Tag: CO2 storage

ISGTCO2: A Grand Success

Posted on by Anna Knudsen

The inaugural International Symposium on Green Transformation of Carbon Dioxide (ISGTCO2) was a grand success, with over 170 delegates from around the world gathering in Brisbane, Australia, from 28 November to 1 December 2023.

The symposium aimed to inspire and advance research collaboration on using carbon dioxide as a resource and developing solutions to accelerate the progress toward net-zero targets. With the theme, “Cooperating on a global opportunity,” the symposium embodied the spirit of GETCO2 as an international, multi-institutional, inter-disciplinary, and highly collaborative ARC Centre of Excellence.

Over three days, ISGTCO2 covered 100 presentations across three concurrent streams. The topics spanned across CO2 capture, CO2 reduction technology landscape, catalysts, membrane electrolysis, system simulation, advanced characterisation, and carbon bonds. In between the highly technical discussions and presentations, there was also time to network, attend a gala dinner at the beautiful Customs House on the Brisbane River – and an opportunity to meet some local Australian wildlife!

The feedback from delegates was overwhelmingly positive and confirmed the importance of bringing experts together from across the world to share their insights and join forces in the journey towards a sustainable future.

Now it is time to GETCO2!

Symposium stats:

  • 171 delegates from 10 countries
  • 36 female delegates
  • 100 presentations
  • 1 wombat, 1 owl and 3 reptiles (representing the local wild Australians)

Symposium Plenary speakers:

Symposium award winners:

Congratulations to:

  • Dae-Hyun Nam, Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) – winner of the Shimadzu Best Presentation Award, sponsored by Shimadzu Corporation
  • Yu Yang, the University of Sydney – winner of the Best Student Presentation Award, sponsored by Elsevier Materials Today Chemistry
  • Ahmad Zhafran Md Azmi, University of New South Wales – winner of the Best Student Presentation Award, sponsored by Elsevier Materials TodayChemistry
  • Aoni Xu, Technical University of Denmark– winner of the PerkinElmer Outstanding Young Researcher Award, sponsored by PerkinElmer
  • Timothy Duignan, Griffith University – winner of the Wiley Outstanding Young Researcher Award, sponsored by Wiley

Symposium sponsors:

A big thanks to our sponsors for their support:

Program booklet and more info:

For more information about ISGTCO2 2023 please visit the Symposium website and check the program booklet.

Fast-tracking CO2 capture technologies with Machine Learning

Posted on by Anna Knudsen

Carbon capture and storage technologies play a crucial role in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. One of the challenges is the search for the best material to store CO2 in the most efficient and inexpensive way.

GETCO2’s Associate Investigator Dr Babarao and his team at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in collaboration with Dr Aaron Thornton from CSIRO have looked at a new class of materials called Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) to capture CO2.

You can design these nano-materials in infinite ways, by tuning the shape and composition of the structures. However, optimisation can quickly become costly, both in terms of materials used and computational requirements in simulations. This calls for cheaper and faster methods of evaluating the growing list of candidates.

Tuning the building blocks

Using Machine Learning the research team has managed to dramatically reduce the time it takes to evaluate the materials and find the best candidates. One of the building blocks in the machine learning model is a descriptor that predicts which materials are best suited for CO2 capture. Dr Babaro’s team has developed a new descriptor, that significantly outperforms others, being hundreds of thousands of times faster. They call it the “Effective Point Charge (EPoCh)” descriptor.

The team aims to use this fast method to find suitable materials for CO2 capture and storage that the experimentalist can test and then scale up for commercial use.

This work is funded by the CSIRO Permanent Carbon Locking Future Science Platform and is recently published in Nature Communications Chemistry journal.

Meet the experts at ISGTCO2 29 in Brisbane this November

You can learn more about the research and meet Dr Ravichandar who will present at the International Symposium on Green Transformation of Carbon Dioxide.

For more information, please visit the ISGTCO2 symposium website.

Image:
From left: Supervisor Dr Aaron Thornton and Team Leader Dr Cara Doherty from CSIRO, Dr Ravichandar Babarao from RMIT and Director of CarbonLock FSP Dr Andrew Lenton from CSIRO.