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The Catalyst Selectivity Index (CSI): A Framework and Metric to Assess the Impact of Catalyst Efficiency Enhancements upon Energy and CO sub(2) Footprints
Heterogeneous catalysts are not only a venerable part of our chemical and industrial heritage, but they also occupy a pivotal, central role in the advancement of modern chemistry, chemical processes and chemical technologies. The broad field of catalysis has also emerged as a critical, enabling scie...
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| Published in: | Topics in catalysis 2015-08, Vol.58 (10-11), p.682-695 |
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Heterogeneous catalysts are not only a venerable part of our chemical and industrial heritage, but they also occupy a pivotal, central role in the advancement of modern chemistry, chemical processes and chemical technologies. The broad field of catalysis has also emerged as a critical, enabling science and technology in the modern development of "Green Chemistry", with the avowed aim of achieving green and sustainable processes. Thus a widely utilized metric, the environmental E factor-characterizing the waste-to-product ratio for a chemical industrial process-permits one to assess the potential deleterious environmental impact of an entire chemical process in terms of excessive solvent usage. As the many (and entirely reasonable) societal pressures grow, requiring chemists and chemical engineers not only to develop manufacturing processes using new sources of energy, but also to decrease the energy/carbon footprint of existing chemical processes, these issues become ever more pressing. On that road to a green and more sustainable future for chemistry and energy, we note that, as far as we are aware, little effort has been directed towards a direct evaluation of the quantitative impacts that advances or improvements in a catalyst's performance or efficiency would have on the overall energy or carbon (CO sub(2)) footprint balance and corresponding greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of chemical processes and manufacturing technologies. Therefore, this present research was motivated by the premise that the sustainability impact of advances in catalysis science and technology, especially heterogeneous catalysis-the core of large-scale manufacturing processes-must move from a qualitative to a more quantitative form of assessment. This, then, is the exciting challenge of developing a new paradigm for catalysis science which embodies-in a truly quantitative form-its impact on sustainability in chemical, industrial processes. Towards that goal, we present here the concept, definition, design and development of what we term the Catalyst Sensitivity Index (CSI) to provide a measurable index as to how efficiency or performance enhancements of a heterogeneous catalyst will directly impact upon the fossil energy consumption and GHG emissions balance across several prototypical fuel production and conversion technologies, e.g. hydrocarbon fuels synthesized using algae-to-biodiesel, algae-to-jet biofuel, coal-to-liquid and gas-to-liquid processes, together with fuel upgradin |
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| ISSN: | 1022-5528 1572-9028 |
| DOI: | 10.1007/s11244-015-0401-1 |