To realise the Net Zero concept, the chemical industries will fundamentally change the way they handle energy, feedstocks, and data. The use of renewable electricity and hydrogen as future energy vector will demand new ways to perform chemical reactions. Engineered removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is one way of helping to meet our decarbonisation and climate change commitments. Here, electrically driven reactors will offer new flexibility and modularity for reactions and separations, whilst direct electrical heating by microwaves, resistive or inductive heating will offer significant cost and energy savings. Microwave processing offers an exciting double opportunity to replace traditional sources of fossil heat with carbon-free electrical energy and enhance process performance through selective and volumetric heat transfer mechanisms.

The centre will bring together world-leading research expertise and facilities from the University of Aston, University of Nottingham, Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Warwick and 25 industrial partners.

The funding has been announced by the UK science, innovation and technology secretary Michelle Donelan. The centre has received £8 M of government money while the remainder will be made up through support from industry and the four universities.

Within our CDT we shall implement projects across the full range of engineered greenhouse gas removal options: direct air capture; CO₂ utilization; biomass to energy with carbon capture and storage; biochar upgrade, life-cycle and techno-economic assessment of different feedstocks and technology options; comparing policy instruments that can encourage negative emissions or evaluating the economic impact of implementation.

At the University of Warwick the CDT management team will be led by Professor Sai Gu and Professor Evgeny Rebrov. We are looking forward to provide our contribution to the NET²Zero CDT, including using our past and existing successful experience in managing large-scale collaborative programs within the Monash-Warwick alliance and the ERC Synergy project SCOPE. The CDT projects will enhance our research in the area of decarbonisation and renewable energy and they will extend our industrial network in the Midlands and internationally.

We will focus on transformation of bio-based and waste-derived feedstocks to materials/chemicals in the drive towards a circular economy. These new feedstocks will force the development of new chemistries and technologies. The major challenge here is the development of technologies to convert these materials without the use of fossil fuels.

In the future, commercial decisions will increasingly be based on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) indicators. Here, the increasing quantity of life-cycle and techno-economic data will change how we design, and monitor different processes from the pilot to the plant scale. Therefore we are also offering projects in the area of life-cycle assessment of different technologies.