Professor C. J. Li receives Moore Foundation funding to advance greener chemical manufacturing

Professor C. J. Li, Distinguished James McGill Chair Professor and E. B. Eddy Chair Professor of Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry, has received a US$925,000 grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to advance sustainable approaches to chemical manufacturing.  

Much of today’s chemical industry relies on energy-intensive processes that require high temperatures and pressures to drive reactions. Li and his team are looking to nature for a more efficient model. Their research focuses on transforming abundant molecules, including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen, into valuable products using sunlight. 

Among the team's long-term goals is developing a cleaner way to produce ammonia, a chemical essential to global fertilizer production that is currently manufactured through highly energy-intensive processes. The researchers are also exploring new routes to produce urea, another widely used fertilizer, from greenhouse gases and nitrogen. 

At the centre of this work is gallium nitride (GaN), a semiconductor already used in LEDs and electronic devices. Li's laboratory discovered that, under sunlight, GaN can bind to and weaken the chemical bonds in carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen gas, three highly stable molecules that are abundant in the atmosphere and notoriously difficult to convert into useful products. By activating these molecules, the researchers aim to transform them from pollutants into valuable building blocks for the production of chemicals and materials. 

Li's team has already demonstrated the potential of this approach, achieving the first sunlight-driven conversion of carbon dioxide and methane into methanol using GaN modified with trace amounts of gold and palladium. The new funding will support efforts to further optimize these materials and move the technology closer to practical, scalable applications. 

As part of the project, researchers will engineer GaN materials with different surface structures and explore combinations of metals to determine which are most effective at activating carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen. Using advanced imaging and spectroscopy techniques alongside computer modelling, they will investigate how these reactions occur and why certain catalyst designs perform better than others. 

Li's team also plans to demonstrate the technology beyond the laboratory by developing a reactor powered by natural sunlight and a continuous-flow system, bringing the research closer to real-world industrial applications. 

Li is internationally recognized as a leader in green chemistry. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the American Chemical Society, among other academies, and was elected a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering in 2025. His honours include the U.S. Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award and the Canadian Green Chemistry and Engineering Award. 

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation was established by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore and his wife Betty to support scientific discovery, environmental conservation and the San Francisco Bay Area.