Jun's group have created a new material to reduce CO2 emissions

Recently, Jun's group have produced a new amorphous (a non-crystalline solid, such as glass) silica-alumina catalyst with stronger acidity than any other silica-alumina material created before. The related work has been published in Nature Communication titled 'Acidity enhancement through synergy of penta- and tetra-coordinated aluminum species in amorphous silica networks'. The research is part of the Sydney Nano Grand Challenge node known as CO2 Zero.

This novel Silica-aluminas with strong Brønsted acidity is promising for various sustainability processes, including the fields of biomass conversion, CO2 capture and conversion, air-pollution remediation, and water purification.

“This new catalyst offers some exciting prospects, if it were to be adopted by the entire oil refinery industry, we could potentially see a reduction of over 20 percent in CO2 emissions during the oil refinement process. That’s the equivalent of double Australia’s crude oil consumption, over 2 million barrels of oil per day.”

“The new catalyst also has the potential to develop the biomass industry. We can now look to biomass material like algae to be part of sustainable energy solutions.”

Next, researchers in Jun's group is going to working on manufacturing the new catalyst at a industrial scale.

This research was a collaboration between University Lille (France), the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (France), ETH Zurich (Switzerland), Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany) and Macquarie University (Australia).