Prof. Weckhuysen from the Utrecht Univeristy, SUNER-C coordinator talks about artificial photosynthesis in this interview

14th October 2022

Artificial photosynthesis: ‘The next step for sustainable energy’

Prof. Weckhuysen explains that the supply and demand of renewable energy often do not match – for example, there is not enough power from the solar panels in the winter, while the heat pumps, stoves and infrared heaters have to run then. Artificial photosynthesis offers an alternative, by directly storing the energy from sunlight in known fuels such as methane, petrol and kerosene, of which the emitted carbon dioxide can be reused. Weckhuysen calls it ‘the refinery of the future’.

He also describes recent discoveries and the field and talks about the EU recently launched CSA ‘SUNER-C‘, a 4 million euro project bringing together European companies, governments and researchers.

You can read the full interview in dutch following this link. Enjoy the reading!

The ‘black box’ of the Utrecht chemist Bert Weckhuysen: water, carbon dioxide and light go in, fuel comes out.

Tarragona’s citizens gets to know about the SUNER-C project 

Prof. Llobet and Dr. López (ICIQ) explain to the population of Tarragona the need of solar fuels and chemicals in the future EU energy landscape

​29th June 2022

​Monday morning and the “to-do-list” is already uploading in your mind. With the feeling of not being on time, you catch the car. Then, you turn on the radio so to get the fresh news in an informal manner, as a calm transtition to get back to society after the weekend. 

‘Today we want to present you a European project, SUNER-C […]. Let’s talk about this project with Dr. Laura López and Prof. Antoni Llobet from ICIQ’, informs the radio presenter.

‘It is a project that agglutinates a lot of EU organisations with the common aim to put the focus on the conversion of small molecules as CO2 or N2 to fuels by using solar energy. We need to use all the tools to bring the innovation and technologies on solar fuels to become a reality’, says Dr. López.

‘If I can add, we need to highlight that the only way we have to survive is to put renewable energies as solar fuels into focus’ utters Prof. Llobet.

As citizens it is usual to hear about photovoltaics (PV) and wind technologies as solar energies, yet we are still unfamiliar with solar fuels and chemicals. In this relaxed but meaningful discussion, our experts explained to the local population what is the SUNERGY community and the objectives to be developed in the next 3 years under the EU-funded SUNER-C project. Tarragona’s citizens got to learn about the importance of solar fuels and chemicals in the future energy and materials landscape of the EU, yet prior to that there is the need of an enterprise that unifies all the actors of society (academia, industry and society) to put all the resources on to reach that goal.

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Don’t miss the video extract of these interesting talks… and get to learn Catalan!

Dr. Laura López and Prof. Antoni Llobet explaining the new EU funded SUNER-C project to Tarragona’s populations through the local radio morning show