The Royal Academy of Engineering has awarded a total of £39m to advance exciting new green technologies.
Thirteen Green Future Fellows were awarded £3 million each to scale ambitious ideas and cutting-edge engineering over the next decade into commercially viable technologies.
The Green Future Fellowship programme is funded by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
The first awards include innovations that turn waste CO2 into useful products like plastics, fuels and chemicals; engineers creating more efficient and recyclable solar panels; and a project to extract critical metals for batteries, magnets, solar panels and fuel cells by filtering salty water.
Dr Madeleine Bussemaker – University of Surrey
A Sound Solution for Contaminants of Emerging Concern
Contaminants of emerging concern (CECs), such as PFAS (also known as forever chemicals), pharmaceuticals and pesticides, are harmful pollutants that are hard to destroy.
In England alone, the cost of cleaning up PFAS could be up to £120 billion. A new high-frequency ultrasound method, sonolysis, safely breaks down CECs without toxic by-products and with potential to be cheaper than incineration.
Dr Sharon Velasquez-Orta – Newcastle University
Carbon dioxide conversion by intensified electrobiocatalysis
This project develops a practical technology that turns CO2 into fuel using microbes and bioelectrochemical reactors (BES). It upgrades biogas to pure fuel, boosting its energy content. If used across all UK anaerobic digesters, it could cut 3.1 megatonnes of CO2 and save £120 million annually.
Dr Jaime Massanet-Nicolau – University of South Wales
BIO-VISTA: Biorefining Waste into VFAs: In Situ Recovery and Low-Temperature Adaptation
BIO-VISTA is a technology to produce volatile fatty acids (VFAs) from waste carbon sources such as biomass and waste industrial gases. VFAs are short-chain organic acids with a wide range of uses including plastics, fuels and chemicals.
With a £10 billion global market, UK deployment could generate £1 billion annually and save up to 50 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. The project aims create a UK Centre of Excellence in VFA biorefining.
Professor Robert Alexander House – University of Oxford
Nanoengineering oxygen conversion electrodes for green electric flight
A new type of rechargeable battery that’s four-times more energy dense than current state-of-the-art lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, making them much lighter and more powerful, perfect for electric or hybrid planes. Increasing the energy density four-fold means batteries can be made much smaller and lighter, which could help to electrify aeroplanes.
Professor Moritz Riede – University of Oxford
Achieving Terawatt-Scale Organic Photovoltaics
Organic photovoltaics (OPV) are solar cells made from carbon-based materials. These panels are flexible, lightweight and can be used on almost any surface. They already work well in the laboratory, but they are not yet good enough for factories to make cheaply at scale.
Professor Riede will use AI and robots to test thousands of designs automatically and quickly to improve OPV so they match what the best labs can do.
Dr Matthew Lloyd Davies – Swansea University
ASPECT: Advancing Sustainable Perovskite Solar Energy
Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) are a type of solar panel made from a crystal-structured material called perovskite that efficiently converts sunlight into electricity.
ASPECT aims to make PSCs a mainstream, sustainable alternative to conventional solar panels – which are designed for a single life, are resource intensive and difficult to recycle.
Dr Rostislav Mikhaylovskiy – Lancaster University
Terahertz magnetic recording for green data storage technology
As we rely more on wireless devices, cloud storage, and artificial intelligence, data centres need to process ever larger amounts of information, and do so at increasingly higher speeds, generating substantial heat. Today, data centres use around 1.5% of all electricity produced globally, with up to 40% of that energy consumed by air cooling systems. This Fellowship aims to develop a new type of memory that uses extremely short bursts of terahertz radiation, which could enable much faster, cooler, and more energy‑efficient data storage in the future.
Professor Laura Torrente – University of Cambridge
Dynamic, efficient and safe green ammonia synthesis
The way we store renewable energy for long-term use is the focus of Laura’s work. She is using renewable electricity, water and nitrogen from air to produce ammonia cleanly and safely. Her work also focuses on safe ammonia storage.
Professor Rebecca Lunn MBE FREng FRSE – University of Strathclyde
Mechanochemical reactions in silicate rocks: Decarbonising the production of critical materials
This Fellowship explores mechanochemical reactions – chemical reactions triggered by mechanical energy, such as the crushing, grinding, or fracturing of rocks. Applied to the 72 billion tonnes of waste rock crushed globally each year, her low-energy process could capture around 1 billion tonnes of CO2 annually, reducing emissions from mining and material production.
Dr Akshay Deshmukh – University of Cambridge
Membrane Cascades for Efficient Critical Metals Extraction & Purification from Brines & Leachates
This project develops clean, energy-efficient ways to extract critical metals important for batteries, magnets, solar panels, and fuel cells, without the harmful chemicals and waste of traditional methods. It uses membrane systems, like filters and electrically driven separators, to pull metals out of salty water and recycled materials while saving water, energy, and chemicals.
Dr Kilian Stenning
(This award is subject to commercial negotiations with Imperial College London and Rayd Technologies)
Reconfigurable, non-linear photonic computing for energy efficient AI
AI and cloud computing use huge amounts of energy, causing unsustainable CO2 emissions. This Fellowship develops brain-inspired “neuromorphic” computing that uses light (photons) to process data and images extremely efficiently, with potential for more than 10,000 times less energy than current GPU microchips. By miniaturising the hardware and expanding its capabilities, this technology could drastically improve AI’s speed, energy and data efficiency, and lower data centre emissions.
Idan Gal-Shohet – Fibe
Sustainable natural fibre from agricultural waste
The company is turning fibrous farm waste, including from potatoes, into high-quality, low-carbon and affordable fibres as an alternative to cotton. This award is subject to agreeing suitable commercial terms.
Dr Aled Roberts – Dekiln
PARK: Scaling Production of Advanced Recycled Kiln-free tiles
Traditional ceramic tiles have a huge carbon footprint owing to high-temperature kiln firing necessary for their production. Dekiln has developed a technology (BioSintering) to produce tiles from over 98% recycled gypsum without the need for kiln firing, which slashes energy use and emissions. This award is subject to agreeing suitable commercial terms.
Supported by a £150m, long-term investment from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, the Green Future Fellowship was established to build bold solutions to climate adaptation, mitigation and resilience.
Dr Hayaatun Sillem CBE, CEO of the Royal Academy of Engineering, said: “We are awarding £150 million over the next five years to at least 50 long-term, scalable, commercially viable solutions that will have real-world impact, with each awardee able to develop their solution over a 10-year period.
“The Royal Academy of Engineering’s Green Future Fellowships provide academics, entrepreneurs, innovators and engineers, the space and time to transform their cutting-edge ideas into scalable, commercially viable, technologies to secure a greener, fairer future.”
At least 50 Green Future Fellows will be appointed over five years. Successful applicants become a Green Future Fellow for the 10-year award duration, receiving up to £3 million alongside non-financial support such as training, mentorship, access to the Academy’s network of exceptional innovators, and additional tailored support.
Applicants can come from any country; however, as a UK-funded initiative, they must locate their work in the UK.
The third round is expected to open for applications in autumn 2026.
