Climate change is a major concern nowadays affecting society. Fossil fuel combustion plays a key role in the production of greenhouse gases, which directly impacts global warming. Recent International Energy Agency (IEA) reports have indicated that fossil fuel accounted for almost 81% of the overall energy supply in 2016. Due to the current and predicted energy demands, fossil fuels are still not replaceable by renewables due to their relatively low costs and continuous development of efficient combustion. Novel environmentally friendly systems that can simultaneously produce energy from fossil fuels and renewables are still in critical need. Nonetheless, the impact on the environment from the combustion process of fossil fuels (i.e., greenhouse gas emissions) is still a major bottleneck to develop long-term sustainable systems. Among all the greenhouse gas emissions, CO2 represents almost 75% of greenhouse gases. Thus, technologies aimed at reducing CO2 emissions are key to achieve environmental and resource sustainability while meeting the current energy requirements for anthropological activities. Accordingly, CO2 capture, utilization, and storage technologies have thus become an urgent necessity to mitigate the negative impacts of CO2 on climate change.
Our group aims to advance the technical feasibility, adoption and development of existing technologies aimed at reducing CO2 emissions from stationary sources, e.g., power plants. In particular, our group develops optimal operational strategies and comprehensive mathematical models that can predict the optimal way to operate carbon capture plants when integrated with stationary sources of CO2 emissions. Moreover, our group also explores emerging technologies that have shown potential to reduce CO2 emissions at low costs and that can be potentially adopted in the short-term by major stakeholders. Intensified systems such as Chemical Looping Combustion is of particular interest in our group. Also, our group explores new processes based on renewable sources such as biomass as a viable alternative to produce valuable chemicals or fuels and motivate the switching from fossil-fired fuels to renewables. A key aspect in our studies is the application of advanced modelling and optimization tools that enable the analysis of systems at different time and spatial scales thus allowing the development of studies that spans from the atomistic design of catalysts that can efficiently transform CO2 into valuable chemicals to the development of long-term sustainable strategies that can maintain the operation of industrial-scale CO2 capture systems near optimal conditions.