 Welcome. My name is John Sutherland and I am the Phasenfeld family head of environmental and ecological engineering and I'd like to welcome everyone to this Purdue Engineering Distinguished Lecture, our speaker today and it is indeed a great pleasure and honor for me to introduce our speaker. He is a colleague and friend and that is Professor Julian Allwood. Let me tell you a little bit about Professor Allwood. He is a professor of engineering and the environment at the University of Cambridge and directs the use less group, not useless use less. His research aims to articulate a pathway to a zero emissions based on technologies that already exist at scale. A particular focus of his research is identifying opportunities for business growth compatible with real zero emissions. In 2022 this led to the founding of three companies including the world's first zero emissions process for producing Portland cement. He has many other opportunities in development. At the beginning of his career Julian spent a decade at Alcoa working on rolling process. He held an academic position then at Imperial College before moving to Cambridge. From 2009 to 2013 he explored material efficiency as a climate mitigation strategy delivering material services with less virgin material. This led to publication of a 2012 book sustainable materials with both eyes open. That book is available online. Bill Gates said that this was one of the six best books he read in 2015. Since 2019 Julian has been the director of UK fires and industry University consortium aimed at developing an industrial strategy to deliver zero emissions by 2050. The first publication of UK fires was entitled absolute zero and attracted widespread attention including a full debate in the UK House of Lords. This has led to many other reports research and impact I'll just note that wherever I go and talk I always encourage people to read Julian's and his colleagues absolute zero report. Professor Alwin is an honorary fellow of the institution of materials minerals and mining and a fellow of the international academy of production engineering or CIRP. He is a member of the UK's energy research partnership and for 10 years he was joint editor-in-chief of the journal of materials processing technology. In 2021 he was awarded the triennial Japan society for technology of plasticity international prize for research and development in precision forging. He was elected as a fellow of the royal academy of engineering in 2017. Let's welcome Julian Alwood and as a reminder if you have questions please place them into chat Julian. Thank you very much indeed John and let me just check that you can see my slides. Yes again. Perfect great thank you very much indeed for inviting me to give this talk and for turning up online which I know many people feel they've done enough online but I'll explain later on why I think it's so important that we build transatlantic connections in this way. I'm using a lot of slides and have a lot of references written into them so if you're interested you can find the slide set on the use less group website I'll put that link up at the end to remind you maybe one of the administrators could share that in the chat at some point on the uselessgroup.org website. I want to spend this talk thinking about making good things happen and I want to start by talking about making things happen i.e. what's the normal track from the work we do in engineering particularly in R&D to things changing and that's essentially defined by the absolute basic economic model that we come across in the first lecture of economics in an undergraduate course. So we believe that markets have led to some form of equilibrium at the moment where the cost of supplying something which falls as the quantity goes up matches the price that people are prepared to pay for it and businesses have solved an equilibrium problem. So when we do new work in engineering we are either trying to come up with a product that's more attractive or one that's cheaper. My understanding having done a detailed literature review of all the work in Cambridge and Purdue is that energy engineering innovation is about making things hotter faster and smaller. Let me know if there are any other motivations and the goal of that is to make them more attractive to customers so they pay more and the alternative is that we find a way of making something familiar cheaper. The history of manufacturing is the history of making luxury products commodities and in either case then we shift the equilibrium point to the right and we believe that because our spending power determines welfare but that means that we're better off. So that is the standard model and it defines very simply the goal of what engineering innovation is about. But does it work for good things? So good things is a slightly nebulous concept. Let me turn to the United Nations sustainable development goals to understand what good things might be and this list has always struck me as being a bit too complicated because I can't remember 17 good things. I need to reduce it to something a bit simpler. Well looking at this list on the middle row it seems to me that the conversation got corrupted by the economists and incumbent businesses who wanted their normal activities to feature as good things. So a lot of these things are normal economic development and nothing to do with an additional benefit. So let me simplify the first row. The next thing on there would be that at number 16 we've got peace, justice and strong institutions. The very first book ever written The Epic of Gilgamesh ends with the hero being sent off to support world peace and it hasn't happened yet so I think it's great that we can aspire to world peace but operationally it's pretty difficult to deliver and if we predicate all of our other activities on delivering world peace then we might not make any progress so we'll just knock that one out. On the bottom right we've got a phrase that I don't understand followed by a logo which looks like part of a board game so I think they're just there for decoration which means me to look at the top two remaining rows where the one at number 10 says reduced inequality and it seems to me that one to six are all functions of reduced inequality so as an engineer with an eye of optimization I'm just going to reduce all of that to reduced inequalities which I think is what they really meant to say. We've then nearly got down to a manageable set I can just about remember four but just to make my life slightly easier I'll notice that the life below water and life on land are two versions of conserving natural species so I'll remove that to species diversity and now I've got down to three good things which is enough that I can remember them. Let's see how we're getting on with equality, climate safety and species diversity. Well here's what the world inequality report says about our progress on inequality and it's absolutely astounding. The top one percent of the world's population is more wealthy than the poorest half of the world and the really really striking thing about this chart is that most of us on this call are in the top three percent. This is wealth not income so as a student you probably have to think of your parents assets to work out where you are on the graph. As a professor you could probably divide it by the number of dependents you currently have at the moment but most of us either are already or aspire to be in the top two or three percent of this chart and that's really sobering when you realize that on the same analysis the bottom 10 percent are defined by the United Nations as being hungry that is they can't guarantee access to one meal per day. We live in a world where we learned we on this call have accepted that amazing level of inequality and we have to face up to it. The trouble is none of us feels rich enough it doesn't matter how big your boat is somebody else has already got always got a bigger boat so I have yet to meet anybody who feels that they are really in the category of the wealthy. We all feel that we're okay we're about normal and it's somebody else we point to somebody else ahead of us in the wealth curve who is the more wealthy. What about climate safety well we've been talking about that with a passion for about 30 years now we signed the the United Nations protocol in Rio in 1992 and since then we have flown around the world with great passion talking about climate mitigation and despite all the meetings the emissions have risen steadily in fact emissions are now 50 percent higher than when we decided that we as a world wanted to reduce them. So I'm afraid so far the evidence is that we are not making progress on climate change and the third good thing is about species diversity. Now those of us in engineering may not be familiar with these systems but these I'll just check my notes these are all birds and birds are a biological species and this is a variety of them there are lots of them and I'd like you to do a thought experiment now and in your mind I'd like you to line up a picture of all the birds in the world. So I don't just mean one swan representing the swans I'd like you to think of all the swans that there are in the world along with all the blue tits and all the flamingos and all of all the other birds that you can think of. So I hope in front of you you've got quite a large picture with quite a lot of birds and now I'd like you to draw a line at 60 percent of the mass of all of those birds so weigh them and then work out where the 60 percent line is and I hope you've got that right because if you did do the experiment I've described to you 60 percent of the world's birds are the same species and like this incredibly 60 percent of all the birds in the world by mass are chickens so the human being has had an astounding effect on the lack of diversity in species and we aren't making very good progress on that. Well here's how we think about making good things happen in the conventional economic political model with normal engineering practice here's the model we want to make things that are hotter faster smaller and good all things that are cheaper and good and we want to improve welfare so we don't mind making things good good things happen provided that economic growth carries on as if we weren't doing anything different and that is the approach that we take to delivering on those good things and probably is the explanation of why we're making so little progress. We're not sure to ideas about how to do that we're very keen on the idea that technology will solve the problem we know that the world's woody biomass is used most inefficiently in the developing countries in open fires for cooking and hundreds of projects have looked at developing efficient wood burners for developing countries and no one has yet developed one that can be sustained locally by local communities without needing support from elsewhere so amazingly we have failed to invent an efficient wood burning stove that actually works with water we know that if there's a water shortage we're going to solve it by desalination and pumping by enormous amounts of energy we haven't really worked out how to manage the freshwater supply with climate change our standard approach is to invent technologies and some of those are very good technologies like renewables and electric cars and some of them are still in the world of fantasy whether it's carbon capture and storage global capacity is currently 0.08 percent of global emissions direct air capture geoengineering the nightmare idea of putting things not dealing with climate change and just shading the earth instead flying wind turbines in hot air balloons that was the key technology that Bill Gates promoted at COP 21 I think it was the Paris meeting or by the magic word hydrogen so we are not short of ideas that we could invent and sell to deal with climate change but they aren't in fact making good things happen and as you saw earlier I don't know so much about birds but I did find that you can get you can already buy a digital bird feeder and you can see here that you can select which bird species are going to get the food so that's going to help a great deal in supporting species diversity and no doubt somewhere somebody has got a research project on artificial intelligence and bird selective bird feeding to maximize species conservation my evidence is that we are not currently dealing with the good things our market based political economic technological tie-up is not delivering on the things that we know to be good but which are outside of the normal profit system let's have a bit more of a detailed look on climate policy because that's what I want to focus on in the talk are good things happening in climate policy well here's the graph I've already shown you the progress of emissions as we have talked about it more and to some extent you could say in the last few years there has been progress because lots of countries including my own and partially I think yours have made legally binding pledges to deliver zero emissions by a certain date almost none of them have a plan to actually deliver on that target so it's a commitment made by an elected politician knowing that by the time the due date falls they will be long out of office that would be fine if climate change was simply a dinner party conversation for the middle classes which I think is where it's largely situated in public framing but it isn't I think we've seen these temperature graphs almost so much that we don't really register with them it's worth noting here that when we talk about temperature rises then the reference is usually pre-industrial times but the graph here is post Second World War just to show you the rate at which temperature is going up at the moment if you project that forwards then the blue orange and purple lines here are three of the projections from the most recent IPCC assessment report I was one of the lead authors of the previous one AR5 and AR6 came out about two years ago so this is what they're projecting are the temperatures the purple one is if we continue to do as little as we are doing at the moment and both orange and blue indicate that we are taking some action to put the timescales in perspective then my life my expectancy is around about 2050 my children should last to around about the end of the century and if I have grandchildren they will outlast it so this is pretty near term in terms of the generations that we ourselves will know and live with and of course in the life of many of you on the call the big challenge here isn't temperature when people in the UK talk about global warming they all broadly think it would be quite nice it would be nicer if it was a bit warmer but the IPCC covers a whole portfolio of risks and the real risk what I think global warming is really about is global food shortage I had a PhD student finish a couple of years ago who looked at the question how will society collapse if we don't act on climate change and the conclusion was that there will be a global world war over food probably this century looking at this then you can see that the IPCC's way of framing that is with this colour bar of risk purple means sustained food supply disruptions globally that seems to me to be a slightly polite way of saying starvation and probable war over food supply and 1.5 degrees is the threshold at which we get to periodic food shocks across regions and you can see that that's why the Paris agreement chose a target temperature of 1.5 degrees over pre industrial times or over the 1980 temperature in the graph that I've got on the screen here and how are we doing with holding it to the Paris agreement well according to the world meteorological office there is a two thirds chance that average surface global temperature will be more than one and a half degree above pre industrial levels for at least a year in the next four years so we are not on track to meet the Paris agreement I think we all know that now but what we aren't facing is the very visceral risks but that creates for us if there really is a global food shortage then it's going to occur at the equator this is another chart from the IPCC report showing how crop productivity will drop and you can see it's primarily in the poor countries near to the equator which are the countries with the least ability to pay if they have to pay inflated prices for food on a global market and what that says to me is there is a very high chance of a global war over food this century and that's the motivation for actually acting on climate change it hasn't entered public dialogue so far the political story is don't worry we're going to solve it with new technologies relax and keep growing in the old way the reality is that continuing to do that and not acting on climate change at the rate we have to is going to lead to a world war over food and I have to say I have been scared this year by some of the data we've seen on things happening much more rapidly the one on the left is the one that really caught my attention this is the South Pole sea ice extent in midwinter by in august september and you can see that there are about 45 years shown on the chart and 2023 was exceptionally low so that is the first indicator we've had of a tipping point we don't know whether it is yet we do know that El Nino is active at the moment but it's been active for many of the other years shown in the graph and we've never seen such a dramatic change as all that so people say when you're talking about climate that you shouldn't do doom mongering I think we should at least be honest about the costs of inaction and face that reality as we then think about how we want to be involved in responding to it so why isn't it working why are we failing to act on climate mitigation despite all of the motivation and all of the talking on it and well I think there are two things here or three mentioned on here the first is that we have become masters of disguise in shifting the burden elsewhere and we're doing that through failing to recognize the aggregation for some key resources and the rate at which we can deploy them and this is the current mechanism for burden shifting it's a genie and I don't know how well you know the story of Aladdin over there we have pantomimes at Christmas here and they're very often based on Aladdin and the good guy has the lamp which they can rub and a genie comes out and solves problems so in European political policy at the moment all you have to do is say hydrogen and the problem goes away in the UK government strategy published just ahead of the COP26 meeting in Glasgow two years ago the word hydrogen appeared 501 times in 360 pages and not a single kilogram of hydrogen is produced in the UK with zero emissions neither then nor now and the government has made no plans to commit to any scalable hydrogen production with zero emissions in the UK but don't worry we can just say the word smile and we know the problem will go away we don't need to do anything else now here's a little bit of data from the international energy agency this is the most up-to-date data on global hydrogen production and you can see two-thirds of it is made from gas fifth from coal some of it is made with as byproducts of other chemical processes and a stunning 0.04 percent is made with electricity a third of which is with no emissions so 0.01 percent of current hydrogen production is made with no emissions hurrah that's definitely going to save us so hydrogen has become a means of shifting the burden I say hydrogen I don't plan to make it but I have a vague idea I might be able to use it so therefore I've done my bit it's not the only one we in the UK claim to have reduced our emissions by a substantial fraction something like a half since about 1990 we have done one thing that's really good which is that we've closed our coal-fired power stations and converted firstly to gas and now we have a very rapid growth in offshore wind power and that's great that's a really positive and good move but the illusion in our figures is that we've closed all of our heavy industry as well and we're importing goods from China and other countries and being British obviously because they're foreign then we don't need to believe that they exist so trade is a way of disguising the reality of our inaction we talked about carbon offsets in the panel earlier on they're the same as medieval indulgences sold by the Catholic Church they don't reduce carbon they just give you the illusion of having offset the emissions that you have genuinely caused and that remain in the atmosphere whether you buy an offset or not negative emissions technologies at the moment there are none operating it's true that a tree is a negative emissions technology but if you plant a new tree initially you disrupt the soil and then it takes about 20 years to grow for as a seedling then as a sapling until it generates its full leaf canopy and only when it has a full canopy does it become a meaningful negative emissions technology and if you think that our target date is 2050 we haven't got very long to plant an enormous number of trees that will be 20 years old or more by that date and as far as I know there are no plans for global afforestation on that scale all the other negative emissions technologies require a huge input of energy if you look at direct air capture it's virtually impossible for a gas-fired electricity power station to capture its own emissions for the very obvious reason that with four or five hundred parts per million you have to pump a gigantic amount of air through the fan in order to capture a meaningful amount of carbon from it biofuels shift the burden onto biomass and to give you a sense of scale there if we made all the world's kerosene as bio kerosene then we would need to treble the output of all global agriculture so biofuels will play no significant role in climate mitigation and equally synthetic fuels ammonia and all the other ones that are being discussed require a huge energy input like hydrogen and we don't have any surplus of emissions free electricity to power their creation so the first thing we can say is let's deal let's get rid of burden shifting let's be a little bit real about it and one way we can do that is to learn how to add things up properly here's a summary of the policies that were discussed at the COP meeting in 2021 the COP 26 and is pretty much the policy portfolio of international climate discussions at the moment this is global emissions the blue ones are transport red and orange are electricity it grays industry and then the other is agriculture forestry and other land uses so the broad consensus in policy is that we deal with transport through electric batteries hydrogen or biofuel we deal with electricity with either renewables nuclear or carbon capture and storage we power industry with hydrogen or emissions free electricity or we use carbon capture and storage we hope that we can solve deforestation and waste decomposition by regulation and we've got no idea what to do about the rest so we hope that direct air capture will take those away i'm simplifying but i'm not far off in describing the consensus view of the people who will meet at the COP 28 meeting in a week or two's time we've been thinking about this thinking how do we reflect the reality that all of the of all the burden shifting shown in that and we've been working for the last three years on creating a calculator which is going to be online very soon within the next couple of months and our calculator uses a model like this on the left is the economic demand for goods and services which are delivered by a set of processes which depend either on fuel or electricity so either the fuel is manufactured or it's a fossil fuel the electricity is either from fossil fuels or it's from renewables or nuclear and if we do cause any missions then we have to have some form of negative emission technology well if you add all of those things up it turns out that all mitigation plans whatever they are depend on biomass non-emitting electricity and carbon storage those are the three fundamental zero emissions resources on which all climate mitigation depends so we can create clarity in the world of burden shifting and disguise in the world of greenwash by adding up the demand for those three substances so during the COP26 meeting in Glasgow I worked on this on the back of an envelope doing a calculation along these lines and I looked at a couple of technologies for each of the options so for road vehicles what would happen if we replaced fossil fuel with biofuel or what would happen if we replaced it with electric power and I did a quick back of an envelope calculation of the options and plotted my outcome on a graph that looks like this so I assume that there actually isn't any surplus supply of biomass and therefore what we really have to play with is carbon capture and storage and emissions free electricity and when I did my adding up of the policy pie chart I've just shown you I showed that the blue dots for example here are solutions which don't require extra biomass and have the least possible direct air capture the more direct air capture is the orange ones and using the maximum possible biomass gets me down to the green dots so my gray egg if you can see it on the screen is roughly the policy space being discussed and on the two axes the red dashed line show how much emissions free electricity we've got today which is about an eighth of what we require and how much ccs carbon storage we've got today which is about one six hundredth of what the policy program assumes so out of that my conclusion was there is no chance that any of these policy plans will be deployed and I had the lead opinion piece in the Financial Times the day after COP26 closed to make that point the question obviously is how could that grow if we deploy more emissions free electricity and carbon capture and storage how much might we have well we can look at that by looking at what's happened recently so here over my lifetime I was born in 1965 is the world supply of emissions free electricity and you can see it's grown at a linear rate this gradient of the line changed in 2010 when wind started growing it started growing 40 years after the Danish government started supporting wind seriously but there is no hint on my graph of any exponential growth large energy infrastructure is slow to deploy and it grows at a linear rate here is the oil and gas funded lobbies view the global ccs institute is the mouthpiece of the oil and gas industry and there is their record of how much carbon capture and storage there is it's growing at an absolutely rock steady two megatons of co2 per year every year and we've reached 0.08 percent of global emissions and here if we look at global biomass use again over my lifetime what it shows is that our use of biomass has grown exactly in proportional with the global population we aren't able to expand the supply earlier for the reasons we talked about earlier on about species conservation the human race is already threatening an enormous number of species by our overuse of biomass so there can't be much more biomass use so is that born out by other analyses well here's Vaklav Smil looking at the take up of new energy technologies showing that they grow at a linear rate and you can only predict that rate once the technology has reached about 5 percent of global world energy supply so he published this in 2014 I updated the numbers just to show that modern renewables wind and solar have followed about the same linear trajectory that he's predicting here and this is something we've done a lot of work on ourselves looking at the fastest rate of deployment of any new energy technology anywhere in the world and they're still broadly at a linear rate much much lower than anybody would believe by looking at the claims of the united nations policy process there's a good reason for it and the reason is that delivering large power stations is a large and complex project the construction is difficult this is for a nuclear power station and this is the one being built in the uk at the moment called Hinckley point c construction should take according to the international energy agency around about three and a half years in fact Hinckley point has taken four years so far and when they announced the latest delays last year they announced that they would be further and further delays announced later on so constructing the projects is a problem but actually the real problem is much earlier than that that there's a political consent that has to be given before you can start the construction project about budgets and location and planning permission and environmental consent and the allocation of the national budget from one use to another we've got the same data here for wind turbines it takes a long time to deploy new large energy infrastructure as a result of which it seems to us that we can predict pretty safely that these key zero emissions resources are going to continue to grow at a linear rate but if we're ambitious let's assume that rate doubles so the purple bar here shows where we might get to in electricity by 2050 the bottom is if it's linear and the top is if the linear gradient doubles and the ccs bar are you can see how optimistic we are there that's if the rate continues or if the rate doubles it still hasn't left the axis so it's irrelevant there is no possibility that the policies being discussed in the COP meetings can be delivered because we don't have the resources to do that and that was our motivation for writing the report gone mentioned in his introduction absolute zero where we looked at what could we realistically expect and we said for the UK we would predict just ahead of linear growth in electricity supply and then there won't be any ccs we can't use any additional biomass what does life look like so the report is there it's become the most downloaded resource ever released by this university amazingly and all it is is a rational adding up of what's possible and it's not bad there are some things that we have to restrain but the main thing is that we have to electrify everything and then plan to use about 60 percent of the electricity we'd like to have is it a total violation of our human rights to drive a smaller car no it isn't we could live perfectly well that way but we aren't looking for it because we're believing fairyland about the availability of the zero emissions resources i was trying to think what it is that's missing from the reality the construction project is part of it and we have a voice in helping politicians understand that but i think the real issue is that politicians like to respond to my analysis by saying oh well we'll just go a bit faster then and i think what they have in mind is a dialogue that looks like this um there's i john kerry in fighting form on a podium saying we're going to test this great new e-carbon storage technology right under your school and the public say oh no problems and if you need to cut the number of teachers pay to pay for it then go right ahead well so far that dialogue hasn't been emerging in the democracies of the world i haven't seen any signs of it in the uk or the us um it doesn't seem to be how we're making the decisions we aren't going to go a lot faster so it would be much more valuable to be realistic about what we can actually achieve and let's give that a very sharp focus by looking at these things these are aeroplanes creating contrails and it's true that you can power a one-seater plane with solar cells and fly one person around the world as somebody did over three weeks in 2016 you can't scale because the um energy area density of solar cells just isn't good enough um we can create pictures of aeroplanes powered by batteries and there are several companies in the world developing very small short distance planes powered by batteries none of them are yet flying and nobody is planning long haul or large capacity flight powered by batteries because they weigh too much uh well don't worry about that though because what we could do is create a picture of a green leaf and stand that on our fuel and call it sustainable aviation fuel because we're going to collect the used chip fan oil from mcdonald's and fly our aeroplanes on that well next time you go to the supermarket and look at the amount of olive oil in your supermarket trolley compare that to the amount of petrol you buy each year and i think you'll find there are some orders of magnitude difference there is no feasible way of supplying sustainable aviation fuel from used cooking oil or from any biomass source as i said before it requires a trebling of world agricultural harvest which is not going to happen well that's all right all we need to do is to put the label hydrogen on the engine and that will solve the problem well it's technically possible to fire plane with hydrogen uh creating the hydrogen requires an enormous amount of electricity and we don't have any spare emissions free electricity and by the way we have to retire and replace the entire fleet because you can't retrofit hydrogen onto existing aeroplanes the only sustainable flying in 2050 is no flying that's why i'm not with you i'd love to be there in person i used to come to the states a lot my phd was funded by our core in pittsburgh before i understood it but it seems to me we've got to face this as academic leaders here are the average emissions per person per year the world average is somewhere about six or seven tons of co2 per year and you can see how different countries are playing out i'm afraid that your country is virtually at the top in emissions per person per year which is worth bearing in mind when you hear your politicians blaming china the reason that china is lower is because there are five times as many people in china as there are in the states and that's why your per capita figure is so high here's a graph showing flying emissions in tons of co2 per person for each hour of flying per year this is if you fly an economy and this is if you fly in business roughly the emissions are double if an academic flies um sorry that's the average world average emissions if you fly to two international conferences per year you beat the world average person that's about 40 hours of flying per year uh if you go in business because you're a professor you get up to 80 and a lot of my academic colleagues are flying a great deal more than this i looked at this in 2012 and i realized i had to stop and i think we all have to look at it and make a personal plan for how we're going to phase this out if we are going to have integrity in talking to our students our children and our grandchildren does restraint mean misery well restraint is essential to what we're going to have to do to get to zero emissions future and roughly speaking the plan looks like this stop flying electrify the heating or cooling at home electrify the road vehicles stop eating beef lamb and dairy products that's the ruminant animals that emit methane use electrically recycled materials to make stuff electrify uh industry and use about half the power and um i'll leave agriculture forestry and other land use out because of a lack of courage and a lack of knowledge um the burden is on us the wealthy this is not about preventing development because the numbers are so skewed but it is the top 10 percent of the population that bear 90 percent of the responsibility for action that's true across all the good things that we're dealing with but very much so in the area of climate so here's the trade-off on the one hand restraint sounds a bit tricky on the other hand we've got human extinction following a global war over food probably in the life of our children or our grandchildren it doesn't sound so tricky after all does it let's just think about a few aspects of what makes a great life i ran the best project of my career uh four years ago uh in leaning to 2019 when with 4 000 primary school children we broke and set the world record for the most people ever playing one piano and to do that you need each player to have an eight meter long finger extender and we asked each child to design a way to play the piano from eight meters away we got 4 000 designs that were totally fabulous this is one of my favorites and i don't think any of you would have thought that you should play the piano by firing a rabbit from a cannon from eight meters away but they were all as imaginative as this and this was the most rewarding fabulous activity and had virtually no emissions in it it was a shared collective bit of creativity uh this is not me i don't know how to throw a javelin but there is a species of humans who every day when they wake up dream of throwing a javelin as far as possible and that's magnificent they restrain everything else about their life in order to throw the javelin as far as possible and we view them as heroes so in sport and in a whole range of creative endeavors we admire the people who give things up in order to achieve the highest forms of human welfare of human expression and i won't talk through the next one which is about time um let me jump over that one but just to comment on welfare um we've been kidded that welfare is about income it is if you're very poor because until you can buy the basics of meal and meals and shelter nothing else is on your mind but for the rich the high emitters that's not it welfare is about imagination being fascinated about the diversity of our activity endeavor trying is much more uh appealing if you could buy a robot that won the crucial points in your tennis game you wouldn't enjoy playing tennis appreciation of things having a balanced life fulfillment wonder virtue i could keep going on absolutely none of these can be purchased and none of them are reflected by or supported by gdp growth all of them can grow and all of them are compatible with restraint so i want to end by talking about what we've been doing recently in trying to look for opportunities for business growth that are compatible with reducing total demand for energy and materials in the uk fires program that uh john mentioned we've published a series of analyses of different sectors all of which are compatible with the absolute zero report where are the big opportunities electrifying the plastics industry is sitting there waiting electrifying the production of bricks is an important one in the uk because we build our houses from bricks there's virtually nobody looking at it raising the quality of recycled steel has so many innovation and uh opportunities for new research and deployment there's a raft of ways that we could transform materials and manufacturing to be all electric and use half the amount of electricity the same with construction and transport and the food sector and in fact we published one report which showed 140 opportunities for new entrepreneurial businesses compatible with the absolute zero uh story i want to tell you about three startups that we've created in the last two years all based on good ideas but they're all there really so i can say to the government there's an opportunity here and you're not engaging with it have a look here's one we did an analysis of commercial construction in the uk and we looked at what fraction of the steel in each building was actually used to meet the safety standards of or sorry how much was required to meet the safety standards that are imposed on uk construction so all of these should be at a utilization ratio of one that would be a building designed to meet the safety standards but you can see that actually the fraction there are plenty of beams here where only a quarter of their capacity or less is used in order to meet the safety standards we are grossly overbuilding and we're doing it because of economies of scale is cheaper to buy beams of all the same cross-section and it harmonizes the joints and also because it makes the design cheaper if i can do cut and paste from previous designs it saves me having to work out what a good new design would look like we did a variety of analyses which we published on this looking at the over specification of steel in commercial construction and what we found was that the number one reason this happens is that the structural designers are paid a fee which is a percentage of total project cost regardless of how long it takes them to design the building so their motivation is to design rapidly and that means to make each new building as similar as possible to the one they did before so we created some software that went through every possible scheme for designing each new building at the column spacing the foundations the form of decking that was used for the horizontal structures all the major choices that the structural designer makes right at the beginning of a project but they don't have the chance to evaluate because it would take too long to work through them it's called structural panda which is an acronym for something i can't remember and now we're selling that and all of the major structural design consultancies in the uk have at least one license as they get used to it and plan to use it in more detail in future a really nice use of computers just to solve a design problem that's too time consuming for any individual here's an analysis we did 10 years ago about making cars when you make the body in white in a car from sheet metal it turns out that on average you scrap just about as much material as you use in fact the reason is not the blanking process where you cut the orange blank out of the constant width coil of blue material but it's the deep drawing process which gives shape to the flat sheet metal we have to grip the material around the edge as we squash it between a male and female die and in doing that then we prevent wrinkling but we then have to trim off all the excess material beyond what we actually need in the car and when we look at real world data this is published by the car industry on some frequency we found that the average utilization was about 50 to 55 percent across all classes of car luxury cars naturally are slightly worse um so the car industry roughly speaking is generating as much scrap as it's generating cars because of deep drawing and we started thinking about this in 2015 and with a rather primitive approach to engineering I went with my one of my best post-ops to my shed and we made with this wooden model here a template for a car body part you can see it looks just like a car and it's a corner and what we wanted to do was to work out how we could shape this wire mesh which represents sheet metal to the shape of the template with as little extra material as possible and instinctively we folded over the edges leaving us with a cone at the edge at the corner and then we used our thumbs to press the cone down uh incrementally moving towards the outside and we found and you can see here that there's a square of material that's been sheared out of the sheet but the diamonds in the middle there show that the sheet largely deformed in pure shear which is perfect for sheet forming because it means the thickness doesn't change so we went ahead and started developing this as what we call the folding shearing process um and we started making trial parts in the lab which were looking very promising and quite quickly we worked out that we could do this in a press tool so here's how you make a car body part at the moment um I know it looks like a five-sided box but it's representative if you have a blank holder without enough grip uh then you end up with wrinkling if you grip it correctly then you can draw the whole part but you can see at the bottom you've got quite a lot of material that you're going to trim off and this amount of material grows and increases as the part becomes more complex so our process is firstly origami folding to get near to the shape and then using tools to shear out the remaining cones or beaks as we think of them at the corners so there's folding now here's the beak and then we're creating a state of pure shear in the corner and there at the end is a tab of material a bit like the square I showed you in our original wire mesh experiment well we've built a large machine in my uh lab uh in order to start exploring this in a general way and we soon realized that we could do this with drop-in tooling into a press line which looks a bit like this the dark blue is the uh workpiece um then the upper tool firstly creates folding no shearing yet and now we've finished the folding and here comes the shearing stage with the material held loosely between an upper and lower cone uh and that creates very nearly pure sheet in the pure shear in the side of the sheet leading to almost no change in thickness and the finished part with almost no trim so we set up a company to deliver this Chris who was a postdoc in the group is now the chief executive and we sold our first part to a car company in the UK just a few months ago and just this week we've completed our first funding round with the first two million pound investment into the company to allow us to start scaling us our sales so it's a great story of spotting an opportunity to use less material having a clever idea and then seeing its scale rapidly into a business the last one I want to talk about is about cement that came up a lot in the discussion earlier on as you know um cement accounts for about 20 percent of industrial emissions uh it's used in concrete when it's mixed with water sand and aggregate and cement itself is the combination of clinker gypsum and supplementary materials and clinker is the thing that causes the emissions both from heating to a high temperature and from the process emissions of removing co2 from limestone there are lots of ideas on the market for reducing the emissions of cement making some of them are quite well established and they have you can see here limited total maximum abatement but a relatively low cost and they're penetrating at a good rate so the supplementary cementitious materials is the key thing here and the industry is moving towards using calcined clays blended with clinker to come up with more cement for less clinker production lots of people have talked about carbon capture and storage we've demonstrated some of the capture but nobody has yet linked uh a cement plant to storage and the novel ideas are a tiny laboratory scale so there aren't really any big players on the market for zero emissions cement until one of the post-docs in our group Cyril Dunant had a great idea what he spotted was that if you crush old concrete and separate out the old stones and sand from it you're left with something which we call recovered cement paste and this has virtually the same properties as the flux used in a steel recycling furnace so instead of adding steel and flux to the electric arc furnace we now add steel and recovered cement paste and the cement paste use it bubbles through the steel as it melts it doesn't affect the steel making or the furnace lining in the operation and it creates a slag and if we cool that rapidly in air and grind it it turns out remarkably that it produces Portland cement so in effect this is a way of re-clinkering cement it has no process emissions because the the cement paste has already given up its process emissions in the first manufacture and there's no additional energy input because the electric arc furnace was already processing a flux to make a slag that has no value as we stand so we've started a lot of programs around this the strength and performance of it is looking great and we're meeting existing standards for all commercial grades of cement and we've started doing trials at what was the British Steel's research labs in teeside which is good fun it makes dramatic photos beyond the scale that we normally achieve in a university lab and here is our clinker cooling just in a tray here but we're working on ways to scale that up we've got a demonstrator coming up early next year with a partner in south wales which is going to be making 20 ton batches of this at a rate of 20 tons every hour and we've set up the company with the patent that we own in order to start exploiting that and again in the last two weeks we just recruited a chief executive into that company so this is a really really exciting development again compatible with the absolute zero view of the future and I'm trying to use it to indicate to you that there is a vast untapped opportunity once we do a realistic about the supply side of climate mitigation and turn our attention to the demand side so to conclude deployment at scale and speed is everything about climate mitigation we desperately need to get engineering involved in the policy process to call out burden shifting and to give reality to the deployment of supply side technologies but if we refocus on demand to ease the ridiculous requirements or supply that we can't meet there's huge innovation potential and most generally new technologies can't solve the problem in time so we've got to be part of a societal dialogue as I said the slides are on the useless group website in a blob and I've put in the references that I've used in here if you want to follow up any of the particulars and with that thank you all very much for listening but let's thank professor allwood great job julian um I think we have time for a few questions and people have put that in the chat so let me uh see whether I can so mo had a question he said he's interested in the uh nearly released almost to be released soon to be released calculator and what do you think is going to be involved in extending that other regions you know for example southeast asian countries um great question we want more friends to work with us on it so if you're interested please do get in touch we're doing it at the moment at a global scale because that solves the problem of burden shifting between countries it's obvious that we're then going to have to develop regional and national versions of it and if you're interested we'd love to work with you on that great other other questions so here's one from from miriam um when you talk about there being many opportunities for new business growth uh in order in particular to reach the climate goals do you see this as uh is there going to be any impact on contraction of the economy uh or perhaps shifting um what do they call it uh economic destruction you you you shift it essentially opportunities from one industry to another um is there a way to kind of reframe that to focus on the good things yeah a really good question um I know something about the degrowth movement but I've tried to stay away from it because politically it has no appeal even if it's true politicians are not going to sign up to it um so the slightly deceptive story I'm telling is here are some things that can grow uh the implication is that other things will contract um and actually I don't think we know what the aggregate effect of that is we do know that the oil and gas industry has to shut the existing aviation industry has to shut uh blast furnaces cement kilns as currently configured all have to close so the that is if you like clear and legislated by every country that has a zero emissions target we don't know what the economic value of the alternatives will be um we've got labor we've going to use our skills to try and do things in different ways and we're going to trade them and I think we can't predict this is so far away from being an incremental change in the economy that I don't think economic models that are based on starting from a notional equilibrium really apply it's a big structural shift and we don't know where we're going to end up yeah um here here's a comment from uh Utakan and it's long but basically says well how do we deal with Javons pair paradox yeah so yeah I get that I'm not sure whether it applies in this case because the scrap is a byproduct of the process um and I suppose my reading is that the global supply of metal is going to be constrained so uh we aren't going to have enough electricity to power all the uh recycling furnaces with emissions free electricity let alone any hydrogen production it takes seven times more electricity to make a kilogram of steel with hydrogen than it does to do it by recycling uh so my reading is that the supply of metals is going to be lower prices will go up and therefore we'll be asking the question of what's the best use we can make of the metal remaining I completely agree with you that this is not a catch all but for me it's a really important toe in the door because it's one I can sell to politicians and say look here is a great story you could get behind this and it's a way of bringing them into the fold yeah that's good just I think we have time for maybe one or two more um one of the questions asks about the you know as we think about absolute zero and zero emissions um especially as we think about materials processing um are are there specific materials that are maybe tougher to handle than others perhaps uh or specific processes that we should be avoiding I I think I know the answer but I'll I'll let you handle that one the way I've approached that is to try and look top down at what the big numbers are so in order the big materials are steel cement plastic paper and aluminium so we focused our attention on those um and I think uh I've talked about steel and cement um during this plastics a really big opportunity at the moment some of them can be made by an electric process without emissions some can't but I don't see as much activity as there should be on all electric plastic production uh paper and aluminium could be fully electrified yeah and then there was uh a comment from one of your fellow pan panellists Mirian that uh was asking about the electric cement I don't know if you can see that one it's kind of I think she's talking about the process of uh obtaining the paste and whether or not there's in fact CO2 emissions associated with that but I think the creation of the virgin cement that's where you're getting most of the CO2 emissions and uh working with the paste you you don't have that same same issue I but again I'll let you perhaps handle that one yeah important question Mirian there is at the moment no market for risk recovered cement paste um there are other uses developing because um a little bit like we said in the panel it is uh it does react with CO2 so you could claim that risk covered cement paste was a carbon negative technology and that's one of the things the cement industry themselves want to do is to extract recovered cement paste and put it in the flu of their existing cement kiln to reabsorb CO2 and therefore claim that the net emissions of their current production is lower um from our point of view that's nuts because that's adding CO2 back to a resource that's had the CO2 taken out of it so we don't want to go that way but uh we have found that to get high quality or high purity recovered cement paste you need to heat it to about 500 degrees in order to break the bond between the cement paste and the sand and so we're assuming that's going to be electrically powered but that actually is a significant new energy requirement in our process and we've factored into that into our expectations of cost and emissions good um there's one more so we don't need to move away from capitalism this is coming from Miriam um but the idea is to is to decouple kind of responding to some of these these challenges and and kind of uh reducing the environmental impact I I'm I'm maybe not maybe you can see that can you see the chats there Julian yeah I think it's a question of time we've got 27 years to try and get to zero emissions um and I say try and what I mean is we've actually got to get there uh and that's I can't believe we can deal with any other major problems at the same time so I think we've got to work with what we've got to work with but um things like pricing the zero emissions resources correctly in order to call out the nonsense about sustainable flying is going to be a really important part of that picture so some cost structures are going to have to change a lot and that is going to depend on uh governmental regulation to which has always been the case it creates the rules within the which the market operates so I look we're going to have one final question it comes from Professor Gore um so as you think about higher education be it at Cambridge or here at Purdue or elsewhere you know what does this mean in terms of how we should be thinking about disciplines and addressing issues the the three kind of the reduced set of SDGs um you know what what does that all mean should we be thinking more multi-disciplinary I perhaps right yeah I think we have to um I don't know what it's like with you but here we just don't equip our students in engineering with the skills to enter political debate and we ought to be training them in the processes of societal dialogue and social change so that they can become informed players we try to give them a general degree so for the first two years they touch all the bits of engineering in the hope that they can then have sensible dialogue across the discipline we've got to augment that so that they can have sensible dialogue with the other key people who are involved in the climate policy space all right that was wonderful Julien you did a fantastic job thought-provoking as always let's thank Professor Allwood once again