Speaker: Professor Krzysztof Koziol, Professor of Composites Engineering and Head of Composites and Advanced Materials Centre, Cranfield University
Abstract:
In order to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C, the world needs to halve annual greenhouse gas emissions in the next seven years. Despite it being our existential threat, there is not a solid plan put in motion to significantly reduce global carbon emissions to meet these targets until now.
There are options to capture carbon before it enters the atmosphere, but those are costly and carry an additional energy burden. Could graphene change this, from economic, societal, and future energy use perspectives? This talk will present a new, powerful technology which can rapidly strip carbon from methane and transform it into a highly valuable material graphene. Besides the generation of graphene, our unique process is generating at the same time hydrogen, a clean energy source capable of powering the societies of tomorrow. Manufacturing of graphene can be deployed to any industrial site that produces methane (such as a wastewater treatment plant, anaerobic digestion plant, flaring site or venting site) or to sites that use methane for their various operations.
The global deployment of this unique, decentralised graphene manufacturing strategy, will not only provide the desirable volumes of graphene to users but also support the decarbonisation efforts and acceleration of the world’s transition to net zero at the same time.
Speaker Bio:
Since 2017, Krzysztof holds a Chair in Composites Engineering at Cranfield University. As the Head of the Composites and Advanced Materials Centre he is leading a team of scientists and engineers, overseeing projects across advanced materials design & development, materials science, polymer chemistry, composites materials, composites manufacture, process control and material/structure performance. Krzysztof’s career spanning polymer science, materials and nanotechnology, with first-class engineering and master’s degree in Chemistry from Silesian University of Technology in Poland and PhD in Materials Science from University of Cambridge.
Back in Cambridge, in 2008, Krzysztof was awarded the Royal Society University Research Fellowship and Oppenheimer Research Fellowship to pursue his passion in science, focusing on nanomaterials – specifically carbon nanotubes and graphene, their molecular design, production methods and their effective implementation into large scale applications.
In 2008, he became the head of Electric Carbon Nanomaterials Research Laboratory in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, University of Cambridge as well as the Fellow and director of studies at Pembroke College Cambridge.
In 2009, he was awarded the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) starting grant to lead the development of new generation, lightweight, high-performance electric wires based on carbon nanotubes, poised to replace materials like copper and aluminium in the next 20-30 years, to enable transformation of the world of power transmission and electric machines. In 2013, he became a project coordinator of Ultrawire EU FP7 project, to lead a consortium of 11 industrial and 3 academic partners for industrial exploration of carbon nanomaterials.
Krzysztof is the co-founder of Levidian Nanosystems, a company based in Cambridge and co-creator of a completely new process, based on atmospheric pressure non-equilibrium plasma, transforming greenhouse gases to hydrogen, a clean energy source, and net zero graphene, a material reshaping the world we live in. The first pilot reactor was built in 2014 and full-scale factory making graphene based on this technology was opened in 2015. The first commercial mobile autonomous decarbonisation device, called LOOP, was deployed outside the Cambridge factory in 2021, producing hydrogen and graphene through the decarbonisation of methane, on industrial scale. In 2022 first LOOP was deployed in Abu Dhabi, UAE, on 3rd party site, to transform fugitive greenhouse gases to graphene and hydrogen, to accelerate the world’s transition to net zero.