• Question: what difference do you think your work will have on our world?

    Asked by Lucy M to Ahmed, Francesca, George, James, Nitheen on 17 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Francesca Paradisi

      Francesca Paradisi answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      Hopefully it will help making industrial processes less polluting. We are trying to substitute some traditional industrial steps in the synthesis of pharmaceuticals (like antibiotics for example) with enzymatic ones which are much more environmentally friendly.

    • Photo: James Sullivan

      James Sullivan answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      Hi Lucy,

      I would hope that the work I do ends up making processes less polluting – either through catalysts that clean pollution up or catalysts that allow products to be formed without pollution being generated.

      On the fuel side of my work I would hope that we could generate liquid fuels from truly renewable resources and as a longer term that we would be able to generate our fuels through CO2 fixation using artificial photosynthesis.

      Those are all fairly huge aims – but there are loads of people working on these problems worldwide and I’d expect there will be positive results.

    • Photo: Ahmed Osman

      Ahmed Osman answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      Hi Lucy
      You come again with brilliant question
      Firstly I am working on the production of renewable and environmentally friend fuel from the agriculture waste (like grass, wood, etc)
      you know that the fuel that car uses is fossil fuel and mostly of it is imported ( in case of Northern Ireland 90% of the energy fuel is imported) so we have two problem with fuel, the first is importation and secondly it makes lots of pollution.
      We can solve this problem in just one step if we produce the fuel from the agricultural waste (the Northern Ireland land is covered by 76% by green like grass), this will save up to 40% of our use and the produced fuel called Dimethyl Ether is clean (where there is no smoke when it is ignited in cars) the process that we use to produce this fuel is anaerobic digestion. It is a natural process where plant and animal materials ( biomass) are broken down by micro-organisms in the absence of air.
      I think this new fuel will make the life happy
      thanks
      Ahmed

    • Photo: George Dowson

      George Dowson answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      Potentially a lot I hope! Transport fuels like petrol cause nearly a quarter of total emissions. If we could decarbonise petrol (ie make it emission free) we’d be halfway to stabilising our Co2 levels and controlling climate change. So I’d say our potential is global!

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