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Power Tools
A chemist leads a West Campus quest for renewable energy.
November/December 2012
by Robert McGuire
As Gary Brudvig begins recruiting
faculty for Yale’s new Energy Sciences Institute, launched last summer, he’ll
be fulfilling an idea that emerged almost from the moment Yale bought the
former Bayer Pharmaceutical complex—now known as the West Campus—five years
ago.
“When Yale first bought the campus, we
had some workshops with a lot of different faculty where we asked what
directions to pursue,” says Brudvig, “and energy rose to the top of the list in
every group.” As a nation, “we get most of our energy from fossil fuels, and we
need to think about how we transition out of that.”
Brudvig, the Benjamin Silliman Professor
of Chemistry, was recently appointed to a three-year term as director of the
new institute, which will provide space and support for interdisciplinary projects
related to generating and storing energy from renewable sources. One current
project, which Brudvig is involved in, studies how solar power can generate the
chemical reactions necessary to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, which
could then be used to produce a fuel like alcohol. A process like that could
essentially allow solar energy to be stored. In another project, faculty in
geology and geophysics are looking at ways of sequestering carbon dioxide in
rocks in order to reduce the negative effects of this greenhouse gas.
Right now those are the institute’s only
two projects. But Brudvig is recruiting at least four new faculty this year,
each of whom would have their own research staff. Eventually the institute
could have up to ten senior faculty.
“We’re a lot smaller than a lot of other
places in this area,” he says. “We’ll probably never be as big as some of the
state universities. But one of the exciting things about the new campus is that
we’ll be able to grow this kind of work quite a bit.”  |
