Online science dialogue in Spanish "A new economy on a molecular scale".

Summary:

On 28 September 2022, the Rafael del Pino Foundation organised the conference by Javier García, president of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, entitled "How to build a new economy on a molecular scale", as part of the series "Science Dialogues in Spanish".

In recent years, all levels of government, from the European Union to municipalities, to businesses, are putting the spotlight on the circular economy, on renewable energy. It was so high on the political agenda that it seemed that Europe was leading the way in renewable energy. But the war in Ukraine has shown how dependent we are on natural gas alone, which is not even the main source of energy, and not just any gas, but gas from Russia. A disruption of Russian gas supplies has sent prices in Europe soaring and highlighted the dependence on fossil fuels, despite the declarations and triumphalism of recent years.

The war in Ukraine has caused the price of natural gas to soar and, as a result, the price of energy, and inflation has soared to double-digit levels in Spain and 9% on average in the European Union, which is fuelled by high energy prices. This is a problem that concerns us all from the point of view of the economy and in terms of climate change, which is necessary to have a habitable planet.

Why is there not more renewable energy in Spain and Europe? In recent years, we have made a lot of progress, but there are some technical problems to take into account. The production of solar energy, whose peak is reached during the central hours of the day, is not adjusted to the needs of the market, which has consumption peaks in the first and last hours of the day, while during the day it is in the valley phase. But, in the middle of the day, when demand is lower, there is an excellent opportunity because there are cheap and accessible renewable energies that, in fact, we cannot use well.

One of the options is for Spain to become Europe's green electricity factory, to increase the capacity of renewables and sell the surplus energy to Europe. This is positive and an opportunity for Spain. But selling green electrons to Europe is a poor proposition, in the sense that we are selling the raw material, i.e. the energy at the beginning of the value chain. It would be much more useful to use the surplus of renewable energies to electrify our economy. This is associated with batteries, which is a major technological challenge. What can already be done, and there are companies that are doing it, is to use the surplus to produce molecules with high added value, for example green hydrogen, which can be a raw material for transport, for the chemical industry and for metallurgy, to produce steel with hydrogen instead of carbon.

Spain is a country that has enormous potential from the point of view of solar energy, both photovoltaic and thermo-solar. One of the advances that we have developed in the molecular nanotechnology laboratory of the University of Alicante, in collaboration with the University of La Rioja, was the new generation of low-temperature solar cells that do not require sintering, which, although not yet as efficient as other energies, is an emerging energy that has many advantages from the point of view of renewable energies and sustainability.

I want to highlight in this conference technologies that look like magic, such as an artificial leaf in which two electrodes are able to break the water molecule without electricity. There are no wires or batteries in this sheet. What there is is a sheet of metal with a nickel, cobalt, molybdenum and zinc catalyst on one side and a cobalt catalyst on the other, which, in direct sunlight, is able to break down the water molecule and generate hydrogen and oxygen. This is one of the trends in hydrogen generation, which does not require photovoltaics, but, directly with photocatalysts, is capable of breaking down water into its components.

The most significant breakthrough in terms of using light to generate fuels is an article published in Nature very recently, entitled in English "Fuels from light and air". This is what researchers at the ETH Zurich have achieved. With solar concentrators they capture CO2 and water directly from the atmosphere and convert them directly into diesel for travel, into paraffin. They are doing this on a pre-pilot scale, they have scaled it up. In fact, at INEA Energía in Madrid, on a pre-industrial scale, they are directly transforming CO2 and water with sunlight into aviation fuels. In a photoreactor, they heat cerium oxide, which loses oxygen at very high temperatures, to over 1,000 degrees Celsius. When the temperature cools down, the oxide wants to recover the oxygen it has lost and steals it from water to give hydrogen and from CO2 to give carbon monoxide. This carbon monoxide-hydrogen mixture is very special, it is what is known in chemistry as synthesis gas because with Fischer-Tropsch catalysts, which we have known since the Second World War, we are able to transform these simple gases into fuel. At this plant in Madrid they are not satisfied with this scale-up, but have set up a company, Synhelio, to commercialise this technology, so that we are able to fill the tanks of aeroplanes with the same fuel they use today, but produced from air and sunlight, artificial photosynthesis. This is an example of the circularity of our economy.

But let's be realistic. When you look at the processing industry, understood in a very general way, it looks much more like a linear process with very large numbers. Every year we consume 1.4 billion tonnes of oil derivatives, more than 500 million tonnes of reagents, more than 250 million tonnes of water for this big transformation. Moreover, we do not do it very efficiently. Only 31% of everything we extract from the Earth is transformed into useful products and only 8% of it we reuse. In reality, our economy today is fundamentally linear and inefficient.

What opportunities do we have to reinvent the processing industry into a recovery industry? That requires a profound change in the way we design molecules and processes to make their recovery and reuse much easier. Imagine if nature had not recycled all the dead trees. That would not be sustainable. With that in mind, there have been two breakthroughs in recent years for one of the biggest problems we have, plastics. Plastics are very difficult to recycle because there is nothing in their structure that helps the transformation. But a new family of plastics has been discovered, containing dynamic bonds, so that, with a simple sulphuric acid treatment, the molecules that make up the polymer of the plastic are separated so that we can recover and reuse them indefinitely. They are not biodegradable plastics, they are reusable plastics because when we designed them we took into account that we wanted to reuse them and we put those dynamic bonds in.

Even more striking is the case of plastics such as mobile phone casings, which are so difficult to recycle. Researchers have included breakpoints in their structure which, with a very simple alcohol treatment, disassemble, allow the recovery of the monomers and thus allow us to make plastics with an infinite life span. These two examples are paradigmatic of this new way of understanding chemistry, in which recovery and reuse are at the heart of the design, making life easier for us, unlike what happens today.

The catalysts we use today have pores into which molecules enter and are transformed into all kinds of products. But very large molecules do not fit inside these catalysts and cannot be converted and transformed. Therefore, the yields of these molecules are low. But we have discovered a new technology that widens the pores and allows any molecule, no matter how large, to travel inside the catalysts, be transformed and increase the yield of the process very significantly. Since 2012, nanostructured catalysts from Javier Garcia's company, which developed the technology, have been used in refineries around the world. Refineries produce a large amount of CO2 because the catalysts are deactivated, coke is formed and has to be burned to eliminate it. This combustion generates an enormous amount of CO2. With the use of nanostructured catalysts, this is reduced by 5% to 10%. If all refineries worldwide were to use them, this would save 2.5 million tonnes per year.

It is possible to have a research and entrepreneurial career. Being an entrepreneur has made me a better scientist and a better teacher.

Today we have science that looks like science fiction, like some of the earlier breakthroughs, but also enormous needs. The gap between what is possible and what we need is not shrinking, but growing. The entrepreneur, the scientific entrepreneur, the person who wants to bring that scientific discovery to the market will be the great transformer of the 21st century, not only because he or she will make the discoveries that we need so much, but also because he or she will bring them to all of us. He or she will make the time between discovery and application much shorter.

The Rafael del Pino Foundation is not responsible for the comments, opinions or statements made by the people who participate in its activities and which are expressed as a result of their inalienable right to freedom of expression and under their sole responsibility. The contents included in the summary of this conference are the result of the debates held at the meeting held for this purpose at the Foundation and are the responsibility of their authors.

The Rafael del Pino Foundation is not responsible for any comments, opinions or statements made by third parties. In this respect, the FRP is not obliged to monitor the views expressed by such third parties who participate in its activities and which are expressed as a result of their inalienable right to freedom of expression and under their own responsibility. The contents included in the summary of this conference are the result of the discussions that took place during the conference organised for this purpose at the Foundation and are the sole responsibility of its authors.

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