Invited Paper EN-TuM5
The Role of Catalysis in Developing Energy Resources for the Future

Tuesday, October 29, 2013, 9:20 am, Room 101 A

The continuing economic success of developed nations and the growth in the economies of developing nations is intimately connected to the availability inexpensive sources of energy. For the past century, the primary energy resources have been coal, petroleum, and natural gas. Coal and natural gas have been used primarily for the generation of electricity, and petroleum as the primary source of transportation fuels. While these traditional resources are projected to last to the end of this century, it is recognized that they are finite and that their consumption contributes to the growing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and consequently to detrimental changes in the global climate. For these reasons, there has been a growing interest in finding more efficient means for utilizing traditional energy resources and developing sustainable energy resources such as biomass and solar radiation as alternatives. This talk will focus on the role of catalysis in enabling the efficient conversion of biomass and solar radiation to transportation fuels. It will be shown that the conversion of biomass to diesel and gasoline can be accomplished in a sequence of steps that involve dehydration, aldol condensation, hydrodeoxygenation, and hydrogenation, each of which requires a catalyst in order to achieve reaction rates that are commercially viable. The photoelectrochemical splitting of water and the photoelectrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide offer longer range means for producing fuels from sustainable resources. Here too, catalysts are required to achieve the formation of products at acceptable rates. This presentation will end with a set of illustrations showing how advances in methods of catalyst synthesis, screening, and characterization can be used to accelerate the discovery and evaluation of catalysts for the conversion of sustainable energy resources to fuels.