Date: Tuesday, March 10, 2026 @ 7:00PM

Doors open at 6:30PM

Location: Robert Tegler Centre, 7128 Ada Boulevard, Concordia University of Edmonton

Admission $20/person

RSVP to Chemistry@MacEwan.ca 

How can fermented grape juice smell like roses and taste like fruits?

Why did the ancient Romans prefer to drink wine from lead vessels?

Do I need to sniff the cork when ordering wine in a restaurant?

These are some of the questions that will be answered as we explore the world of wine throughout the ages and see some of the surprising chemistry behind this popular beverage. The presentation will touch on topics including the fermentation process, the infamous French paradox, bottle shapes, bubbles in Champagne wine, and the seemingly mysterious process of wine tasting.

So whether you are new to wines or already know them from their nose down to their legs, join WSET certified wine expert Ruth Blakely (The Wine Cellar) and Professor Dietmar Kennepohl for this descriptive and humorous presentation to see how the histories of humans and wine are so intertwined.

During the presentation the audience will be invited to participate in tasting some wines.

Lecture Title: A Paradigm Shift in Catalytic Water Gasification and the Water-Gas Shift Reaction

Date: Wednesday, February 25, 2026 @ 7:00PM

Location: The Centennial Centre for Interdisciplinary Science (CCIS) Room L1-140, University of Alberta

RSVP to Chemistry@MacEwan.ca

Abstract

The development of catalysts capable of performing the water-gas shift (WGS) reaction at room temperature could fundamentally reshape the technology, economics, and environmental footprint of industrial hydrogen production. Converting CO (syngas) and water to hydrogen and CO2 is thermodynamically favourable but suffers from a high kinetic barrier that decades of catalyst development has yet to address. Conventional WGS requires an energy-intensive two-state, coupling high-temperature (~400-600 °C) and low-temperature (~250 °C) reactors to deal with the entropic limits on conversion.

The challenge lies in engineering catalysts to function mechanistically by proton-coupled electron transfer (PCET). Theoretically the lowest energy pathway for oxygen atom transfer (OAT), PCET requires simultaneous transfers of protons and electrons, mirroring how metalloenzymes function to extract oxygen from water, produce ammonia from nitrogen, and convert CO2 to carbohydrates under physiological conditions.

Dark Matter Materials, Inc., a University of Alberta spinoff company, has solved this problem by developing a family of earth-abundant, non-strategic metal oxide catalysts designed from first principles to exploit a PCET mechanism. At this stage, a reactor loaded with a single catalyst charge operated continuously for two months, terminating only when the CO supply was exhausted. By controlling reaction conditions, the CO₂ produced can be directly converted into valuable chemicals – ammonium and guanidinium salts, methanol, and acetic acid – without exogenous hydrogen.

This breakthrough builds upon our discovery of a practical OAT process for water gasification, which generates hydrogen from unpurified water under exceptionally mild conditions by transferring the oxygen to a redox-active support. Strong oxygen-support bonds render the process exothermic, deoxygenating the gas stream at the point of production. Initially driven by unrefined silicon, our latest generation catalysts transfer oxygen to a carbon support. Once saturated, the solid oxide is readily deoxygenated and reused.

Following a comparison of conventional and PCET catalysts and mechanisms, both “off-grid” water gasification and the water-gas shift process will be discussed, as will the challenges that remain. Video demonstrations will feature an “off-grid” water-to-water hydrogen fuel cell engine and internal combustion generator.

Speaker Bio

Jeffrey Stryker is a professor of organic and inorganic chemistry at the University of Alberta. He earned his AB (Hons) in chemistry from Harvard University and a PhD from Columbia, training in organic synthesis under Profs. Paul Wender and Gilbert Stork, respectively. He held an NIH postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley with Prof. Robert Bergman, working to determine the mechanism of methane C–H activation at a well-defined transition metal center. Dr. Stryker began his academic career at Indiana University and in 1992 emigrated to Canada and the University of Alberta.

Among other things, Dr. Stryker is credited with the discovery of the first class of hydrogenation catalysts rigorously selective for reducing polar unsaturation in the presence of nonpolar alkenes and alkynes. Designed for heterolytic rather than homolytic hydrogen activation, the homogeneous copper catalysts react with hydride-like selectivity and were the first high-activity hydrogenation catalysts composed of an earth-abundant first row transition element. Modern variants of this work continue to resonate in both academia and the pharmaceutical industry; a recent review reported that several thousand papers using copper(I) hydride catalysts for hydrometallation reactions have been published in the decades since. 

More recently, Dr. Stryker turned to addressing real world problems, developing heterogeneous catalysts for electrochemical desulfurization and denitrogenation of bitumen asphaltenes and thermal catalysts for the conversion of lignocellulose to platform aromatics. His research both here and in the US has been generously supported by the NIH, NSF, PRF, NSERC, CFREF (Future Energy Systems), IOSI, Alberta Innovates, the Japan Petroleum Energy Center (JPEC), and the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST).

During the development of electrocatalytic hydrotreatment, senior research associate and associate director of the Stryker labs, Robin Hamilton, discovered the silicon-supported nanocatalysts that gasify water spontaneously at room temperature, transferring the oxygen to silicon to produce nanoscale silica. The catalysts alone convert nitrogen and water to ammonia at 250 °C, sequestering the oxygen as soluble nitrate, providing a potential alternative to the energy-intensive Haber-Bosch process. Dark Material Materials, Inc. was founded to develop and commercialize these transformational catalysts for sustainable hydrogen production, ammonia synthesis, and carbon reforming.