Back in my youth, when deciding what subjects to study at school and university I wanted to make sure that I would come out versed in something that would be of use to the wider world, perhaps even do some good. I chose chemistry. It’s clear from conferences like this that many chemists are interested in the subject for similar reasons.

Climate change is a big topic that chemists are tackling. This morning’s session on carbon capture and storage being a good example.

This is a technology intended to clean up coal-powered power stations by scrubbing out carbon dioxide from flue gas, and compressing it to be stored elsewhere – anywhere but into the atmosphere.

There are a number of problems that chemists are looking at. Today kicked off with a talk by Gary Rochelle from the University of Texas at Austin. He took us through the major considerations that are needed for the solvent that is used to collect the carbon dioxide from the gas. The standard at the moment is something called MEA, monoethanolamine. Rochelle’s fundamental physical chemistry calculations on this and other candidate solvents showed that there isn’t a simple one-size-fits-all solvent. The considerations are: capacity of the solvent to hold carbon dioxide; how much the solvent degrades when heated; how fast the reaction is; how much heat it requires.

Some of these properties are better in different solvent, he says, which are again different in different plants. Another good candidate solvent looks to be piperazine.

Then we heard from Trevor Drage from Nottingham University, UK, about using solids not liquid solvents to strip out the carbon dioxide. His systems are a long way from being scaleable but show promise. On paper, he said, solid sorbets could reduce energy loading in the systems by 30 – 50%. These systems are amine polymers loaded onto porous silica-based materials, or basic nitrogen in an activated carbon matrix.

One area that is often overlooked, says Drage is the regeneration of these sorbents and how the carbon dioxide is removed so they can be reused.

Matthew Hunt is from Doosan Babcock, a Scottish-based company

spending a lot of effort in scaling up CCS technology, with demonstration plants in Canada. This is just a 4 tonne plant so far, which is no real use for a power plant which will need to porcess 850 tonnes of carbon dioxide a day, he said. But according to Hunt, the company is on track to full-scale post-combustion carbon dioxide removal by 2014.

Of course, the impetus for these small demonstration scale plants needs to come from government, and the feeling in certain quarters of this meeting at least, was that not enough push, and not enough decisiveness is being shown to make the technology viable.

My hope is that in 2014 we are not still at the stage where academics working in small groups are showing results of small scale CCS projects and saying that scale up is needed urgently.

Image: representation of MEA

Back in my youth, when deciding what subjects to study at school and university I wanted to make sure that I would come out versed in something that would be of use to the wider world, perhaps even do some good. I chose chemistry. It’s clear from conferences like this that many chemists are interested in the subject for similar reasons.

Climate change is a big topic that chemists are tackling. This morning’s session on carbon capture and storage being a good example.

This is a technology intended to clean up coal-powered power stations by scrubbing out carbon dioxide from flue gas, and compressing it to be stored elsewhere – anywhere but into the atmosphere.

There are a number of problems that chemists are looking at. Today kicked off with a talk by Gary Rochelle from the University of Texas at Austin. He took us through the major considerations that are needed for the solvent that is used to collect the carbon dioxide from the gas. The standard at the moment is something called MEA, monoethanolamine. Rochelle’s fundamental physical chemistry calculations on this and other candidate solvents showed that there isn’t a simple one-size-fits-all solvent. The considerations are: capacity of the solvent to hold carbon dioxide; how much the solvent degrades when heated; how fast the reaction is; how much heat it requires.

Some of these properties are better in different solvent, he says, which are again different in different plants. Another good candidate solvent looks to be piperazine.

Then we heard from Trevor Drage from Nottingham University, UK, about using solids not liquid solvents to strip out the carbon dioxide. His systems are a long way from being scaleable but show promise. On paper, he said, solid sorbets could reduce energy loading in the systems by 30 – 50%. These systems are amine polymers loaded onto porous silica-based materials, or basic nitrogen in an activated carbon matrix.

One area that is often overlooked, says Drage is the regeneration of these sorbents and how the carbon dioxide is removed so they can be reused.

Matthew Hunt is from Doosan Babcock, a Scottish-based company

spending a lot of effort in scaling up CCS technology, with demonstration plants in Canada. This is just a 4 tonne plant so far, which is no real use for a power plant which will need to porcess 850 tonnes of carbon dioxide a day, he said. But according to Hunt, the company is on track to full-scale post-combustion carbon dioxide removal by 2014.

Of course, the impetus for these small demonstration scale plants needs to come from government, and the feeling in certain quarters of this meeting at least, was that not enough push, and not enough decisiveness is being shown to make the technology viable.

My hope is that in 2014 we are not still at the stage where academics working in small groups are showing results of small scale CCS projects and saying that scale up is needed urgently.

Image: representation of MEA

Back in my youth, when deciding what subjects to study at school and university I wanted to make sure that I would come out versed in something that would be of use to the wider world, perhaps even do some good. I chose chemistry. It’s clear from conferences like this that many chemists are interested in the subject for similar reasons.

Climate change is a big topic that chemists are tackling. This morning’s session on carbon capture and storage being a good example.

This is a technology intended to clean up coal-powered power stations by scrubbing out carbon dioxide from flue gas, and compressing it to be stored elsewhere – anywhere but into the atmosphere.

There are a number of problems that chemists are looking at. Today kicked off with a talk by Gary Rochelle from the University of Texas at Austin. He took us through the major considerations that are needed for the solvent that is used to collect the carbon dioxide from the gas. The standard at the moment is something called MEA, monoethanolamine. Rochelle’s fundamental physical chemistry calculations on this and other candidate solvents showed that there isn’t a simple one-size-fits-all solvent. The considerations are: capacity of the solvent to hold carbon dioxide; how much the solvent degrades when heated; how fast the reaction is; how much heat it requires.

Some of these properties are better in different solvent, he says, which are again different in different plants. Another good candidate solvent looks to be piperazine.

Then we heard from Trevor Drage from Nottingham University, UK, about using solids not liquid solvents to strip out the carbon dioxide. His systems are a long way from being scaleable but show promise. On paper, he said, solid sorbets could reduce energy loading in the systems by 30 – 50%. These systems are amine polymers loaded onto porous silica-based materials, or basic nitrogen in an activated carbon matrix.

One area that is often overlooked, says Drage is the regeneration of these sorbents and how the carbon dioxide is removed so they can be reused.

Matthew Hunt is from Doosan Babcock, a Scottish-based company

spending a lot of effort in scaling up CCS technology, with demonstration plants in Canada. This is just a 4 tonne plant so far, which is no real use for a power plant which will need to porcess 850 tonnes of carbon dioxide a day, he said. But according to Hunt, the company is on track to full-scale post-combustion carbon dioxide removal by 2014.

Of course, the impetus for these small demonstration scale plants needs to come from government, and the feeling in certain quarters of this meeting at least, was that not enough push, and not enough decisiveness is being shown to make the technology viable.

My hope is that in 2014 we are not still at the stage where academics working in small groups are showing results of small scale CCS projects and saying that scale up is needed urgently.

Hello from Glasgow, Scotland. Home to the deep fried mars bar, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Gordon Brown MP, and now for one week only the IUPAC congress.

I’m here to delve into the finer points of chemistry and to see what is getting chemists salivating this year.

The first session I went to was about artificial photosynthesis. The process that plants carry out with ease – turning sunlight into stored energy – is causing a major headache for scientists trying to mimic the process.

Rather than try to rebuild the molecules used by nature for photosynthesis, chemists are looking at systems that they can build and understand better, and use them to do the same jobs that plants do with their complex molecular machinery.

In these systems, sunlight is used to power the separation of charge – from a neutral molecule to one with a positive and negative component. But the big problem is keeping those charged states apart from one another for any length of time. If they recombine, the charge separation, which could lead to electric current, is lost.

Today I got to see how making the molecules really long with the charged ends separate from each other in space can help. Ken Ghiggino from the University of Melbourne, Australia, uses a set of four porphyrins, which are big ring-shaped molecules. One end has a zinc atom sitting inside the ring and the other a gold atom. These two metals can shunt a charge from one end to the other. The trouble is that this kind of system is far too complicated to ever be manufactured on a large scale.

Another suggestion is simple dyad systems with one charge donating and one charge accepting part. But as Andy Benniston from Newcastle University showed us, to separate the charge with these systems is also not as easy as hoped. He suggested that when previous chemists have claimed to have a long lived charge separated state what they had actually done was form a different quantum state called a triplet state. This is something else entirely.

All this is yet more evidence that nature is unfathomably clever in its use of molecular processes to gain energy, and that humans are way behind in our understanding. But thanks to chemists who refuse to get depressed by this notion, one day we may just be able to take sunlight and produce energy that we can store and use at will, without destroying our world.