Chemical Engineering

Phillip Servio

Clean energy and nail care

Ed Kromer | The cache of nail polish vials on Phillip Servio's desk is a little distracting. Peculiar, even. So is the attending laser jet printer that looks as if it has been genetically modified to paint fingernails.

I have come to meet this 28-year-old assistant professor who has just joined McGill's Department of Chemical Engineering, and learn about his intriguing research on gas hydrates, the massive stores of crystalline methane and carbon dioxide that may prove to be either boon or bane of human existence over the next century or so.

Claudio Calligaris

But the printer is beckoning. It's irresistible. I have to know.

"That's the NailJet Pro," Servio replies to my embarrassed query, in the folksy lilt of a seasoned tradeshow pitchman. "Yeah, I get a lot of interest in this, especially from the women in the department."

It seems that Servio has developed nail-decorating technologies for a Florida start-up company called ImagiNail. The founders approached him during his doctoral studies to engineer a suite of nail coatings that would keep the water-based ink of a laser jet from bleeding. "I was cheap labour," Servio admits. "Polymer science was not my central field of research, but I branched out."

Two years later, the process has been perfected. In minutes, the daring fashionista can now wear fingernails of unprecedented artistry: Greek lettering, the Jamaican flag, religious symbols, even the likeness of the Mona Lisa, all printed in impeccable definition and vivid colour. "The coatings absorb it, protect it, give it a week of longevity," Servio cheerfully guarantees.

While this confection of a side project may not be the stuff of Nobel chemistry, it is rooted in serious science that could become seriously lucrative. In less than two months on the $11-billion nail care market, ImagiNail has already received roughly 1,300 orders.

But Servio is not ready to quit his day job just yet. There's too much to learn, and he's too curious. He always has been. The son of Portuguese immigrants who operated an orchard in southern British Columbia, Servio was intellectually restless from an early age. "When I wrote in grade two that I wanted to be an engineer, I remember getting all upset because the teacher read it and said, 'That's cute, you want to go on a choo-choo train," he says. "I was like, no lady, I want to build those choo-choo trains."

Servio earned his BEng and PhD in Chemical Engineering at the University of British Columbia, then spent eight months at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Lab in Upton, New York, where he began studying methane and carbon dioxide hydrates. Hydrates are compounds that form when gas molecules infiltrate a network of hydrogen-bonded water molecules, creating a crystalline structure that remains stable under a certain amount of atmospheric pressure. That certain amount of pressure exists at the bottom of the ocean and in permafrost, where vast stores of naturally occurring gas hydrates exist.

According to Servio, this is a good news/bad news scenario if ever there was one. If the earth's air and water temperature increase even a degree or two, the pressure will drop, the hydrate structure could break down and a pestilence of methane and carbon dioxide could spew into the atmosphere, accelerating the global warming that released it. Or, humans might come up with a way to harness methane hydrates to fuel the planet's energy needs for as much as 400 years.

Servio's study begins with the basics. "It's the baby steps approach," he explains. "As I understand the properties of hydrates better, I'll be able to develop better technologies."

This could mean using hydrates to power microelectric machines, or as a means to sequester industrial carbon dioxide emissions at the bottom of the ocean.

Right now, Servio is developing a process of manufacturing hydrates to store and transport natural gas more cheaply and conveniently than conventional methods. As a serendipitous by-product, the eventual simple extraction of natural gas for energy leaves behind pure, potable water. "This could be a new method of not only delivering energy, but also pure water to Third World countries," Servio says.

All in a day's work for an ambitious young scientist capable of balancing the serious with the, well, less serious. "On one hand I'm out to solve the world's energy problem," Servio says, "and on the other I'm just trying to make women happy."