ISCRE 21
21st International Symposium on Chemical Reaction Engineering
Sunday June 13th - Wednesday June 16th, 2010
Loews Philadelphia Hotel, Philadelphia, PA, USA
CRE: Addressing resource sustainability, environmental and life science challenges
Plenary Lecture
Sustainable RD&D
James Katzer
ExxonMobil (Retired); Iowa State University
A major theme today is sustainable development; this meeting is also focusing on sustainability. In sustainable development, many of the critical challenges revolve around: energy, resources, and environment. Success requires sustainable: resource-use strategies, processes, products, and services. Additionally, in the energy area the major challenges that we face are long term, massive in scale, and have high future uncertainty. Sustainable solutions must address these very issues and must: work now, work in the future, not put off addressing the problem, and not disadvantage future generations. These are tall challenges. Sustainability in RD&D faces many of these same challenges and must fit into a similar framework. CRE is an important component contributing to all aspects of RD&D. Sustainable RD&D supports both short-term and long-term needs, provides for a broad range of options, and continuously evolves to address progress made and shifts in future needs. It must provide society or a business with a portfolio of technology options; develop a science & technology base to support their application, to seed future discoveries, and to address uncertainty. This cannot be done at the individual level but must occur at the organizational level to be truly sustainable. Approaches to achieving this are discussed, and several examples of success and failure are drawn from the energy, transportation and semiconductor areas. The content will form a lead into the following plenary lectures, and the role of CRE will be highlighted wherever possible.