Carbon Negative Technology to Solve the Climate Crisis

SPECIAL EVENT

Eli Yablonovitch & Harry Deckman

Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Dept.,

University of California, Berkeley & UCLA

Location: UCLA Engineering | Mong Auditorium

Date/Time: September 12, 2023 | 4:00 pm PT

Zoom: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/3965234221

Abstract:

In 1977, the physicist Freeman Dyson1 proposed the burial of biomass, as a scalable, economical solution to the CO2 problem. Today we know that the harvested vegetation should be buried in an engineered dry biolandfill. Plant biomass can be preserved for thousands of years by burial in a dry environment with sufficiently low thermodynamic “Water Activity”, which is the relative humidity in equilibrium with the biomass. A “Water Activity” <60% will not support life, suppressing anaerobic organisms, thus preserving the biomass for millennia. Current agriculture costs, and biolandfill costs indicate $60/ton of sequestered CO2 which corresponds to $0.53/gallon of gasoline. If scaled to the level of a major crop, existing CO2 can be extracted from the atmosphere and sequester a significant fraction of prior historical CO2 emissions

Prof. Yablonovitch introduced the idea that strained semiconductor lasers could have superior performance due to reduced valence band (hole) eective mass. With almost every human interaction with the internet, optical telecommunication occurs by strained semiconductor lasers. He is regarded as a Father of the Photonic BandGap concept, and he coined the term “Photonic Crystal”. The geometrical structure of the first experimentally realized Photonic bandgap, is sometimes called “Yablonovite”. In his photovoltaic research, Yablonovitch introduced the 4(n squared) (“Yablonovitch Limit”) light-trapping factor that is in worldwide use, for almost all commercial solar panels. He was elected to NAE, NAS, NAI, AmAcArSci, and as Foreign Member, UK Royal Society.