FACULTY FOCUS campusreview. com. au
Energy sells
Research grants target improvements in technology for fossil fuels whilst also looking to discover clean alternatives to replace them.
By Andrew Bracey
Australia’ s reliance on fossil fuels amid a global push to reduce carbon emissions is a perennially hot-button topic and has engineering researchers working hard to find green alternatives.
Meanwhile, further work continues to examine the most ecologically friendly methods of extracting energy from traditional fossil fuel sources through increasingly popular methods such as fracking in coal seam gas mining.
Within the $ 354 million worth of Australian Research Council grants recently allocated to fund 941 projects, the council appears to have keenly recognised the need to support and improve existing technologies whilst also aiding those masterminds they hope will eventually overtake them.
Campus Review spoke to some of the big ARC winners.
CLEAN HYDROGEN Professor Chennupati Jagadish of ANU’ s research school of physics and engineering was a key beneficiary of grants, with a pair of projects he is spearheading attracting a combined $ 1.5 million.
One of his projects will aim to develop a new photocatalyst for water splitting to increase the efficiency of clean hydrogen generation as a new energy source. His second project meanwhile aims to develop a new class of semi-conductor nanotechnology for high-efficiency solar cells, UV LEDs for solid-state lighting, and for water purification.
Jagadish says the key to both his projects remains the need to improve the efficiency of renewable energy sources in order to make their adoption over high carbon emitting sources of energy a“ no-brainer”.
“ Once the cost becomes comparable to the traditional fossil fuel energy sources, people simply will not longer have to choose,” he says.“ It makes no sense for you to go and start burning coal and that sort of thing when we are able to use these new types of technologies [ with less detrimental environmental impacts ]. As human beings we all want to do that.”
However, Jagadish concedes that such an energy revolution may take up to another two decades to be realised.
“ There is certainly a huge adopting of these kinds of renewables taking place but at the same time if we really want to have much more widespread use then we need to look at the science part of it, then the engineering part of it, and of course the materials part of it – each individually,” he explains.“ Then we need to work out how the combination of all three coming together can work – these things can take a long time and I think that is again why we see collaboration with people working on various aspects of these technologies.”
COAL SEAM GAS EXTRACTION Professor Scott Sloan from the University of Newcastle’ s school of engineering received a $ 453,900 grant to aid the development of new computational models and software designed to simulate the fracking process used in natural gas extraction from coal seams.
Sloan’ s research aims to provide greater insight to the risks involved in what is arguably the most controversial form of energy extraction taking place in Australia and around the world.
Despite well-documented public concerns over contamination of water supplies by both gases and chemicals used in the fracking process, CSG mining continues to increase in its use, making such research all the more vital to policy decisions regarding the practice he says.
“ In 2010, shale gas accounted for 27 per cent of the total US natural gas production – up from only 2 per cent in 2000,” Sloan says.“ Moreover, shale gas production is projected to account for 43 per cent of the total gas production by 2015 and 60 per cent of the total gas production by 2035.”
With vast gas reserves under Australian soil, Sloan expects local production trends to follow a similar path.
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