Carbon Capture and Storage: the good, the bad and the ugly
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Carbon Capture and Storage: the good, the bad and the ugly
Fri, 24/11/2017 - 14:00 to 15:00
Location:
Speaker:
Prof. Berend Smit
Affiliation:
Energy Center at EPFL
Synopsis:
In this presentation we discuss the role CO2 plays in our environment. By discussing the carbon cycle, we analyse in terms of volume and time scales the different sources of CO2 production in nature and we compare how these processes relate to anthropogenic CO2 production. We show how this analysis relates to our past, current and future climate, and the role of fossil fuels play in this.
We will argue that that there is no silver bullet in addressing climate change, and that carbon capture and storage (CCS) is for various reasons an important component of a possible solution. We will also show that the expensive part of CCS is the capture of CO2 from flue gasses, and how modern computational materials genomics can contribute in reducing the costs of a carbon capture process.
Biography:
Berend Smit received an MSc in Chemical Engineering in 1987 and an MSc in Physics both from the Technical University in Delft (the Netherlands). He received in 1990 cum laude PhD in Chemistry from Utrecht University (the Netherlands). He was a (senior) Research Physicists at Shell Research from 1988-1997, Professor of Computational Chemistry at the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands) 1997-2007. In 2004 Berend Smit was elected Director of the European Center of Atomic and Molecular Computations (CECAM) Lyon France. Since 2007 he is Professor of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry at U.C. Berkeley and Faculty Chemist at Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Since 2014 he is director of the Energy Center at EPFL.
Berend Smit's research focuses on the application and development of novel molecular simulation techniques, with emphasis on energy related applications. Together with Daan Frenkel he wrote the textbook Understanding Molecular Simulations and together with Jeff Reimer, Curt Oldenburg, and Ian Bourg the textbook Introduction to Carbon Capture and Sequestration.