What is carbon neutrality and how to achieve it?

"Promoting Chemistry Applied to World Needs" Webinar Series (coordinated by Beyond Benign and CHEMRAWN)

Reducing total CO₂ emissions to zero is called #CarbonNeutrality. To achieve this, industrial and energy reforms must be undertaken within the next decade. However, the specific measures are not generally known. Join us for a special webinar with Junji Nakamura, a Research Professor at the International Institute for Carbon-Neutral Energy Research, Kyushu University, to explore what the path to carbon neutrality looks like.

What is Carbon Neutrality, and How to Achieve it-- with Dr. Junji Nakamura of Kyushu University

The global warming problem is serious. Reducing total carbon dioxide emissions to zero is called carbon neutrality. To achieve this, industrial and energy reforms must be undertaken within the next decade. However, the specific measures are not generally known. If we limit the use of fossil resources such as oil, natural gas, and coal, we must produce artificial fuels. Chemical reactions are used to produce them. Therefore, the contributions of chemists are extremely important. In addition, chemists need to use numbers to quantitatively discuss and select the most desirable path. The keywords here are hydrogen and methanol. This webinar will focus on what the path to carbon neutrality looks like.

Nakamura has extensively studied catalytic mechanism relating to methanol synthesis on Cu-based catalysts. Nakamura has clarified that the alloy site of Cu and Zn is the active site through model catalyst research. The “CuZn active site model” is known worldwide. Recently, Nakamura has found that formation of formate takes place through an extremely rare Eley-Rideal (ER) type mechanism as a catalytic reaction mechanism, which has been reported in Nature Chemistry (2019). Another outstanding research is the study of nitrogen-doped carbon catalysts for oxygen reduction reaction. There are two major types of doped-nitrogen, graphitic nitrogen and pyridinic nitrogen, but which one forms the active site was a controversial issue. Nakamura conducted electrochemical measurements using a model catalyst that produced both nitrogen species separately, and clarified that the pyridinic nitrogen form an active site. The research paper has been published in Science in January 2016, which is the most cited paper with a keyword of “catalyst” published since 2016.

[Event URL]: What is carbon neutrality and how to achieve it? - IUPAC | International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry

[Video URL]: OYOT-hero-elle-chaintabby-video-6s-02-16×9-2