What I Learned At ARPA-E

Chaos might be the watchword of our political reality, but it hasn’t distracted the ecosystem around ARPA-E from forging our future.

At a gathering of some of the brightest minds in the country, there was no diminished commitment to finding clean and affordable baseload sources of energy, cleaner ways to manufacture, and less harmful ways to extract minerals from the earth, among other initiatives.

Large-scale fusion energy might not yet be a reality, but the number of companies and research institutions devoted to solving Einstein’s dream was ever-present. To make it a reality, an entire supply chain of industries is under development, from building reactors to the plasma and rare earth minerals needed to heat the cores.

Storage, Storage Everywhere

It’s mind-boggling to see the different materials that can be used to make anodes and cathodes that store energy for applications that are too numerous to list here. Don’t like lithium-ion, how about lithium-sulfur, aluminum air, or plain old domestic materials? All were on display.

Capture Carbon

The question is no longer whether we can capture CO2 (we can), but how many different ways can we put it to humanity’s use? Produce cleaner chemicals: check. Turn it into eFuels: yes. What about nanomaterials for consumer goods like tires? It’s closer than you think.

I’ve long been suspicious of relying on carbon credits as a means to value captured carbon, but by turning it into something of value is where we can finally unlock the technology’s promise.

The Built Environment

While I hate the term, I love the technologies I saw that use timber slash and bamboo for housing and lasers to melt iron ore into steel rather than fossil fuels.

Mineral Extraction

There’s a race for the rare earth minerals we need for car batteries and to power AI technologies. How we extract those resources has become an industry sector that’s exploded in recent years, and there is no shortage of companies with a mission to make the industry more sustainable.

Hydrogen

How are we producing it? How should we use it? Can it be a cost-effective way to decarbonize? The consensus is that, like fusion, we are just around the corner, but the use cases have expanded. Whereas it was a given that the first commercialized use for H2 would be for transportation, using it in smaller amounts to make cleaner chemicals and fertilizers may be the key to unlocking its potential.

Cheap Power

The conference thread's undercurrent was cost competitiveness to power data centers that run AI, home computers, and smartphones. The Trump administration has placed this at the center of its energy policy. I suspect research grants and funding will be directed at companies, universities, and technologies that can compete with oil and natural gas. 

River and tidal energy are small baseload power sources that might have a heightened profile. Under Democratic administrations, ocean and wave energy technologies conflicted with environmental concerns, but politics making strange bedfellows might result in a Republican administration unlocking the potential of this clean, baseload source of energy.

Conclusion

The ARPA-E Summit was comfort food for me, reinforcing my belief that whatever the political exigencies of the moment, progress is inevitable and that America’s best and brightest are on the job.