 Welcome to this webinar on future directions of sustainability and chemical manufacturing. My name is Jessica Wolfman, and I am a research associate with the Chemical Sciences Roundtable at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The Roundtable provides a neutral forum to advance the understanding of issues important to the chemical sciences and engineering and promotes the exchange of information among government, industry, and academic sectors. This year, we are continuing our series of webinars on emerging topics. We launched our series of webinars last year, and all of the presentations and recordings from 2020 and 2021 are available on the CSR website. Today, we will discuss incorporating sustainable practices into the many areas of chemical manufacturing as sustainability becomes more valuable to consumers and resources become more limited. The format will consist of three presentations. There will be time for one or two clarifying questions after each presentation, but all other questions will be addressed in our discussion time after the presentations. Dr. Timothy Patton will be our moderator for this webinar. He is a member of the Chemical Sciences Roundtable and the Deputy Division Director for the Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems Division of the National Science Foundation, Directorate for Engineering. He will be asking the questions on behalf of the audience. If we can advance the slide, please. Thank you. One more. Thank you very much. Questions can be submitted via the Q&A button on Zoom, located in the bottom control panel. The chat feature has been disabled on Zoom for audience members. For those tuning in via live stream on the CSR website, please submit questions by email to csr at nas.edu or through the chat box on the live stream screen. With that, I would like to introduce our first speaker, Dr. Ed Ryder. Dr. Ryder is the Director of the Industrial Program at the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, where he develops and leads the strategic vision for the industrial sector, shapes the research and policy agenda, and convenes stakeholders to accelerate energy efficiency. Dr. Ryder. Thanks, Jessica. And I'd like to thank the National Academies for this opportunity to discuss decarbonization with you. This is a topic that has got a lot of buzz in the industry at this point. And I hope to provide an introduction to this topic. Next slide, please. So I'll cover four areas. Give you a quick snapshot of the energy use of greenhouse gas emissions in the US for the industrial sector. Talk about decarbonization strategies and pillars. I'll highlight several roadmaps that provide guidance for this transformation on the path to zero net carbon that also talk about pursuing opportunities, actions that are being taken in this space and the commercial sector as well as some of the areas that are earlier. Next slide. So if we look at the current emissions across the industry, you can see that the industrial sector accounts for about 28% of emissions. In the US, a further breakdown shows that the industrial sectors of refining chemicals, iron, steel, food, and cement account for the largest portion of the CO2 emissions from the industrial sector. Next slide. If you can go back one. Yes, thank you. You can also see where that energy is used. In particular, that energy, a large portion of it is used for process heating. Machine drives probably second place, followed by cooling, other processes, etc. So process heat is a key opportunity for reducing CO2 emissions and energy use, and I'll talk about that in just a few minutes. But first, next slide. Let's talk about several different strategies. The first one, next click, is to look at ways to decarbonize the inputs, power, feedstocks, materials. Some of this can be switching to lower carbon sources. Some of it can be avoiding. Some of the usage of materials were not necessarily needed. Next click. You can see within the chemical fence line itself, there's opportunities here to reduce process heat, make every unit of energy count, introduce new processes that are low carbon. I'll talk about those some briefly. And the next click, you can see it's also important to think about decarbonizing supply chains. For a number of companies have seen the largest portion of their CO2 footprint, particularly Scope 3, so-called emissions, is along the supply chains. The next click, you'll see that it's important. In fact, it's vital to increase the demand for low carbon products. There's a little called embodied carbon. If the demand is increased for this, that kind of market pull allows industrial companies to help justify the investments that are being made and to help improve the efficiency throughout the supply chain for delivery of those lower carbon products. Next slide. So let me talk about four main strategies, some of which can be used within the chemical fence line itself and in some cases outside the fence line. The first is energy efficiency. Energy efficiency is the first primary fuel, if you will, that needs to be considered in this case. Because not only does it have energy benefits, but there are also a multitude of non-energy benefits, which I'll mention shortly. It's also a pathway that industry is very familiar with, especially heavy industry, which means it has to be cost-effective on energy. The second, I'll note, is energy substitution, changing out hydrocarbon sources, for example, from electrification, electricity where the electricity comes from an increasingly green grid. Third, low carbon fuels and feedstocks. Wind and solar can be used, for example, to generate hydrogen. And that hydrogen can be used not only for process heat, but it can also be used as a precursor in many chemical processes. But finally, after aggressively pursuing those first three pillars, there may be some CO2 left over. And that's where mitigation option comes in, such as carbon capture, utilization and storage, direct air capture, and others. Next slide. There have been a number of roadmaps in this area that look at ways to reduce the energy in the greenhouse gas footprint of chemical enterprises. I'll highlight three here, but note that there's many others that are out there. Back in 2013, a roadmap from the International Council of Chemical Associations International Energy Agency in DECMA looked at routes to improve chemical processes and reduce energy in greenhouse gases. The key findings included that those chemical processes, mainly catalytic, could reduce CO2 emissions by over a billion tons a year and reduce over 12.3 quads, quadrillion BTUs of energy, by reducing the emissions from those chemical processes. Next, I'll highlight a roadmap from National Labs plus E3, looked at decarbonization pathways across the US. And there's a series of roadmaps in this space that this group had done that are very well done. Finally, I'll note a roadmap recently produced from the National Academies. It came out in 2021, that looks at the accelerating the transition for the US energy sector. But it also talks about how that transition and energy can benefit sectors such as the industrial space. And it also includes diversity, equity and inclusion aspects and other social parts of the transformation that's needed. Next slide. A roadmap that's in flight at this point, I should say in review is one from the Department of Energy, looking at RD&D opportunities that are needed for this transformation. A couple of key slides I'll highlight, this one shows that the path to a net zero in 2050 with these four different pillars can show that you could see in 2030, energy efficiency, the light green here can have a market impact because it can be the first out of the gate, it has relatively low capital costs. I get a number of energy and non-energy benefits. Second, you can see kind of the light tan color which is electrification and low carbon fuels can have an early start, but certainly its impact can grow as additional infrastructure, such as the greening of the grid can help to have additional impact. In this case, electrification and low carbon fuels are combined because of the fact that they are closely connected. Finally, I'll note that carbon capture utilization and storage and other mitigation options can have a substantial impact by 2050. I'll also note that you can see by 2050, there's still some of the blue bar left that even if you aggressively pursue those early options and carbon capture utilization and storage, it's likely there's gonna be some CO2 emissions left. The reason why is that number of sources in the chemical industry are dilute, dispersed and there's thousands of them in chemical facilities. It's really gonna be super difficult and expensive to capture all those. Hence, netting options such as the use with forestry, for example, or direct air capture or others may need to come in at the end to mitigate the CO2 emissions that are remaining. Next slide. I talked about process heat earlier. Let me note that that is one of the prime opportunities in this space. Some 60% of the greenhouse gases are associated with heating, another 3% are with cooling in the chemical enterprise. And if you look at the breakdown by temperature, degrees C here, you can see that for the chemical industry at the light blue and the darker blue, temperatures below 150 degrees C dominate. That temperature range is amenable to electrification and other relatively straightforward options at this point. The number of electric technologies are available, such as industrial heat pumps, electric boilers, infrared microwaves, the list goes on. And that's an area where adoption needs to be accelerated in the chemical enterprise as well as demonstration as some of the emerging technologies in that space. Next slide. A key slide from the DOE roadmap that's in flight at this point is this one, looking at the landscape of decarbonization options. There's a lot on this slide. Let me break it down for you. The four pillars are on the outside, energy efficiency, electrification, low carbon fuels and CCUS. And you can see that in the bands that a number of investments are noted here. This isn't exhaustive, but these are illustrative examples of where investments are needed in the next five years, the next 10 years, all the way across to the next 30 years. And the key points are that a number of investments are needed in parallel for the chemical industry to effectively reduce its energy and greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Secondly, I'll note that the kind of horizontal lights from upper left to lower right that are marking the time points, five, 10 year time points, suggests that there are also cross cutting opportunities in this space. The process heat is one, separations is another across this space. So it's important that we consider not only the opportunities within the bands where investments are needed, but also the cross cutting opportunities. Next slide, please. So there are barriers, of course, in this space. There are a number of barriers, in fact, I've listed just five of them in this case, but they're big ones. There are also opportunities. Next click, there are commercial opportunities. There's opportunities for innovative processes at this point, process improvements in the chemical space. And this is an area where not only at universities and industries, but national labs need to work together to aggressively pursue these opportunities. Next slide. I noted earlier, in addition to energy benefits, there's non-energy benefits, a selection of which are shown on this slide. Some of these I'll just point out is that if you improve efficiency, you also can improve yield. You also can decrease maintenance cost. In several cases, you can improve workforce safety. And oftentimes these non-energy benefits are key to justification of implementing these lower carbon processes and technologies. They're gonna be more expensive out of the gate. And so these justifications for the non-energy benefits are super important. Next slide. So this is also a prime opportunity for green chemistry and engineering to have a significant impact. This area has been developed over the last several years. Let me just highlight a couple of things that are going on in the commercial space. Ethylene, one of the biggest commodity products in this space. There's moves for benign by design improvements here. Electronic Cracker, for example, is being discussed and moved by several different companies. Folks are looking at electrochemical reduction, CO2. And of course, companies have worked on things such as sugar cane routes to the ethylene for years. And that's a commercial process. For as renewable feedstocks, groups such as CF Industries and YARA are working on demonstration projects for green hydrogen. Hydrogen accounts for some 50% of the energy spent in ammonia production. So if one can come up with solar or wind routes to produce the electricity for that hydrogen, that's a definite route to reduce the feedstock footprint. CO2 burden. Waste, companies such as Lanzatec are looking at ways of producing jet fuel from carbon monoxide that waste gas through fermentation that can produce ethanol and then produce a jet fuel. And companies such as Shell and Suncor and Matsui are backing that project. Catalyst efficiency. North Carolina State has come up with a process to greener route to styrene. Instead of a 50% yield can get upwards of 90% yield. It's also lower temperature. It's got 82% less energy spent. It can have 79% less CO2. Finally, let me talk about some examples for atom economy and circular economy. Groups are pursuing CO2 into materials for example, solidia and carbon-free are working in the cement space. Routes to reduce the CO2 that evolves from cement, particularly important because of 60% of the CO2 emissions from cement are associated with chemistry. There's also work in the space relative to membranes and enzymes and others. So tremendous opportunity here for green chemistry and engineering. And we'll hear some more of that from Jeff shortly. Next slide. So let me wrap up here, noting that roadmaps describe the opportunity in high level pathways to pursue. But there's a lot of opportunity in this space to figure out how to get past barriers. This is white space for innovation. Prime opportunity where the chemical industry has shown its skills in the past. But next click, you'll see that, go ahead to the next one. Although we can see what's right in front of us and the barriers and the challenges, our crystal ball is a lot fuzzier the further out we lock. And so we need an agile, flexible approach across the next 30 years. And I'll note that it's certainly time to pursue transformative change in the space. Next click. There's some references here that I'll mention. You can see and next click. At this point, I'll look forward to any conversation, any questions that come up and look forward to the talk to the other presenters. All right, thank you, Ed. So we have some time for a few clarifying questions. Remind you again that you can type your questions into the chat below in Zoom or you can email the NAS email address. Okay, so we have a question from Laura Gaugliardi. Do you think it's more of an engineering science problem or a policy problem? Both. I would say the policy is a challenge. There's a number of challenges here. If we had a carbon tax in the US, that would help to spur things. But as you can see from Europe, Japan and elsewhere, Canada that even with the policy in place and the supportive policy, there's a lot of transformative technology innovation that's needed as well in this space. So I would say both. Okay, and Ed, you mentioned in one of your earlier slides that one of the pieces to moving towards the more sustainable chemical industry is to increase the market pull for low carbon products. Could you talk a little bit more about what's going on in that space? Yeah, that's a good question, Tim. There are several initiatives in that space. Let me talk about policy first. So in states such as California, Wisconsin, Minnesota and others, there's this session about a process called by claim. The idea is that it's the largest purchaser of goods in the US preferentially specified low carbon products that would increase market pull. Of course, the largest purchaser is the government, right? So that has been approved in California. It's under discussion in those other states. Key to that process is having what I'll call the knowledge infrastructure that will allow people to understand what is lower carbon. Environmental product declarations or EPDs are part of that. In the first products described there are construction products such as cement, for example, and steel. And even for those relatively simple products, we've seen a number of challenges in understanding the EPDs. So there's dozens of products in that space, but in the chemical sector, there's over 70,000 products, chemical products made in the US. So having an EPD for every one of those products be super difficult. So I think what's needed at this point is the development of that type of knowledge infrastructure so that we know what's clean, LCA is going to be really important in that space and to have shared databases that people have really high level of confidence in that so far. And the primary database in that regard is a global database, which is not specific enough in some cases to be used for US products. Great. And we have another question from Jeevan Nakum. The question is, is it possible to make carbon neutral plastics or indefinitely recyclable polymers? Yeah, that's gonna be a good question for Jeff. But my answer to that is yes, but the proof is in the technology demonstrations which are still I think in the early stage. But one of the things you're seeing in the chemical space that's a dramatic transition is the look at chemical recycling. 10, 15 years ago when I was involved in the space was all mechanical recycling. And now there's a lot of resurgence in looking at chemical recycling and doing that in ways that are lowest impact. So yeah, good question. I think there's lots of opportunity in that space and Jeff will probably have some more comments. All right. And a question from Bob Moleska. Aside from CO2 capture and reuse, what are other needs to create a circular economy around energy? I think part of that, good question, Rob. Part of it is looking at taking waste from stacks. So Lawns Attack and other companies have been working on that part of things. I think improved ability to recycle. One of the biggest challenges in the recycling space is the purity of the supply and the costs associated with cleaning up the supply, such as plastics, but you see that in areas such as in steel. A number of the processes such as EAF processes in steel are principally based on having the ability to recycle those materials. So I think the opportunity is really there in that space and for the chemical industry, it's a big opportunity area that I think is just starting to be tapped. Okay. There are a bunch more questions and I think we're gonna have to reserve those for the discussion after our third seminar speakers and we'll move on to our next speaker. So thank you, Ed, for your presentation. Our next speaker is Dr. Jeffrey Coates. Dr. Coates is the Tisch University Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell University. The broader impacts of his research include benign polymers and chemical synthesis. The utilization of renewable resources and materials and safe and economical energy storage and conversion. Jeff, take it away. Great. Can you hear me, Tim? Yes, I can. Okay. I'm on the road and I just got a thing that said my internet's unstable. So I don't know, let me know if I cut out. So thanks for the invitation to be here today and thanks for the leading questions. I'm the polymer person for this meeting and today I'll be telling you about some of the projects that my group and other groups around the world are looking at to improve the sustainability of plastics. So I probably don't have to impress upon you the importance of plastics. There's so many applications that these materials can do. You know, especially in the pandemic, safety materials, making our cars lightweight and more fuel efficient, basically protecting our food, transporting our water, but these all come with a price. And if you just look at the use of plastics, I think everybody would agree it's spectacular. The problem is we make a lot of plastic, 300 million tons every year of plastic are made annually. The way they're made, as Ed already mentioned, these are relatively carbon expensive processes. So from capturing either fuel or natural gas, doing refinery transformations of it, polymerizing it to make your average polymer, the carbon footprint is about three pounds of CO2 per pound of plastic. Okay, so we clearly need to improve on that. If we take transportation and energy and decarbonize it, the chemical industry is gonna be one of the big sources of CO2 that we're gonna have to work on. Okay, so I've already mentioned, I think we all agree plastics are great when we're using but then there's this other end where when we're done with them, worldwide about 40% end up in landfills, that's not sustainable for the long haul, about a third end up in the ocean, in soil and in air. Obviously we need to fix that. Some of these are incinerated, you least get some energy from them, but then it makes CO2, that only about 14% are collected for recycling and I'll talk a little bit more about that. Not all of these materials that are collected for recycling are actually recycled. So we wanna keep the good stuff and get rid of how they're made, the carbon footprint of these materials and also worry about kind of the end of life of these polymers. Okay, I give a general talk and I probably more scientist on so this maybe isn't so relevant but I think if I asked a lot of people, you would look at this and go, I think that's a famous painting by Seraf but if you actually blow this up and look in, this is not the original painting, it's kind of an art representation of this painting made with bottle caps and this particular painting is representative of about 400,000 bottle caps. That's about the number of plastic bottles we use every minute in the United States. So we clearly are making a lot of these plastics and our mission is to try to figure out how to make them better and get rid of them at the end of use. So today I'm gonna talk about some of the ways that my group is attacking this problem. I thought I would start out with kind of an overview of what we're trying to do. So if you could go back in time and try to change the way we make and use plastics, there would be a lot of interest and there already is a lot of interest in using renewable feedstocks to make these plastics, not fossil fuels. We'd like to try to time the lifetime of the polymer that we're using with its application. So if we're gonna use a plastic spoon for 15 minutes, do we really wanna make it out of a material that if it gets into the ocean, it would float around for 100 years, probably not. So try to match the lifetime of the material and the environment with its use time. We'd like to limit the energy and raw material consumption. I've already talked about that, Ed talked about that. Now, if you're gonna change the polymers that we make, we can't make polymers that have poor properties. Consumers are used to these great materials and I've got a bottle here on my desk in my room. It's a guy drop this from six feet up, it's not gonna break. We've gotta make materials that are as good as what's out there. We also have to consider cost. It's not a scientific constraint, but it is an economic one and we can't make materials that are a lot more expensive than what's out there. You could argue that if you want people to adopt these materials, they actually have to be cheaper to get the interest of the end users to use these new materials. So I've drawn this very optimistically, like there is some magic intersection of these five areas. We're pretty far away from achieving that. So I'm gonna go through and tell you some of the things that are being done to try to address the sustainability of plastics. Okay, so first of all, can we flip the script instead of taking fossil fuels as our building block, making a good amount of carbon dioxide and making materials that if they get into the environment, they'll be there for a long period. Can we flip the script? Can we actually use carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide, which you can get through the reduction of carbon dioxide? Can we use biomass, readily available biomass, ideally non food source biomass? Can we make these polymers? And then can we, at the end of life, can we have materials that are ocean and soil degradable? Even better than that, Y feed bacteria, wouldn't it be better if we can have a chemical recycling where we have an object when it's used up, we can then do energy efficient chemical processes to break it back down to the monomer. The monomer could then ideally be purified and brand new pristine polymer. So this would make polymers, maybe a little more like the aluminum can, right? The aluminum atoms can be used infinitely. Plastics, we can't just infinitely recycle the base plastic because issues with purification, issues with changing molecular weights and compositions. Okay, so I'm gonna give you some concrete things that at least that my lab has been doing. The first thing is we've done a lot of work to look at carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide as building blocks for making polymers. I'd like to give a shout out to the NSF for longtime support of our work on carbon dioxide in the Department of Energy for its longtime support of our work on using carbon monoxide. To this group, I probably don't have to impress why we'd wanna use these materials. But one of the things I would like to mention is that we got into this from a basic science standpoint. These are hard molecules to do reactions with and we thought even if we could make things on any scale, it would be a kind of a scientific challenge. So we've done a lot of work for the chemists. These are some of the molecules that we've been working on. These are very unreactive carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide molecules. And so we have to use molecules that bring energy to the table, molecules such as the epoxide. And we've worked on making these polycarbonates and polyesters. I'm gonna show you some of the real world scale up of these materials really briefly, just to show that these started out as academic curiosities but they're being translated ideally into materials that'll be on the marketplace in the near future. So the first molecule that we made was this polycarbonate. For those of you who are chemists, this is the catalyst, kind of the magic fufu dust that makes this thing work. We started out as making these polymers because these have been known to use for high barrier films, for lost foam casting to make metal engines and things like that, very energy efficient electronics. These are relatively small scale applications. So bigger scale is can liner materials for beverage cans, polyurethane insulation and things. And to do that, we needed a low molecular weight polycarbonate. And so we spent a lot of time developing a catalyst that would do that. I'm gonna cut to kind of where we left this project and a company called Novermer, of which I'm a co-founder, started to scale these up four to few years ago announced that they're gonna try to move over to the foams in their automobiles to use this CO2 based polymer. It was about 30 pounds of foam in a typical vehicle. And just shifting in that one small application will reduce fossil fuel use by about 600 million pounds per year. Novermer sold that technology to Aramco. Aramco performance materials is in the process of scaling it up. So hopefully that'll soon come to the marketplace. Another polymer that came out of my lab also transitioned over to Novermer. More recently, Danimer Scientific has purchased this technology is to take ethylene. And ethylene can be made from shale gas, could be made from ethanol that you could get, for example, from sugarcane or corn. That thing can be oxidized with oxygen to make ethylene oxide. This is currently the way they make this on a huge industrial scale. We then take with our catalyst, we combine it with carbon monoxide and we make this molecule called perpialactone. Perpialactone could be polymerized to give a, it's a new the world polymer, but it has some pretty interesting properties. It has really good mechanical properties, which of course is kind of the first thing you'd want. It's got a low carbon footprint. It's got really good gas barrier properties for food application. It's compostable, it's ocean degradable. It's also chemically recyclable. You can pyrolyze it to make acrylic acid. Okay, so continuous pilot plant. This is the polymer. This was an announcement that Novermer made back in March before it was transitioned to Danimer. And they've announced that they're gonna be making this 80,000 ton commercial facility by next year, which is pretty aggressive, but they're working really hard to do that. Okay, a brief interlude on plastic materials that are used for recycling, very small amount of the plastics that we use and plastic packaging is actually recycled. The real number is about 2%. 14 is collected, their process losses, some downgrading of the application to plastic two by fours, things like that that are not the original application of the material. So really only about 2% of packaging materials undergo what we call closed-loop recycling. And we'd like to make that better. One of the problems with recycling is not all plastics are the same and you can't just take all plastics and melt them down and make something new out of it. A lot of plastic packaging is high-density polyethylene or polypropylene. Some things like a pill bottle, they're made out of polyethylene and polypropylene. The tide bottle is a good example of that as well. And so if you try to recycle a high-purity polyethylene stream, it's always gonna have some polypropylene in it, unless you really carefully separate the materials and that's too cost prohibitive. So here is a movie. If you took a 70, 30 mixture of polyethylene and polypropylene, it looks like a nice plastic, but if you simply give it a tug, it rips more like a piece of paper than a nice piece of plastic. Scientifically, we know why that is. These polymers are different. They macrophase separate, making the polymer really, really brittle. So my lab decided that we might be able to make some compatibilizers by making blockhole polyethylene and polypropylene. Again, a big shout out to the National Science Foundation who has been a long-time thunder of our work on making sustainable plastics. This is through the Center of Sustainable Polymers at the University of Minnesota. And we had a project. Again, this was basic science. Can we make these polymers? Can we make blockhole polymers of basically the world's number one and number two polymers? People hadn't done that before, at least to make multi-blockhole polymers and to be able to efficiently tailor the architecture. We found from this basic science, then we can make materials and then try to look at how architecture can impact performance. So this is a paper we published in 2017. I've already showed you what happens if you don't efficiently separate waste polyolefins into really clean polyethylene or polypropylene streams. Now I'm gonna show what happens if you add in just 1% of our tetra blockhole polymer. So this is a material here. Looks kind of like that other material that was really brittle. If you try to rip that material, it's really, really tough. It seems like it's a totally different material. The only difference is we've added this tetra blockhole polymer. It compatibilizes the two different polymers. So it brings them together at the interface and provides a molecular stitch to basically tie it together. So here's some mechanical properties of these materials, stress strain properties of the alloys of 7030 with our multi-block additive. Really, it's kind of like the stainless steel of the polymer world. We've made now an alloy that we think is gonna have properties that are at least as good, if not maybe even better than polyethylene or polypropylene. This technology is being commercialized by a startup called InterMix Performance Materials. Okay, I think I've only got a couple of minutes left. So I wanted to end up with a paper that we just published. And this idea goes back to what I mentioned at the beginning. I think or a real dream and this, thanks to, I think Givon that asked a question about chemical recycling, can you make a polymer that has good properties and use it for whatever application and then collect it at the end of use? And of course, there could be some applications where you just melt it down and make a new object out of it. But if I'm gonna eat my yogurt out of a container that might've been somebody's, I don't know, motor oil bottle or got, who knows what, I'm gonna worry about that. I really like to know that it's brand new polymer. And so this idea of chemical recycling back to the monomer and where you take that monomer then re polymerize it completes this cycle. And so, they're doing that with a polyolefin industry. I think the question will remain, can you do that in an economically energy efficient process? A lot of heat and a lot of energy goes into breaking down these polymers like polyethylene and polypropylene. So we designed a new polymer and this is a polymer. It's actually been known, DuPont published patents on this back in the 1940s. It's a polyacetal. They couldn't make high molecular weight. And basically before we made high molecular weight of this polyacetal properties are really brittle. But we got a new catalyst. This is work supported by the Department of Energy to polymerize this DXL monomer which can be made from basically from wood, from methanol, from aldehyde and ethylene glycol which could become from sugar. And we have a catalyst system that allows us to make really high molecular weight polymer. What's great is with a strong acid catalyst which can be a solid acid which you recover. Dow Ex-Resin for example, we can heat that up to just a little bit over 150 degrees and it officially de polymerizes. It also cleanly de polymerizes in the presence of other polymers. So you might in the recycle stream have other plastics present. So this is a movie. We've got all these different plastics in here and we have our polyacetal polymer. We're heating this to 150 degrees. You can maybe see the dial here. This is in minutes, we're speeding this up. But over here, we're really efficiently collecting in this particular case we got 96% de polymerization back to the Diox-Lane monomer. In all other cases, you can heat this polymer. It's totally thermally stable up to over 250 degrees Celsius but only in the presence of a really strong acid catalyst will it de polymerize. So I think my time's up. I want to quickly analyze some of the students that have done this work. This is our first kind of group picture in about two years, especially like to, I think I've already mentioned the Natural Science Foundation and the Department of Energy who has been a long time thunder of the basic research we do in these areas and also in some of the startups that are commercializing these polymers. So I'll stop there and answer your questions. All right, Jeff, thank you very much for that seminar. I would remind the attendees that they can ask questions in the chat at the bottom of the Zoom or by emailing the question to cesr at nas.edu and that will be entered into the chat as a question as well. So we have a couple of questions in the Q&A, one for Mark Jones. There are a number of commercial compatibilizers for polyethylene and polypropylene that have been and are on the market by several producers, including block of polymer offerings. How are these deficient and what is the remaining commercial need? Yeah, so we've talked to two dozen recyclers in the polyolefin area. Nobody can afford the current materials that are out there. There are a number of polymers that are made, one is a material made by Dow, one's made by Exxon. You need to put about anywhere between eight or 10 or even more percent of these materials in to get good compatibilization. If the compatibilizer costs $2 a pound, you have to put 20 cents of a compatibilizer in to remediate a pound of a mixed plastic. Recyclers can't afford that. Right now, they can afford about five cents a pound. And so you need a much more potent compatibilizer if you're gonna make these economically viable. That's not to say you can't compatibilize, make alloys that maybe have better properties and use them in high value application, but in the recycling industry, and I've asked a number of the companies that make these for any application where they actually use it in post-consumer waste and kind of low value applications. And I haven't been able to find one. So the real problem is the potency of what's on the market. Great, I see that we're coming close to 11.45. There are a few more questions in the Q&A and I think we're just gonna have to save those for the discussion afterwards, right? So thank you again, Jeff, for your seminar. And our third speaker is Dr. Peter Levi. Dr. Levi leads the sectoral analysis of industry within the Energy Technology Policy Division of the International Energy Agency. His work is focused on the technologies and policies that can be employed to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions from hard to debate sectors within industry, as well as cross-cutting themes such as energy, security, hydrogen, carbon capture and electrification. And Peter, I'll hand it off to you. Thank you very much, Tim and Jessica and everyone at the National Academy for inviting me to speak and present our work. Just to check it, you can hear me okay. I'm assuming because no one's stopped me that you can. And I'm gonna provide an overview of a publication that we released in May of this year called Net Zero by 2050. And this is a roadmap for the global energy sector. The first of its kind that the IEA released and it paints a picture for, well, it outlines a possible pathway to net zero emissions from the whole energy system by 2050 as the title suggests. This was the work of 40 or 50 peoples. I'm not gonna be able to totally do it justice in 15 or 20 minutes, but I thought I'd start by providing a high level overview of the overall analysis, so the energy system level and then move to focus on the industry sector transition. When we talk about industry at the IEA, we're talking about lots of the topics that we've heard already. The chemical industry, but also I was asked to provide a bit of an insight into other areas of the industry sector, so non-metallic minerals and of which the cement is particularly important and which cement is particularly important and the iron steel industry among several other sectors. So I'll tailor the presentation towards the industry sector after an overview. So I'm just seeing if I can control the slides. That's working, that's great. So by way of introduction to the overall energy system level analysis, this was conceived in the context of many government and company announcements to reach net zero emissions by the year 2050. Some countries are aimed to achieve this target earlier, some later, but 2050 is increasingly the target year around which climate ambition is measured for national and company targets. Net zero pledges of this type, so net zero by 2050 or some other year, today cover around 70% of global GDP and CO2 emissions. However, a quarter of announced net zero pledges are fixed in domestic legislation and few are still underpinned by specific measures or policies to deliver them in full and on time. One of the key components of our scenario analysis that we did for the net zero by 2050 report and in our scenario, which is called the net zero emissions by 2050 or just NZE scenario, is a series of detailed milestones, more than 400 actually in total in the full analysis, which is available online, which are designed to help governments see the scale of the challenge that's ahead of us and provide some tangible examples of the scale of deployment required for specific technologies and sectors in the energy system. I'll just provide a few examples here and you'll see some appear on the slide and your capacity additions of solar PV and wind have quadrupled in the last decade. They need to quadruple again over the next decade in the NZE. They're more than 1000 gigawatts in 2030. This says PV and wind combined and they provide around 40% of electricity generation again by 2030 up from around 9% today. Electric car sales must increase 18-fold up from around 5% of sales today. When I say today, 2020 was the base year for this analysis to about 60% of total sales by 2030. And by 2035, there are no new sales of internal combustion cars globally in this scenario. Boosting energy efficiency, as was mentioned by Ed in the context of the chemical industry is absolutely key in the context of the broader energy system analysis here. This is also important for increasing energy security even with the rapid growth in low emissions power generation and the most secure form of energy and energy security is a key area that the IA works on, the key aspect about mandate and energy that's not used is really the kind of the most secure form of energy that you can get. On the efficiency front, around 20% of existing buildings globally need to be retrofitted to be zero carbon ready by 2030 compared to less than 1% of the building stock today. And overall, the energy intensity of the global economy must fall by around 4% per year in this scenario about three times the average rate achieved over the last two decades. So this is just a snapshot of the analysis but you can read about the full energy system results on the online publication which is available for free on our website. Some of the milestones I've mentioned there for 2030 are things where there's already encouraging progress we can see today and the technologies themselves can continue being deployed at scale. The remaining challenge is for these technologies that are kind of ready is getting the policy framework right and achieving further incremental gains in performance and driving down costs and so on. Technologies that are available in the marketplace today provide nearly all of the emissions reductions to 2030 in the NZE. However, reaching net zero emissions by 2050 will require much more than just deploying these technologies that we have available at our disposal today that are market ready critically. And we will need innovative technologies to tackle what we refer to as the hard to abate emissions within the energy system and the hard to abate sectors if you like which we categorize or designate as the long distance transport modes and the heavy industry sectors. These technologies that are not kind of market ready today comprise particularly technologies that involve the application of CCUS also CCUS carbon capture utilization and storage technologies, hydrogen and some sustainable bioenergy and direct electrification technologies. And there are a number of examples that are provided here of those technologies where innovation still needs to take place and we utilize all of the technologies listed on this slide in our analysis. And so, yeah, these innovation milestones are something that we lay out in quite a lot of detail for each of these sectors and technologies in the roadmap where really a lot of progress needs to take place for them to be deployed at scale. And so that was an overview of some of the key milestones and considerations around innovative technologies in the broader energy system analysis and now I'd like to focus on the industry sector specifically. So industry sector emissions, cement, steel, chemicals and several other industry sectors besides those heavy industry sectors cannot be neglected nor entirely offset by carbon removal technologies in other sectors and that's because they are large of course. And industry emissions amounted to around eight and a half gigatons in 2020 or around a quarter of total energy sector emissions. Advanced economies account for around a fifth of these today whereas the emerging market and developing economies account for the remaining 80% for fifths. Three heavy industry sectors which I've mentioned already steel, chemicals and cement account for 70% of the emissions from the industry sector and are the key components of this hard to abate designation that I mentioned earlier. Heavy industry sectors use large quantities of fossil fuels for three key purposes. So the first among those is to generate high temperature heat. The second is for uses feedstock or raw material inputs particularly relevant to the chemical sector. And then lastly as chemical reduction agents particularly relevant to the iron and steel sector where coal or in the form of coke where once transformed coke is used as a carbon-based reduction agent to produce steel or iron initially and then steel from iron ore. And the problem is that fossil fuels provide these energy services in heavy industry sectors so well and cheaply today and directly substituting these with electricity is either expensive or impractical with the technologies that we have in many instances today. And there's one of the key technical feature of the heavy industry sectors that contributes to this hard to abate designation that we give them. And that's the to do with the existing assets that these industries comprise today. These tend to be emissions intensive and long lived as very emissions intensive and capital intensive and long lived. And I'm talking here about assets in the heavy industry sectors so cement kilns, steam crackers, ammonia and methanol production facilities. But as an illustrative example here I'm showing the iron making equipment in the iron and steel sector. So this is DRI and blast furnaces. Here we can see the age profile and geographical distribution of these two types of furnaces in the iron and steel sector. And relative to a typical lifetime of around 30 to 40 years for these pieces of equipment we estimate that the average age is around 10 to 15 years old on average for heavy industry assets across the board so including cement kilns and equipment for producing primary chemicals in the chemical sector. And as I mentioned, there's a huge concentration of heavy industry capacity in the emerging market and developing economies and particularly in China which accounts for around 60% of iron making capacity shown here. It's a similar picture for cement with respect to China. Much of the country's enormous fleets of steel and cement plants have been installed in the last two decades and as a result around 85 to 90% of the steel and cement sector assets are less than 20 years old in China. More than half the cement plants are less than 10 years old. Without any alteration to the mode of operation of these assets, just the existing stock of assets in heavy industry sectors could lead to around 150 gigatons of CO2 emissions if operated to the end of their typical lifetimes. And just to put that in context in the context of the net zero emission scenario for the whole energy system we're talking about cumulative emissions and there's lots of complicated subdivisions here where which sectors get what quantity of emissions but around about 500 gigatons of CO2 that we're working with as a sort of budget for that scenario. And so as you can see just the emissions from this assets and leaving aside any capacity additions that will no doubt be required to meet rising demand for these materials exceed the envelope of the net zero emission scenario for these specific sectors, the green line there. And this all paints quite a bleep picture in terms of the quantities of emissions that can be expected from existing industrial equipment absent any intervention. But it's not all bad news with respect to existing assets. There are several interventions and improvements that can be made to existing assets to including incremental energy efficiency improvements the blending in of low carbon fuels and in several instances the application of CCUS in a retrofit arrangement. The other thing to highlight is that the dynamics of investment cycles whereby every 20, 25 years or so a plant operator will face the decision as to whether to renew or upgrade or replace a key piece of capital intensive equipment. We can look at the investment or the cycle of time that takes place there and project forward emissions from these assets on that basis. And that's the darker shaded purple area here. If these investment cycles are strategically considered alongside the availability and development of innovative technologies the importance of which I stressed earlier in the presentation. We estimate that around 40% or around 60 gigatons of the emissions from existing heavy industry assets could be avoided as long as the innovative technologies are available in time to replace them at the end of this investment cycle. Of course, existing assets are only part of the story when it comes to achieving deep emissions reductions in heavy industries. A portfolio of mitigation options is leveraged to achieve a 95% reduction in emissions between 2020 and 2050 in the NZE in the net zero emissions by 2050 scenario. And while certain segments of material demand are expected to expand rapidly over the coming years steel and cement for renewable energy infrastructure for example, the NZE also embodies a strong push on material efficiency strategies across supply chains. These are strategies including modular and lightweight design practices yield improvements, life extensions, increased collection and recycling rates among several other strategies. These together contribute around a fifth of the emissions reductions when we show when we decompose this on a strategy basis on a mitigation measure basis they comprise around a fifth of the emissions reductions that take place to 2050 in the NZE. Incremental energy efficiency measures together with various categories of fuel shifts to electrify and otherwise integrate renewable heat into production account for a further 30% of emissions reductions in the NZE. And then around 50% of emissions reductions are achieved through the application of CCS and hydrogen technologies many of which are not commercially available in heavy industry sectors today. This innovation dimension is reflected in the right hand side or the second part of this decomposition analysis where we can see that around 60% of the emissions reductions in heavy industries in the NZE are derived from technologies that are either at demonstration or prototype phases in their development today. So if you delve a little deeper into the specific categories of innovative technologies that play an important role in each of these heavy industry sectors we can see in some important differences as well as some parallels between them. So starting with primary chemical production we can see that electrolytic hydrogen production for use as feedstock becomes a key means of decarbonizing large chunks of ammonia and to a lesser extent methanol production direct electrification of steam cracking something that also Ed mentioned the kind of initial pilots that are going on in that area also plays a role in the chemical industry but the need to retain carbon as an inherent part of the production process means that CCS technologies are needed to capture process emissions and to alleviate the need to source large quantities of biogenic or atmospheric CO2 for to replace this feedstock carbon. In primary steel production there's also a very important role for electrolytic hydrogen production primarily through its use in the hydrogen-based DRI process that's in the direct reduction of iron and also as a blending strategy in existing iron-making assets so both in glass furnaces and in DRI furnaces that we have on the system today. The innovative smelting reduction pathway this is a project or this is a technology that's at demonstration phase today this smelting reduction method of producing iron results in a relatively pure process stream of CO2 which better facilitates carbon capture and that's also a key among the kind of CCS-equipped portion of the technologies that are deployed in the iron and steel sector. And in the cement sector the heavy lifting is really done by CCS technologies and carbon capture and utilization storage technologies whether post combustion, pre-combustion or partial oxyfueling arrangements pre-combustion arrangements and hydrogen and direct electrification also play a modest role here but these innovative technologies in those specific categories do nothing to address the process emissions that result from producing clinker. So carbon capture is still needed at vast scale. In all three sectors, innovative technology these broad and innovative technology categories that are shown here in aggregate account for an excessive 90% of production on a mass basis from these sectors by 2050. So I'm going to keep it relatively short and stop there but just acknowledge upfront that I've focused entirely on the technology story and now NZ scenario and just given the limited time and the technology focus of the event today. But I'd like to underscore the evident point that the other side of the industrial decarbonization coin is policy and it's highly unlikely that the technology transition that's been outlined here will take place without a strong push from policymakers to establish the right conditions for these technologies to emerge. So yeah, I'll stop there and I look forward to taking your questions. All right, thank you, Peter. I'm looking at the time and I'm thinking that maybe we should move on to the discussion. I see a couple of questions for you, Peter and maybe that will use that to start off the discussion since a couple of these look like ones that our other speakers could chime in on as well. So just want to remind everyone that if you have questions you can submit them to the question and answer function at the bottom of your Zoom or you could send an email to CSR at NAS.edu and that will be transferred into the question and answer field as well. So if I could ask Jeff and Ed to come back on and we'll start the discussion section of this webinar and I'll start off with a question specifically for Peter at first from Bella Suburbanian. Does the IEA have any recommendations for how governmental agencies and private industries should partner to fund and deploy the innovations that are rather urgently needed to achieve substantial reductions in CO2 emissions? Thanks very much for the question. Indeed, this is an area where we provide a kind of menu of policy options and a certain degree of collaboration between policymakers and governments between them and the private sector is certainly a kind of an ingredient of that policy menu. I think that the role for governments in the areas that I've been talking about spans the whole pipeline of development for these technologies but particularly the upfront stages of technology development where you need to go from essentially concept stage design that's developed in laboratories and in testing facilities through to a kind of full scale prototype and then through to a demonstration scale plant. These initial first plants in the industry sector for demonstrating these technologies actually work and can be run in the conditions that the industry sector faces every day. Those are areas where government support is no doubt required for those plants to get off the ground. I think there's a next phase of establishing markets, differentiated markets for some of the products from these industries. So the government again can have an important role there by leveraging its large procurement, a large role in procurement for various government infrastructure and services to set up differentiated markets for products that are produced in a low emissions way. Those are just some examples, but I mean government's role in the industry sector for these technologies is directly linked to the private sector actors roles and there are a number of examples that we outline of specific examples of how that can take place. Great, Edward Jeff, do you want to add anything in? I think it's a really good question. A couple of comments I'll make is that the discussion of the industrial sector and how to reduce its emissions is a topic that has been discussed on the hill in Congress amongst senators and representatives. Some provisions got included in the bipartisan infrastructure bill, but they really just scratched the surface of what's needed. The reconciliation bill, although we have, we at Eastern Tripoli and several others have proposed a number of initiatives, just doesn't look very good for them to be incorporated at this point. So I put in the answer to the question, I'll link to some of those provisions if you can look at further. But I think a challenge in this space is that the policy makers, they just want to look at a silver bullet and they say, well, for an industry, here's a little bit of money for hydrogen or a little bit of money for CCUS and done, check the box, let's move on. But the challenge is that some estimates for the transformation in the industrial sector suggest that what's needed is upwards of four to six trillion dollars and what they're getting right now is tens of billions of dollars. So it's really a misperception, I think of what's really needed at this point. So something that's needed is certainly partnership across industries, national laboratories, agencies and others to understand how to take initiatives from the lab and to get them to commercial levels at scale. Jeff talked about some of the processes that have made it. But there's many technologies that are low carbon out there that really need to be pushed. And so a larger initiative and partnership is really needed. And some folks talked about it, industry institutes. And that's also something that's been discussed and something we've tried to push. Thank you, kind of a related question comes from kind of Maloy. So what are the key barriers to implementation of carbon capture utilization and storage? I'll start with that. And then Peter, maybe you can come back me up there. Some of the challenges is that CCUS has been around for decades and it's principally been pushed for utilities, power plants at this point relative to demonstrations. There haven't been very many demonstrations at scale within industry. And I think that needs to change. So that's one of the opportunity spaces. But the second is economics. The current penalty for CCUS is somewhere to 30 to 50% of the energy spend for production facilities. That's huge. And we already looked at the energy burden of the associated CO2 penalty. So if the ride of CCUS is 30 to 50% that really has got to be reduced. Third, all node integration. So particularly for the industrial sector where CCUS has not been deployed at scale, the integration with facilities upstream and downstream is a challenge. There's opportunities in that space though, because process heat where it's available can be used to help reactivate the amines after they have captured the CO2. So there's some options in that space with certainly a number of challenges as well. Peter, anything to add? I think you've given a very comprehensive answer there, Ed. I mean, the four areas I would highlight from the challenges of, yeah, R&D innovation, cost infrastructure and the regulatory and permitting environment. So I think, Ed has touched on one of those. I think that I would definitely emphasize the point that CCUS is really a family of technologies with very, especially on the capture side, we see very different levels of technology readiness level as a metric for measuring the current status of these technologies today across the different applications for carbon capture, direct air capture and capture of cement process emissions, capture of emissions from power plants. These are all different capture applications and different technologies, even if the transport and storage infrastructure could be the same. So I think that, yeah, those are the four main dimensions I'd highlight. I'll just note as well that the capture efficiency for CCUS is somewhere around 80 to 90%. If you try to go much further than that, the costs go up exponentially. So I think one of the challenges in this space is try to figure out what to do with the other 10 to 20% as well. There are advances in membranes, ionic liquids, moffs, metal oxygen frameworks have been used and a number of different avenues are being pursued at this point. Lots of opportunities still for innovation science. The Carbon Capture Institute has got some really good reports on CCUS, I'll steer you to as well. Great, thank you. Kind of moving back into the, back towards the research and innovation space. Are there things that you're seeing in your three areas that's coming down the pike that you think are exciting and potentially, I don't know, disruptive for a lack of a better word? That's a good one for Jeff to start on. Yeah. Yeah, we're to start. I think the area I'm most excited about is the ocean plastic issue. And I went with my family to a beach summer where there should have been no garbage just in the middle of nowhere. And I went out one morning and just thought I would pick up any little piece of plastic I found. And five minutes later, I didn't have a bag with me. I couldn't carry all the little bits of bottle caps and materials. And the bottom line is there are so many applications where a lot of the plastics that are used in certain applications end up in the environment that we have to get materials that are degradable. I'm particularly excited about the polyhydroxyalkanoates as a class. Brandon, I work in that area. We have a chemical route that I would say the bigger, more promising route for a lot of large scales by fermentation. There are companies like mango materials that are using methane to make these. Obviously, Danimer, a company that we're starting to work with makes it from oil and other, you know, make it from sugar and other things like that. So that's, you know, in terms of polymer sustainability, that's one of the areas that I'm super excited about. I guess I'll chime in next and say, I think one of the areas that's particularly interesting is companies picking up tools that are already available to reduce their energy and greenhouse gases. Companies are setting science-based targets that are aggressive and that's good. But the challenge is, how are they gonna meet some of those targets? Some companies have been snapping up power purchase agreements like their candy. That's good. It certainly helps with the renewable energy generation, but there's only so much you can do in that space. So adoption of current electric technologies, for example, is important. Folks have been looking at hydrogen and I think that's good as well. One of the challenges we've seen with hydrogen as far as its use as a chemical feedstock is if the hydrogen comes from the grid and the grid is not yet fully decarbonized, emissions can actually go up. So it's important in that case that direct use of wind and solar come along. And I think one of the exciting areas there is the use of storage to mitigate the intermittency of wind and solar. Peter, any comments? Yeah, thanks, Ed and Jeff. I think that I guess one, we're not so much in the business of picking out our favorite technologies or the picking winners here at the IA, one area that I think is where we see technologies that are comparatively lower technology readiness levels generally for heavy industry emissions reductions are those that enable direct electrification of processes where either feedstocks or high temperature heat is required. So Ed already mentioned the consortium around the electrified steam crackers providing the process heat to the steam cracker directly via electricity, ion or electrolysis in the steel sector. So avoiding even the need for the use of hydrogen in the reduction of ion or and the direct electrification of various large volume high temperature heating applications such as cement kilns. These are the areas that I personally would be following and excited about because the challenges or a lot of the kind of hard to abate characteristics of these are precisely related to the fact that these hydrogen and CCUS technologies have various challenges associated with them, whether they are the challenges that were mentioned for carbon capture early on or some of the challenges on the electricity side and the infrastructure side that Ed has alluded to there with respect to hydrogen. So where we have avenues to use electricity directly in the areas that is currently challenging to do so. Some of these barriers and challenges can be alleviated but that notwithstanding hydrogen and CCUS is going to be required. They're both technology families that are going to be required a gigantic scale in the context of a net zero emissions trajectory. So it's about alleviating rather than fully substituting in my view. But that would be a reason why I would be interested in following those developments in those areas. Great, so we have a question from Tashi Bell. Can someone elaborate on the by clean initiative? How is this different from current USDA bio preferred program or the EPA's environmental preferential purchasing? I'll take a start on that. I would say scale is the big issue and scope. So the EPA programs and the USDA programs look at a particular range of products. The by clean process suggests looking across an entire application or sector of materials. So they're looking at building materials and everything that goes into buildings, starting with cement and steel and a few other areas. Second, I'll say that it's also at an early stage at this point, California has approved it. They're trying to iron out some of the application, sorry, some of the implementation aspects of that. But this is also a national program. It could, after construction materials, move to other materials as well. So I think the other part of it is its reliance on EPD's environmental product declarations where they look at the life cycle impacts across several different categories. So carbon is of course where they're starting but folks are also talking about water, land and other impacts. So I think in addition to scale, I think the scope is the other big differentiator. I mean, I could come in and that question briefly. I think this is an example. I'm afraid I'm not familiar with the exact details of this specific policy, but I think this is an example of the family of policies that I mentioned in answer to the first question where the power of government procurement is used to drive a kind of differentiated market for a set of products that are produced in a more environmentally friendly way. And I absolutely agree with Ed's remarks there that definitions and the scoping around the kind of boundaries of environmental impacts of these products needs to be kind of manageable in the sense that it can't be in a kind of endlessly expanding and changing set of criteria because otherwise that makes the procurement process too complicated, but on the other hand it needs to be comprehensive enough so that it captures the, well, includes the products that are being developed that are actually substantially reducing emissions and drives the kind of extra premium that can be paid for those materials and to the right areas. I think in the three sectors that I was talking about in chemicals and steel and cement I think the challenges are quite different between those three when you've got a chemical industry that's producing literally hundreds of thousands of products at very, you know, at industrial scale that is a completely different order of magnitude of challenge in terms of tracking all of the environmental impacts of those products compared to say the cement industry where you have not a totally undifferentiated product there are lots of obviously grades of cement but you can, I think, more straightforwardly kind of assess the manner in which that cement was produced and what its direct emissions for print was and so on. So I think there are different challenges for different materials even within these relatively narrow kind of heavy industry boundaries that I've been talking about. Okay, next question I think I might direct this to Jeff. It's from Bala Subramanian in catalytic upcycling of plastics has a sustainability assessment been made with regard to the catalyst and cells especially where noble metal catalysts are being proposed. Yeah, Bala maybe can follow up. I assume you mean like for existing plastics like, you know, like polyolefins and, you know, I think definitely noble metal catalyst is gonna be a, you know that's gonna be one of the big sticking points. I'm part of a DOE funded EFRC called IQU based at Ames National Laboratory, Aaron Sadaw is the PI and we're working on this directly and it is a really hard problem. You know, I think not only the noble metals, you know, if you, you know we're not gonna be taking pristine polyethylene and cracking it and making ethylene again, right? There's gonna be polyethylene that might have a little bit of PVC. You're gonna heat it up. It's gonna make HCL and right, you know could be trace amounts of materials that are in our plastics totally destroy the catalyst that we're trying to to use to break it down. I think that probably the, well I guess what I'm more worried about is, you know, I'm here in a hotel room I got my plastic spoon and my breakfast with, right? This is a solid, if I've got a catalyst and I, you know, nothing happens until I melt this thing down and get this to a liquid state that can interact with, you know a homogeneous or more likely a heterogeneous catalyst that takes heat, right? And it's gonna take not just heat to melt but heat to, you know get these reactions to occur at the temperatures they need to proceed. So we've got an awful lot of basic science to do to try to figure out, you know how can we, you know, take these materials you make polyethylene it's incredibly downhill, you know exothermic process going back to ethylene is not gonna be, you know you can't defy the laws of thermodynamics. So, you know, obviously we can try to do things with catalysts and we don't have the catalyst right now that allow you to do it. So that sounded very pessimistic that, you know, I say it's a great opportunity for people that want to, you know do science to try to figure out better ways to break it down. I guess I'm more bullish. I, you know, I'm gonna go out on a limb here you guys are recording this you can play it back to me in 30 years. You know, I'd like to think in 30, 40 years you know, we still make polyethylene but it's not the number one polymer. We're gonna have to have polymers that are much more low energy come from renewables that can, you know be more readily recycled in a chemically, you know, efficient fashion and, you know, the problem is polyethylene is a great polymer, right? It's really, it's really hard to take things that are thermodynamically downhill and make them go uphill. So, so that's my, that's my view of the future. Great. Peter, anything you want to add in? Nope. I think Jeff covered that really well. Excellent. Another question from Atashi Bell and it's about what is the role of synthetic biology in decarbonizing the economy? I mean, because there was a mention in Jeff's seminar about fermentation-based companies to make monomers and things like that. Well, let me take that and I'm gonna start by saying, I'm in no way even a remote expert in this area that I will say, you know I do know a lot about the polyhydroxyalkanoates and, you know, if you use certain feed stocks like, you know, fatty acids to ferment to make PHAs, they get really hot. It's a, you know, you have a massive heat transfer issue and a cooling issue. You know, I would think PHAs that, you know come from, you know, from biological processes that can take the heat would immediately be a huge advance. Just a couple of things I'll mention is that you've seen synthetic biology being used by companies like Lanzatec to take waste gases and to convert that into ethanol. There has been literature for years on using microbes to digest plastic. I think, you know, one of the challenges there is probably the structural property relationships of what you get at the end. But I think there are opportunities in that space perhaps to determine how to most effectively prepare the polymers for recycling. There's some opportunities in that space, I think as well. Peter, any comments? I know I'm not on that one. I think we're well covered there. Okay. I don't see any further questions in the Q&A. Maybe wait a couple of seconds to see if one pops up. If not, we're just about at 12.30. So I think perhaps we could start wrapping up this webinar. So first off, I wanna thank everyone for tuning in to this webinar. I'd like to thank Dr. Ryder, Dr. Coates and Dr. Levi for taking time out to give presentations and for this wonderful discussion. I would like to remind everyone that the three presentations that you saw and the recording of this webinar will be posted up to the CSR website next week. And it says here that the URL will be on the screen. So not sure if that's posted or not, but I'm sure it would be on the NAS CSR website. If anyone has any additional questions, comments, or concerns, please email CSR at nas.edu. The CSR's next event will be a day and a half workshop on laboratory automation, excuse me, let me say that again, laboratory automation and accelerated synthesis and the date of this workshop will be November 16th and 17th. So for more information about this event and more information in general, you can subscribe for updates, which can be done on the CSR website. So once again, I'd like to thank everyone for tuning in and the speakers and I hope you have a great day and this concludes today's webinar.