Conversations with Young Scientist SDGs Award winners

"Carbon dioxide from the air and factory exhaust is fed into reactors as a raw material and efficiently converted, using clean electricity, into the chemicals, materials and fuels we need in daily life. This is completely different from the fossil-fuel-dependent path of the past few hundred years — it is a greener and more advanced way for human society to manufacture molecules," said Wang Haotian. He has long researched electrochemistry and catalysis in the energy and environment fields, focusing on carbon dioxide capture and resource utilization, electrocatalysis, green hydrogen, sustainable fuels, critical materials recycling and water treatment, and is committed to combining fundamental catalysis research with the design of scalable electrochemical reactors.

His team has taken this path to the global frontier: building porous solid-state electrolyte reactors to achieve low-energy direct air capture; publishing research on electrochemical direct air capture in Nature Energy; reporting in Nature Catalysis a new reactor that converts nitrate pollutants into green ammonia while simultaneously purifying water; and continuously tackling the long-term operational stability challenges of CO2 electrolysis. Their results point to a clear vision — making "carbon capture and carbon use" modular and scalable, much like power generation.

Wang revealed that many AI tools are already available in the field of electrochemical catalysis to help guide the development of catalysts and reactors, and that his team is building a "fully automated AI electrocatalysis laboratory" at Tongji University, using AI to guide catalyst and reactor design. He advises young scientists to embrace AI boldly: "At first, AI may only do 'childish' things, but its growth is exponential. If you wait until it has grown into a giant to catch up, it will be too late."