Development of clean energy and environmental technologies to address humanity’s top problems

Abstract

This special issue on clean energy and environmental technologies aims at providing a forum for researchers who are working on relevant areas to exchange ideas driving innovation and report their latest research outcomes in developing clean energy and environmental technologies. A few years ago, Nobel Laureate Richard E. Smalley outlined Humanity’s Top Ten Problems for the next fifty years, in a talk given for the Enterprise Forum at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Energy was listed as the first of the top ten problems and the environment as the fourth. Actually energy is the most basic requirement for economic development and people’s livelihoods while this requirement is constantly increasing, particularly in economically rapidly developing countries like China. Supply of energy still mainly relies on fossil fuels such as coal, petroleum, and natural gas around the world. However reserves for fossil fuels are limited and producing energy from these fossil fuels with existing technologies has caused serious environmental problems, e.g., increasing greenhouse gases emission which exacerbates global warming. Resolutions to these global problems lie in the innovative technologies to produce energy in a clean and environmentally friendly manner. Both developing renewable energy and using energy more efficiently are major components of clean energy and environmental technologies. Development of clean energy and environmental technologies has been thought of as two of the most active research fields today. This special issue includes 12 papers consisting of research and review articles selected from different research institutions in Australia, China and Indonesia. They contain a wide range of the hottest research topics in clean energy and environmental technologies, including development of the innovative catalysts used for clean energy and environmental processes, studies on hydrogen production and storage, CO2 capture and syngas clean technology as well as other research in energy efficiency, coal seam gas recovery and environmental economics. These research and/or review articles, which although do not cover the full scope of studies in energy and environment due to page limitations , can still provide readers with brief track references to facilitate the development of new clean energy and environmental technologies. This special issue was organized as per instructions of the Editors Dr. Fei Yuan, Prof. Yaodong Huang, and Prof. Yanni Li. We have received invaluable help from colleagues working with or having worked with clean energy and environmental research, especially Prof. Edward White, Prof. Duong Do, Dr. Greg Birkett and Dr. Fu-Yang Wang in School of Chemical Engineering, the University of Queensland. They provided careful peer-reviews on the selected papers with many useful comments and suggestions for authors to enhance the quality of the papers. It would be impossible to publish this special issue without the help of these peer-reviewers. Finally, as the Guest Editor, I would like to thank all the people—all the authors and co-authors and reviewers for their contributions to this special issue, and editors of the Frontiers of Chemical Science and Engineering for their scientific input and consistent support.