The next industrial revolution

Professor Stefaan Simons from UCL Chemical Engineering is director of the department’s Centre for CO2 Technology, a multidisciplinary research and training centre that develops innovative technologies for the reduction, removal and long-term storage of carbon dioxide.

Coal on white paper

"If we are to achieve the CO2 emission reductions necessary to avert catastrophic climate change, we need to initiate the next industrial revolution, a transition from a low-efficiency, high-carbon energy system to one that is high efficiency, low carbon. This means a complete replacement of the current fossil fuel energy system, at the same time massively reducing energy demand by both increases in efficiency and changing people’s behaviours.

How can such a transition be achieved? Learning the lessons from our own past, the move from wood to coal in England during the two centuries spanning the 1600s to 1800s, the approach is not to focus on CO2 emissions as such, but to tackle the technological, policy and regulatory innovations that will enable the entire energy infrastructure, both supply and demand, to be developed based on renewable sources.

The focus now is on technologies that produce energy, but this ignores the infrastructure required to deliver that energy in a reliable and consistent manner, much as the initial move to coal began without the supply infrastructure in place and the ability to use the different form of energy.

A major factor in England’s move to coal was the innovation in technologies used to make glass and steel so that coal-firing could be used, and the construction of supply lines, such as canals, to deliver that coal. At the same time, domestic dwellings needed to be redesigned so that coal could be burnt without noxious fumes filling houses and ruining the taste of food formerly cooked in wood-fired stoves. Our present-day chemical industry will also need to face the challenge of changing its processes to enable the use of feedstocks and energy supplied via renewable resources, at the same time significantly reducing its energy demand.

UCL’s Centre for CO2 Technology is leading the development of innovative technologies and systems that will radically change the way the chemicals and materials we so depend on today are made, massively reducing demands on energy and other resources. For instance, an ultra-low energy alternative to the manufacture of cement is being pioneered in the centre’s laboratories.

In addition, even though ultimately we will have to displace coal and other fossil fuels from our energy system, clean coal technologies are part of the centre’s research effort, especially those that can remove carbon emissions in less energy intensive and technically complex ways than the proposed geological carbon capture and storage schemes discussed so much in the media. For instance, the centre has spearheaded the development of accelerated carbonation technology as a way to store carbon emissions permanently and safely in treated waste materials that can then be used in construction applications.

Finally, a key barrier to the success of the next industrial revolution is in the capability to store electrical energy from renewable sources, something that the Centre for CO2 Technology is working hard to solve in its newly formed Electrochemical Innovation Laboratory, developing new batteries and fuel cell systems."

Image: Black coal on white paper