Tuesday, 14 October, 2025 / Edition 80

Intentionality in my work has been one of the biggest multipliers I’ve come across. I have too little time to waste on distractions and wrong paths, so when I’m working on something, I am 100-percent focused on it. I also take some time to plan out what I’ll be doing and why. A team from the Department of Chemical System Engineering at the University of Tokyo found that this principle might be useful in chemical reactions, too. Let’s dig in and learn more.

Sarah Compton

Editor, Enspired

Microwave Magic: A Hot Idea for Cooler Chemistry

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The materials industry has a supply problem. Well, maybe more of an efficiency problem.

Energy drain: Creating high-value-added compounds from chemical reactions is often an energy- and CO2- intensive process, because heat is regularly used to improve efficiency.

The problem: But heat is not a great catalyst, as it can take a lot of energy to create.

• The overall process is also often wasteful: So much is lost to dissipation.

• Microwave (MW)-driven catalytic reaction processes are gaining attention, though, because MW heating can selectively deliver thermal energy to specific materials.

  • Some of us have known this intuitively from Hot Pockets, where the cheese is molten lava, and the breading is ice, after microwaving.

What’s new: The research team from the Department of Chemical System Engineering at the University of Tokyo managed to create a system to amplify this concept using a MW that proved to be around 4.5 times more efficient than current methods.

How it works: Our interactions with MWs are focused on the wavelength optimized for polarized water molecules, which is 2.45 gigahertz, but the team used MWs tuned to much lower frequencies—900 megahertz—which is ideal for exciting their material of interest: zeolite.

• Their process used zeolite because it has a lot of cavities whose size the team could control, allowing them to balance different factors within the reactions.

• Indium ions were the focus of the work since they are excited by the microwaves, which created heat that could be transferred to reaction materials passing through the sponge-like environment near the cavities.

What they found: The result was an overall reduction of necessary temperatures for reactions that create fuel products, such as water decomposition or methane conversion.

What they are saying: “The most challenging aspect was proving that only a single atomic active site was being heated by the microwaves. To achieve this, we spent four years developing a specialized experimental environment at Japan’s world-class large synchrotron radiation facility, SPring-8,” said researcher Fuminao Kishimoto.

What’s next: To garner results, the research team spent years creating the optimal environment, so scaling this up outside a lab could prove challenging. It does sound like a great opportunity for geoscientists to step in with our materials and heat transfer knowledge.

To read the full paper, go here, and to find a report about it, go here.

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Natural gas: The Steady Hand

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Tech companies need power solutions that are fast and effective. Mark Zuckerberg summed it up over a year ago, “We would probably build out bigger clusters than we currently can if we could get the energy to do it.”

It just works: These organizations have had a hard time finding the power they need with local grids and only renewable solutions at the scale and speed they require, so they’re turning to ‘ol Reliable: Natural gas.

Moar power: Meta’s Socrates project in Ohio has grown from a $1.6-billion project that will provide 400 megawatts of gas-fired power to a $2-billion project providing 750 megawatts, according to Morgan Stanley analysts.

Unexpected beneficiaries: Companies that stand to benefit from bringing in natural gas include Williams Cos., which is in the natural gas infrastructure business, but also companies like Caterpillar thanks to its gas turbine business.

Turbine diversity: Caterpillar’s turbines are already part of the power team for OpenAI’s Stargate data center project in Abilene, TX, but the type of turbine being used and the type of capacity are important.

Bottleneck alert: There is a gas turbine shortage, the price for gas-fired power plants has tripled, and the lead times can be five years or more.

Specifics matter: The turbine shortage requires context, though, because it is most applicable to large turbines that are used in combined cycle systems for power plants that serve the grid, meaning their scales and power outputs are substantial.

Small, but mighty: Data centers, while requiring vast amounts of power, have specific needs, and the behind-the-meter solutions they are seeking can be smaller, simple-cycle turbines: The turbines for Meta’s Ohio data center range in output from about 14 to 23 megawatts.

Big grid comparison: The GE Vernova 7HA combined-cycle turbines that utility Duke Energy buys, however, range in output from 290 to 430 megawatts.

Fast delivery: Renewable solutions like combined solar and battery banks have been sold as fast and cost-effective solutions, with timelines of 12 to 18 months, but simple-cycle gas turbines are proving to have at least equally fast delivery times.

Building steam: Williams is under contract to install six gigawatts of behind-the-meter power for their combined projects by the first half of 2027, and it took xAI’s Colossus data center in Memphis only six months to go from lease to training its LLMs.

CO2 factories: Efficiency is still a concern, though. BloombergNEF analysts estimate 1,400 pounds of carbon per megawatt-hour for single-cycle turbines, which is nearly double the more than 800 pounds of output by combined cycle.

Viable tradeoff: When data centers need electrons, though, carbon emissions seem like something companies are willing to slate as a “tomorrow” problem, or maybe as an excuse for more work and problems for the AI models to solve.

To learn more about the way AI companies are going “all in” on solving their problem needs, go here.

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