Chairs
Henri Winand, AkinovA, UK
Henri Winand, AkinovA, UK
Henri co-founded AKINOVA, an insurance technology company, with a specialist ILS (insurance linked securities and related insurance products) London-based City fund manager. Prior to this, he served as CEO of a British tech company (Intelligent Energy, grew from 40 people to $1bn IPO). He served on several Boards in the UK, Singapore, India, Japan and the US in the energy, software services, film contents publishing and automotive sectors. He also served on the Board of an EU funded €1bn+ public private tech partnership (PPP) and on several advisory bodies to Ministers, Secretaries of State and Officials in the new energy, automotive and materials science sectors in the UK as well as on the Alumni Advisory Board of the Warwick Business School and of the University of Cambridge. He has more than a dozen patents granted and pending as well as papers with topics including composite materials, neutron diffraction and processes to improve industrial product development cycles. He is regularly invited to speak at international conferences and spoke in the US Senate and French Sénat. He provides advice to selected major global institutional, venture capital and private equity funds. In addition to meeting several Heads of State including that of France, India and the UK over the last few years, he has made several appearances on live and recorded TV and Radio programmes (e.g. Live CNBC TV, Live Bloomberg TV, Live BBC Radio 4 “The Today Programme”, recorded BBC and other programmes, provided thought leadership and quoted articles in broadsheets, e-newspapers and The Huffington Post). He is married to Anne and has a son, Alexander.
11:30-11:50
Market-focused UK innovation in fuel cells and H2, as funded by Innovate UK
Michael Priestnall, Innovate UK
Abstract
Innovate UK is the UK Government's innovation agency. Global market opportunities for the products of UK research and Innovations are created by the need for clean, affordable and resilient energy. Commercially-focussed innovations in fuel cells and hydrogen technologies in development by UK business and research communities are in scope for the Energy Catalyst and other Innovate UK competitions. A selection of these innovations will be presented.
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Michael Priestnall, Innovate UK
Michael Priestnall, Innovate UK
Michael Priestnall is Innovation Lead in Energy for Innovate UK where he is responsible for the Energy Catalyst competition – this programme has, to-date, competitively grant-funded around 250 UK energy innovation projects with a budget ~£90m. Michael is an energy and materials chemist and has co-founded three technology companies in fuel cells, photovoltaics and carbon capture. Previously, Michael led Energy Consulting at Sagentia in Cambridge, and development of advanced ceramics for fuel cells and superconductors for Cookson Group in Oxford. Michael held an EPSRC Energy Research Fellowship at University of Cambridge and was a British Gas Research Scholar in ceramic fuel cells at Imperial College.
11:50-12:10
Green hydrogen and solar to fuels
Professor James Durrant FRS, Imperial College London, UK
Abstract
Harnessing renewable energy sources to drive the synthesis of energy dense fuels and chemical feedstocks has the potential to address several key challenges for reducing CO2 emissions: providing a scalable strategy for energy storage in chemical bonds (the most energy dense storage strategy by mass), providing carbon neutral pathways to sustainable fuels for transport applications and feedstocks for the chemical industry and, where targeted on CO2 reduction to chemicals, providing a market for carbon dioxide utilisation. ‘Green hydrogen’ produced by the electrolysis of water powered by photovoltaics or wind turbines is already being demonstrated in the UK, with significant ongoing cost reductions. In the longer term, rapid scientific progress is being made in directly harnessing sunlight to drive the photolysis of water, and the reduction of carbon dioxide to carbon based fuels. My talk will review recent advances in the science and technology which can enable such pathways, and discuss their future potential.
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Professor James Durrant FRS, Imperial College London, UK
Professor James Durrant FRS, Imperial College London, UK
James Durrant is Professor of Photochemistry in the Department of Chemistry, Imperial College London and Sêr Cymru Solar Professor, College of Engineering University of Swansea. His research addresses the photochemistry of new materials for solar energy conversion – targeting both solar cells (photovoltaics) and solar to fuel (ie: artificial photosynthesis). It is based around employing transient optical and optoelectronic techniques to address materials function, and thereby elucidate design principles which can help guide technological development. His research is currently addressing the development and functional characterisation of organic and perovskite solar cells, and photoelectrodes and photocatalysts for solar driven fuel synthesis. In addition to his core research activities, Professor Durrant leads Imperial’s Centre for Plastic Electronics and the Welsh Government funded Sêr Cymru Solar initiative. He also founded the UK’s Solar Fuels Network, and was founding Deputy Director of Imperial’s Energy Futures Laboratory. His awards include both the Environment (2009) and Tilden (2012) Prizes of the RSC. He was elected a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales in 2016.
12:10-12:30
The role of ‘green’ ammonia in decarbonising energy
Dr Rene Banares-Alcantara, University of Oxford, UK
Abstract
The main challenge to substitute fossil fuels with renewable energy (RE) sources is the intermittency of the latter. Energy storage (ES) systems have been proposed as a solution to bridge intermittency as they can store RE, and use it when the energy demand is higher than the supply. Several types of ES technologies are available, and they differ in terms of their energy density, charge time, self-discharge, capacity, efficiency and cost. There are two important questions that need to be answered when selecting the most appropriate ES technology for a given problem: the amount of energy that needs to be stored, and the duration distribution of the stored energy. Both of these quantities depend on how well the RE and demand profiles match, but there is little discussion that both short and long term duration ES are needed in most situations.
We have been studying methods (a) to determine the distribution of short vs long duration storage requirements for different geographical locations, and (b) to size and cost long duration ES technologies. Our research focus has been the production of ‘green’ ammonia (using H2 produced via water electrolysis powered by RE) as opposed to ‘brown’ ammonia (using H2 from steam methane reforming (SMR)). ‘Green’ ammonia can be used as an energy storage vector, but in its current use as raw material for the production of fertilisers could also avoid the large amount of CO2 emissions originating from SMR (an estimated 1.3% of worldwide CO2 emissions).
The production of ‘green’ ammonia has been technically feasible for many years, but it has not been competitive economically. Recent models indicate that reductions in the cost of RE begin to make it possible to produce ‘green’ ammonia economically, but a competitive ammonia-based ESS would also need to account for the effect of intermittency as it affects the size and operation of the ESS. We have identified a number of key variables that influence the levelised cost of ammonia (LCOA) and have developed a model to quantify the dependence of LCOA with respect to those variables: energy source mix (solar PV, wind and grid), LCOE, electrolyser CAPEX, relative size of the ESS components, and load ramping capabilities for each of those components.
The talk will also briefly discuss future technologies that will provide further opportunities to reduce the cost of ‘green’ ammonia such as new electrolyser technologies and improved reactor design for ammonia synthesis.
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Dr Rene Banares-Alcantara, University of Oxford, UK
Dr Rene Banares-Alcantara, University of Oxford, UK
Dr Rene Banares-Alcantara is a Reader in Engineering Science at the University of Oxford. He has an I.Q. degree from the Facultad de Quimica, UNAM (Mexico) and an MSc and PhD from Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, USA), all of his degrees are in the field of Chemical Engineering.
His research interests are in the area of Process Systems Engineering (mainly process design, synthesis and simulation, but also diagnosis and control) and the development of decision support tools. For the last three years he has been involved in projects related to long-term (chemical) storage of renewable energy and the production of ‘green’ ammonia.
He has (co-)authored 60 journal papers and around 100 other refereed publications of various kinds.