Transcriber: Martina Tortorici Reviewer: Silvina Katz
-There you go, the stage is yours. - Thank you
When I tell people I'm a chemist,
they typically ask me which kind of chemist I am.
Am I one of these guys cooking drugs in a basement,
like we see in a TV show?
And I really love this show
because somehow it’s showing to a wide audience,
what working in a lab looks like.
And if you have the cool chemist, you must have the bad chemist,
the chemist who belongs to an industry hurting the planet
because when people think chemistry,
what they see is crude oil, plastic waste or dangerous chemicals.
We’re going to spend the next few minutes together,
and I hope you will discover
that chemistry is not only cooking drugs or hurting the planet.
Chemistry has much more to offer
and it has a solution to build a greener future.
So, let’s start with this graph showing what the future could be made of.
And this has been published in the very recent IPCC reports
and shows the evolution of CO2 emissions across a century
with three main scenarios.
On the top, you can see the fossil fuel intensive scenario.
In the bottom, the predominantly non-fossil fuel scenario
and, in the middle, a more balanced scenario.
And there are two main learnings we can get from that graph.
First, if we carry on using fossil fuels the way we do it today,
CO2 emissions will dramatically increase
and this will make life on Earth very difficult.
Floodings, fires, hurricanes or air pollution.
The events we had across the globe during the past years
are just a teaser of what is coming next.
So this is bad news,
but there is a second learning we can get from that graph.
Technology has the potential to bring down that CO2 curve.
People used to think that we will rely on fossil fuels
as long as we can extract them.
But the oil age will end way before the world runs out of oil.
Demography and economic development will also play a key role,
but today I want to focus on the key technologies
which have the potential to move away from this fossil fuels scenario.
So, if we want to get rid of fossil fuels,
first let’s look at what a barrel of oil is used for today:
heavy fuel oil, gasoline, jet fuel, diesel.
Most of the barrel is just used for energy and transportation.
And for these,
we already have great solutions, which are implemented.
One example is electric cars, which you can feed with green electricity
from solar, windmills or hydro power.
But there is another family of products, called petrochemicals.
These are used to make all the products of our daily life.
So, let’s look around us in the room.
Plastics, cosmetics, textiles, paintings, fragrances and many more.
All these products are made of carbon.
And to make these products,
we are still using 14 % of the barrel
in a very linear economy,
adding more CO2 to the atmosphere.
But can you imagine living without these products?
No.
So, we need to identify and implement solutions
to get that carbon from renewable resources.
And we only have three solutions.
The first one is recycling.
If we can get that carbon from a waste,
then we could make new products over and over.
And this field keeps improving,
but it’s nearly impossible to close the loop
because the recycling processes do not have 100 % efficiency.
And also not all the streams are collected so far.
So, there is a need for additional streams.
The second option is atmospheric CO2.
CO2 contains carbon and it’s a greenhouse gas.
So, capturing it seems like a very appealing solution.
But CO2 is very diluted in the atmosphere,
so it's very costly to capture it.
Also, then you need to put all the carbon atoms together
and this costs a lot of energy.
So again, there is need for additional solutions,
in addition to atmospheric CO2 and recycling.
So, the third and very last solution is biomass.
And, as a scientist, I could be working on recycling or CO2,
but I really fell in love for the field of biomass valorization.
It’s really fascinating to see
how nature is putting together these amazing structures
and, at the same time, just capturing CO2.
So, it will really be a pity not taking advantage of this.
And here I’m talking about ligneous cellulosic biomass,
also called terrestrial plants.
So, these are side streams from the forestry,
the agriculture,
or the food industry.
And the point is not to solve the fossil fuel problem
by creating deforestation or a food supply issue.
So, we want to focus exclusively on side streams,
which do not compete with the food supply.
And these streams are widely available.
There is about billion tons of biomass produced every year on Earth,
of which ten billions are produced sustainably.
And if you remember the barrel of oil,
we need to cover 14 % of it
to make the products I mentioned.
And this represents 730 million tons every year.
So, we are safe by more than an order of magnitude.
So, here we see
that there is endless biomass on Earth to make these products.
OK, now we have this biomass,
but we still need to find a way to make all the products I mentioned.
And I want to dive a bit into the challenge of biomass valorisation.
So, biomass is composed of three main elements.
The first one is cellulose.
And most of us know it because this is used already today in the paper industry.
But there are two other fractions,
called hemicellulose and lignin,
and I would bet that only few of you heard about these
because the industry has been failing extracting these so far.
The challenge is that these fractions are strongly linked together.
So, it’s very hard to take them apart.
So, I want now to dive into the challenge
and to show you the key to break it down efficiently.
But when I got invited to give the talk, the organizers told me:
“Please, don’t be too technical. People are just going to get bored.”
So, I came up with a very simple analogy.
A tree is just like an egg.
And I know at first sight it doesn’t sound so obvious,
but at the end, the egg is also composed of three elements:
the yolk, the white, and the shell.
And we also want to use what is inside.
So for this, we need to break it down.
And for this we actually need some energy.
So, if you need energy to break down the egg,
the first thing you could do is just hammer the egg
and then you just get the juice out of it.
Maybe you filter the shell away
and then you could still cook some scrambled eggs.
So, somehow it works.
But somehow it sounds very wrong.
But to my eyes this is exactly how the industry has been doing it with biomass.
But luckily, I think you know, there is another way.
You can carefully crack down the egg
and then you can separate the yolk from the white and from the shell,
and then you can develop a lot of recipes
and a lot of specific recipes from each of the ingredients.
You can make chocolate mousse from the white,
you can make cream from the yolk and many others.
And this sounds much better, right?
And the good news is that we can do exactly this with biomass.
I actually founded a startup company where we collect waste from biomass
and then we deliver high purity streams to industries
from fragrances to packaging,
and then we are matching the quality standards of the industry
while using sustainable carbon.
But having a sustainable source of carbon,
and we can get it from CO2, from biomass, or from recycling,
this is only the first step towards sustainability.
Because, as you can see here,
if your materials end up in the environment,
it doesn’t work.
So, end of life needs to be considered.
We need recycling or biodegradability.
Also, the footprint of the manufacturing process
must be as low as possible.
We need to design clean processes.
And finally,
these products must have performances matching or overpassing
the current standards of the industry.
So, we need sustainability at four levels:
sustainable sourcing of the carbon,
manufacturing,
utilisation,
and end of life.
OK.
Let’s come back to our cool chemist and to our bad chemist.
Now I hope you know that chemistry has much more to offer.
There is a new generation of chemists
driven by sustainability
and on a mission to build a greener future.
We need policy makers, but we also need you.
Help us to accelerate the switch
from petrol chemistry to sustainable industry.
As the consumer, you are driving the change.
Consume less and consume better.
Thank you.