Making industrial chemistry green: catalysts, chemicals, and lifecycle

Flickr user: klar_rocks

The Earth has finite resources and they're not evenly distributed. As we use up the easy-to-access sources of ores and fossil fuels, some of the key foundations of modern society risk becoming rare and prohibitively expensive. Until we actually perfect fusion and asteroid mining, these are realities driving our push to develop sustainable practices.

At the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, researchers talked about the progress they're making when attempting to put industrial chemistry on a sustainable path. The overall belief of the panel is that it's not simply enough to make any one part of the process sustainable. Using a cheap and easily available catalyst to drive reactions that require fossil fuels will only buy us so much. It's only when we make every step of the process sustainable—including what happens to the chemicals when we're done with them—that we can really make progress.

The session's organizer, UCSB's Susannah Scott, set out the scale of the problem. Industrial chemistry needs account for something like a quarter of US energy use. The metals Ru, Te, Pd, Rh, Au, Pt, Re, Os, and Ir are all fantastic catalysts, but they are the least common elements in the crust relative to silicon. Princeton's Paul Chirik added a few more details: the current US lifestyle requires something like 80 different elements (GE, for example, uses 72 of the first 82 in the periodic chart). Right now, 19 of them come exclusively from different countries.