Dalian National Laboratory will focus on reducing carbon emissions from coal.

Jessie Jiang  Time：2011-10-31

From: Nature

The inauguration of the Dalian National Laboratory for Clean Energy is raising hopes that China will develop technologies to reduce emissions from its coal-fired power plants.Yanrong Zhao/DNL

After five years of preparation, China has officially opened a clean-energy research centre that will spearhead the country's efforts to develop new ways to reduce its carbon emissions.

"Our goal is to lead energy research in the country, and to rank among the world's top energy labs," says Can Li, head of the Dalian National Laboratory for Clean Energy (DNL), which was inaugurated in early October. Li says the facility will combine all major areas of energy research, including cleaner fossil fuels, solar power, and fuel cell technologies.

The lab is based at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP), a subsidiary of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The DNL's 600 scientists will be housed in a sprawling 40,000-square meter research complex on DICP's campus, where construction of the 204-million-renminbi (US$32 million) facility began in late 2006 after approval from the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology.

"Now is a major turning point for the DNL," says Tao Zhang, director of DICP. "We are transitioning from the planning and team-building stage to actual research."

Mindful that China relies on coal for more than two-thirds of its electricity, Li expects the DNL to focus much of its resources on clean fossil-fuel technologies, at least initially. This plays to the strengths of the DICP, which has developed methanol-to-olefins conversion processes that help to reduce waste in the industrial processing of coal. In cooperation with the Shenhua Group, China's largest coal supplier, the DICP last year opened a factory using its technology.

The DICP also has an ongoing energy research partnership with international oil giant BP. The DNL is expected to establish similar links with businesses and research institutions in China and abroad.

"Much of the research scope is strategically defined by China's unique energy resources, and will be critical for the development of the country in the next few decades," says Peidong Yang, department head at the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. "Establishing the national lab is a great first step."

The DNL's research into renewable energy sources will be more modest, however. "We are a latecomer in terms of solar-power research," says Li, who hopes that the lab will be able to leapfrog into more cutting-edge areas of renewable-energy research, such as artificial photosynthesis.

The DNL sprang from the Chinese government's 2006 plan to set up ten national laboratories, each focusing on a broad topic, such as protein science or modern rail transportation. But the government has yet to set up a separate fund for those initiatives; the science ministry declined to comment on the situation.

For now, the DICP is investing more than 289 million renminbi a year — over half of its annual research budget — in the DNL. More than half of that funding stream comes from DICP's business collaborations, with the remainder from government-funded research programs.

"We are faced with some very fierce competition from labs all over the world, and money is one of the necessary ingredients to keep us going," says Li. "We hope for more funding from the government, but we are also prepared to generate revenues on our own."

Website:http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111031/full/news.2011.622.html