V
What are we going to do now?
With an exponential increase in population, major concerns about global warming leading to climate change and with
oil and gas becoming scarcer and more
expensive to extract, we stand at a point
in the world’s history where everything
we do needs to change - and quickly. We
need to turn to renewable resources and
to make sure that we have enough land
to grow food as well as to provide all the
essential and luxury items that are currently produced from fossil fuel based
starting materials. Most of our static
energy needs will be provided by wind,
solar, wave and tidal power. Cars will be
powered by electricity from renewable
resources but how will we continue to fly?
How will we provide all the essential and
luxury items that are so familiar to us and
we love to have without using fossil fuelbased resources whilst at the same time
increasing the amount of food we produce.
The United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals provide a road map to a
future of peace, justice, equality and prosperity in a pollution-free world espousing
a circular economy. They hint at the end
point but how will we actually get there?
Many grandiose schemes are proposed
but who will actually bring them into
practice?
Much of the work will be done by chemists and chemical engineers working with
a whole myriad of end users to provide
solutions to all the problems. There has
never been a better time to be starting out
on a career in chemistry or chemical engineering. The challenges are huge, addressing them will require the most creative of
minds and the rewards, intellectual, social
and financial will be enormous. Are you
up for this exciting journey? Where will
it start and what is the final destination?
Nobody knows the answer to the second
question but, if you have been hooked
into wanting to set out on this journey
and do not know where to start, this
book, The Chemistry of Renewables, which
gives a snapshot of where we are at present and a hint at directions we might take,
is the book for you.
There are some major differences between
oil and naturally occurring feedstocks.
Oil contains only carbon and hydrogen
whilst feedstocks like natural oils, cellulose, lignin, etc also contain significant
amounts of oxygen and sometimes other
elements especially nitrogen, phosphorus and sulphur. Oil is mostly a mixture
of various chain length hydrocarbons so
is relatively simple. It has only C-H and
C-C bonds and is mostly easy to handle
as a liquid, which can be pumped from
well-defined reservoirs. Natural resources
are chemically much more complex and
diverse often occurring naturally as solids, sometimes spread thinly over large
areas making handling trickier but not
impossible. Most of the many thousands
of effect chemicals we use on everyday
life contain oxygen or nitrogen as well as
carbon and hydrogen so, to make them
from oil, we must add these elements generally in oxidative-type chemistry whilst
the chemistry of the future will require
removal of oxygen or reductive chemistry.
One possible way to solve the problem
would be to gasify biomass to give carbon monoxide and hydrogen then carry
out Fischer-Tropsch chemistry to make a
mixture of hydrocarbons rather like the
oil that we use already and feed it into a
standard oil refinery. However, taking all
the oxygen out of biomass and putting
some of it back in again is not only inelegant, it is massively energy intensive and
expensive so we really have to look for the
direct production of effect chemicals from
biomass. A whole new chemical industry
Foreword
What are we going to do now?
With an exponential increase in population, major concerns about global warming leading to climate change and with
oil and gas becoming scarcer and more
expensive to extract, we stand at a point
in the world’s history where everything
we do needs to change - and quickly. We
need to turn to renewable resources and
to make sure that we have enough land
to grow food as well as to provide all the
essential and luxury items that are currently produced from fossil fuel based
starting materials. Most of our static
energy needs will be provided by wind,
solar, wave and tidal power. Cars will be
powered by electricity from renewable
resources but how will we continue to fly?
How will we provide all the essential and
luxury items that are so familiar to us and
we love to have without using fossil fuelbased resources whilst at the same time
increasing the amount of food we produce.
The United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals provide a road map to a
future of peace, justice, equality and prosperity in a pollution-free world espousing
a circular economy. They hint at the end
point but how will we actually get there?
Many grandiose schemes are proposed
but who will actually bring them into
practice?
Much of the work will be done by chemists and chemical engineers working with
a whole myriad of end users to provide
solutions to all the problems. There has
never been a better time to be starting out
on a career in chemistry or chemical engineering. The challenges are huge, addressing them will require the most creative of
minds and the rewards, intellectual, social
and financial will be enormous. Are you
up for this exciting journey? Where will
it start and what is the final destination?
Nobody knows the answer to the second
question but, if you have been hooked
into wanting to set out on this journey
and do not know where to start, this
book, The Chemistry of Renewables, which
gives a snapshot of where we are at present and a hint at directions we might take,
is the book for you.
There are some major differences between
oil and naturally occurring feedstocks.
Oil contains only carbon and hydrogen
whilst feedstocks like natural oils, cellulose, lignin, etc also contain significant
amounts of oxygen and sometimes other
elements especially nitrogen, phosphorus and sulphur. Oil is mostly a mixture
of various chain length hydrocarbons so
is relatively simple. It has only C-H and
C-C bonds and is mostly easy to handle
as a liquid, which can be pumped from
well-defined reservoirs. Natural resources
are chemically much more complex and
diverse often occurring naturally as solids, sometimes spread thinly over large
areas making handling trickier but not
impossible. Most of the many thousands
of effect chemicals we use on everyday
life contain oxygen or nitrogen as well as
carbon and hydrogen so, to make them
from oil, we must add these elements generally in oxidative-type chemistry whilst
the chemistry of the future will require
removal of oxygen or reductive chemistry.
One possible way to solve the problem
would be to gasify biomass to give carbon monoxide and hydrogen then carry
out Fischer-Tropsch chemistry to make a
mixture of hydrocarbons rather like the
oil that we use already and feed it into a
standard oil refinery. However, taking all
the oxygen out of biomass and putting
some of it back in again is not only inelegant, it is massively energy intensive and
expensive so we really have to look for the
direct production of effect chemicals from
biomass. A whole new chemical industry
Foreword