Press Release 088/2022

New Electrolysis Processes for Sustainable Chemical Production

In the Future Cluster ETOS, Researchers are Developing Processes That Save Energy and Resources in the Chemical Industry and Reduce Carbon Dioxide Emissions
2022_088_Neue Elektrolyseverfahren fuer eine nachhaltige chemische Produktion_72dpi
Carbon-neutral chemical production: Researchers in the ETOS project want to achieve this goal with electricity from renewable energies. (Photo: Amadeus Bramsiepe, KIT)

Basic chemicals, which are needed as raw materials for a wide range of products such as medicines and detergents, can currently only be produced with an enormously high input of energy and raw materials. In many cases, fossil fuels and raw materials are still used. The extraction of chemical substances alone requires high temperatures, expensive catalysts made of precious metals and, in some cases, environmentally harmful starting materials. The aim of the ETOS future cluster, which is co-led by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), is to develop more sustainable processes based on electrolysis. Using electricity from renewable energies, they are to create a basis for carbon-neutral chemical production. The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is funding ETOS as one of seven projects in the Clusters4Future competition. 

With special electrolysis processes for the production of fine chemicals, the ETOS future cluster wants to contribute significantly to the defossilization of the chemical industry. "The advantage is that no waste is produced when a reaction is triggered with the help of electricity. It is a 'clean' process, allows mild synthesis conditions, and is inherently safe," says Dr. Philipp Röse from KIT's Institute for Applied Materials - Electrochemical Technologies (IAM-ET). The researchers now want to adapt the electrolysis processes and develop them to industrial scale so that energy and raw materials can be saved. The focus is on the production of fine chemicals, which are basic materials for numerous products. Until now, these could only be produced with sometimes environmentally harmful starting materials, such as oxidants containing heavy metals, at high temperatures, and with expensive catalysts made of precious metals such as palladium or platinum. The team's research is based on organic electrosynthesis, where organic compounds are converted into the desired chemical products by means of an electric current.

"Organic electrosynthesis is still a little-researched niche technology that is rarely used in industry. We now want to use it to develop customized methods for specific production processes that are ecologically and economically worthwhile," says Professor Ulrike Krewer, head of IAM-ET and co-spokesperson of ETOS. "If we then also rely on electricity from renewable sources, the new methods are an important step toward CO2 neutrality in these processes." ETOS will be the first major technology platform to drive the transfer of electroorganic syntheses from the laboratory to industrial scale and, on this basis, develop proposals for solution and key technologies for sustainable, robust, and future-proof processes and products.

Process and Reaction Engineering from Electrodes to Large-scale Demonstrators

The KIT team led by Ulrike Krewer contributes the engineering perspective to the ETOS future cluster. "This involves improving individual components, such as electrodes, as well as entire demonstrators through to the complete process chain in large-scale plants," Röse explains. In ETOS, KIT researchers deal, among other things, with the experimental and model-based analysis and optimization of electrodes and cells and the additive manufacturing of structured reactors. They work on process design as well as on upscaling of processes and evaluation in large-scale plant operation. They are joined by experts in AI-assisted molecular screening. In addition to the IAM-ET, the Institute of Fluid Mechanics, the Institute of Catalysis Research and Technology, the Institute for Micro Process Engineering, the Institute of Organic Chemistry, and the Institute of Biological and Chemical Systems are involved also.

The scientific leadership of ETOS is in the hands of Professor Siegfried Waldvogel at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). There, research focuses on the methods and reaction pathways in organic electrosynthesis, but also on electrolyzers with small electrode spacings, which are intended to enable further increase in the energy efficiency of the cells.

About the ETOS Future Cluster

The future cluster "Electrification of Technical Organic Syntheses" (ETOS) of JGU and KIT is one of seven winners in the "Clusters4Future" competition of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Also involved in ETOS are TU Kaiserslautern, TU Darmstadt, Fraunhofer Institute for Microengineering and Microsystems, and 15 industrial partners, including BASF, Boehringer Ingelheim, Merck, Bayer, and Evonik. For the first funding period from 2023 to 2025, ETOS will receive funding of approximately 15 million euros. Industry will contribute an additional approximately five million euros. Subsequently, such funding can be applied for twice more, each time for three additional years, so that ETOS could receive funding of up to 45 million euros for a total of more than nine years.

Read more: https://etos.uni-mainz.de/ 

Being “The Research University in the Helmholtz Association”, KIT creates and imparts knowledge for the society and the environment. It is the objective to make significant contributions to the global challenges in the fields of energy, mobility, and information. For this, about 9,800 employees cooperate in a broad range of disciplines in natural sciences, engineering sciences, economics, and the humanities and social sciences. KIT prepares its 22,300 students for responsible tasks in society, industry, and science by offering research-based study programs. Innovation efforts at KIT build a bridge between important scientific findings and their application for the benefit of society, economic prosperity, and the preservation of our natural basis of life. KIT is one of the German universities of excellence.

mle, 06.10.2022
Contact:


Monika Landgraf
Chief Communication Officer
Head of Corporate Communications
Chief Press Officer
Phone: +49 721 608-41150
Fax: +49 721 608-43658
presse does-not-exist.kit edu

Contact for this press release:

Margarete Lehné
Press Officer
Phone: +49 721 608-41157
Fax: +49 721 608-41157
margarete lehne does-not-exist.kit edu
The photo in the best quality available to us may be requested by
presse does-not-exist.kit edu or phone: +49 721 608-41105.