Abstract
Fossil fuels—coal, oil and gas—supply most of the world’s energy and also form the basis of many products essential for everyday life. Their use is the largest contributor to the carbon dioxide emissions that drive global climate change, prompting joint efforts to find renewable alternatives that might enable a carbon-neutral society by as early as 2050. There are clear paths for renewable electricity to replace fossil-fuel-based energy, but the transport fuels and chemicals produced in oil refineries will still be needed. We can attempt to close the carbon cycle associated with their use by electrifying refinery processes and by changing the raw materials that go into a refinery from fossils fuels to carbon dioxide for making hydrocarbon fuels and to agricultural and municipal waste for making chemicals and polymers. We argue that, with sufficient long-term commitment and support, the science and technology for such a completely fossil-free refinery, delivering the products required after 2050 (less fuels, more chemicals), could be developed. This future refinery will require substantially larger areas and greater mineral resources than is the case at present and critically depends on the capacity to generate large amounts of renewable energy for hydrogen production and carbon dioxide capture.
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Acknowledgements
B.M.W. acknowledges financial support from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) in the frame of a Gravitation Programme MCEC (Netherlands Center for Multiscale Catalytic Energy Conversion; www.mcec-researchcenter.nl), as well as from the Advanced Research Center (ARC) Chemical Building Blocks Consortium (CBBC), a public–private research consortium in the Netherlands (www.arc-cbbc.nl). We acknowledge the help of G.-J. Kramer at Utrecht University (UU), the Netherlands, and C. Vogt at Technion, Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, for valuable discussions. T. Hartman (UU) is acknowledged for help with the figures.
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Vogt, E.T.C., Weckhuysen, B.M. The refinery of the future. Nature 629, 295–306 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07322-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07322-2
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