Chris Yip  0:01  
Welcome to Tell Me More: Coffee with Chris Yip, the official podcast of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto.

In our second season, I want to focus on the journey, how people got to school, what they did during their time here, and where they've ended up after graduation. You will meet students, professors and alumni, and learn what pleases them at the heart of designing bold solutions for a better world. My guest today is U of T Engineering alumnus and clean tech innovator Phil De Luna. His PhD thesis in material science and engineering focused on new ways to convert carbon dioxide into commercially valuable products. And he's continued that work as director of the $57 million Materials for Clean Fuels program at Canada's National Research Council, making him the youngest person ever to serve as a director NRC. He is also the chair of the board for CMC Research Institutes, and a member of the Royal Society of Canada, and Forbes top 30 under 30. Most recently, we invited him back to U of T Engineering as an adjunct professor in material science and engineering so he's back to his home department. Phil DeLuna, Welcome to the podcast. 

Phil De Luna  1:19  
Thank you so much for having me and I'm so excited to be back at U of T as an adjunct professor as well. I haven't been gone that long but I've always, always loved my time here so thank you for inviting me on the podcast as well.

Chris Yip  1:31  
It's always good to talk to alumni, it's always great in particular when welcome them back to campus. You haven't been gone that long, like you said, so I think your chair is still there, your lab equipment is probably still there as well. Let me dive right into this. Can you tell us a little bit about where and how you grew up? And how you figured out that engineering was your passion or was for you?

Phil De Luna  1:51  
Sure, yeah. So I'm Filipino but I was born in Taiwan. My parents moved to Taiwan when they were around my age for work. They moved back to the Philippines and then I moved to Canada, in Windsor, Ontario when I was five years old. Dad was an auto worker, mom worked in customer service, very typical immigrants upbringing and story life. My parents, they always said they couldn't give me much, but they could give me an education. And then it doesn't matter what people take from you, they can never take away what you know. And so from a young age, I'd always realized that education was going to be my path to a better life, a life that my parents sacrificed so much to provide for me. And science had always been something that drove me and I was excited about. The Magic School Bus was my favorite TV show growing up, you know, Bill Nye and all this kind of stuff. I loved it. So I grew up in Windsor and I did my undergraduate in chemistry at the University of Windsor. And you know, if I'm going to be honest with you, I wasn't the best student. I was good in my first and second year, I didn't have to try too hard but in the third and fourth year, things started to get a little bit more difficult. You know, I was a little bit more preoccupied with hanging out with friends than doing my classes and my exams. That changed when I discovered research. And I actually went to a bunch of different professors and asked to volunteer, one of them gave me a shot and I was discovering things. I think that's the difference between learning in school and writing exams, where you're ingesting information that already exists and being in the research lab and discovering things. I always say that as a scientist, you're expanding the sphere of human knowledge, even if by an inch, and I loved it. So then I did my Master's at the University of Ottawa and that's where I started to fall in love with the environmental side of things and my Master's was on materials for carbon capture and metal organic frameworks, and these self assembled three dimensional nanoporous...think of them as kind of like microscopic sponges that could suck CO2 out of the air. And then after that, I ended up at the University of Toronto. I came for a graduate engineering visit, and I fell in love with the faculty at the material science and engineering. I fell in love with the community aspect of it. You hear about U of T being this massive and impressive, and it is, school and it can be a little bit daunting and a little bit overwhelming. But MSC felt like a family within that massive institution so that's what brought me here.

Chris Yip  4:17  
Cool. The conversation I think around greenhouse gases is sort of changing a little bit. Alternative energy is important, but we're hearing more carbon capture, carbon storage, carbon recycling, carbon, upcycling, can you tell our listeners a little bit more about these different technologies?

Phil De Luna  4:33  
Yeah, absolutely. So I like to broadly describe them under the label of carbon tech. A lot of people when they think of clean technology or green tech, they think solar cell, wind turbines, hydro, which is all true, but that only accounts for about a third of worldwide yearly emissions. The remaining 70% are in sectors like transportation, agriculture, buildings, lived environment. Some of these sectors are extremely difficult to electrify, and very hard to abate. And that's where the concept of carbon technology and carbon capture, utilization, storage, upconversion all fits into play. So we have to find a way to address the emissions that we can't electrify and we have to find a way to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. You know, a lot of people will say, "Phil, we know how to do this. It's called trees." And I'll say, "Yeah, absolutely. That's part of the solution. That's nature based carbon capture." But trees only grow so fast. How long does it take to grow a tonne tree and that's over 10, 15, 20 years, when we're emitting 40 billion tons of CO2 yearly. So we have to find ways to capture carbon from the atmosphere and that's the idea of carbon capture. Put the genie back in the bottle, so to speak. But once you capture the CO2, what do you do with it? Yes, you can store it, and it's stored underground, and it solidifies and you can permanently sequester it. But you can also use it to create the things that we need, that are already based on fossil fuels today. And the way that I like to describe this is, if you think about a fossil fuel, it's essentially liquefied sunlight. It's sunlight that shone on the earth, millennia ago, spurred plant matter and life that plant matter and life died, were buried underground, liquefied under immense heat and pressure over 1000s of years, that we dug it out, burned it to extract its energy and allow that carbon to go into the atmosphere. Instead, imagine of having to wait the millions of years for fossil fuels to form, if we could create electro fuels by capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using electricity, renewable electricity, and solar, or wind and water to convert the carbon dioxide into the chemicals and the fuels that we still need. Everything that we touch has some form of carbon that the phone that you use to call people, the laptop, the polyester in your shirt, people don't realize how much of that is actually derived from fossil fuels. And we still need these things for our quality of life, we are still going to need plastics to make the N95 masks that will protect us so imagine a world where we can source the carbon that we need for the things that we need for our quality of life, from the air, from carbon dioxide in the air, rather than fossil fuels in the ground. 

Chris Yip  7:20  
So these are all great technologies. We see lots of I think, you know, demo projects for pulling CO2 to the atmosphere, we see lots of demo projects that are sequestering carbon dioxide into concrete and all these different strategies. They're all kind of demo projects, in a sense, right? And I guess you could argue that those are on their route to commercial application but what do you think is kind of holding us back? What do you feel are some of the barriers?

Phil De Luna  7:44  
Oh, there's so many (laughing). I've thought a lot about this, obviously, part of my job and also just in general. I view my life's mission as trying to help take technology out of the lab and into the marketplace to make an impact and improve people's lives. There are unique challenges that are unique to Canada, there are unique challenges that are unique to specific technology. Maybe I'll start with, why is it that clean technology or clean energy technology is so difficult? Well, one, first of all, it's capital intensive. Like if you have a laptop and some coffee, you can make the next Facebook but if you want to convert carbon dioxide into a fuel that requires hard engineering that requires physical labor and things and you're going to fail, it's very complex. There's actually been studies that have looked at the timeline for commercialization, for example, the car, it took 70 years from its invention to impact to be scaled. But then when you look at the electric vehicle, it's a it's a little bit shorter timeframe, you can argue it's about 20, 15 years. For clean technology, it's always some kind of the first of a kind; solar took 40 to 50 years, nuclear took 30 years, wind took 25 to 30 years, well, we don't have half a lifetime until 2050. We need these solutions now. So that's a bit of the issue. If you think about Canada and its economy, it's either a primary or tertiary resource economy, right? A lot of our economy comes from extracting natural resources, or from service sector, things like baking and real estate. We don't have as much of that middle anymore, the upgrading of things and creating things and then innovation. A lot of it has been hollowed out. I actually think that's because of the curse of the plenty. We are a massive country with an abundance of natural resources and if you look at other economies like Japan or Germany, they don't necessarily as much natural resources. They're kind of forced to innovate in a way and so you see a lot of the industrial powerhouse or the electronic industry and a lot of these high technologies coming out of Japan and Germany, and they're able to scale them more quickly, because they know they need to innovate in order to compete. Canada, I think it's just a very risk averse society in general and so some of the biggest issues with some of these technologies - especially in Canada - commercialising, is you don't necessarily have that market, you don't have the pull from the customers that are willing to take a risk and purchase these things, especially in clean technology, the biggest energy producers, whether the utilities, or whether they're oil and gas companies, these are large, established companies that have very thin profit margins. And they don't necessarily have the desire or the courage to implement new technologies. And the only reason I think now that we're starting to see these new technologies happen is because the push is different. It's not just about cost competitiveness anymore. It's about climate change. And I think that these companies are starting to realize that they need to innovate in order to survive. It's complex and I think that there are lots of barriers and it's our jobs, to try to figure out ways to help lower those barriers, because we need it. CO2 doesn't know borders, just like COVID doesn't know borders. Emissions that have been emitted in China will be felt in Vancouver, and vice versa so we have to lower these barriers and get these solutions out there quicker, because we all benefit.

Chris Yip  11:05  
I was going to ask a quick question. So you were involved with this COSIA Carbon XPRIZE? Can you give us some background on that on that prize? And where are things right now with the technology that came out of that?

Phil De Luna  11:16  
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So the COSIA Carbon XPRIZE was a $20 million global competition to capture and convert carbon dioxide into the most useful good and when I started my PhD in Ted's group - Professor Ted Sargent, who was my supervisor during my PhD - CO2 conversion was still a new topic. And the XPRIZE had launched a call, just as I was finishing the first semester of my first year. And, along with Ted's group, and along with Alex - who is with the company now I think leading the charge at CERT, which is the company that came out of the work we had done - we had applied thinking there's no way we're going to get it. We ended up getting it. 

Chris Yip  12:02  
Congratulations (laughing).

Phil De Luna  12:04  
Into the second round, into the semifinal round and then in the span of a year, we had to take this reaction, which was happening in a little Rubik's Cube sized box, wires and fluids flowing into them, and upscale it from a few milligrams per hour to kilograms per day. I was involved in helping lead the work in trying to find partners for that and sourcing contracts. We ended up talking and doing it actually with Xerox Research Center Canada to help build the semifinal prototype and to everyone's surprise, it worked. And the funny thing is, up to the week leading up, you can have in your mind, a mad scientist working in a lab trying to make sure this thing works with duct tape and that's exactly what it was like. It was barely held together but it worked and it really gave a really interesting look into what it takes to try to take technology out of the lab and scale it really rapidly. So then we got to the final round of the XPRIZE. This was at the end of my PhD. And let me preface this by saying that I always thought I was going to be a professor. I was publishing papers, I was going down that academic path and then about halfway through my PhD, I had a conversation with my  fiancée. She's a nurse at SickKids, her family is here, our friends are here, she wanted to have our life here. And as you know, in academia, you have to go do a postdoc somewhere, and you don't know where you end up. And so I decided in that moment that rather than become a professor in Who-knows-where-ville, I wanted to be with her. So that little aside goes because towards the end of my PhD, as I was working with the XPrize and with the team intense group, I wanted to turn this into a company. So I went to tell this to Ted. I want to find ways to stay in Toronto, I love research, I want to take this to the next step. And so you know, for some time, one day, we would be talking to some venture capitalists and the next day it'd be you know, in creative destruction lab trying to get non-diluted funding thinking in my head, I'm going to be the next Canadian Elon Musk, you know, I'm going to change the world and start this multibillion-dollar company. And then the NRC had this position come up for program director starting this brand new program. And I'll be honest, I did reached out and they encouraged me to apply. I applied. I didn't think I would get it because I thought quite frankly, I'm not a middle aged man. I'm far too young to be director of a multimillion-dollar program and then I got it. I left the start-up and Ted's group and folks there continue to work on the technology, continue to work at the Carbon XPRIZE and try to scale that up and they've done some amazing work so unfortunately while we were finalists, after I'd left we didn't win the competition. However they were able to contract and and build this amazing cemonstration prototype pilot reactor plant that fit in a shipping container and they shipped it over to Alberta and attached it to a real life natural gas power plant and were able to convert emissions and do that amazing work. I haven't been involved as much recently but, you know, when I talk about my career going from science to almost entrepreneur to becoming a director at a national lab, walking along the technology readiness level scale, it was an immense amount of personal professional growth in such a short amount of time competing in something like the XPRIZE.

Chris Yip  15:33  
That's an amazing story. As you were talking about the prize itself, I was thinking, would this translational path would this have happened if the XPRIZE had never been put out there as an opportunity? What are your thoughts there? Are there other opportunities like that, were "we" in quotations should be looking to create and incent that kind of rapid translation?

Phil De Luna  15:54  
Yeah, no, I am a huge, huge fan of the sort of challenge program, actually the program I run at the National Research Council was fashioned and I built it based off of my experience in the XPRIZE. What it does, it actually helps to share the cost risk of the funder of the challenge are the ones who want the solution and what they do is by making it a competition, you end up getting a wide variety of possible technologies to compete against each other and innovate upon themselves. It's almost like an evolutionary algorithm, you want the survival of the fittest and by doing so you end up getting better solutions. And not only is it competitive, but it can also be collaborative. I'm a huge, huge fan of these competition and challenge style programs because I really do think that they spur innovation in ways that if you were to try to prescribe or build a portfolio of projects, you wouldn't be able to get that same innovation.

Chris Yip  16:50  
Which leads me obviously right to your program, Materials for Clean Fuels. Tell us about that program. What is its focus? 

Phil De Luna  17:00  
Yeah, so it's a seven-year $57 million collaborative research program. And for the listeners, for those who aren't aware or know very much about the National Research Council, we are the Government of Canada's national lab system. We've been around for over 100 years, we own and operate 22 national labs, we employ over 4000 scientists, researchers and engineers, and we work on everything from COVID-19 vaccine, and manufacturing, to quantum computing to telescopes to clean technology to AI and artificial intelligence, you name it, we do it. My program is very unique. It's the first time in NRC's history where we have what we call grants and contributions, or funding, that we can actually give to our collaborators or partners to work with us to solve a problem. And so my problem and my focus is how do we make a cleaner and more sustainable energy and chemical industry in Canada through materials innovation. My program has three thrusts, CO2 conversion, clean hydrogen production, and artificial intelligence for materials discovery or accelerated materials discovery. So the way that the program works is every single project is collaborative between an NRC staff scientist, and then a partner that can either be a startup company, or that could be an academic professor. And together, they co-own and they co-deliver the projects. And we're focused on everything from fundamental, foundational research like advanced materials spectroscopy, how do we look at these reactions of CO2 being converted in situ with X-rays in real time and understand how it works on a molecular level? To techno-economic assessments and lifecycle analysis to building materials acceleration platforms, or self driving labs. And then on the other side, we're also looking at prototypes and working with other companies or with academic groups, to kind of do the things that I was talking about in the XPRIZE, and take the technology out of the lab, and then build something that could potentially be commercialized. To me, it's all about that concept of how do we use material science to address the sectors of our economy that are difficult to electrify? How can we create renewable fuels from CO2 or water or hydrogen to address the transportation sector? How can we decarbonize parts of our chemical production industry, or embed co2 into building materials? The way I actually describe to people what my job is, I consider myself a research capitalist. So similar to how a venture capitalist tries to find the best startups to invest in, their return on investment is money and their time horizon is a few years, I try to find the best research ideas to invest in and co-develop at NRC. And my return on investment is emission reductions and my timeline is 5, 10 years plus.

Chris Yip  19:42  
You mentioned earlier the differences between someone who can grab their laptop and write an app versus someone writing technology and the ability to translate that into something that's got high valuation is really easy if I'm writing an app versus if I'm trying to build a pilot plant. I wonder in the clean tech space, what are the challenges there for a startup in that context?

Phil De Luna  20:05  
When I think about commercializing technology, whether it's clean technology or otherwise, I think of it, you know, there's the technology piece of it, there's the finance piece of it, and the policy piece and technology is actually the easiest part. It either works or it doesn't. Give it enough time and enough money, you can make it work. But it's the market and the policies that are actually little more difficult. Who's going to fund it? Why will they fund it? Who's going to buy it? Why will they buy it? The policy, is it safe? Does it strategically fit? Are there lots of bureaucratic barriers? Or is it a highly regulated space? These are all things that are difficult to navigate and especially if you're a scientist, you haven't really thought about these things, you don't have that context, that bigger picture. You're suddenly thrust into this world of investments and cap tables and dilutive equity, and at the same time thrust into this world of environmental assessments and zone permitting. And it's the hardest thing to do but that's what makes it the most necessary.

Chris Yip  21:03  
Yeah, I think you hit something that is resonating with me a lot recently and that's really this intersection between developing technology or inventing technology or creating something and getting adopted. And I think this intersection, what you just said, about understanding technology, but understanding all the other stuff, whether it's the zone assessment, whether it's your CapEx tables, whether it's how to raise funds, how you work with government regulatory in an industry, which is highly regulated, and it's something that I think I want our students, whether they're graduate students, or undergraduate students, as they go through their programs, to appreciate kind of this intersection between the technology space and the policy space. We've always had ties, there's always been engineering and medicine, that's been pretty straightforward. But nothing about, you know, engineering and policy, and engineering governance. And I think there's an opportunity and something that we're exploring, about how do we give our students the opportunity to gain insight into the public policy space and look at how their technical backgrounds can help inform, be part of that discussion. And I know, I'm going to jump right into this, you probably knew this was coming, but you actually are kind of in that space, right? You stood as a candidate for the Green Party during the federal election, which was just held this past September, and that's right into the policy space. What was that like?

Phil De Luna  22:25  
We could almost spend an hour talking about that by itself. But I ran for office and I knew when I was going to run that my chances of winning were very, very low, and especially what ended up happening with the Green Party and sort of leadership and we won't get into any of that. I always tell people that if you're going to run for office, you need to ask yourself two questions; why do you want to run? And what does success look like even if you don't win? So the reason I wanted to run is because I wanted to bring more science to politics. I wanted to bring more diversity to Parliament. You know, being Filipino Canadian, being a young person, being a scientist, these are things that I didn't - I don't see represented necessarily in Parliament, or in the people who make these policy decisions that impact our lives every single day. And I firmly believe that we get better ideas and solutions when we have people with different backgrounds and different experiences contributing to those solutions. That was one of the reasons I wanted to run. The second is because I wanted to help to lower the barriers of entry, especially for non-traditional candidates. And I wanted to do that by being an example and showing people that, yeah, young people can run, yeah, you don't necessarily need to be rich, or to have these political connections, to run a good campaign and to get your message out there. And so one of the things that I did during my campaign is I vlogged, the entire process like I would talk about, like how to raise money, how to build funds, how to get the signatures that you need to be on the ballot, I did that because when I first looked at running for office, I Googled how to run for office in Canada. And I just got like, Elections Canada forms, and there was nothing. So that's why I wanted to run. To me what success looked like was, am I able to run a positive campaign? Am I able to innovate and do things in politics that, for example, I ran a very digitally tech savvy technology heavy campaign. I did things where Minister Carolyn Bennett, the liberal minister, who had been there for 30 years before me and then won again, actually ended up asking, "Phil, how do you do this? What did you do over here?" To show that you can still innovate in something as tried and true as politics. To me, success also was potentially being an inspiration for other people to try. And especially when it comes to something like science, where I think scientists are scared or you know, politics is a dirty word. And scientists are very risk averse, because they think, oh, if I become politically active or if I volunteer for something, will that impact my research funding? Will that impact my neutrality? Science is all about, you know, being neutral and all these sorts of things. And I learned that no, actually, you are enriched by understanding that world and how you can communicate your science and your engineering to the people who make policy because they need it. One of the things that I hope, as an adjunct professor I'll be able to do is develop a course on that to use the skills that you've learned in a very technical in a very quantitative way, and translate that and communicate that to people who are making really big decisions about the way we live our lives.

Chris Yip  25:22  
That's perfect timing, because I literally just came from a conversation about how do we build an opportunity for a public policy governance type minor certificate inside our undergraduates? Because we have significant number of our undergraduates who are interested at the intersection between political science and public policy and the technology. And I think what you just said is so important these days because the questions that politicians are dealing with are questions which have obviously global impact, global significance. But I think that is kind of a nice lesson to kind of end off on because it is hard to describe, well...your path, on the science side now bringing that together into a larger context. I'm going to say thank you so much, Phil, for spending time with us today on the podcast.

Phil De Luna  26:07  
It was such a pleasure and thank you again.

Chris Yip  26:11  
Thanks again for listening to Coffee with Chris Yip. If you want to catch up on past episodes, or make sure that you don't miss the next one, please subscribe. We're on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. Just look for Coffee with Chris Yip. You can also check out @UofTengineering on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn for more stories about how our community is building a better world. And finally, if you've been inspired to join us, we'd love to welcome you. Whether you're thinking of taking a degree or working with us on a research project, you can find us online at engineering.utoronto.ca. Or you can visit our beautiful campus in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I hope I can join you for coffee soon.