Sustainable Chemicals Innovations Enabling Net Carbon Emissions (SCIENCE)

The UK has recently taken a bold step towards clean growth, consulting on ending the sale of conventional diesel and petrol passenger cars by 2035 and to realise a zero-emissions vehicle fleet by 2050. These ambitions are indeed bold however they place additional pressures on the automotive industry and its supply chain to innovate and highlight concerns about the onwards environmental viability of the existing automotive fleet. Placing aside the obvious scientific, environmental and technical hurdles that must be overcome to deliver mass electrification (assuming that is what is adopted and is the lowest environmental impact), these ambitions stimulate an awareness to reduce the impact of traditional internal combustion engines (ICE) in transportation across all scales. There is a pressing need to raise efficiencies, while reducing the integrated, life-long carbon footprint of the vehicle which prompts scrutiny on fuel efficiency, maintenance frequency, and indeed the impact of all ICE related consumables.

To date Lubrizol products, which deliver a significant proportion of the fuel and engine oil additives that are used across all ICE platforms, have directly contributed to and help enable technology which gives notable increases in engine efficiency, in the order of 20% increase in typical MPG, which delivers savings in terms fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. To continue to deliver year-on-year savings in terms of embedded carbon and product performance there is a clear and urgent need to drive harder, in terms of small-molecule, additive design and to innovate in terms of manufacturing and formulation. Furthermore, Lubrizol chemistry reaches beyond ICE transportation and feeds into vehicle electrification and wider end markets, including home and personal care, industrial, and Life Sciences. Indeed, chemistry is at the heart of most products and it is estimated that over 96% of all manufactured goods have chemical industry content, making the industry a major contributor to the UK economy and a key facilitator of change through innovation.

This Prosperity Partnership proposal builds on existing strategic relationships with University of Nottingham and University of Warwick to tackle a distinct series of business-led research challenges that are considered "critical path" in terms of Lubrizol technologies, which can only be addressed by assembling a multidisciplinary research team with experts drawn from academia. This partnership will deliver an integrated vision to design Smarter Molecules, using Better Chemistries, and Energy Resilient Processes. Our vision is to use, whenever possible, continuous processing to transform how chemicals are manufactured in Lubrizol and beyond. We aim to minimize the amount of chemicals, solvents and processing steps needed to construct complex molecules. We will achieve this by exploiting atom efficient catalysis to promote more specific chemical transformations and cleaner processes. By linking continuous thermal chemistry and environmentally acceptable solvents, we will create a toolkit with the power to transform all aspects of additive synthesis from initial discovery through to chemical manufacturing of high-value molecules.