TOSHIBA Atmospheric CO levels are the highest in 2-million years.
As greenhouse gases accumulate, climate change is triggering rising sea levels, heat waves and torrential rain.
In response, countries worldwide have announced measures to promote carbon neutrality, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to substantially zero by 2050.
Toshiba is contributing to decarbonization. The company has developed a power to chemicals (P2C) process that uses surplus renewable energy to decompose CO to carbon monoxide (CO), for use by industry. Details of the technology, and how it achieved the world's highest CO throughput, are covered HERE. In this article the focus is on the researchers who led the development: their thinking and goals, and how their capabilities came to the fore as they shaped their working environment and research direction. Their committed efforts were also bolstered by lessons learned by the project leader in the failure of an earlier project. The team's innovations are gathering pace, a reboot away the leader's past embarrassment and frustrations, and moving toward real-world implementation.
From conversion efficiency to current density; a major shift aiming for practical results
The work on P2C is being done at the
When Mizuguchi and his team started to research the transformation of CO into valuable raw material in industrial chemistry, their first choice was artificial photosynthesis-so named because it is patterned after plant photosynthesis and driven by sunlight. But Mizuguchi decided to review the idea of conversion efficiency from the ground up.
'We found that even if you did increase conversation efficiency, annual throughput of CO was at the level of thousands of grams. That's completely unrealistic for facilities like waste incineration plants and thermal power plants, which emit CO by the ton. Competition to improve CO conversion efficiency using artificial photosynthesis was overheating, but only in labs. I'm not even sure it was intended for real-world application. But our lab's mission is conversion to create value, and I realized that unless we changed our perspective we wouldn't create value for the world.
The team shifted its focus to electrolysis of CO and the metric of current density. Their read was that by pushing current density to the extreme, tons of CO could be processed. They also had a hunch that the floor area of the equipment would be about 20% that of current electrolysis equipment, making introduction in factories and power plants a more realistic proposition. From grams to tons-while leading the conversion efficiency race, the team changed direction for a new metric, current density. Mizuguchi says that the context for this was his own experience of failure.
'I joined Toshiba as a nuclear researcher,' says Mizuguchi, 'and I was assigned to a project to extract uranium and rare metals in
Mizuguchi went on to study cost engineering by applying cost management and business planning techniques to a virtual plant constructed from experimental data. After being assigned to the
Any concerns Mizuguchi felt about acceptance of this change of direction proved groundless. The team immediately started work on preliminary calculations of the shift to high current density, using experimental data to estimate costs against budget, and anticipated returns from commercialization. By qualitatively incorporating the insights of Kitagawa and other researchers, the team came up with a proposal to the business unit that was more than empty theory. In fact, the researchers' adoption of cost engineering marked the start of a shift toward cooperation with the business division. Kitagawa recalls it well. 'I had a feeling that there would be a good fit between Toshiba's technological assets and the expertise of the team, and that things would take shape.'
In addition to the
'Hiroyuki Ota, who at that time headed
'Working on the nuclear energy project made me really aware of how coordination between the lab and business unit impacts on progress. Bringing a product into the world won't work if, at the end of the development work, you say, 'Here it is, commercialize it.' It's also a real pleasure for researcher to be involved in the realization of a final design, and I want our team members to have that experience.'
Has the lab's approach resulted in an emerging technology that can change the world
Despite the pivot to current density, team morale remained high. As reported in the previous article, the team met its goals of higher density, larger area and stacking with a high current electrode for a larger electrolytic cell with greater CO throughput, and a design that boosted areal density through stacking. An annual processing rate of 900 grams/m2 was pushed to a potential for 30 to 40 tons/m2.
With his sights set on securing more advances, Mizuguchi says that 'Teal organization' is the lab's guiding principle. It's an organizational approach far from a top-down system, one where individuals act autonomously to advance projects, and that is attuned to responding to our age of 'VUCA,' where volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity add up to a murky future that is difficult to predict.
'We no longer live in age of limited choices and mass production by hierarchical organizations,' Mizuguchi explains. 'Predicting things is more difficult, and we have to be self-motivating. Our team is proactive and grabs opportunities, and we've experienced a lot of success. The breakthrough idea of applying a high density current came from a young engineer who joined the company just a few years ago. This is all due to the team's strong motivation to carry out research.
'The question is, how do we maintain that lofty ambitiousness When setting research target in the lab, we encourage each other to self-questioning the target by asking, 'Can this change the world' Because our lab brings together people who are on fire with an enthusiasm for innovation, such as 'make the world a better place by achieving P2C' and such attitude emerges ideas for technologies our society needs.'
Kitagawa offers his own enthusiastic comments: 'Studying cost engineering with Mizuguchi broadened my perspective as a researcher. It also introduced me agile development methods that speed up the achievement of results. We are now determining how much value that products based on our research will bring to society through verification testing that looks in fine detail at each step.
'I started my career researching materials, but I can't get an overview of things like cost and the system if I focus only on material performance. By asking where the materials function in the system, I became able to look at the whole, and to understand where cost compromises have to be made.'
P2C has built a presence, and is seen as a project that contributes to society and to resolving environmental issues. It has been recognized with awards from academic societies, and with the 2020 with the
(C) 2022 Electronic News Publishing, source
