Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for Carbon Dioxide Utilization (CarbonUSE)

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The Planning Grants for Engineering Research Centers competition was run as a pilot solicitation within the ERC program. Planning grants are not required as part of the full ERC competition, but intended to build capacity among teams to plan for convergent, center-scale engineering research. This planning grant will develop well-formulated plans for a future Engineering Research Center for Carbon Dioxide Utilization by: (a) enabling face? to-face interactions among diverse academic experts and industry leaders at planning workshops, (b) building industrial alliances, and (c) achieving deeper and more closely integrated convergence across disciplines. The in-person workshops will establish cohesive/coordinated interactions among team members, both at a personal and professional level, thereby enabling organic collaborations within and across disciplinary domains to fulfill a unified vision and goals. The provision of dedicated planning resources will create momentum within the team, helping to create an ascending and compelling agenda. This will cohere and motivate the team to develop grand solutions to the grand challenges of C02 management.This project has the potential to advance knowledge in (a) molecular-level interactions of CO2 with sorbents, membranes, and catalysts to exploit attributes such as defects, disorder, interfaces, and heterogeneity to control and enhance reaction rates, and (b) how cooperative phenomena (e.g., based on structural transitions) can reduce the extrinsic energy needs of CO2 capture and conversion processes, thereby improving process efficiencies. These advances will allow exploitation of complex electronic and atomic correlations to design and control materials, and the fabrication of hierarchical structures toward a common goal: the cost-effective capture and conversion of CO2. The project will allow for upcycling (beneficial utilization) of CO2 emissions at the gigaton scale and will position the U.S. as the world leader in this emerging domain. The institution of such disruptive offtake pathways for CO2 is a prerequisite for empowering the creation and success of the carbon-to-value economy and retarding the rate at which the climate is changing.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.