Microsoft Research Podcast - Collaborators: Renewable energy storage with Bichlien Nguyen and David Kwabi

Episode Date: June 22, 2023

Transforming research ideas into meaningful impact is no small feat. It often requires the knowledge and experience of individuals from across disciplines and institutions. Collaborators, a new Microsoft Research Podcast series, explores the relationships—both expected and unexpected—behind the projects, products, and services being pursued and delivered by researchers at Microsoft and the diverse range of people they’re teaming up with.In this episode, Microsoft Principal Researcher Dr. Bichlien Nguyen and Dr. David Kwabi, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan, join host Dr. Gretchen Huizinga to talk about how their respective research interests—and those of their larger teams—are converging to develop renewable energy storage systems. They specifically explore their work in flow batteries and how machine learning can help more effectively search the vast organic chemistry space to identify compounds with properties just right for storing waterpower and other renewables for a not rainy day. The bonus? These new compounds may just help advance carbon capture, too.Learn moreMicrosoft Climate Research InitiativeProject ZerixProject CarbonixKwabi Lab, University of MichiganUnderstanding capacity fade in organic redox-flow batteries by combining spectroscopy with statistical inference techniques

I'm a mechanical engineer who sort of likes to hang out with chemists. I'm an organic chemist by training and I dabble in machine learning. Brian's a computational chemist who dabbles in flow cell works. Anne is a purely synthetic chemist who dabbles in almost all of our aspects. There's really interesting synergies that show up just because there's people, you know, coming from very different backgrounds. Because we have overlap, we have lower, I'm going to call it an activation barrier in terms of the language we speak. You're listening to Collaborators, a Microsoft Research podcast showcasing the range of expertise that goes into transforming mind-blowing ideas into world-changing technologies.

I'm Dr. Gretchen Huizenga. Today I'm talking to Dr. Biklan Nguyen, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, and Dr. David Quabey, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan. Biklan and David are collaborating on a fascinating project under the umbrella of the Microsoft Climate Research Initiative that brings organic chemistry and machine learning together to discover new forms of renewable energy storage. Before we unpack the computational design and characterization of organic electrolytes for flow batteries and carbon capture, let's meet our collaborators. Biklan, I'll start with you. Give us a bit more detail on what you do at Microsoft Research and the broader scope and mission of the Microsoft Climate Research Initiative.

Thanks so much, Gretchen, for the introduction. So I guess I'll start with my background. I have a background in organic electric chemistry, so this is quite fitting. And as a researcher at Microsoft, really it's my job to come up with the newest technologies and keep abreast of what is happening around me so that I can actually fuse group of researchers came together and said, how can we use the resources, the computational resources and expertise at Microsoft to enable new technologies that will allow us to get to carbon negative by the year 2050? How can we do that? And that, you know, as part of that, I just want to throw out that the Microsoft Climate Research Initiative really is focusing on three pillars, right? The three pillars are being carbon accounting, because if you don't know how much carbon is in the atmosphere, you can't really

do much to remedy it, right? If you don't know what's there. The other one is climate resilience. So how do people get affected by climate change and how do we overcome that? And how can we help out with technology? And then the third is materials engineering where that's where I sit in the Microsoft Climate Research Initiative. And that's more of how do we either develop technologies that are used to capture and store carbon or are used to enable the green energy transition. So do you find yourself spread across those three? You said the last one is really where your focus is, but do you dip your toe in the other areas as well? I love dipping my toe in all the areas because I think they're all important, right? They're all important.

We have to really understand what the environmental impacts of all the materials, for example, that we're making are. I mean, so carbon accounting is really important and environmental accounting is very important. And then people are the ones that form the core, right? Why do we do what we do? It's because we want to make sure that we can enable people and solve their problems. Yeah. When you talk about carbon accounting and why you're doing it, it makes me think about when you have to go on a diet and the doctor says, you have to get really honest about what you're eating. Don't fake it. David, you're a professor at the University of Michigan and you run the eponymous Quabi Lab there. Tell us about your work in general.

What are your research interests? Who do you work with and what excites you most about what you do? Happy to. Thank you for the introduction and for having me on here today. So as you said, I run the QuabiLab here at the University of Michigan. And the headline in terms of what we're interested in doing is that we like to design and study batteries

that can store lots of renewable electricity on the grid. So that's our mission. That's not quite all of what we do, but it's how I like to describe it. And the motivation, of course, comes back to what Biklin just mentioned, that this need for us to transition from carbon intensive ways of producing energy to renewables. And the thing about renewables is that they're intermittent. So solar and wind down there all the time, you need to find a way to store all that energy and store it cheaply for us to really make a dent in carbon emissions from energy production. So we work on building

systems or energy storage systems that can meet that goal, that can accomplish that task. Yeah. Both of you talked about having larger teams that support the work you're doing or collaborate with you two as collaborators do you want to talk about the size and scope of those teams or you know this collaboration across collaboration yeah so I can start with that so my group like you said we're in the mechanical engineering department so we really are we call ourselves electrochemical engineers and electrochemistry is the science of batteries, but it's the science of lots of other things besides that. But the interesting

thing about energy storage systems or batteries in general is that you need to build and put these systems together, but they're made of lots of different materials. And so what we like to do in my group is build and put together these systems and then essentially figure out how they perform right try to explore performance limits as a function of different chemistries and system configurations and so on but the hope then is that this can inform materials chemists and computationalists in terms of what materials we want to make next, sort of. So there's a lot of need for collaboration and interdisciplinary knowledge to make progress here. Yeah. Biklan, how about you in terms of the umbrella

that you're under at Microsoft Research? There are so many different disciplines within Microsoft Research, but also with the team that we're working with, David. So we have actually two other collaborators from two different, I guess, departments. There's the chemical engineering department, which Brian Goldsmith is part of,

and Anne McNeil, I believe, is part of the chemistry department. And for this particular project on flow battery electrolytes for energy storage, we do need a multidisciplinary team, right? We need to go from the atomistic simulation level all the way to the full system level. And I think that's where, you know, that's important. Now that we're on the topic of this collaboration, let's talk about how it came about. I like to call this how I met your mother.

What was the initial felt need for the project and who called who and said, let's do some research on renewable climate friendly energy solutions? Biklin, why don't you go ahead and take the lead on this? Yeah. So I'm pretty sure what happened, and David, correct me if I'm wrong. Pretty sure. I'm pretty sure, but not 100% sure, is that while we were formulating how to, what topics we wanted to target for the Microsoft Climate Research Initiative, we began talking to many different universities as a way to learn from them to see what areas of interest and what areas they think are really important for the future. And one of those universities was University of Michigan.

And I believe David was one of few PIs on that initial Teams meeting and David gave, I believe, David, was it like a 10-minute presentation? Very quick, right? But it sparked this moment of, wow, I think we could accelerate this. David, how do you remember it? I think I remember it. This is sort of like a marriage, like, how did you guys meet? And then the stories have to align in some way yeah who liked who first yeah exactly um but yeah i think i think that's what i recall so basically i'm part of here at the university i'm part of this group called the global co2 initiative uh which is basically a an institute here at the university that convenes research related to co2 capture, CO2 utilization.

And I believe the Microsoft team set up a meeting with the Global CO2 Initiative, which I joined in my capacity as a member. And I gave a little 10-minute talk, which apparently was interesting enough for a second look. So that's how the collaboration started. There was a follow-up meeting after that. And here we are today. Well, it sounds like you're compelling. So let's get the collaboration started. There was a follow-up meeting after that, and here we are today. Well, it sounds like you're compelling. So let's get into it, David. Now would be a good time to talk about more detail on this research. I won't call it flow batteries for dummies, but assume we're not experts. So what are flow batteries? What problems do they solve? And how are you going after your big research goals methodologically?

Okay. So one way to think about flow batteries is to think first about pumped hydro storage. That's how I like to introduce it. So a flow battery is just like a battery, the sort of battery that you have in your cell phone or laptop computer or electric vehicle. But it has a very different architecture. And to explain that architecture, I'd like to talk about pumped hydro. So pumped hydro is, I think, a technology many of us probably appreciate or know about.

You have two reservoirs that hold water, so upper and lower reservoirs. And when you have extra electricity or excess electricity, you can pump water up a mountain, if you like like from one reservoir to another and when you need that electricity that water just flows down spins some turbines and produces electricity you're turning gravitational potential energy into electrical energy or electricity is the idea and the nice thing about pumped hydro is that if you want to store more energy you just need store more energy, you just need a bigger reservoir.

So you just need more water essentially in the two reservoirs to get to longer and longer durations of storage. And so just then it's nice because more and more water is actually, it's cheap. So the marginal cost of every stored unit of energy is quite low. This isn't really the case for the source of batteries we have in our cell phones and laptop computers. So if you're talking about grid storage, you want something like this, something that decouples energy and power. So we have essentially a low cost per unit of electricity. So flow batteries essentially mimic pumped hydro because instead of turning gravitational and potential energy into electricity, you're actually changing or turning chemical potential energy, if you like, into electricity. So essentially what you're

doing is you're storing energy in the form of electrons that are sort of attached to molecules. So you have an electron at a really high energy that if like flowing onto another molecule that has a low energy, that's essentially the transformation that you're trying to do in a flow battery. But that's the analogy I like to draw. Instead of a high and low reservation reservoirs,

you have high and low chemical potential energy. So what did these do better than the other batteries that you mentioned that we're already using for energy storage? So the other batteries don't have this decoupling. So in the flow battery, you have the energy being stored in these tanks and the larger the tank, the more the energy. If you want to turn that energy into chemical energy into electricity you you run it through a reactor so the reactor can stay the same size but the tank gets bigger and bigger and you store

more energy in a laptop battery you don't have that if you want more energy you just want more battery and that you know the cost of that is the same right so there isn't this big cost advantage that comes from decoupling the energy capacity from the power capacity. David, would you also say that with Redox organic flow batteries, you also kind of decouple the source of the battery material. So it's no longer, for example, a rare earth metal or precious metal. Absolutely. So that's then the thing. So when you, so you've got, you know,

imagine these large systems, these giant tanks with molecules that store electricity. The question then is what molecules do you choose? Because if it's really expensive, then your electricity is also very expensive. Right um the particular type of battery we're looking at uses organic molecules to store that electricity and the hope is that these organic molecules can be made very cheaply from very abundant materials and in the end that means that this didn't translate to a really low cost of electricity yeah bicklin i'm glad you brought that up because that is a great comparison

in terms of the rare earth stuff, especially lithium mining right now is a huge cost or tax on the environment. And the more electric we have, the more lithium we need. So there's other solutions that you guys are digging around for. Were you going to say something else, Biklan?

I was just going to say, I mean, another reason why we thought David's work was so interesting, it's because, you know, we're looking at energy storage for renewables. And so to get to this green energy economy, we'll need a ton of renewables, and then we'll need a ton of ways to store the energy because renewables are, you'll need a ton of ways to store the energy because renewables are you know they're intermittent I mean sometimes the rain rains all the time and sometimes it

doesn't it's really dry um I don't know why I say rain but I'm assuming I probably because you're Seattle that's why that's true but like the sun shines um it doesn't shine. Yeah, the wind blows. Sometimes it doesn't. Or doesn't. Yeah. Well, let's talk about molecules, David, and getting a little bit more granular here, or maybe I should say atomic. You're specifically looking for aqueous soluble, redox active organic molecules. And you've noted that they're really hard to find these molecules that meet all the performance requirements for real world applications. In other words, you have to swipe left a lot before you get

to a good match. Continuing with the marriage analogy. So what are the properties necessary that you're looking for and why are they so hard to find? So the aqueous soluble just means soluble in water. You want the molecule to be able to dissolve into water at really high concentrations. So that's one property. You need it to last a really long time because the hope is that these flow battery installations are going to be there for decades. You need it to store electrons at the right energy. So I mentioned you have two tanks, one tank will store the electrons at high energy, the other at low energy. So I mentioned you have two tanks. One tank will store the electrons at high energy, the other at low energy.

So you need those energy levels to be set just right, in a sense. So you want a high voltage battery, essentially. You also want the molecule to be set so that it doesn't leak from one tank to the other through the reactor that's in the middle of the two tanks. Otherwise, you're essentially losing material, which is not desirable.

And you want the molecule to be cheap. So that's really important, obviously, because if we're going to do this at a really large scale and we want this to be low cost, we want something that's abundant and cheap. And finding a molecule that satisfies all of these requirements at the same time is really difficult. You can find molecules that satisfy three or four or two, but finding something that hits all the criteria is really hard, as is finding a good partner. Right. Well, and even in other areas, you hear the phrase, cheap, fast, good, pick two, right?

So, yeah, finding them is hard. But have you identified some or one? Or, I mean, where are you on this search? Right now, the state-of-the-art charge storing molecule, if you like, is based on a rare element called vanadium. So the most developed flow batteries now use vanadium to store electricity but vanadium is pretty rare in the earth's crusts it's unclear if we start to scale this technology to levels that would really make an impact on climate it's unclear if there's

enough vanadium to do the job so it fulfills a bunch of the criteria that I just mentioned, but not the cheap one, which is pretty important. And we're hoping with this project that with organic molecules, we can find examples or particular compounds

that really can fulfill all of these requirements. And we're excited because organic chemistry gives us, there's a wide design space with organic molecules. And you're starting from abundant elements and the hope is that we can really get to something that we can swipe left on.

Is it swipe left or right? I'm not sure. I have no idea. Swipe left means, I looked it up. I've been married for a really long time, so I did look it up and it is left if you're not interested and right if you are apparently on Tinder.

But not to be that awesome. We want to swipe right eventually. Yes. Which leads me to Biklin. What does machine learning have to do with natural sciences like organic chemistry? Why does computation play a role here, particularly generative models for climate change science? Yeah, so what, you know, the past decade or two in computer science and machine learning have taught us is that ML is really good at pattern recognition, right? Being able to take complex data sets and pull out the most type, you know, relevant trends and information.

And it's good at classifying, you know, used as a classification tool. And what we know about nature is that nature is full of patterns, right? We see repeating patterns all the time in nature at many different scales. And when we think, for example, of all of the combinations of carbon organic molecules that you could make, you see around 10 to the 60. It's estimated to be 10 to the 60. And those are all connected somehow in know, space, this large distribution. And we want to, for example, as David mentioned, we want to check the boxes on all these properties. So what is really powerful, we believe, is that generative models will allow us to sample this organic chemistry space and allow us to condition the outputs of these models on these properties that David wants to

check mark. And so in a way, it's allowing us to do more efficient searching. And I like to think about it as like you're trying to find a needle, right, in the ocean. And the ocean's pretty vast. Needles are really small. And instead of having the size of the ocean as your search space, maybe you have the size of a bathtub. And so that we can narrow down the search space and then be able to test and validate some of the molecules that come out.

So do these models then eliminate a lot of the options, making the pool smaller? Is that how that works, to make it a bathtub instead of an ocean? I wouldn't say eliminates, but it definitely tells you where you should be. It helps focus where you should be. It helps focus where you're searching. Right, right, right. Well, David, you and I talked briefly and exchanged some email on the Elements song by Tom Lehrer. And it's a guy who basically sings the entire periodic chart of the Elements really fast to the piano. But at the end, he mentions the fact that there's a lot that haven't been discovered. There's blanks in the chart. And so I wonder if, you know, the search for molecules,

it just feels like, is there just so much more out there to be discovered? I don't know if there's more elements to be discovered per se, but certainly there's ways of combining them and ways that produce new compounds or compounds with properties that we're looking for, for example, in this project.

So that's, I think, one of the things that's really exciting about this particular endeavor we're engaged in. So one of the ways that people have traditionally thought about finding new molecules for flow batteries is, you know, you go into the lab or you go online and order a chemical that you think is going to be promising. Some people I know have done this, myself included.

But you order a chemical that I think is promising, you throw it in the flow battery, and then you figure out if it works or not, right? And if it doesn't work you move on to the next compound or you um if it does work you publish it oh yeah exactly you tweak it for example um but one of one of the questions that we get to ask in this project is well rather than think about starting from molecule and then deciding or figuring out what whether it works we we actually start from the criteria that we're looking for and then figure out if we can intelligently design a molecule based on the criteria.

So it's, I think, a more promising way of going about discovering new molecules. And as Biklin has already alluded to, with organic chemistry, the possibilities are endless. We've seen this already in the pharmaceutical industry, for example. And there are lots of other industries where people think about this combinatorial problem of how do I get the right structure, the right compound that solves the problem of killing this virus or whatever it is. We're hoping to do something similar for flow batteries. Yeah. In fact, as I mentioned at the very beginning of the show, you titled your proposal, The Computational Design and Characterization of Organic Electrolytes for Flow Batteries.

So it's kind of combining all of that together. David, sometimes research has surprising secondary uses. You start out looking for one thing and it turns out to be useful for something else. Talk about the dual purposes of your work, particularly how flow batteries both store energy and work as a sort of carbon capture version of the Ghostbusters ecto-containment unit. Sure. Yeah, so this is where I sort of confess and say I wasn't completely upfront in the beginning when I said all we do is energy storage. But another application we're very interested in

is carbon capture in my group. And with regard to flow batteries, it turns out that you actually can take the same architecture that you use for a flow battery and actually use it to capture carbon, CO2 in particular. So the way this would work is it turns out that some of the molecules that we've been talking about, some of the organic molecules, when you push an electron onto them, so you're storing energy, and you push an electron onto them, it turns out that some of these molecules also absorb hydrogen ions from water.

So those two processes sort of happen together. You push an electron onto the molecule and then it picks up a hydrogen ion from water. And if you remember anything about something from your chemistry classes in high school, that changes the pH of water. If you remove protons from water, that makes water more basic or more alkaline. And alkaline electrolytes or alkaline water actually absorbs or reacts with CO2 to make bicarbonate. So that's a chemical reaction that can serve as a mode or a mechanism for removing CO2 from the environment.

So it could be air or it could be flue gas or exhaust gas from a power plant. So imagine you run this process, you push the electron onto the molecule, you change the pH of the solution, you remove CO2. You can actually concentrate that CO2 and then run the opposite reaction. So you pull the electron off the molecule

that then dumps protons back into solution. And then you can release all this pure CO2 all of a sudden. So now what you can do is take a flow battery that stores energy, but also use it to separate CO2, separate and concentrate CO2 from a gaseous source. So this is some work that we've been pursuing sort of in parallel with our work on energy storage. And the hope is that we can find molecules

that in principle maybe could do both, could do the energy storage. And the hope is that we can find molecules that in principle maybe could do both, could do the energy storage and also help with CO2 separation. Biklan, is that part of the story that was attractive to Microsoft in terms of both storage for energy and getting rid of CO2 in the environment? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Of course, the properties of, you know, both CO2 capture and the energy storage components are sometimes somewhat, David, correct me if I'm wrong, kind of divergent. It's hard to optimize for one and have the other one optimized, too. So it's really a balance of things. And we're targeting just right now for this project, our joint project,

the energy storage aspect. Yeah. On that note, and either one of you can take this, what do you do with it? I mean, when I used the Ghostbusters ecto-containment unit, I was being direct. I mean, you got to put it somewhere once you capture it, whether it's storing it for good use or getting rid of it for bad use. So how are you managing that? Great question. So, Vicklyn, where are you going to go? Oh, I mean, yeah, I was going to say that there are many ways for, I'll call it CO2 abatement, once you have it.

There are people who are interested in storing it underground, so mineralizing it in basalt formations, rock formations. There are folks like me who are interested in developing new catalysts so that we can convert CO2 to different renewable feedstocks that can be used in different materials, like different plastics, different, you know, essentially new fuels, things of that nature. And then there's, you know, commercial applications for pure streams of CO2 as well. Yeah. So I would say there's a variety of things you can do with CO2. What's happening now? I mean, where does it generally... David, I want to say we talked about you could do with it but right now of all the sort of large projects that have been set up large pilot plants so co2 capture that have been set up i think the main one is enhanced oil recovery which is a little bit

controversial um because what you're doing with the co2 there is you're pumping it underground into an oil field that has become sort of less productive over time. And the goal there is to try to coax a little bit more oil out of this field. So you pop the CO2 on the ground and mix it in with the oil. And then that sort of comes back up to the surface and you separate the CO2 from the oil and you can go off and use the oil for whatever you use it for. So the economically attractive thing there is there's going to be some sort of payoff. There's a reason, commercial incentive for

separating the CO2. But of course the problem is you're removing oil from the, you're extracting more oil that's going to end up with in most co2 emissions so um there are in principle many potential options but there aren't very many that have both the sort of commercial where there's sort of a commercial impact and there's also sort of the scale to take care of you know the gigatons of co2 that we're going to have to draw down, basically. Yeah, and I think, I mean, to David's point, that's true. That is what's happening today because it provides value, right? The issue, I think, with CO2 capture and storage

is that while there's global utility, there's no monetary value to it right now. And so it makes it a challenge in terms of being able to industrialize, you know, industries to take care of the CO2. But I think, you know, as part of the MCRI initiative, you know, we're very interested in both the carbon capture and the utilization

aspect. And utilization would mean utilizing the CO2 in productive ways for long-term storage. So think about maybe using CO2, converting it electrochemically, for example, into different monomers. Those monomers maybe could be used in new plastics for long-term storage. Um, maybe those are recyclable plastics. Maybe there are plastics that are easily biodegradable, but you know, one of the issues with using or manufacturing is that there's always going to be energy associated with manufacturing. And so that's why we care a lot about renewables and the green energy transition. And that's why, you know, we're collaborating with David and his team as part of that. It's really full circle. We have

to really think about it on a systems level. And the collaboration with David is one part of that system. Well, that leads beautifully. And that's probably an odd choice of words for this question. But it seems like solving for X in climate change is a no-lose proposition. It's a good thing to do. But I always ask what could possibly go wrong? deemed environmentally friendly at first, but turned out to have unforeseen environmental impacts of their own. So even as you're exploring new solutions to renewable energy sources, how are you making sure or how are you mitigating harming the environment while you're trying to save it? That's a great question. So it's something that I think isn't traditionally, at least in my field, isn't traditionally sort of part of the software X when people are thinking about coming up with a new technology or a new way of storing renewable electricity. So, you know, in our particular case, one of the things that's really exciting about the project we're working on is we're looking at molecules that are fairly already quite ubiquitous. So they're already being used in the food and textile industry for example derivatives of the molecules we're using so you know thinking about the materials you're using and the synthetic routes that that are necessary to produce them is sort of a pitfall

that one can easily sort of get into if you don't start thinking about this question at the very beginning right you might come up with a technology that's appealing and that works really well performance-wise, but might not be very recyclable or might have some difficulties in terms of extraction and so on and so forth. So lithium-ion batteries, for example, come to mind. I think you were alluding to this earlier.

They're a great technology for electric vehicles, but mining cobalt, extracting cobalt, comes with a lot of just negative impacts in terms of child labor and so on in the Congo, et cetera. So how do we, you know, think about, you know, materials that don't, that sort of avoid this? And I'll just highlight as one of our team members, so Anne McNeil, who's in the chemistry department here, thinks quite a lot about this. And that's appropriate because she's sort of the synthetic chemist on the team. She's the one who's thinking a lot about, you know, given we have this molecule we want to make, what's the most eco-friendly, sustainable route to making that molecule?

Right. With materials that don't require, you know, pillaging and polluting the earth to do it, in a sense, right? And also making it in a way that, you know, at end of life, it can be potentially recycled, right? Right. So thinking about sustainable routes to making these molecules and potential sort of ways of recycling them are things that we're trying to, in some sense, to take into consideration.

And by we, I mean Anne specifically is thinking quite seriously. David, can I put words in your mouth? Yeah, sure, go ahead. You're thinking of sustainability as being a first design principle for... Yes, I would take those words, exactly. Okay. Yeah, I mean, that's really important.

I agree and second what David said. Biklin, when we talked earlier, the term co-optimization came up, and I want to dig in here a little bit, because whenever there's a collaboration, each discipline can learn something from the other, but you can also learn about your own in the process. So what are some of the benefits you've experienced working across the sciences here for this project? Could you provide any specific insights or learnings from this project? I mean, I think maybe a naive, something that maybe seems naive is that we definitely have to work together in all three disciplines, because what we're also learning from David and Brian is that there are different experimental and computational timelines that sometimes don't agree and sometimes do agree. And we really have to, you know, work together in order to create a unified, I'm not going to call it a roadmap, but a unified research plan that works for everyone. For example, it takes much longer to run an experiment to synthesize

a molecule. I think it takes much longer to synthesize a molecule than, for example, to run a flow cell experiment. And then on the computational side, you could probably run it, you know, at night on a weekend, you know, have it done relatively soon, generate molecules. And one of those that we're, you know, understanding is the human feedback and the computational feedback. It takes a lot of balancing to make sure that we're on the same track. What do you think, David? I think that's definitely accurate. Figuring out how we can work together in a way that sort of acknowledges these timelines is really important.

And I think I'm a big believer in the fact that people from somewhat different backgrounds working together, the diversity of background actually helps to bring about really great innovative solutions to things. And there's various ways that this has shown up in our own work, I think, and in our discussions. We're currently working on a particular molecular structure for a compound that we think will be promising at storing electricity. And the way we came about with it is that my group, we ran a flow cell and we saw some data that seemed to suggest that the molecule

was decomposing in a certain way. And then Anne's group or one of Anne's students proposed a mechanism for what might be happening. And then Jake, who works at Bicklin also, and then thought about, well, what about this other structure? So that's sort of, and then that's now informing some of the calculations

that are going on with Brian. So there's really interesting synergies that show up just because there's people working from, you know, coming from very different backgrounds. Like I'm a mechanical engineer who sort of likes to hang out with chemists and there's actual chemists and then there's, you know, people who do computation and so on.

I think you're absolutely right here in terms of the overlap too, right? Because in a way, I'm an organic chemist by training and I dabble in machine learning. You're a mechanical engineer who dabbles in chemistry. Brian's a computational chemist who dabbles in flow cell works. Anne is a purely synthetic chemist who dabbles in almost all of our aspects. in terms of the language we speak. I think that is something that, you know, we have to speak the

same language so that we can understand each other. And sometimes that can be really challenging, but oftentimes it's not. Yeah. David, all successful research projects begin in the mind and make their way to the market. Where does this research sit on that spectrum from lab to life and how fast is it moving as far as you're concerned? Do you mean the research in general or this project? This project specifically. So I'd say we're still quite early at this stage. So there's a system of classification called technology readiness level. And I would say we're probably on the low end of the scale. I don't know, maybe

like a one or two. We just started six months ago. We just started six months ago. Okay, that's early. Wait, how many levels are there? If there's one or two, what's the high end? I think we go up to an eight or so, an eight or nine. So we're quite early.

We just started. But the nice thing about this field is that things can move really quickly. So in a year or two, who knows where we'll be, maybe four or five, but things are still early. There's a lot of fundamental research right now that's happening. Which is so cool.

Proof of concept, which is necessary, I think, before you can get to the point where you're spinning out a company or moving up to larger scales. Right, which lives very comfortably in the academic world. Biklin, Microsoft Research is sort of a third space where they allow for some horizon on that scale in terms of how long it's going to take this to be something that could be financially viable for Microsoft. Is that just not a factor right now? It's just like, let's go, let's solve this problem because this is super important.

I guess I'll say that it takes roughly 20 years or so to get a proof of concept into market at an industrial scale. So what I'm hoping that with this collaboration and with others is that we can shorten the time for discovery so that we understand the fundamentals and we have a good baseline of what we think can be achieved so that we can go to, for example, a pilot scale with like a test scale outside of the laboratory, not full industrial scale, but just a pilot scale much faster than we would if we had to hand iterate every single molecule. So the generative models play a huge role in that

shortening of the timeframe. Yes. Yes. what we yeah i think go ahead david yeah i think the idea of having a platform so so rather than you know you found this wonderful precious molecule that you're going to make a lot of um you know having a platform that can generate molecules right i think is you know proving that that this actually works gives you a lot more shots on goal basically and i think that you know if we're able to show that in the next year or two that there's a proof of concept that this can go forward, then in principle, we have many more chemistries to work with and play with.

Yeah. And we might also be able to, with this platform, discover molecules that have that dual purpose of both energy storage and carbon capture. Well, as we wrap up, I'd love to know, in your fantastical ideal preferred future, what does your work look like? Now, I'm going to say five to 10 years, but Bicklin, you just said 20 years, so maybe I'm on the short end of it here. In the future, how have you changed the landscape of eco-friendly, cost-effective energy solutions? That's a big question.

I tend to think in more two, three-year timelines sometimes. But I think in five, ten years, if this research leads to a company and we have that sort of thriving and demonstrating that flow batteries can really make an impact in terms of low-cost energy storage, that would have been a great place to land. That and the demonstration that with artificial intelligence, you can create this platform that can custom design molecules

that fulfill these criteria. I think that would be a fantastic outcome. Biklan, what about you? So I think in one to two years, but I also think about the 10 to 20 year timeline. And what I'm hoping for is, again, to demonstrate the value of AI in order to enable a carbon negative economy so that we can all benefit from it. It sounds very a polished answer, but I really think that there are going to be accelerations in this space

that's enabled by these new technologies that are coming out. And I hope so. We have to save the planet. There's a lot more to AI than chat GPT and language models and so on, I think. That's a perfect way to close the show. So Biklin Nguyen and David Quabi, thank you so much for coming on. It's been delightful and informative.

Thanks, Gretchen. Thank you.