Industrial Chemistry Transformation

I was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, back in the ’80s and ’90s. Venezuela is a beautiful country, rich with natural treasures from beaches to rainforests. But one thing that people don’t quite realize is that we also have really tall mountains. These are part of the Andes, and they stretch all the way down from Chile and Argentina. And they’re also home to some of the very few tropical glaciers in the world.

Back in 1910, when the first map was drawn, Venezuela used to have five tropical glaciers, which we used to call the five white eagles. Today, unfortunately, there’s only one left, and it covers an area which is smaller than Central Park in New York City. These glaciers have been disappearing because of the use of a resource that we extract not too far from them: oil.

As a Venezuelan, my relationship with oil is complicated. On the one hand, oil is the resource that helped my country develop, as well as human civilization. On the other hand, it’s a resource that slowly but surely fuels an existential threat. Climate change.

We now know that to avert the worst impacts of climate change, we’re going to have to decarbonize everything that we do and everything that surrounds us. And to do that within the next three decades. These include things like transitioning from oil, natural gas to clean sources of electricity; electrifying all of our vehicles; rethinking the way that we make our buildings and cities.

The good news is that technologies to do some of these things already exist. And legislation to frame and direct this effort is starting to be put in place. The bad news is that even if we do all of these things, it will still not be enough. There are still large sectors of our economy that will need to be decarbonized for which we don’t have the technology yet. These include the things like manufacturing processes that are used to make everything that surrounds us, from the cement and steel that holds our buildings together to the chemicals and materials that we use to make the goods that we use in our daily lives. Things like the chair that you’re sitting in, your shoes, the cars that you use, and all the devices that we use every day.

The chemical manufacturing industry alone accounts for 10 percent of the energy consumption. And 20 percent of the carbon emissions from industry. These emissions arise from the use of fossil fuel combustion to generate the heat that is required to drive processes inside of our old and inefficient chemical plants. One way to start fixing the issue will be to use electricity instead of heat from fossil fuels to drive the processes inside of these plants. Sounds easy enough, right? Just unplug the natural gas pipelines, plug in the electrical wire, and make sure that you source electricity from clean sources like solar, wind or nuclear. Unfortunately, in reality, it’s much harder than that.

We’re going to have to come up with new chemical reactions that can source their energy directly from electricity. These are called electrochemical reactions. And it’s what my research group at New York University is focusing on: figuring out electrochemical paths that can create direct links between clean electricity and molecules. In electrochemical reactions, heat is replaced by electricity as an energy source. This allows us to operate reactors and carry out reactions at room temperature with minimal energy losses. But the problem is that for electrochemical reactions to become viable, they will need to be more efficient and cost competitive than the heat-powered ones that we use today. That means that electrochemical reactors will need to transform raw materials into products very efficiently, with minimal waste and very selectively. This will then in turn incentivize chemical manufacturers to switch to electrochemical production processes instead of deploying new fossil fuel chemical plants.

In our research, we started by looking at a chemical reaction that is used to make one of the most important polymers in the world: Nylon 66. More than 5 million tons of all kinds of nylons are produced every year. And out of those, two million tons are of Nylon 66. And these are used to make things like the textile fibers that we use in our winter jackets or the plastic car parts that help make our vehicles lightweight and fuel-efficient. Through our research, we managed to identify electrochemical reaction mixtures with the right additives and voltages to be able to transform raw materials into nylon precursors very selectively. We achieved selectivity of more than 80 percent, a value that is on par with commercial reactors. But we didn’t stop there. While most electrochemical reactions operate with a constant stream of electrical currents, we knew that if we control the interactions between the electricity input and molecules, we could achieve a higher performance. To do that, we decided to start exploring different electrical pulses in the search for the right pulse sequence that will deliver electrons at the same rate that molecules could react. Since there were so many pulses that we needed to test, we decided to then use a few number of results from different pulses to train machine-learning models that then help us identify the appropriate pulse sequence for this reaction. This was the first time that artificial intelligence was used to optimize an electrochemical reaction, and the pulse sequence that we discovered allows us to increase by 30 percent the production rate of these reactors. These large improvements in efficiency, selectivity and production rates are very important because they will ensure that electrochemical reactions are competitive with fossil-fuel-powered ones which are already highly optimized.

But hey, nylon is only one molecule in a network of tens of thousands of chemical products, many of which you see in this diagram, and many of which are a common occurrence in your daily lives. Just think of the plastics that are used to make your computers and phones, or the pane that covers the walls around us, or the medicines that help us live a healthy life. We’re going to have to decarbonize it all within the next 30 years. That means that we’re going to have to discover, develop and deploy chemical processes much faster than we did in the past century.

To that end, my group at NYU is combining artificial intelligence with autonomous research tools to run hundreds to thousands of experiments per day. In this way, we hope to decrease the time from idea to discovery by more than 100 times. Beyond nylon, we’re also looking into production processes to manufacture other chemicals like ethylene and propylene. These are the main precursors to most of the plastic in the world. Through electrochemistry, we have managed to electrify already the most energy intensive steps on the production process of these chemicals: a set of processes that alone account for a very substantial amount of energy in the chemical manufacturing industry. We’re also rethinking the way that we make our chemicals and the chemicals supply chain, by developing new processes that can use and transform food waste into the chemicals that we make today from oil. This can be done by extracting molecules from waste streams and using them as precursors to things like plastics, additives, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, and many more. And in this way, enhancing sustainability in chemical manufacture even further.

The chemical industry is central to our modern economy and to our ways of life. Decarbonizing it will take us several decades. This will include things like retrofitting our chemical plants so they can use electricity directly, capturing and sequestering CO2 as it comes out of the gas flue stacks, and more importantly, developing new chemical processes that are more efficient and can source electricity directly from clean sources. By accelerating research in electrochemical manufacturing, my team aims to develop some of these reactions and in this way help to transform the chemical industry one reaction at a time. When we get there, we will have been able to erase the carbon footprint of the chemical industry. And while we won’t be able to bring our tropical glaciers back, we will have helped to develop a sustainable path for the future of our planet.

Thank you.