To keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, we need to cut emissions in half by 2035—even as we will likely hit another record for burning fossil fuels this year. Still, the brilliant engineering demonstrated in this year’s winning projects provides hope that we can rise to the challenge. A new kind of thermal battery will allow us to decarbonize the heat that powers the industrial processes behind everything from cement to chemicals. Newly inexpensive lasers are helping turn ore into pure iron for steelmaking using renewable electricity. Food challenges have generated different types of innovation: Instead of hauling agricultural waste to decompose in the dump, why not create a harvester-style robot that can process it into carbon-sequestering, soil-enriching biochar? To fight pests, a technique called mRNA interference allows bioengineers to create a precision poison for a particularly troublesome beetle. The most miraculous achievement in food this year may be an AI-formulated vegan cheese that is actually delicious.
(Editor’s Note: This is a section from Popular Science’s 37th annual Best of What’s New awards. Be sure to read the full list of the 50 greatest innovations of 2024.)
Grand Award Winner
Joule Hive “firebrick” thermal battery by Electrified Thermal Solutions (ETS): A cleaner 21st-century firebrick
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Though wind and solar costs are falling, battery costs remain a lingering roadblock to decarbonizing the economy. After all, the sun is not always shining, and the wind is not always blowing. This issue is particularly problematic for heavy industries like cement, steel, glass, and chemical production, which require very high temperatures and typically keep furnaces running 24/7. Burning fossil fuels to produce heat for heavy industry accounts for about 17% of the world’s CO2 emissions.
An impressive solution to this problem is the Joule Hive, a 21st-century application of a technology that dates back to the Bronze Age: firebricks, which store heat in insulated structures. The Joule Hive uses clean electricity to maintain temperatures as high as 3,270 degrees Fahrenheit in a shipping container-sized box full of hot ceramic bricks. Channels in the box dole out heat to factory processes via a cold air stream, which the Joule Hive heats up to near-flame temperatures. Nearly ten years of research at MIT resulted in tweaking metal oxides to perform as the Joule Hive firebricks. These bricks consist of certain compounds that are electrically conductive interspersed with others that provide insulation to contain the heat.
Unlike your old toaster, in which electricity combines with oxidation from the air to eventually burn out the heating element, the Joule Hive firebricks are already oxidized. This high-tech take on ancient technology lets the Joule Hive reach higher temperatures and requires less maintenance than competitors. A recent Stanford study found that if deployed widely around the world, firebricks heated via renewable electricity could eliminate 90% of the fossil fuels heavy industry burns for heat. For its first commercial-scale installation, ETS will deploy a Joule Hive at San Antonio’s Southwest Research Institute in 2025.
Mobile biochar farm robot by Applied Carbon: Gathering agricultural waste and turning it into biochar in the field
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Nine of the ten companies that have removed the most carbon from the environment use modern versions of an ancient method known as biochar. Heating wood scraps or particularly dense agricultural waste like nutshells in oxygen-deprived environments—a process called pyrolysis—turns the biomass into black carbon, also called biochar, that bacteria and fungi cannot further decompose. But there’s a scale-up problem: There simply isn’t enough dense wood waste to sequester billions of tons of carbon.
Applied Carbon’s breakthrough was to develop a new pyrolyzing chamber that can handle the prodigious waste left after corn, wheat, and sugar harvests, even though the piles of stalks, husks, and leaves are not very dense. The Applied Carbon robot pyrolizes the waste in the field, producing synthesis gas as a helpful co-product that the robot scrubs and then burns to help maintain temperatures over 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit in the chamber. Making the biochar in the same field where it will be deposited saves additional emissions and costs of driving the material to a central facility and back. Over the summer, the company deployed four robots into corn fields in the Texas panhandle to process the waste into biochar and sell carbon credits.
In the long term, the company plans to sell or lease larger versions of the robots, estimating that waste from the world’s row plants can sequester roughly 2 billion tons of CO2 as biochar each year. Co-founder Jason Aramburu half-jokingly likens his future vehicles to the Jawa crawlers from Star Wars—ones that scavenge for stalks and corncobs instead of dead robots.
Calantha by GreenLight Biosciences: Precision biopesticide using messenger RNA interference
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The Colorado potato beetle is one of the most rapacious and pesticide-resistant bugs, feasting on tomatoes, eggplant, bell peppers, and, of course, spuds. The bug has developed resistance to dozens of chemicals and causes about $500 million in annual crop damage worldwide. Rather than escalate the arms race of stronger and higher-dose chemicals to kill it, Calantha, created by GreenLight Biosciences, is a precision poison guided to interfere with the reproduction of crucial proteins in the beetle’s body. The precision-targeted pesticide is highly effective. Even better, the researchers at GreenLight Biosciences combed through bioinformatic databases to find just the right gene to disrupt to avoid collateral damage to honeybees and other harmless species.
An application of work that won the Nobel Prize in 2006, Calantha consists of double-stranded RNA that farmers can “drop in” to conventional sprayers, like a typical pesticide. The beetle ingests the RNA, triggering interference by binding to messenger RNA instructions for a gene called PSMB5, which is critical for the elimination of damaged proteins. These mRNAs are then targeted for degradation in the gut cells of the beetle, causing damaged proteins to build up to fatal levels in the insect.
Despite its success, Calantha is not immune to the threat of beetles evolving an immunity, so GreenLight recommends that farmers rotate Calantha with conventional pesticides. Still, the company is betting that any technology that reduces chemical use will be a major driver of consumer acceptance. Calantha has sold out its first two batches and now has taken over 10% of the market for potato beetle pesticide.
Vegan cheese by Climax Foods: Plant-based blue, brie, and feta cheeses formulated by AI
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Cheese has a worse greenhouse gas footprint than pork or chicken, but until now, vegan makers haven’t been able to crack the code for flavor, texture, and overall deliciousness. To tackle this, California-based Climax Foods built a training set of metrics for cheese characteristics such as scent and stretchability. Then, they used AI and educated guesswork by cheesemakers to develop plant-based formulations that hit the same benchmarks as dairy cheese.
Michelin-starred chef Dominique Crenn said the resulting blue cheese, with top ingredients of pumpkin seeds, hemp protein powder, lima beans, and coconut oil, is “beyond imagination for a vegan cheese.” Climax became the first ever vegan cheesemaker to win a prestigious Good Food award—though dairy complaints caused the prize to be rescinded at the last minute, with shades of the protectionist, legal skulduggery faced by non-dairy milk products.
For now, Climax is trying to scale up to capitalize on the good press, though it has faced furloughs while seeking additional investment “runway.” The company has a licensing agreement with the “Laughing Cow” maker Bel Group and a second, still-unnamed producer. In the meantime, the blue cheese is available online and at select restaurants in California, New York City, and Las Vegas.
Laser furnace by Limelight Steel: Laser processing of iron ore for steel with 95% fewer emissions
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In 1985, a 1-watt laser cost about $1 million. Today, a laser of that same size costs just $1. Oakland-based Limelight Steel is capitalizing on this “Moore’s Law of lasers” to re-invent iron ore processing for steel to reduce emissions. After all, 75% of the world’s steelmaking industry still uses coal-fired blast furnaces, and the industry as a whole accounts for about 8% of global emissions. The Limelight Steel process directs laser light via mirrors and lenses onto the surface of ore, raising it to temperatures above 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit. The proprietary set of conditions created by the lasers breaks the bonds between iron and oxygen in the ore without needing carbon or expensive green hydrogen to act like a bouncer that carries the unwanted oxygen away. Limelight then follows standard steelmaking techniques to create a slag of impurities at the top of the brew, allowing dense pure iron to flow out through a channel below. Finally, steelmakers alloy the pure iron with small amounts of carbon and other elements to make different grades of steel.
CTO and co-founder Andy Zhao says the lasers approach 70-80% efficiency in converting electricity into light energy. When powered by renewable electricity, the process produces 95% fewer emissions than traditional steelmaking. Having used a $2.9 million grant from ARPA-E to demonstrate proof of concept, Limelight is now planning a pilot-scale plant in 2025 capable of producing 100 tons annually.
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