Sustainable Processes – The Challenge of the 21st Century for Chemical Engineering
Special Symposium - Environmental Protection & Sustainability
Keynote Lectures: EP&S
Keywords: sustainable processes, renewable resources, process synthesis, process evaluation
The 21st century inherits stark challenges for human society: environmental degradation, global warming and shrinking fossil resources. All these problems are paired with a dramatic growth of the economy in China and India, home to 2.3 billion people. We need to make more from less and we need to do this while reducing our impact on nature by the order of magnitudes.
This challenge is particularly tough for chemical engineering. This sector is on the one hand responsible for providing most of the products of daily consumption, the base for modern agriculture as well as energy carriers for power generation, transport, heating and cooling. On the other hand chemical engineering has a considerable impact on the environment, via its resource consumption, its emissions and the impact of its products.
Chemical engineering will have to explore new ways in order to stay ahead of these challenges. The most important changes for this sector in the 21st century will include:
The change of the raw material base
Today chemical industry is mainly dependent on fossil oil and gas as its main raw material base. Both resources will face their production peak during this century, forcing process industry to look for alternative resources. One obvious candidate are renewable, biogenic resources.
Such a change in the raw material base however entails a profound revolution in the structure of processes, the technologies employed and the economical framework of process industry. For one, these resources constitute a “limited infinity”: although they may be provided for infinite time, their productivity is limited. The chemical sector here enters competition not only with the energy sector (who also sees renewables as alternative resources) but with the food sector, too.
Another problem lies in the altered logistics of renewable resources: they are produced de-centrally and mostly discontinuously in contrast with the continuous point sources of fossil materials. This will lead to complete new structures of chemical processes, with the raw material logistics a solid part of the process.
Life cycle stewardship
Efficiency will be key to success. This will start with the choice of the right raw materials, where process industry will play out its high flexibility, allowing it to utilise raw materials not suited for food like straw and other agricultural residues. Utilising every part of its raw materials as it does now with fossil resources will become an imperative when using renewable resources.
On top of this process industry will also become more responsible for re-integrating its products after use into the biosphere. A close and efficient co-operation with agriculture will ensure long-term fertility by closing material cycles from agriculture via process industry, society and back to agriculture.
New construction principles
For the first time since many decades process industry will have to generate new industrial structures for whole value chains. Besides economic optimisation the reduction of the ecological impact over the whole life cycle will become a necessity. This means for chemical engineering to apply new principles for the construction of its processes: process synthesis and ecological process evaluation will become prominent tools for the chemical engineer in the 21st century.
See the full pdf manuscript of the abstract.
Presented Tuesday 18, 11:45 to 12:30, in session Keynote Lectures: EP&S (S-7K1, K2).
