The biggest source of global energy consumption is the industrial manufacturing of products such as plastics, iron, and steel.
The biggest source of global energy consumption is the industrial manufacturing of products such as plastics, iron, and steel. Not only does manufacturing these materials require huge amounts of energy, but many of the reactions also directly emit carbon dioxide as a byproduct.
In an effort to help reduce this energy use and the related emissions, MIT chemical engineers have devised an alternative approach to synthesizing epoxides, a type of chemical that is used to manufacture diverse products, including plastics, pharmaceuticals, and textiles. Their new approach, which uses electricity to run the reaction, can be done at room temperature and atmospheric pressure while eliminating carbon dioxide as a byproduct.
“What isn’t often realized is that industrial energy usage is far greater than transportation or residential usage. This is the elephant in the room, and there has been very little technical progress in terms of being able to reduce industrial energy consumption,” says Karthish Manthiram, an assistant professor chemical engineering and the senior author of the new study.
Read more at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Image: MIT researchers used these manganese oxide nanoparticles to catalyze the breakdown of water and the subsequent incorporation of oxygen into useful compounds called epoxides. Courtesy of the researchers
