The Department of Chemistry
Energy in Numbers
Drawing on his success leading intra-university consortiums, Prof. Emeritus Doron Aurbach is bringing Israel’s best energy researchers together for a comprehensive response to the climate crisis.
Competition to Cooperation
When Prof. Emeritus Doron Aurbach of the Department of Chemistry was a young master’s student at Bar-Ilan, he worked on the side as a tour guide to support his family. One day, he was asked to guide a visiting group of energy engineers on a trip to Jerusalem. “The whole day, we spoke about alternative energy technologies, and by the end, I was so frustrated: I realized that my work in both organic and physical chemistry was too far from the practical issues facing society,” Aurbach recalls. In response, he decided to study chemical engineering at the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology alongside his studies at Bar Ilan. Today, nearly four decades, ten highly prestigious awards, more than one hundred and fifty mentored students, and 800 groundbreaking papers cited more than 116,000 times later, Aurbach is directing a four-year, 18 million NIS academic consortium for accelerating practical solutions to the climate crisis.
Initiated in response to a call for a proposals by Israel’s Council for Higher Education (CHE), the consortium, explains Aurbach, was actually 15 years in the making. It began with Bar-Ilan’s leadership of INREP, the Israel National Research Center for Electrochemical Propulsion, which brought 28 research groups from 7 Israeli universities together to advance petroleum-free ground transportation for commercial use. The experience was so successful that when Moroccan universities sought energy-research collaborations with Israeli counterparts after the signing of the Abraham Accords, another intra-university cohort was quickly established—many of whom, Aurbach notes proudly, include his former students. “Unfortunately, when war broke out, the collaboration with Morocco was put on ice. So, when the CHE asked universities last year to compete for a climate-crisis related grant, we decided to do even better and revive our planned cooperation instead,” Aurbach says.
With 16 different top energy researchers participating from 7 Israeli universities—including Bar-Ilan chemists Profs. Malachi Noked and Dan Major and expert on environmental regulation Prof. Oren Perez of the Faculty of Law—the consortium has set an especially ambitious goal: the development of new technologies for large energy storage (i.e., batteries) and recycling, both of which hold the key to decreased dependence on environmentally devastating fossil fuels. In particular, they plan to work on safe, durable, and cost-effective sodium-ion batteries and iron-oxygen batteries, as well as methods for the reuse of elements in lithium-ion batteries. Aurbach notes that in this regard, Bar-Ilan’s new Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust Energy Prototype Lab will prove critical. Established to help both academic and industry researchers determine their technologies’ readiness, the prototype lab will enable the consortium to test and refine their innovations. Finally, the consortium will conduct an economic assessment of the use of these technologies in Israel and ensure that they meet both national and international regulatory requirements for swift implementation. “The climate crisis is too critical and complex a challenge for researchers to address individually,” concludes Aurbach. “Thankfully, it is very much in the Bar-Ilan spirit to collaborate, and to leverage our shared expertise for the betterment of Israel and humanity.”
