagement approach for the City of Toronto's TransformTO Net Zero Strategy

The City of Toronto plans to reduce city-wide carbon emissions to net zero by 2040, and researchers from the University of Toronto are helping to ensure young people play a key role in reaching its goal.

A new report outlining best practices will guide researchers as they co-design a youth engagement strategy with the city for its TransformTO Net Zero Strategy – one of the most ambitious plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in North America.

Researchers will spend the next year working with youth climate activists and youth-led organizations to begin pilot projects and boost existing programming, all while studying which approaches work best and why.

“We’re helping support the change while we're studying the change,” says Laura Tozer, co-author of the report and assistant professor in the department of physical and environmental sciences at U of T Scarborough.

“We have lots of research questions around what young people think a good life would look like in Toronto’s net-zero carbon transition – and how we would get there.”

The Youth Climate Action in Toronto project will also study ways to support young people from historically marginalized communities in overcoming the additional barriers they face, such as stereotypes and a lack of representation in environmental work. Several research questions and initiatives will focus on ways to reach underrepresented demographics and communities, and amplify their voices.

Assistant Professor Laura Tozer's research focuses on energy governance and how urban settings can become sustainable (supplied image)

Researchers plan to support about eight pilot projects so far. For example, Eve Tuck and Fikile Nxumalo, associate and assistant professors respectively at U of T’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), are working with the Tkaronto CIRCLE Lab to run an after-school workshop where Black and Indigenous youth are designing a land education program focused on climate justice.

One initiative led by Michael Classens, associate professor in the School of the Environment in the Faculty of Arts & Science, is examining how youth-led efforts to improve food justice can overlap with climate action, while another project will study methods to spread the word on climate change in ways that address – not exacerbate – the significant impact the climate crisis has on youth mental health.

“We want to fundamentally resource the action that is already being taken,” says Tozer, director of the IMPACT Lab, a research group focused on climate-change policy and action. “This project is really about supporting the way that young people want to do this work.”

Several initiatives are bridging different fields of study – a core aspect of the U of T centre co-funding the project, the Climate Positive Energy Initiative. Many of the centre’s experts – which span scientists, engineers and economists to social scientists and policy researchers – are bringing different research questions and insights to the project.

“It's a very diverse interdisciplinary team coming at this question from a lot of different angles,” Tozer says.

Report highlights opportunities and obstacles to engaging youth

The researchers’ report lays out best practices gleaned from existing research and their own interviews with young climate activists, city employees and youth engagement specialists, which probed what makes young people want to take action – or avoid it.

They found youth are deeply worried about climate change – to the extent that it is harming their mental health – but many are convinced their actions won’t make a difference. Some see climate change as just one of many threats facing the world, some don’t know where to start and others are moored by feelings of frustration and betrayal at older generations.

The report does strike an optimistic tone, highlighting successful programs, workshops and events across North America – many hosted by schools and noted as accessible entry points. Youth climate councils working with municipal governments were found to be powerful outlets, though more difficult to join.

While many youth believe governments should be held accountable in finding solutions to climate change, they often had low levels of trust in the political process. Young climate activists also shared a concern at being seen as a token young person in political spaces – Tozer says unless they see their voices making an impact, they risk further losing trust in governments.

“Young people need to get something out of this engagement – they don't want to just be extracted from,” Tozer says. “They’ll stop engaging if nothing happens, and stop lending their brilliance to what should be done on climate action.”

The report also highlights the importance of community. Young people are effective recruiters, and spaces that are welcoming, fun and community-oriented tend to not just get young people involved, but keep them coming back. The report also highlights how important it is to acknowledge youth as individuals with varying goals, free time and capacities – as one interviewee put it, “We’re not all Greta [Thurnburg].”

“There are differences in which young people are able to take climate action now, or think of it as part of their lives, so taking an equity-based approach is also important,” Tozer says. “Young people hold strategic power when it comes to climate action, and they are capable of great influence.”

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Climate Positive Energy Initiative

U of T's Climate Positive Energy initiative to partner with City of Toronto on youth-led leadership in climate action

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 21:54:06 +0000

U of T's Climate Positive Energy initiative to partner with City of Toronto on youth-led leadership in climate action

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 03/03/2023 - 16:54

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Youth march in downtown Toronto in 2019 during a Fridays for Future demonstration to raise awareness of the climate change issues (photo by Shawn Goldberg/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images)

Sayyeda Masood

Topic

Our Community

Climate Positive Energy Initiative

Institutional Strategic Initiatives

Cities

Sustainability

U of T Scarborough

The Climate Positive Energy initiative, an Institutional Strategic Initiative at the University of Toronto, is partnering with the City of Toronto’s Environment and Climate Division to lead the development of a city-wide youth engagement strategy.

The work will enable youth-led leadership with an equity lens in climate action in Toronto, supporting the implementation of the city’s TransformTO Net Zero Climate Action Strategy.

Shatha Qaqish-Clavering

The TransformTO strategy outlines a pathway to achieve net-zero emissions in Toronto by 2040. As part of the research and development of TransformTO, it was identified that the creation and implementation of a youth-specific engagement strategy is critical to the adoption of the city-wide actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“Our youth are the inheritors of a changing planet,” said Shatha Qaqish-Clavering, director of strategy and operations at Climate Positive Energy. “By engaging them in the creation and implementation of climate action strategies, we empower them to shape a better future for themselves and generations to come.

“Their energy, creativity, and drive can make all the difference in accelerating progress towards our net-zero goals.”

The City of Toronto and Climate Positive Energy will work collaboratively to support the development of a strategy that:

Considers an anti-oppression equity lens that prioritizes equity-deserving communities, reconciliation, and accessibility while building meaningful partnerships
Is framed around positive change and opportunities for a better future, being mindful of climate anxiety and youth mental health
Will inform the formation of a city-wide youth-academic partnership hub and support future climate action youth-led pilot projects; and
Will be co-designed and developed with youth representatives

The four-phase project will see the research team complete a jurisdictional scan and review of relevant best-practices to inform the approach for a city-wide youth climate action strategy. Once this phase is completed, a co-design with key youth-led or youth focused organizations will be developed, followed by a city-wide consultation process utilizing identified support options to inform the youth engagement strategy. The results of the research and consultations will be presented in a written report, which is expected to be completed next year. The report will continue to inform key recommendations for youth climate action engagement in Toronto.

The project team is composed of eight researchers from U of T led by principal investigator Laura Tozer, an assistant professor in the department of physical and environmental sciences at U of T Scarborough. A multi-disciplinary team of researchers from seven different departments and divisions will be working with Tozer on this project.

“We’re looking forward to working with young people from across the City of Toronto to understand how climate action matters in their lives and what their visions are for a zero carbon Toronto,” said Tozer. “Young people are already a driving force for climate action. This project is about empowering youth engagement in climate action to accelerate it while also addressing inequalities in our city.”

“Our partnership with the University of Toronto on the development of a youth engagement strategy is a key part of our city-wide climate action engagement work,” added James Nowlan, executive director, environment and climate at the City of Toronto. “We look forward to our collaboration on this important work and to creating a prosperous, equitable, low-carbon city that works for everyone.”

‘An everybody problem': David Sinton on how U of T experts can help Canada – and the world – get to net-zero

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 15 Dec 2021 15:15:58 +0000

‘An everybody problem': David Sinton on how U of T experts can help Canada – and the world – get to net-zero

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 12/15/2021 - 10:15

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David Sinton, a professor of mechanical engineering, is the academic lead of U of T's Climate Positive Energy Initiative, which seeks to develop clean-energy solutions by harnessing expertise across a wide range of fields (photo courtesy of David Sinton)

Geoffrey Vendeville

Topic

Our Community

Climate Positive Energy Initiative

Groundbreakers

Institutional Strategic Initiatives

Climate Change

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Research & Innovation

Sustainability

Canada has formally committed to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 – and since 78 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions globally are related to energy, finding cleaner sources is a big part of the puzzle.

Researchers at the University of Toronto have responded to this challenge by forming a new research network: the Climate Positive Energy Initiative, which seeks to harness U of T expertise, across a wide range of fields, to develop clean-energy solutions that are guided by political, human and societal considerations. It’s one of 19 projects currently supported by U of T’s Institutional Strategic Initiatives (ISI) program, a tri-campus network that unites researchers, students, faculty and external partners to fuel multidisciplinary solutions to today’s problems.

So far, the Climate Positive Energy Initiative comprises more than 100 faculty members from departments ranging from anthropology to electrical engineering. The initiative will work with community, non-profit, government and industry partners in a bid to address climate change. To enable this effort, the network aims to raise $100 million in external funding within three years.

“If you have a very narrowly defined problem, you can collect a small group of experts, execute a solution and get it done,” said David Sinton, the academic lead of the new initiative, a professor of mechanical engineering in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering and Canada Research Chair in microfluidics and energy.

“But when you have a problem like how to respond to climate change, you’ve got an everybody problem. You have an all-profession, all-social sciences, all-natural sciences and all-humanities problem.

“We’re united by the climate challenge.”

Sinton recently spoke to U of T News about the Climate Positive Energy Initiative, the problems it plans to tackle and what role students will play in the research network.

How did this research network come to be?

I’m trying to think if there was an apple-hitting-me-on-the-head kind of moment. I don’t think so. It was a realization that the University of Toronto has such incredible expertise – and such diversity of expertise. Great universities are unique in this regard. That’s something that struck me and others whom I was speaking to at the time.

There are many notable national labs and large corporations with climate-centred mandates – but do they have a university-sized roster of climate scientists, ethicists, economists and sustainable architecture experts? No.

That made me think: Not only is this a great opportunity, but we have a responsibility to organize around these multifaceted challenges. This is the kind of stuff that universities have to do.

To take one example that I’ve been closely involved with: Researchers at U of T are working on ways to use electrochemistry to convert CO2 into other carbon-based molecules, such as ethylene – which can be used make everything from antifreeze to lawn furniture. Or, to put it another way, we're working on ways to convert harmful greenhouse gases into products people use every day.

What is the university’s role in fighting climate change?

If you have a very narrowly defined problem, then you get a very specific set expertise and you can execute a solution and get it done. If you have a legal problem you need some lawyers. If you’ve got an engineering problem, you hire engineers and just go do it.

But when you have a problem like how to respond to climate change, you’ve got an everybody problem. You have an all-profession, all-social sciences, all-natural sciences and all-humanities problem.

Historically, we take an iterative approach toward solving problems related to energy. It’s usually tech-heavy, tech-led – and then after a decade or more we figure out what went wrong, do a cost-benefit analysis and do better next time.

We can’t do that now. The issue is time. Ten-year iterations are too slow when you have 2050 [the year by which Canada aims to reach net-zero emissions] staring at you. We have a giant multidisciplinary challenge on our hands – and a tight deadline. That’s a unique scenario.

What can we do about that? Universities can chart pathways that have some degree of consensus. We come to this challenge with a level of maturity and an understanding that no solution will be perfect. No solution will get everyone on this incredible roster of experts at U of T to align completely. But we can build a model of consensus at the university that could serve as a proxy – a way of demonstrating a pathway that was hard-fought and delivered in months instead of decades.

We also have credibility. What other organization can present a solution for de-carbonizing Canadian communities without controversy? Plans put forward by government or industry would tend to engender more skepticism. That doesn’t mean those plans are not worthy of consideration – it just means they might be less actionable.

On the other hand, a plan that comes from a university – because of its structure, academic freedom and diversity of expertise – might be more credible. We could present workable options for going forward that have a lot of traction.

De-carbonizing the Canadian North came up in a recent panel you participated in about a climate-positive energy transition. Why will this be a challenge?

We’re working on a project to bring together a national network, based at U of T, that would look at this question. The vision is to focus first on what forms of energy communities are using and what their needs are currently. What are their concerns, stated needs and opportunities for generation? Then assess if there are generalized solutions we can offer or develop together. Generalizability is important because it enables economies of scale, industry engagement and ultimate implementation.

In an energy context, we would look at what supplies they have. There are some great examples of renewable energy production in the North, but they are very seasonal – ample renewable power in the summer, followed by a shortage in winter, that means relying on fossil fuels. Saving summer’s energy for winter is the big challenge – not just in the North, but throughout Canada and much of the world.

We are engaging with local partners to tackle this seasonal energy storage conundrum and look for community-partnered solutions. Very few communities would have opportunities to store renewable electricity from summer to winter. Is it possible to store it in a chemical form compatible with their winter energy demands? We have U of T experts developing such technologies.

One last point on the North: We’re particularly interested in the Yukon grid. It’s big, isolated and they spill water, which means they have hydro dams that waste energy potential in the summer because they can’t use it and can’t store it. This renewable power capacity is lost. In the winter, they have to buy diesel and there’s all sorts of challenges with that including the logistics of getting it there, safety, energy security and dependence on southern regions.

That’s one example of a problem that requires experts across the academic spectrum – with social, political, legal, scientific and engineering backgrounds. There are opportunities to make big changes if you have those disciplines aligned.

What are some other projects or questions that researchers with the Climate Positive Energy Initiative will work on?

Closer to home, the U of T Scarborough team of researchers is looking at the transition to sustainable energy for urban communities, including Scarborough. They are studying how changes in energy use and energy systems transform the community and ecosystems. Their team is a microcosm for the whole Climate Positive Energy Initiative. They have a diversity of expertise in: faculty in human geography, arts and culture, political science, management and the physical and environmental sciences.

We also have researchers exploring how the university itself can reduce its emissions and serve as an example. We’re working with Climate Positive Campus and the President’s Advisory Committee on the Environment, Climate Change, and Sustainability to lever U of Ts research expertise to reduce energy use in our buildings, enable renewable power generation, and reduce theCO2 impact of operations, heating and cooling.

The Climate Positive Campus team is hard at work and they have lots of cool projects on the go, including installing a geoexchange energy storage system under Front Campus that is projected to reduce GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions by 15,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent by 2024.

We’re working together by putting out a call for proposals. And we are asking researchers to propose how we can do better. If the outcome of a research program could be implemented on campus within five years, we’ll co-fund the research.

Can students expect more opportunities to collaborate on research through the Climate Positive Energy Initiative?

We see student engagement as central to our mandate. Students are in everything we do. They’re absolutely critical in every activity.

We are forming a network of students from across the tri-campus with the full spectrum of expertise discussed earlier. There will also be direct support in the form of scholarships and opportunities to get involved in research projects.

We’re also aiming to engage our undergraduate students. We recognize that a lot of researchers, myself included, first became aware of the research side of the university through an undergrad thesis or project. That exposure to – and engagement in – research is super important.

Equally important is facilitating the peer environment – networks of undergraduates, graduate students and post-doctoral fellows. It’s just so enriching to work with people from diverse academic backgrounds, like those on the panel last month. You have ethicists, social scientists, scientists and engineers looking at climate and energy challenges from different vantage points. Students also benefit from this kind of multidisciplinary collaboration.

We have a great network of faculty working in this area, as we do post-docs and students. Closer collaboration through the Climate Positive Energy Initiative will give them a chance to make meaningful connections that last throughout their careers.

Consider the period between now and 2050, who’s working lifetime does that represent? Not mine. That timespan represents the professional lifetime of our current graduate students and post-doctoral fellows. This is their life. This is their challenge.

Connecting them within a diverse network of experts united by a shared challenge – that’s powerful.

Many are skeptical that we’ll meet our 2050 goals. How do you feel? Are you optimistic?

There are a few things to unpack here. I share the concern regarding the speed of change. There’s broad agreement – we need to act more quickly than we are.

In some ways we’re through with the denial phase. Most organizations and most governments are done denying climate change. We’re in the pledge phase. That's better than the denial phase. We’re making progress.

In practical terms, the pledges are ambitious. I don’t say that to make people more depressed. It’s just really challenging. I’m not going to comment on whether Canada or other countries should have promised more or less. It’s not within my expertise. But I will tell you that all of those pledges – including the corporate net-zero pledges that are now the norm – they’re all ambitious. They all involve transformations on a scale that few appreciate.

So, it might mean – as one of our Climate Positive Energy researchers, Shoshanna Saxe of the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, said the other day – the problem is harder than we want it to be. She’s right.

Am I hopeful? Absolutely. We’re in a real moment right now. What am I worried about? A couple of things. We’re not moving fast enough. I share that worry. What else am I worried about? That the same people who are frustrated now will get completely discouraged three years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now.

I feel that we need a strange combination of urgency and endurance: an urgency to get stuff done at the speed needed, and a perseverance.

That’s the challenge we’re facing. We need to have that engagement and action orientation right now, but we’re also going to need that for decades.

Where do you see the Climate Positive Energy Initiative in five or 10 years?

We need to take U of T's climate and energy research, which is broad and diverse, put it at the forefront worldwide and enable real solutions. We will raise U of T’s already excellent research capacity in this area by an order of magnitude or two.

U of T has given us – departments and divisions across the three campuses have given us – tremendous support and they’re saying: Here’s the starting point – now get going, growing and make this a global entity.