Three Ways Quantum Computing Could Benefit Fight Against Climate Change

(BigThink) There are many more known applications of quantum computing that could benefit us in our fight against climate change. Odds are, there’s even more unknown applications that we’ll only discover once we begin playing around with this new technology.
1. Deploying better CO2-scrubbing compounds
Experts claim that if we could scale that up to around a million qubits, we would likely be able to simulate the compounds that are likely to be more effective at capturing CO2.
2. Developing better batteries
advances in battery technology are made through physical prototyping and testing. Using a quantum computer to simulate the complicated chemistry that hypothetically better batteries would employ would make this process many, many times faster.
3. Modeling the Earth’s climate
The Earth’s climate is an enormously complicated system with numerous sensitive components that interact with one another. Our current understanding of climate change is the result of decades of modeling work from thousands of researchers. At 2018’s SXSW conference, tech entrepreneur William Hurley suggested that quantum computing’s exponentially superior computing power could be used to model the many, many variables that go into the Earth’s climate system.