Manufactured chemicals and materials are necessary for practically every aspect of daily life, from life-saving pharmaceuticals to plastics, fuels and fertilizers. Yet manufacturing these important chemicals comes at a steep energy cost.
Many of these industrial chemicals are derived primarily from fossil fuel-based materials. These compounds are typically very stable, making it difficult to transform them into useful products without applying harsh and energy-demanding reaction conditions.
As a result, transforming these stubborn materials contributes significantly to the world’s overall energy use. In 2022, the industrial sector consumed 37% of the world’s total energy, with the chemical industry responsible for approximately 12% of that demand.
Conventional chemical manufacturing processes use heat to generate the energy needed for reactions that take place at high temperatures and pressures. An approach that uses light instead of heat could lower energy demands and allow reactions to be run under gentler conditions — like at room temperature instead of extreme heat.
Sunlight represents one of the most abundant yet underutilized energy sources on Earth. In nature, this energy is captured through photosynthesis, where plants convert light into chemical energy. Inspired by this process, our team of chemists at the Center for Sustainable Photoredox Catalysis, a research center funded by the National Science Foundation, has been working on a system that uses light to power reactions commonly used in the chemical manufacturing industry. We published our results in the journal Science in June 2025.
We hope that this method could provide a more economical route for creating industrial chemicals out of fossil fuels. At the same time, since it doesn’t rely on super-high temperatures or pressures, the process is safer, with fewer chances for accidents.
Plants capture sunlight to convert carbon dioxide from the air into carbohydrates, or sugars.
Wattcle, Nefronus/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
How does our system work?
The photoredox catalyst system that our team has developed is powered by simple LEDs, and it operates efficiently at room temperature.
At the core of our system is an organic photoredox catalyst: a specialized molecule that we know accelerates chemical reactions when exposed to light, without being consumed in the process.
Much like how plants rely on pigments to harvest sunlight for photosynthesis, our photoredox catalyst absorbs multiple particles of light, called photons, in a sequence.
These photons provide bursts of energy, which the catalyst stores and then uses to kick-start reactions. This “multi-photon” harvesting builds up enough energy to force very stubborn molecules into undergoing reactions that would otherwise need highly reactive metals. Once the reaction is complete, the photocatalyst resets itself, ready to harvest more light and keep the process going…
