Materials Engineering for Solar Negative Emissions Technologies

Speaker: Raul Quesada-Cabrera, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria/ University College London

Abstract: Greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations continue to rise to record highs. The Paris Agreement (2015) committed its Contracting Parties to act towards the objectives of keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, and to pursue efforts to further limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C. Currently, the emissions reduction pledge for 2030 needs to be seven times higher to be in line with the Paris Agreement. We are heading in the wrong direction. Since some sources of emissions are extremely difficult to eliminate, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has envisaged the deployment of negative emission technologies (NETs) to remove GHGs from the atmosphere after 2050. In fact, out of the 400 scenarios that have a 50% or better chance of achieving no more than 2°C warming, 344 assume the successful and large-scale deployment of some form of NET. Since CO2 is the major GHG, current NET designs focus on carbon dioxide removal (CDR), such as direct air capture with carbon storage (DACCS), bio-energy with carbon, capture and storage (BECCS) and biochar, among others.

Biography: Raul Quesada-Cabrera is chemistry lecturer (Beatriz Galindo Senior) at Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands (ULPGC, Spain) and visiting researcher at University College London in the UK. He has a broad, multidisciplinary background in materials chemistry with focus on photocatalytic materials for environmental applications. His main scientific interests centre around the engineering of functional and smart materials to clean air and water; solar-to-chemical energy conversion systems; and advanced materials for sustainable infrastructure.