Reviews & Analysis

Decarbonizing the steel industry is crucial but challenging. Now, an enzymatic method is introduced for converting carbon monoxide from industrial off-gases into formate, offering a path towards carbon-neutral steel production. The enzymatic process achieves high selectivity, and operation of a 10-liter-scale reactor with real industrial emissions indicates its scalability and practical applicability.

Accurately modeling CO₂ electroreduction is key to advancing the technology and understanding its productivity and CO₂ utilization trends. Now, Marcus–Hush–Chidsey theory offers accurate predictions of experimental results, leading to further insights beyond reaction kinetics.

Transitioning to more sustainable chemicals will require the challenging replacement of fossil resources with renewable carbon and energy sources in their production. Now, integrating industrial sectors offers an interim solution to mitigate emissions in the chemical industry until technologies for closing the carbon loop can be deployed at scale.

The carbon footprints of petrochemicals have large uncertainties, challenging decarbonization efforts. Now, a study identifies the main uncertainty sources and strategies for improving the accuracy of greenhouse gas emissions estimations and reporting for petrochemicals.

Liquid–liquid extraction is an indirect separation technique requiring solvent regeneration, and if a back-extraction is needed, it typically reduces the concentration. Now, using an electrochemical reaction, the concentration can be pumped up to 16 times the feed concentration.

Electric fields offer an easy means to manipulate liquid metal droplets. Now, directed droplet transfer between immersed electrodes is achieved in an alkaline electrolyte without electrical short circuit.

Properly maintaining the skin temperature is critical for wound healing, especially outdoors. Now, a lightweight and skin-friendly wound dressing is reported that can continuously cool the skin without energy input.

Conventional linearly responsive methods for quantifying host–guest complexation in supramolecular chemistry have a fairly narrow dynamic range. Now, a logarithmically responsive electrochemical method promises to facilitate the measurement of complex equilibria over a larger dynamic range in host–guest systems.

A self-driving lab, called Fast-Cat, is developed for the rapid, autonomous Pareto-front mapping of homogeneous catalysts in high-pressure, high-temperature gas–liquid reactions. The efficacy of Fast-Cat was demonstrated in performing Pareto-front mappings of phosphorus-based ligands for the hydroformylation of olefins.

Water management is crucial for enhancing economic viability and minimizing the environmental impact of direct air capture (DAC) technologies, but the high energy intensity necessitates heat recovery techniques. This Perspective discusses several front-end and back-end strategies for coupling water management with heat integration in DAC processes.

Fine chemical production mostly relies on petroleum-based chemical synthesis. Now, a process is established to produce benzyl acetate, the main fragrance molecule in jasmine scent, from renewable sugars with engineered bacteria.

Directing CO₂ electroreduction toward a single C₂ product poses challenges because the reaction mechanism is unclear. Now, oxygen affinity is identified as a potential key descriptor to manipulate the selectivity of ethylene versus ethanol.

Designing liquid devices with liquid pathways that can be reconfigured on-demand is important to many chemical and biological applications. Now, a facile approach enables reconfigurable liquid devices through precisely arranged connected liquid droplets that can be rapidly assembled and disassembled.

We asked a group of chemical engineering educators with a broad set of research interests to reimagine the undergraduate curriculum, highlighting both current strengths and areas of needed development.

Tandem catalysis and tandem reactors provide unique opportunities for sustainably converting CO₂ into valuable products that are not accessible by traditional catalytic processes. This Perspective discusses progress in and opportunities for developing tandem catalytic process that involve various combinations of thermocatalysis, electrocatalysis, photocatalysis, plasma catalysis and biocatalysis.

Fibers featuring anisotropic structures for liquid transport are often limited to specific liquids and are impractical for large-scale manufacturing. Now, a microfluidic fabrication technique produces continuous hemline-shaped microfibers with improved liquid transport properties and tunable flexibility.

Removing trace alkyne contaminants in crude ethylene is challenging by traditional catalytic hydrogenation. Now, adsorptive separation through advanced materials design selectively sequesters alkynes in a single-step pathway to produce high-purity ethylene from complex mixtures.

Lignin contains both C–O and C–C bonds, where C–C bonds are highly resistant to cleavage. Now, a bifunctional catalyst enables the cleavage of the challenging C–C bonds in lignin to produce biofuels.