The Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) is the nation’s largest research program dedicated to the development of an artificial solar-fuel generation technology.  Established in 2010 as a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Innovation Hub, JCAP aims to find a cost-effective method to produce fuels using only sunlight, water, and carbon-dioxide as inputs.  JCAP is led by a team from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and brings together more than 120 world-class scientists and engineers from Caltech and its lead partner, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. JCAP also draws on the expertise and capabilities of key partners from Stanford University, the University of California campuses at Berkeley (UCB), Santa Barbara (UCSB), Irvine (UCI), and San Diego (UCSD), and the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC).  In addition, JCAP serves as a central hub for other solar fuels research teams across the United States, including 20 DOE Energy Frontier Research Center.  The program has a budget of $122M over five years, subject to Congressional appropriation.

The development of a renewable fuel source that can meet the nation's energy demand while reducing carbon dioxide emissions is critical to the energy security, environmental protection, and the economic well-being of the United States.  JCAP's mission is to develop a manufacturable solar-fuels generator, made of earth abundant elements, that will use only sunlight, water, and carbon as inputs and robustly produce fuel from the sun ten times more efficiently that current crops.  Such an achievement would minimize trade-offs between food and fuel, would allow for installation of the systems in a diverse range of sites and environments, and would provide the direct production of a useful chemical fuel from the sun.

JCAP’s research and development programs span a wide range of activities from fundamental discoveries of materials needed for solar-fuel generator sub-components to applied development of scalable prototypes:

Light Capture and Conversion

Molecular Catalysis

Heterogeneous Catalysis

High-Throughput Experimentation

Benchmarking

Molecular and Nanoscale Interfaces

Membranes and Mesoscale Assembly

Scale-Up and Prototyping