Quantum Computing to help tackle climate change?

As temperatures soared to dangerous new highs last week in the Pacific northwest and with recent devastating flooding in west Germany, our minds naturally turn to the impending climate crisis.

Reports are saying the heatwave in Canada has been particularly dangerous, because homes in this part of the world are generally not equipped with air conditioning units or even sometimes fans. This is certainly true for now, but if temperatures in Canada start to consistently reach new heights, people will understandably look to install cooling devices in their homes and offices. But if everyone in formerly temperate zones starts to do this, it could be catastrophic as we move globally towards carbon neutrality.

We cannot fall into the trap of consuming more energy, as we try to mitigate the circumstances of our previous high energy lifestyles.

Although the Green Revolution is slowly cranking into action, far too much of our technology and attention has been aimed at limiting the impact of our actions, rather than tackling the root cause.

So which offsetting solutions do we have currently? In India, where high temperatures are part of daily life, they have in part learnt to live with the searing heat. Government incentives encourage people to install solar panels on their homes and businesses, or for those who cannot afford the panels, simply to paint their roofs white to reflect the sun. Solar ovens are a popular way to harvest the energy of the sun to make simple meals and bread. Using external shutters to keep the heat off glass windows is also another low-tech way to maintain cooler temperatures.

However, in other certain geographical areas, floods and or drought and unbearable temperatures will force the continued displacement of people, forcing mass migration.

At BSI, we are of course interested in the technological side of things. Although we are quite far off from developing the means to completely remove carbon from the atmosphere (rather than capturing and repurposing it), we do have the technologies currently available to ensure that either no more or minimal quantities are added.

The technology behind Smart Cities is particularly interesting, as they are tipped to play a vital role in preventing built up areas from becoming ultra-heated zones. Smart cities put data and digital technology to work to help make better decisions to improve efficiencies and quality of life. For example, by monitoring the number of cars at a traffic light, smart cities can gauge the overall volume of traffic. With this data, integrated apps can recommend to residents that they travel at a more off-peak time or take a different route. Buses can be deployed to accurately reflect the number of people travelling at a given time and limit the number of empty buses on a route.

As helpful as these mitigating measures are, quantum computing can offer a potentially formidable tool in the fight against climate change. To ‘scrub’ carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere is a mammoth task and known catalysts for carbon capture either contain highly expensive precious metals or are difficult and costly to deploy. Given the infinite number of potentially useful molecules that are available, we can be confident that there is at least one catalyst (or more likely multiple) which will do the job cheaply and easily. However, testing each molecular combination one by one is an impossible task, and requires the ability to rapidly simulate the properties of each candidate molecule.

Currently, we haven’t found a way of simulating large and complex molecules, and conventional computers are not capable of scaling up to the task. The problem is the exponential growth of the amount of compute power needed to simulate a molecule as it gets larger. In very simple terms, if it takes one minute to simulate a molecule with 10 atoms, it will take two minutes to simulate 11, four minutes for 12 and so on until a molecule with 70 atoms would take 13 billion years to simulate - longer than the lifetime of the universe.

We can currently simulate small molecules on prototype quantum computers with up to a few dozen qubits (the quantum equivalent of classical computer bits). But scaling this to useful tasks, like discovering new CO2 catalysts, will require error correction and simulation, which translates into more compute power needed.

As quantum development continues, it seems very likely that this will be something achieved within our lifetimes. True to say however, that radical global policy is required to address fossil fuel use and to drive adoption and investment in green technologies. The solutions are already available today... it just requires the political will and the transition to a circular economy.

Quantum computing takes up a huge amount of power, so it’s important to mitigate the environmental cost of these computers. BSI recently hosted a webinar in association with Bulk Data Centres to promote our network of data centres in the Nordics. You can read more about our partnership on the Case Study page here.