The first edition of Energy Week, an event that brought together the productive sector and academia at Unicamp to discuss the present and future of energy, had the participation of CINE on its organizing committee. The center’s main contribution was the holding of a workshop on entrepreneurship and three panel discussions that addressed challenges and solutions related to the energy transition, energy storage, and green hydrogen.

Held by the Center for Energy and Petroleum Studies at Unicamp, CEPETRO, on December 3rd, 4th, and 5th, the event had approximately 200 participants, including professionals from companies, researchers, and representatives from funding agencies. CEPETRO is one of CINE’s supporters.

“Energy Week was a highly relevant event because it consolidated the university as a strategic space to connect science, industry, and public policies in the debate on the energy transition,” says Professor Gustavo Doubek (Unicamp), who was one of the CINE representatives on the event’s organizing committee. “The event reinforced Unicamp’s role as an active agent in building solutions for decarbonization, stimulating collaborations, bringing value chains closer together, and training human resources capable of leading the transformation of the energy sector in Brazil,” adds the researcher.

During the event, Doubek moderated the panel on green hydrogen, which discussed different aspects of creating a low-carbon hydrogen supply chain in Brazil, from process safety to laws and financing possibilities. The debate explored the bottlenecks that still hinder a more emphatic performance by the country in this area.

The panel on energy storage included professionals from the sectors of development, manufacturing, recycling, and use of batteries. The discussion addressed the bottlenecks in battery recycling and the difficulties of transforming research into products and services in a still poorly regulated environment, among other topics. “I showed how CINE initiatives can help reduce these disconnections and accelerate the arrival of technologies to the market,” says Professor Hudson Zanin (Unicamp), Coordinator of the CINE Adavanced Energy Storage division, who participated in the debate.

Hudson, who coordinates the Technology Transfer area at CINE, was also responsible for leading the entrepreneurship workshop at the Energy Week. The workshop offered a practical roadmap for researchers without business training to better communicate their technologies to the market. Several startups that originated from research developed at CINE were presented at the event.

In total, 17 panel discussions were held over the three days of the event. The panels included representatives from energy companies and related sectors, such as Petrobras, Shell, TotalEnergies, BYD, Marcopolo, and Volkswagen, among many others, as well as researchers from Unicamp and other universities. The opening lecture was given by Angélica Laureano, Executive Director of Energy Transition and Sustainability at Petrobras.

Learn more about the Energy Week.