Role of chemical reaction engineering for sustainable growth: One industrial perspective from India

Chemical reaction engineering (CRE) is vital to solve many of the pressing societal challenges—energy and energy transition, materials, food, mobility, and so forth, to meet the aspirational goals of developing country population in the face of climate change, changing demographics, and geopolitical challenges. Application of the core principles of CRE to the emerging societal challenges is creating new technologies and cost‐effective solutions by integrating the widely varied CRE activities into broad, powerful, systems descriptions with the help of interdisciplinary teams with broad expertise including chemistry, catalysis, chemical kinetics, transport phenomena, biology, applied mathematics and modeling, emerging data science technologies to design and optimize chemical/biochemical reactors. Such developments will be critical for CRE to play an important role in the emerging fourth industrial revolution—amalgamation of physical, digital, and biological worlds, where the velocity of disruption and acceleration of innovation are hard to comprehend or anticipate and such broadening of CRE discipline will be critical for the field to remain agile and relevant. This article describes some latest technical advances in Reliance Industries Ltd. using this philosophy to help achieve sustainable growth and Net Zero business targets. We will broadly discuss renewable hydrogen from novel biomass catalytic gasification, multizone catalytic cracking process to convert crude oil and low value hydrocarbon streams to petrochemical building blocks, an adsorption/desorption process for CO2 concentration and monetization from industrial flue gases. Furthermore, biotechnology advances in leveraging photosynthesis kinetics, synthetic biology, and genetic modifications for converting solar energy and carbon dioxide through algae production will be discussed to produce proteins, biomaterials, renewable biocrude, and so forth. We will also discuss new catalytic technologies to convert mixed plastic waste to stable oil and organic waste such as agri and municipal solid waste, and so forth, to biocrude for circular economy, and biodegradable plastics production to manage plastics pollution.