Sustainability
Sustainability
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences has gone to Avelino Corma, John F. Hartwig and Helmut Schwarz for fundamental advances in the field of catalysis that have made it possible, in the words of the awards committee, to “control and accelerate chemical reactions” and obtain products across multiple industrial processes”, thus “improving efficiency and reducing energy consumption.” Their work has had a profound impact on sectors such as pharmaceuticals, energy and food.
A simple accounting identity shows that greenhouse gas emissions that build up in the atmosphere and cause climate change evolve according to GDP and emissions intensity per unit of GDP. Global GDP grew by 114% between 2000 and 2022, while emissions intensity fell by 33%.
Neustark, founded just five years ago, has developed a technology that captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stores it within concrete, which is capable of retaining it for hundreds of thousands of years. This is a novel contribution to the fight againstclimate change.
The world is entering a new era of global competition, and cleantech manufacturing is at its heart. Reindustrialisation has brought industrial policy back into the mainstream, with China’s Made in China 2025 programme, and the American Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) investing billions of public funds to capture a share of a global market likely to reach $650 billion by 2030.
For Ismael Olmedo, CEO of Captoplastic, seeing clean, vibrant waterways is priceless —a value he cherishes more with age. He finds his company’s work particularly gratifying; they have developed technology to capture microplastics as small as one micron (0.001 mm), which are otherwise elusive and harmful to nature and health. We spoke with Olmedo to learn how this technology cancleanse ecosystems of these tiny pollutants and protect the environment.
Sustainability inevitably means replacing fossil fuels —the main cause of global warming— with cleaner alternatives in terms of greenhouse gases. In this endless search for cleaner energy sources, green hydrogen emerges as a promising option, yet it remains far from decarbonizing sectors difficult to electrify, such as industry or heavy transport.
The global energy sector has been through extremely turbulent times in recent years. Many consumers around the world are feeling the bruises from high and volatile fossil fuel prices, especially for natural gas, which led to major pressures on the cost of living.
Fusing the nuclei within atoms could offer humanity a clean and virtually boundless energysource, although various technical and economic challenges must first be overcome.