When Andrew Sutton arrived at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in late 2020, he knew the move would be significant in more ways than just a change in location. The chemist was leaving Los Alamos National Laboratory and New Mexico, his home base for the past decade, to join ORNL’s recently formed Manufacturing Science Division and lead the new Chemical Process Scale-Up Group.
While life itself seemed uncertain for much of the world during the height of the pandemic, Sutton said his transition to ORNL provided a solid foundation in unsettled times, allowing him to focus on one of his primary interests: decarbonization.
“I had spent the bulk of my career working with biomass as a source of carbon that can be used for future energy as an alternative to petroleum,” he said. “But I also wanted to look at ways to improve carbon dioxide capture to reduce atmospheric carbon. These are complex issues, and ORNL has the expertise to further this research.”
Sutton has settled into his group leader role more than a year later, guiding a team of researchers pursuing scientific efforts that enable clean and renewable energy-derived fuels. His group capitalizes on ORNL’s strengths in spectroscopic analysis; theory and modeling; chemical transformations; separations; polymers and material science. Research also supports advanced manufacturing, demonstrating how chemical processes can drive solutions for decarbonizing industry through chemistry and chemical engineering discoveries that enable the utilization of renewable and waste feedstocks.
“I think it’s important to leverage our capabilities while also building a diverse team and developing strong ties to our sponsors. Then we can enhance our fundamental understanding of catalysis and address real-world needs by transferring technology to industry,” he said. “The long-term goal is to maintain the ability to adapt to any research challenge. If we can do that, we’ll be able to surpass our goals.”
From discovery to marketplace
Over the years, Sutton has kept his eye on not only proving the viability of his research, but also ensuring that ideas move out of the lab space and into production for eventual use by consumers. At Los Alamos, Sutton led chemical catalysis initiatives in bioenergy where he focused on how to develop systems that produce fuels and feedstocks from biomass and then translate those systems into viable technologies for marketplace deployment. This interest in demonstration and deployment resulted in Sutton serving as lead for a team of entrepreneurs in the Department of Energy’s iCorps program, sponsored by the Office of Technology Transitions.
“Working with entrepreneurship development provided a greater appreciation for the real-world application of fundamental chemistry,” Sutton said. “This experience helped me better understand how new technologies evolve into the marketplace, too.”
His interest in supporting entrepreneurs was bolstered by his own scientific breakthroughs. Sutton’s early career research led to the discovery of a chromium-based stable compound that demonstrated, for the first time, a five-fold bond between two metal atoms. Chemistry is based on understanding how bonds between atoms are made or broken, and historically, until Sutton’s discovery, only certain metals were thought capable of more than triple bonds. The work, published in Science, led to new insights into the nature of chemical bonding, and to date, no comparable compound has been found to exist in nature.
Sutton said it was discoveries such as the compound paired with success in converting biomass into feedstocks for fuel applications that have further smoothed the transition to his chemical process scale-up role at ORNL.
“Here, I’m solving those complex problems in chemical conversion so that we can have airplanes running on clean fuels, and we can have power generation with net-zero carbon emissions,” he said. “My team is looking at the processes at the molecular scale in the laboratory and then moving up to full-scale systems and demonstrations.”