Episode 37: The climate promise of quantum computing
Pete Shadbolt, co-founder of PsiQuantum, talks with Molly about why quantum computing could be the foundational breakthrough that enables all kinds of climate breakthroughs.
So, in the climate solutions conversation, you will often hear people talk about the need for game-changing innovations. This can mean everything from green hydrogen to affordable direct-air carbon capture to fusion energy to new battery chemistry for longer-lasting EV batteries or long-duration energy storage, maybe a little magnesium metal made from seawater, that kind of thing.
Given my “everything everywhere all at once” belief in how we tackle such a large, systemic problem, you can imagine that I don’t want us to wait for breakthroughs and, as a result, stop doing all the other things like policy and business strategy and energy use changes.
But count me in on breakthroughs, because I firmly believe that’s how we get to a better future for everyone, where developing countries can industrialize without adding gigatons of carbon emissions, where we can clean up our mess but also have cleaner air and water, healthier food and thriving animal species and ecosystems.
So it is in that spirit that this week’s episode investigates a world where one big breakthrough—quantum computing—could lead to a cascade of others. Extremely powerful computing could allow for a revolution in new materials, like photovoltaic cells for collecting solar power, advanced batteries, or carbon-neutral fertilizer.
Quantum computing has been on the horizon for a long time, but I recently got introduced to a company called PsiQuantum, which is working to commercialize quantum computing as fast as possible by actually architecting quantum computing chips that can be manufactured in the same commercial foundries that currently produce silicon semiconductors. (It’s obviously a lot more complicated than that, involving making photonic qubits, manufacturing chips, and harnessing them together to get to the million-qubit threshold that’s generally considered necessary to have a really revolutionary uptick in computing capability, and a bunch of stuff in this screenshot from one of PsiQuantum’s whitepapers, below.)
McKinsey put out a report in 2022 detailing some of the ways quantum computing could solve some currently unsolvable climate problems, like carbon capture, decarbonizing ammonia (fertilizer), higher-density batteries, and the like, and while Pete and I talked about all of those cases, he made the salient point that if you went back in time to when the first computers were being invented with the primary goal of cracking codes during World War II, and you asked Alan Turing and the gang what they’d use computers for in the future, they’d have come up with about 7 use cases, none of which included Candy Crush (my example, not Pete’s).
Anyway, please enjoy this week’s episode, thanks for listening, and as always, tell a friend or email me your thoughts and suggestions — in at everybody in the pool dot com. See you next week!