Become a future leader of the Net Zero Process Industries

The use of renewable electricity and hydrogen will demand new ways to perform process steps, including reactions, separations, and heat transfer, as well as whole process design. Here, electrically driven chemistry will offer new flexibility and modularity for reactions and separations, whilst direct electrical heating will offer significant cost and energy savings.

Hydrogen will also become both a chemical feedstock and a vector for heat supply, whilst plasma-, light-, and sono-driven chemistries will, in some cases, replace the need for heat entirely.

New, more sustainable feedstocks will force the development of new process chemistries and technologies. Increasingly, these new feedstocks will be bio-based, carbon-neutral, and waste-derived, in the drive towards a circular economy.

Whether this is the currently under-valorised components of lignocellulosic biomass, or the utilisation of captured carbon dioxide as a feedstock, there are opportunities for efficient, coupled separation and reaction processes. The close collaboration of leading chemists and chemical engineers is needed to realise these opportunities in industry.

In the future net zero process industries, research and commercial decisions will often be based on environmental, economic, social, and overall sustainability indicators. Here, the increasing quantity and quality of life-cycle and techno-economic data will dramatically change how we design, operate, and monitor processes from the unit operation to the plant and cluster scale. Furthermore, processes will be increasingly data-rich, so will require appropriately skilled engineers and chemists to design and operate them.