This article appeared in Catalyst Magazine, Spring 2024
Faculty Profile
Nationally recognized electrochemist Shannon Boettcher joined the Berkeley faculty this year to lead the new Center for Electrochemical Science, Engineering, and Technology (CESET).
When he's feeling especially optimistic, chemist and engineer Shannon Boettcher thinks that, one day, the oil, gas, and petrochemical industries in the United States will be replaced by a massive electrochemical industry. Electrochemists like Boettcher study how chemical reactions can be driven with electrical energy, or used to generate or store electrical energy, and their work has implications in developing clean, renewable energy.
For the electrochemical industry to take off, however, will require not only advances in electrochemical technologies but also a purposeful growth of education and infrastructure around electrochemistry, Boettcher says. He's ready to move forward on all those fronts.
To that end, Boettcher—who joined Berkeley this year as the Vermeulen Chair in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Chemistry—founded the new Center for Electrochemical Science, Engineering, and Technology (CESET). CESET aims to bring together Berkeley researchers, students and industry partners to tackle fundamental electrochemistry research, technology creation, and education and workforce development.
Boettcher received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from the University of Oregon and his graduate degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has long been motivated by the practical applications of his research. As a postdoctoral research fellow with Nathan Lewis at Caltech, Boettcher helped develop new microscale arrays of silicon wires to convert solar energy into fuel.
"I made an intentional choice to steer my research right towards the heart of energy conversion and photoelectrochemistry," says Boettcher. "I have a general interest in technology development and I wanted to do something that contributed to solving the energy crisis and creating renewable energy technologies."
In the last 14 years at the University of Oregon, Boettcher's research team dramatically improved bipolar membranes that are used to split water into acid and base components—a critical step in many systems that aim to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
"We started asking very fundamental questions about how water reacts with surfaces and how to optimize the reactions," Boettcher explains. "As we got more mechanistic insight into the process, it let us build a next-generation membrane far superior to existing technology."
A small manufacturing company is now beginning to produce the membranes designed by Boettcher's team—at the same time the researchers continue work on their deeper understanding and optimization.
Boettcher says that his efforts often involve breaking down the basic science of a technology in order to improve it.
"I don't like to optimize things until I know the design principles," he says. "I always push my students to understand the mechanism behind something as they start to try to make it work better."
Another technology that his lab has tackled this way: electrolyzers, which use electricity to split water into separate hydrogen and oxygen molecules. The hydrogen produced by this process can be used for heavy duty transport, aviation, and long-term energy storage. His lab group collaborates with multiple commercial electrolyzer manufacturers to ensure that their findings and developments have quick implications in industry.
At Berkeley, Boettcher plans to continue his work on bipolar membranes and electrolyzers, as well as expand in new directions—like using electrochemical driving forces to control higher temperature thermochemical reactions.
Boettcher says that Berkeley has all the ingredients to lead the field of electrochemistry in the coming years.
Boettcher hopes that, through CESET, Berkeley will train the next generation of scientists to integrate electrochemistry into their research—whether they come from an engineering, physics or chemistry background.