To meet environmental commitments, France must regularly limit its greenhouse gas emissions to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. For this purpose, the implementation of the hydrogen chain should allow to make a major contribution to the decarbonation of our heavy transport and industries. Among alternative solutions, the massive production of renewable (or low-carbon) hydrogen, based on the water electrolysis process gives high hopes.
Through various research programs, IFP Energies nouvelles is strongly involved in the development of bioprocesses to produce biofuels and bio-based chemical intermediates. In particular, the Biotechnology department focuses on biological pathways trough the use of micro-organisms, such as Clostridium acetobutylicum.
Greenhouse gas emissions are one of the main research areas at IFPEN. Through the solutions panel for reducing such emissions, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) represents between 15 to 30% of the total required work to achieve, following the different constructed models for climate prediction. This important challenge claims for continuous innovation and development of more efficient solutions for a large and accelerated technology deployment.
The advent of Machine Learning techniques (ML) is stimulating modern computational chemistry. This methodology may open avenues to address challenging questions in catalytic reactions involved in biomass derived molecules transformation. In particular, free energies of activation and rate constants determination may become accessible by Ab Initio Molecular Dynamics (AIMD) combined with ML.
Hydrogen is a strategic source of energy which may replace fossil fuels used for mobility or energy storage. Hydrogen production by water electrolysis is a particularly relevant technology because it emits much less CO2 than current and widely spread steam methane reforming process. Nevertheless, to decrease electrolyser cost, it is necessary to identify new active phases to replace platinum which is currently used at cathode to catalyse the half reaction of hydrogen evolution (HER).
Plastic recycling is gaining more and more attraction, not only to find a solution to fossil resources depletion, but also to prevent plastics from damaging environment and to limit health issues. As IFPEN intends to be a major actor of low carbon footprint circular economy, R&D work on plastic recycling is ongoing. Polyolefins (PO) -which are the most difficult polymers to convert selectively- present a similar chemical nature than long paraffins present in conventional oil.