Keynote Presentation
Chemical Hydrogen Storage: hydrogenation of CO2 to produce formic acid & low-temperature cracking of ammonia
Short Bio of the Speaker
Charles Chunbao XU, PhD, P.Eng, FCIC, FCAE, FEIC
Chair Professor of Advanced Biorefinery, School of Energy and Environment, City University of Hong Kong
Prof. Charles Xu is currently Chair Professor of Advanced Biorefinery at School of Energy and Environment, City University of Hong Kong. He is Fellow of Canadian Academy of Engineering.
He was a full professor, the NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Forest Biorefinery, and Associate Director of the Institute for Chemicals and Fuels from Alternative Resources at Western University, Canada.
He has over 20 years of research experience in conversion of biomass and organic solid wastes into biofuels and green chemicals and biopolymer materials.
He has authored/edited 3 books on biorefinery and published 20+ book chapters and 380+ peer-reviewed papers in journals.
He is recipient of many prestigious awards including the Syncrude Canada Innovation Award, the Industrial Design and Practice Award from the Canadian Society of Chemical Engineers, and the 2023 Humboldt Research Award from the German Humboldt Foundation.
Abstract
The main challenges in hydrogen storage and transportation are its low density and high flammability. Hydrogen embrittlement can cause metal materials to become brittle, increasing the risk of rupture or leakage in high-pressure hydrogen environments.
While high-pressure hydrogen storage can increase storage density, it carries significant safety risks. Liquified hydrogen storage requires extremely low temperatures (-253°C).
Formic acid and ammonia have been regarded as two most promising chemical hydrogen storage media, as they have much higher hydrogen storage capacity, being 53 g H2/L and 108 g H2/L for formic acid and ammonia, respectively, at ambient temperature, compared with only ~20 g H2/L for compressed hydrogen gas.
This presentation reports our recent research on catalytic hydrogenation of CO2 to produce formic acid and on low-temperature catalytic cracking of ammonia, focusing on development of novel homogeneous catalysts.
They include MOF-based Ru catalysts and carbon-supported Ru single-atom catalysts for CO2 hydrogenation, and a low-cost, highly efficient and durable Ni/Al2O3 catalyst enhanced by interfacial Ga3+ for ammonia decomposition at temperatures below 500°C.
Transforming energy systems for a low carbon future in Asia and the Pacific
Short Bio of the Speaker
Mr. Hongpeng Liu
Director, Energy Division, United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP)
Mr. Liu is leading the energy team at ESCAP to promote regional energy cooperation with a focus on energy transition and the Sustainable Development Goal 7 – affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.
His initiatives include the development of the National SDG7 Road Map, energy connectivity for regional economic cooperation and enhancing the sustainability of minerals critical to energy transition.
His work ranges from organizing intergovernmental meetings and policy dialogues, developing knowledge products, and providing technical assistance to support member States on sustainable energy development in Asia and the Pacific.
He is a member of the Technical Advisory Group on SDG7 under UN-Energy, the United Nations' mechanism for inter-agency collaboration in the field of energy.
Mr. Liu has over 30 years’ experience in sustainable energy. Prior to joining the United Nations, he served as a government official in China in the areas of energy policies and plans, renewable energy industry development, environmental industry development and climate change.
Abstract
The Asia-Pacific region's progress and challenges in achieving a low-carbon energy future, particularly in relation to Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG 7), have been significant.
While electricity access has reached 98.6% of the population in 2023, about 50 million people still lack access. Clean cooking access lags behind, with approximately 1 billion people still relying on polluting fuels.
Despite a substantial increase in renewable energy capacity, its share in the total energy supply is growing slowly due to rising overall consumption and a decline in the use of traditional biomass.
Energy efficiency improvements have also slowed, with the region consuming roughly double the energy per unit of GDP compared to Europe.
The keynote will focus on challenges and policy recommendations to accelerate energy transitions in the Asia-Pacific region.
Recommendations include strengthening investments, modernizing infrastructure, and fostering regional collaboration to ensure a just and inclusive energy transition.
The potential for hydrogen in the energy transition
Short Bio of the Speaker
Professor Sara Walker
Director, Birmingham Energy Institute, University of Birmingham
Professor Sara Walker is a leading expert in whole energy systems and the energy transition at the University of Birmingham, where she is Director of Birmingham Energy Institute.
She has been working in the energy sector since 1996, with a career spanning both industry and academia.
Her research focuses on renewable energy and energy efficiency in buildings, energy policy, energy resilience, and more recently, whole energy systems.
She is Director of the EPSRC Hub on Hydrogen Integration for Accelerated Energy Transitions (HI-ACT), Co-Director of the EPSRC Energy Demand Research Centre (EDRC), and Co-Investigator for the Supergen Network Plus on Renewable Energy and AI (SuperAIRE).
This portfolio of research has a value of over £20m.
She is a member of the UK Energy Research Centre Advisory Committee, the UK CCS Research Centre Advisory Committee, and the EPSRC Scientific Advisory Committee for Energy and Decarbonisation.
In 2025, she was appointed as a Member of the Science and Technology Advisory Committee to the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ).
Artificial Intelligence-based Approaches for a Sustainable and Efficient Energy Future
Short Bio of the Speaker
Professor Zita Vale
Full Professor, Polytechnic of Porto; Leader of Intelligent Power and Energy Systems Research at GECAD
Zita Vale graduated in Electrical Engineering in 1986, received the PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1993,
and the Agregação title (Habilitation) in 2003 from the University of Porto, Portugal.
She is Full Professor in the Polytechnic of Porto and leads the research activities on Intelligent Power and Energy Systems at GECAD – Research Group on Intelligent Engineering and Computing for Advanced Innovation and Development.
She coordinated or participated in more than 60 R&D projects and published more than 200 journal papers.
Her scientific research focuses on Artificial Intelligence models for Power and Energy Systems Operation, Electricity Markets, Energy Communities, and Renewables.
Abstract
A significant increase in the use of renewable energy sources is driving a more sustainable energy future.
Trends towards increased electrification in mobility and building climatization, and power and energy systems’ increasing distributed nature
are important aspects of the energy sector evolution and the energy transition.
This process is very challenging to the power and energy industry as it faces a steep increase in demand and the need to deal with
distributed generation, electric vehicles, and distributed storage.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) models are needed to face these challenges, ensuring not only adequate approaches for sustainable and efficient energy use
but also bringing a human-centric paradigm to the energy business.
AI concepts and methods have a huge potential to bring effective solutions ensuring efficient and sustainable solutions,
as well as the fair and efficient participation of all actors, from small consumers and energy communities to large utilities.
This talk will discuss data-driven and knowledge-based approaches that can ensure the required distributed decision support, planning, and management
of the energy resources in current and future power and energy systems.
AI traditional paradigms, the boom of machine learning applications, and the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs)
and agentic approaches will be covered, alongside perspectives for the future.
Absorbing Energy from a Random Source without Absorbing Entropy
Short Bio of the Speaker
Professor Oscar Dahlsten
Associate Professor in Physics, City University of Hong Kong
Oscar Dahlsten works in the field of quantum information science. His research covers information thermodynamics, foundations of quantum theory, and quantum computation and machine learning.
Trained at Imperial College, he has worked at ETH Zurich, NUS Singapore, Oxford University, and SUSTech before joining City University of Hong Kong.
His contributions, in collaboration with others, include showing that random quantum circuits typically generate maximal entanglement, and pioneering the single-shot approach to non-equilibrium statistical mechanics.
Abstract
We address a foundational question in energy harvesting: Can energy be extracted from a partly random source without transferring randomness or incurring thermodynamical costs?
We answer affirmatively by presenting protocols that extract energy while avoiding both entropy transfer and energy dissipation.
These protocols fundamentally outperform existing rectification methods that dissipate power and feedback control protocols that transfer randomness to the control system.
The key innovation exploits the harvesting system taking multiple pathways to reach the same final energy state.
A central example involves Rabi oscillations in a two-level quantum system (such as an atom or qubit) interacting with an electromagnetic field.
The system is deterministically excited to its highest energy level after a fixed interaction time, regardless of the field's random initial phase.
This phase-insensitive energy transfer occurs because different phase values lead the system through different trajectories that converge to the same excited state.
We further show that this deterministic energy harvesting capability extends beyond individual field states to include their mixtures and combinations, a consequence of quantum superposition principles.
Using the well-established Jaynes–Cummings model describing light–matter interaction, we demonstrate these effects for electromagnetic field states with fixed amplitude.
These results reveal how quantum mechanical features enable entropy-free energy transfer and demonstrate the practical value of Rabi-oscillation techniques for enhancing energy harvesting efficiency in quantum devices.
