Stuart Licht

Stuart Lawrence Licht is an American chemist and academic. He is a Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at George Washington University. Licht's research focuses on carbon capture to mitigate climate change and the electrochemical conversion of carbon dioxide into nanocarbons and other useful society stables, as well as solar energy, battery chemistry, and physical analytical chemistry.
His earlier works primarily focused on fundamental physical and analytical chemistry, high efficiency solar cells, and photo-electrochemistry. This included solar cells that could store energy for night time use. His focus slowly expanded to include, electron transfer, batteries and fuel cells, including making the first practical aqueous sulfur batteries, super iron batteries, the assembling of micro-electrodes, and vanadium diboride batteries and air batteries.
After 2009, his work primarily shifted to focus on generating useful molecules, such as graphene nanocarbons, ammonia, iron, solar fuels such as sungas, and hydrogen using high temperature electrolysis where heat and electricity can come from either renewable or non-renewable energy. High temperature electrolysis per equations outlined in his STEP solar energy conversion process reduces the energy needed for electrolysis with higher efficiencies than would be used in a heat engine, and using available heat, exogenic reactions, concentrated reactants, and high ionic activity electrolytes facilitates the predicted and observed highest levels of electrical to chemical energy and solar and climate mitigation decarbonization conversion efficiencies.

Early life and education

Licht was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1976 and a Master of Science in 1980 from Wesleyan University, where he conducted research in molecular quantum mechanics. He completed his Ph.D. in 1985 at the Weizmann Institute of Science in materials chemistry, with a focus on photoelectrochemical solar cells. From 1986 to 1988, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied developed theory and experiment of microelectrode and chemical diffusion under the direction of Mark S. Wrighton.

Academic career

From 1988 to 1995, Licht held the Carlson Endowed Chair in Chemistry at Clark University. He subsequently served at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology from 1995 to 2003, and then chaired the Department of Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2008. He also worked as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation. In 2008, he joined George Washington University, where he became Professor Emeritus of Chemistry in 2023.
He has chaired the New England Section of the American Chemical Society and is a Fellow of the Electrochemical Society, where he founded both the New England and Israel sections.

Research

Licht's research is centered on developing carbon-negative technologies. His work on liquid solar solar cells pursued discovery of the role of solution chemistry in the mechanism and enhancement of photoelectrochemical solar energy conversion, development of a solar cell with built energy charge storage, multi-bandgap photoelectrochemistry, a light addressable sensor and highest solar conversion efficiencies for solar water splitting to produce hydrogen.
He is the developer of the Solar Thermal Electrochemical Photo process, which combines solar energy and high-temperature electrolysis to remove or convert carbon dioxide into solid carbon nanomaterials. Examples of STEP CO₂ elimination processes are STEP iron and STEP cement. STEP carbon capture converts CO₂ directly into solid carbon, and in particular, a new chemistry, C2CNT decarbonization, which transforms carbon dioxide directly to various graphene nano-allotropes of carbon, such as carbon nanotubes and carbon nano-onions. In a 2015 "Diamonds from the Sky" American Chemical Society press conference, Prof. Licht described the discovery and the carbon dioxide removal process. The decarbonization chemistry is driven by molten carbonate transition metal nucleation electrolysis. The resulting nanocarbons such as a wide variety of advanced material CNTs, graphene, nano-onions and graphene nano-scaffold, all made from CO₂, have applications in composites, cement, EMF shielding, metal replacement, water purification, higher capacity and more rechargeable batteries, plasmas, medical delivery, and electronics.The STEP Carbon Capture process is designed to both capture and utilize CO₂, contributing to climate mitigation efforts.
In addition to carbon conversion, Licht has conducted research in solar water splitting, and battery technologies, including iron redox systems, aluminum–sulfur batteries, polysulfide batteries, highest power domain aluminum/permanganate, ferricyanide or peroxide batteries, non-aqueous aluminum and lithium batteries, and molten-air batteries.Licht introduced theoretical and experimental tools for the measurement of aqueous pH beyond14 pH, and other novel analytical methodologies to probe analytes in concentrated medium, including spectroscopy in the domain in which the path of the incident length is shorter than the wavelength of the incident light in the spectroscopy to determine speciation and activity in concentrated media without perturbing the equilibria by dilution. He has also delineated extensive revisions of the fundamental physical chemical constants of high purity water, selenides, sulfides, and carbonates.
He has authored numerous scientific publications and holds patents related to physical chemistry, carbon removal, solar energy and energy storage, and books including those on photoelectrochemistry, and solar hydrogen generation.
By 2024, Licht's STEP-based carbon conversion technology had progressed to industrial demonstration through Carbon Corp in Calgary, Canada. The technology received recognition from the Xprize Foundation for its potential to create valuable products from captured CO₂ and to reduce the carbon footprint of materials such as cement and polymers.
Scale-up during this time included developing novel pressing based extraction method to extract carbon nanomaterials from electrolyte at high pressures.
Later on, he investigated C2CNT's CNT to create a unique, cold dusty plasma through microwave radiation efficiently shown below as an image and video.
Licht is the grandson of industrial chemist Joseph Licht, published with his father analytical chemist Truman Licht, and published and patent extensively with his son Gad Licht. His over 900 patents and publications, have often focused on removal of the greenhouse gases. He also has an extensive presence in the journals Nature and ''Science.''

Selected honors

2005 Beckman Young Investigators Award
2006 Energy Technology Research Award, Electrochemical Society
2015 Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award by EPA
2015 Open Innovation Energy Storage Prize, BASF
2015 Open Innovation Energy Storage Prize, BASF
2016 Hillebrand Prize
2018 Fellow of the Electrochemical Society
2019 Distinguished Researcher Award by the George Washington University
2022 XFactor XPrize Award for the most valuable product from CO₂, Carbon Corp Team Leader by Xprize Foundation.