Carbon Dioxide Utilisation: Closing the Carbon Cycle

Peter Styring is Professor of Chemical Engineering & Chemistry at the University of Sheffield where his research sits at the interface between the two disciplines. He is interested in carbon capture agents that not only achieve high levels of activity and selectivity, but which also act as catalysts or catalyst supports for the in situ conversion of CO2 into valuable products. Peter also works across disciplines with experts in other fields to take into account social and economic factors such as energy integration, public perception and supply chain economics.Peter is Chair of the CO2Chem Network (www.co2chem.com), an EPSRC Grand Challenge Network bringing together collaborators interested in CCU. Together with Katy Armstrong and collaborators at ECN in the Netherlands he has co-authored the policy document “Carbon Capture and Utilisation in the Green Economy (ISBN 978-0-9572588-1-5 for eBook) which has received considerable global attention. A recent paper has been published in Chimica Oggi that reviews some of the catalytic approaches to CCU. Peter is a former EPSRC Senior Media Fellow working to make science and engineering more accessible to the public so is experienced at writing to attract all levels. In 2007 he was awarded the IChemE Hanson Medal for a paper on ski engineering, written to appeal to a wide audience.

Alessandra Quadrelli is the chairwoman of the Sustanability Chair of Chemical, Physics and Electronic Engineering School CPE Lyon since 2009. She is a CNRS researcher in the field of catalysis and organometallic chemistry and teaches undergraduate inorganic and organometallic chemistry courses and the graduate course “Sustainable development and homogeneous catalysis at CPE Lyon. Her research interests at the Laboratoire de Chimie Organométallique de Surface, now part of the C2P2 unit, under triple tutelage CNRS CPE and Université de Lyon 1, have focused on gaining molecular understanding of the interaction between organometallic precursors and solid surfaces, such as silica and more recently, metal organic frameworks, in route to heterogeneous catalysts. With Jean-Marie Basset, Mostafa Taoufik and coworkers she has uncovered a unique system capable of achieving dinitrogen splitting with diydrogen on an isolated metal atom. After her bachelor studies at Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, and her PhD studies at University of Maryland awarded with the Pelczar Award in 1998, Alessandra Quadrelli has been postdoctoral fellow at the Chemical laboratories of Cambridge University and Dipartimento di Chimica of Università of Pisa. In 2002, she integrated the French National Centre for Scientific Research, CNRS, and joined the Laboratoire de Chimie Organométallique de Surface. She has coauthored over 35 papers, among which 2 reviews and 2 book chapters. She serves as referee to numerous international journals and as evaluator in French and European proposal evaluations. She has contributed to the European Network of Excellence “IDECAT- Integrated design on Catalytic nanomaterials for sustainable production and has co-founded with Silvia Bordiga the “NANOCAT- International Summer School on Molecular and Supramolecular Approach to Nano-Designed Catalysts.