Sebastian Chirambatte Peter
JNCASR, Bengaluru
Sebastian Chirambatte Peter joined JNCASR, Bengaluru, in 2010 as a Ramanujan Fellow and has been an Associate Professor since 2017. He holds a PhD (2006) from Institut fiir Anorganische und Analytische Chemie and NRW Graduate School of Chemistry, Universitat Munster, Germany, and pursued his post- doctoral research under Prof. Yuri Grin at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, Germany and Prof. MG Kanatzidis at Northwestern University, USA. His research interests include fuel cells, water splitting and CO2 reduction. He has been selected as a young research investigator by ACS, RSC, IOP and MRSI, and is the recipient of the prestigious Swarnajayanti Fellowship (2017-2018) and CRSI Bronze Medal (2021). Apart from fundamental research, he is involved in translational research and is the Founder and Director of the start-up Breathe India Pvt. Ltd., which aims to convert CO2 into chemicals and fuels. The technology received the National Award (2021) from the Technology Development Board, DSTindia.
Session 1B - Symposium on "Catalysis for a sustainable society"
Catalyst designs in carbon recycling for sustainable energy
The two most imminent scientific and technological problems humanity faces now are energy and climate. Energy production and utilization in modern society is mostly based on the combustion of carbonaceous fuels like coal, petroleum and natural gas, which produces CO2, which alters the Earth's carbon cycle. 30 billion tons of CO2 per year are emitted globally as waste from carbonaceous fuel burning and the industrial sector, which, if converted to valuable chemicals, has the potential to change the world's economy. Both issues are being addressed by us in our lab, and a strong emphasis is placed on translating their innovative technologies from the lab to the industrial and commercial scale. Our recent discoveries of materials based on intermetallics, chalcogenides, oxides, organic-inorganic hybrids, etc., as efficient catalysts for converting CO2 to chemicals/fuels will be discussed in this talk. CO2 from industrial flue streams is captured and converted into value-added chemicals/fuels such as methanol, CO, methane, dimethyl ether, C2-C5 and C5-C 11 gasoline hydrocarbons. Catalyst design is at the heart of all these technologies; customized catalyst systems for targeted product conversions as per the needs of different industries have been developed by the team. Development of these catalysts via various methods, the driving force behind the enhancement in activity and the mechanistic pathways will be explained with the support of various in-situ (DRIFTS, IR, XAFS), ex-situ (XPS, XRD, IR, XAFS) and theoretical (DFT calculation) studies. The industrial viability of these catalysts will also be covered in the talk.