Green Chemistry Principle #6
Design for Energy Efficiency
Energy requirements should be recognized for their environmental and economic impacts and should be minimized. Synthetic methods should be conducted at ambient temperature and pressure.
By Dr. David Constable, Director, ACS Green Chemistry Institute®
In recent years I've begun to talk about the green chemistry and engineering's "forgotten principles," and Design for Energy Efficiency is one of them. Amongst synthetic organic chemists, no consideration is given to temperature or pressure. The chemist just follows a protocol to get a reaction to go to completion and to separate the desired product at as high a yield as possible. Energy, from the chemist’s perspective, is irrelevant and for all intents and purposes, free. Just put the plug in the wall or the heating coil around the flask, or get the liquid nitrogen out of the dewar.
For those that do think about energy, most if not all the attention that energy gets from chemists is devoted to heating, cooling, separations, electrochemistry, pumping and reluctantly, to calculations related to thermodynamics (e.g., Gibbs Free Energy). The attention is not in minimizing or considering where energy comes from or if it matters what form is used, it's just a given that we need to heat or cool or shove electrons into the reaction to make or break bonds. In reflecting on my own training as a chemist, I never was asked to convert any heating, cooling, pumping or electrochemical requirements to a cost for electricity, steam or some other utility. That may be done in chemical engineering, but not in chemistry.
Energy is a key issue for the 21st century. A majority of the energy that is produced is based, and will continue to be based on fossil fuels. And most of the energy that is delivered to the point of use is lost in conversion and transmission. What this means is that if you look at the life cycle of energy production, and you look at how much energy is actually available for useful work at the point of need, it is less than 1 or 2% of the energy that was originally available in the fossil fuel. It is also true that most fossil fuel energy is used for transportation services of one kind or another and the second biggest use is in space heating and cooling. There are a tremendous number of opportunities for chemists to change this energy use profile, but it is my experience that very few chemists see themselves as being a part of either transportation or the built environment.
If you think about where most chemists are trained around energy, and certainly chemical engineers are, it's around ∆H in the Gibbs Free Energy equation. Heats of formation, heats of vaporization, enthalpy, exothermic reactions, etc; these are what we think about. The interesting thing is that nature largely works with ∆S and weak forces of interaction. You don’t see a tree doing photosynthesis at reflux using a solvent, or a cell membrane is not extruded at the melt temperature of something like polystyrene.
There is so much more to energy and engaging chemists in thinking about energy than asking them to run reactions at ambient temperature and pressure. Reactions themselves are rarely where a majority of energy is used; most is used in solvent removal to set up for the next reaction, or to remove one solvent and replace it with another, or to isolate the desired product, or to remove impurities. Apart from hydrogenations or reactions that are oxygen or moisture sensitive, most reactions are done at atmospheric pressure. This doesn't mean that energy isn't important, it is just important in areas where most chemists are not focused.
Once again, thinking about more than one part of the reaction or the process during the design of a new molecule is critical not only from the standpoint of energy, but also from many different angles. Energy—like thinking about how to arrange a synthesis to have the fewest number of steps, or use the lowest cost starting materials or any other aspect of interest to the synthetic or process chemist—is just another design parameter. Historically it has not been seen as that, but we can no longer afford to design new molecules in the absence of a detailed and extended consideration of how energy will be used.
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