Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

The access to Energy vectors (ideally renewable and sustainable) is humanity's greatest challenge in the 21st century. Succeeding in addressing this challenge is the only hope of ensuring prosperity for our modern society. Hydrocarbons (e.g. oil, natural gas) are currently the most widely used Energy vectors, yet their continued use poses enormous problems as they are inherently not renewable as well as highly pollutant, therefore not sustainable. In particular, world oil consumption is constantly on the rise, while production is dwindling, and this causes continuous oil price increases. Therefore the development of renewable energy sources will enable global economic growth, minimizing impact of these human activities on the environment. One further problem that needs an urgent solution is finding new and efficient ways of transporting and storing energy. Methanol production has been indicated as a way of solving at once all these problems. Methanol can be produced from synthetic gas (syngas), which in turn can be produced by a large variety of sources, like biomasses, waste and natural gas. This proposal addresses the problem of developing novel and more efficient nano-catalysts for methanol production. By exploiting recent nanotechnology breakthrough concepts, we plan to synthesize core-shell metal clusters with custom designed reactivity, so as to optimize the synthesis of methanol. We will design metallic components and cluster structure from first principles, thus obtaining a fine-tuning of the catalyst's chemical reactivity, which will allow to maximize the Turn Over Number for the industrially and economically relevant catalytic reaction of methanol synthesis. This project will be carried out in collaboration with ENERKEM, a Canadian company that manufactures catalysts. Our approach is likely to generate new wealth in terms of access to a renewable and environmentally friendly energy vector as well as new jobs in the R&D, manufacturing and green chemistry sectors.