The efficient and environmentally sustainable generation of energy is the most pressing challenge for European science and technology in the 21st century. The increasing environmental awareness of European societies, together with depletion of easily accessible fossil fuels and geostrategic considerations, calls for a paradigm shift away from large-scale technologies that deploy limited reserves and generate huge amounts of waste. Renewable energy sources, such as biomass and solar or wind energy, are the only viable long-term alternative for an infrastructure based on the concepts of recycling and the distributed generation, storage and use of energy.
The large-scale implementation of renewable energy sources necessitates the introduction of technology that can deal with the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources and their restricted predictability. These technical problems can be successfully mitigated through electrochemical technologies. While electricity is traditionally stored in electrochemical devices such as supercapacitors and batteries, large-scale implementation of renewable electricity will require to extend the existing energy storage technologies by the (photo-)electrochemical conversion to fuels and other chemicals, such as hydrogen obtained from water splitting, or small organic molecules obtained through electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction.
The scientific objectives of ELCOREL are: (1) to deploy a systematic theoretical description of electrocatalysis by means of quantum chemical calculations to gain fundamental insight into the rational design of electrocatalysts for water oxidation and CO2 reduction; (2) to implement advanced techniques of material synthesis to prepare novel nano-particulate catalysts for multiple electron redox reactions meeting the predictions of the rational computational design; (3) to investigate the dynamics of nanostructured metal and metal-oxide interfaces in the electrocatalytic processes using state-of-the-art electrochemical and spectroscopic techniques and (4) to engineer the knowledge and materials developed under (1)-(3) into working electrochemical applications which meet the cost and scale requirements of the industrial partners, and (5) to transfer the knowledge to the public so that the society can discuss the best options for the implementation of the Paris agreement to reshape the society based on carbon energy into the one based on renewable energy sources.
