Interview with Jeffrey Long

Abstract

J effrey L ong : C arbon C apture and S ustainability B S J Jennifer Cherone, Kapil Gururangan, Jared Rosen, Prashant Bhatt, Elaine Owen, Manisha Rai Professor Jeffrey Long graduated with his doctorate from Harvard University in 1995 and en- tered UC Berkeley as a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow from 1996 to 1997. Since then, he has researched metal organic frameworks to push environmental technology forward. With a mind to- wards creating sustainable energy and cleaning cur- rent fuel sources, he has toyed with the mechanism of carbon-capture technology that could purify the emissions of smokestacks and reduce carbon diox- ide emissions. With the eminence of climate change, Professor Long’s research is both topical and immedi- ately relevant to the sustainable energy movement. W e were mainly looking at two of your projects , the first one being the discovery of molybdenum - oxo com - plex and then your work using metal organic frame - works in carbon capture technology . H ow did you first get involved in research regarding sustainable energy ? “You never know where you’re going to head when you’re a synthetic chemist; something really new could take you in any direction.” Long: That’s a good question – it sort of happened by accident. We are generally interested in making new inor- ganic materials, so that means figuring out how to make connections between atoms other than carbon-based atoms that organic chemists work on. In our research, we found a basic method for making these solids that had a porous structure, so they would have holes in a three- dimensional network of atoms. Solids like that turn out to be useful for absorbing gases into the pores, so they’re kind of like a sponge to soak up gases like carbon diox- 1 • B erkeley S cientific J ournal • A ccidents • V olume 14 • I ssue 2 Figure 1. Long standing in front of a working bench. ide, and so on. We had a synthetic technique for making those kinds of solids and when you make something new in the lab, you’re always interested with: what can do with it, what are its properties, what’s special about it that we can take advantage of that nobody’s ever done before. So we started thinking about that, and at that time, around 2002 or 2003, the Department of Energy had a big push for research on hydrogen storage materials and those were intended for use in cars that are fueled by hydrogen instead of gasoline. People are interested in that because if you burn carbon in gasoline, then you produce carbon dioxide, which is bad for life on earth, but if you burn hydrogen or use a hydrogen fuel cell to power your car, then the by-product is water. It’s a very clean technology for driving around and so we thought our approach to making materials might be applicable to storing hydrogen at high capacity in cars. It’s important for hydrogen cars because now, hydrogen is such a volatile molecule that cars struggle to travel long distances before you have to refill them. We started working on targeting our new materials towards that application. We’ve worked for almost ten years on mak- ing new hydrogen storage materials that might one day be used in hydrogen cars in the fuel tank. More recently, we’ve been thinking about other applications and got interested in carbon dioxide capture. So you never know where you’re going to head when you’re a synthetic chemist – something really new could take you in any direction.