A Vision for Sustainable Energy: CHASE

The U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently granted $40 million to the Center for Hybrid Approaches in Solar Energy to Liquid Fuels (CHASE) to accelerate fundamental research on the production of liquid fuels from sunlight, water, nitrogen, and/or carbon dioxide. The overarching five-year goal of CHASE is to develop a fundamental molecular-level understanding of how hybrid photoelectrodes couple single photon absorptions to the multi-electron/multi-proton chemical transformations necessary to generate liquid solar fuels.

The mission is to develop molecule/material hybrid photoelectrodes for the cooperative sunlight-driven generation of O₂ and liquid fuels from CO₂, H₂O, and N₂. Emphasis is placed on molecular catalysts integrated with semiconducting materials with precisely controlled microenvironments created around the catalysts. There is a vast, mostly unexplored research space at the intersection between molecular catalysts and heterogeneous materials, presenting unique opportunities for advances in photocatalytic durability and product selectivity. CHASE is guided by the overarching hypothesis that the challenge of liquid solar fuel production can only be met through the cooperative interactions of molecules and materials. This hypothesis derives from observations suggesting that neither heterogeneous materials alone nor homogeneous molecular catalysts alone have proven to be sufficient and that untapped opportunities for cooperativity exist at this interface.

Dempsey, J. L.; Heyer, C. M.; Meyer, G. J. A Vision for Sustainable Energy: The Center for Hybrid Approaches in Solar Energy to Liquid Fuels (CHASE). Electrochem. Soc. Interface 2021, 30 (1), 65-68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1149/2.F10211if