A University of Sussex professor has been given a major grant to research ways of helping solve the world’s fuel crisis by turning carbon monoxide into fuel
Professor Geoff Cloke’s project has been given €1,775,000, or just over £1.5million, by the European Research Council’s Advanced Investigator awards.
This will pay for five years of research into how to turn the deadly by-produce of fossil fuel burning into methanol, to be used as fuel.
The ERC’s Advanced Investigator awards support exceptional, professorial-level research leaders in undertaking groundbreaking, high-impact research projects.
The 2009 call to which Geoff applied had only a 14% success rate (of which 19% of the projects are to be held in the UK) and has resulted in an award of €1,775,000. Sussex, as lead partner, will receive €1,397,000 over five years.
Geoff’s project, Reductive Transformations of Carbon Oxides, builds on the recent discovery of organometallic compounds which are capable of activating and coupling together two very topical molecules – carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.
“Finding new ways to use these two environmentally important gases as a fundamental building block for simple organic molecules is a significant challenge for chemists,” explains Geoff.
“Sadly the world’s oil supply, which is the source of most of the world’s gasoline, will not last forever, so one of our key objectives is to use this chemistry to turn carbon monoxide into methanol which can be used as a fuel – effectively closing the carbon cycle.”
The other major goal of the project is to develop a system that will catalytically recycle carbon dioxide into useful organic compounds. “Removing and storing CO2 is one approach, but it would be so much better to turn it into something we could use,” Geoff explains.
His colleague Dr John Turner is a senior member of the project research team. “We are both really excited about working on it together,” says Geoff.
“The five years’ funding means that we have the opportunity to take some risks and do some really novel and pioneering blue-skies research (which is how most major discoveries are made!), but with a real possibility of making a significant impact on a major scientific challenge.
“This project also fits perfectly in to the new research focus on clean energy in chemistry at Sussex.”
