Stable catalytic materials for emerging energy conversion technologies and greenhouse gas mitigation

所有产品中95%以上的产品是通过催化合成的，随着我们进入向替代能源过渡的世界，可持续发展的关键将是实现这种转变。催化剂通过在实际时间尺度上(几秒而不是数百年)实现工艺，极大地降低了能源需求，并允许目标生产大幅减少废物产生。理想情况下，生产线上的催化剂寿命应该是无限的，但催化剂会失活，需要频繁更换。其中许多都含有昂贵的贵金属，停用会损害经济效益并增加能源消耗。 我们的项目结合了化学家、材料和化学工程师的努力，为实际应用开发稳定的催化剂制定了通用战略。通过这一策略，我们将能够在很长一段时间内保持催化剂中活性成分的新鲜性质，这转化为在反应速度和减少能量输入方面的生产效率的数量级提高。 将制定的战略旨在广泛适用于现有的和新兴的工艺，但在短期内，我们将解决i)新兴的二氧化碳价态技术，而无需进行初步的成本分离，以最终生产超清洁替代燃料和增值产品，以及ii)目前面临经济挑战的天然气汽车尾气处理系统。这两项技术都将显著减少温室气体排放，并使人们能够过渡到替代燃料，如沼气或废物衍生的先进生物燃料。

More than 95% by volume of all products are synthesized by means of catalysis, and as we are entering a world transitioning to alternative energy resources, the key to sustainable development will be to enable such transformations. Catalysts dramatically reduce energy requirements by enabling processes on practical time scales (seconds versus hundreds of years) and they allow target productions with significantly reduced waste generation. Ideally, a catalyst lifetime in a production line should be infinite, but catalysts suffer from deactivation and require frequent replacements. Many of them contain expensive noble metals, and the deactivation compromises economic benefits and increases energy consumption. Our project combines efforts from chemists, materials and chemical engineers to develop a universal strategy for stable catalyst development for real-world applications. With this strategy we will be able to maintain fresh-like properties of active components in catalysts for prolonged periods of time, which translates into an order of magnitude improvement in the production efficiency in terms of reaction rates and decreased energy input. The strategy to be developed is intended to be universal for a wide range of existing and emerging processes, but in the short term we will address i) the emerging technology for CO2 valorization without preliminary costly separation for the ultimate production of ultra-clean alternative fuels and value-added products, and ii) currently economically challenged exhaust treatment system in natural gas vehicles. Both technologies will lead to significant greenhouse gases emission reduction and enable the transition to alternative fuels, such as biogas or waste-derived advanced biofuels.