Geopolitical, economic and climatic changes in Europe and around the world highlight the importance of a more resilient, sustainable and climate-neutral energy supply. Solar fuels - i.e. fuels produced with the help of solar energy - are an emerging promising solution for production of clean, renewable energy, which can power our cars and transportation systems, our houses and our industries. The EU project SUNGATE (the acronym stands for SUnlight-driven Next-Generation Artificial photosynthesis bio-hybrid TEchnology platform for highly-efficient carbon-neutral production of solar fuels) started in autumn 2023 and is developing a ground-breaking technology that uses sunlight as the energy source to convert water and CO2 as simple, abundant resources into climate-friendly fuels such as methanol and formate. Conceptually, SUNGATE is based on artificial photosynthesis (AP), a new technology which is inspired by natural photosynthesis, nature’s own method of converting sunlight into chemical energy, such as sugars. However, to date, AP systems are still too inefficient, too expensive, and impractical for large-scale use in our societies. SUNGATE addresses these limitations and takes up the challenge of combining the principles of AP with those of chemical processes driven by the energy of light known as photoelectrocatalysis and use these in modular reactor system composed of two electrodes: an anode and a cathode that work in tandem to continuously store the energy of sunlight in energetic substances such as methanol or formate.
To achieve this ambitious goal SUNGATE has set the following main objectives:
1. Develop a reactor design suitable for simplifying the scale up of the components and for exchanging modules at the end of their technical life. These modules should be built so that their components can be replaced, or recycled thus avoiding or minimizing production of waste that is difficult to dismantle. The idea is to produce reactors that are conceptually based on the modern principles of circular economy.
2. Chose components at the anode and the cathode of the reactor that can operate at ambient temperature, in simple water solutions with neutral pH and without use of toxic and pollutants solvents.
3. Ensure that the components at the anode and cathode are efficient at converting solar energy in energetic methanol or formate. However, unlike costly competing systems developed so far, the SUNGATE technology should not contain or should contain only minimal amounts of raw materials which due to high costs and scarcity in Europe are considered to be at critical supply risk. By avoiding these materials known as critical raw materials such as noble and rare earth metals SUNGATE aims to reduce production costs and make the technology less dependent on resources that are unavailable in Europe.
4. Achieve the long-term goal to replace fossil fuels with solar fuels. For this goal the SUNGATE technology aims to be more efficient than natural photosynthesis and other artificial photosynthesis technologies. Our ambition is to develop a technology which is around 24 times more efficient than natural processes by the end of the project.
5. Demonstrate our technology prototypes to industry representatives towards the end of the project to raise awareness of alternative methods to produce energy and to attract interest in supporting this research work further. However, we also plan to demonstrate the technology to interested citizens and consumers because it is important to familiarise society with these new technologies to ensure future uptake.
We expect our technology to advance research into artificial photosynthesis within the scientific community. However, the future vision of the project is to significantly increase the production of solar fuels such as methanol in Europe aiming at estblishing a fruitful industry around the SUNGATE technology and the energetic fuels it produces. Our motivation is to generate economic impact by making Europe a net exporter of methanol in the future and to impact the society by promoting employment, and providing guidelines to policy makers to push innovation for climate neutrality in the future.
