Swansea University
After having gained his BSc and PhD degrees from Imperial College (London) and performing post-doctoral research at the University of Texas at Austin, Barron spent eight years as a Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University before moving to Rice University in 1995 where he is the Welch Chair of Chemistry and Professor of Nanoengineering and Materials Science. In 2014 he was appointed the Sêr Cymru Chair of Low Carbon Energy and Environment at Swansea University, and founded the Energy Safety Research Institute, where he is the Director.
He is the author of over 530 publications, 40 Patents, 10 books, and has graduated 30 PhD students. His early research focused on the chemistry of aluminum and related elements and spanned catalysis, electronic materials and nanotechnology. His current research involves the application of chemistry, nanotechnology and materials science to fundamental problems in energy, the environment and health.
Prof. Barron is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the recipient of several awards, including: Star of Asia International Award, the Hümboldt Senior Scientist Research Award, the Corday Morgan Medal, the Meldola Medal, and the first Welch Foundation Norman Hackerman Award. In 2009 Barron was appointed as the Prince of Wales Visiting Innovator. In 2011 he won both the Lifetime Achievement Award in Nanotechnology and the World Technology Award (in Materials).
Barron is the co-founder of several companies over a diverse range of industries. His latest commercialization ventures are technologies for water purification of produced water and an anti-viral mask for the COVID crisis.
In addition to teaching in chemistry and materials science, Prof. Barron created the first educational programs at Rice University to span the schools of Science, Engineering and Management. For relaxation Barron races cars, as both an amateur and professional, on both sides of the Atlantic.
Role of CSS in Low-Carbon Economy
A disruptive innovation to enable the economic capture, separation, sequestration, and valorisation of carbon dioxide. In the short-term, climate change cannot be addressed exclusively by reductions in CO2 emissions. We urgently need to reduce the amount of CO2 already in the atmosphere to limit global temperature increases to “well below 2 degrees.” Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage (CCUS) must play a central role to meet its legally binding commitments as part of the Paris Agreement. Despite this recognition of its vital role, CCUS has not, to date, been deployed at scale. Reasons cited for this have included the high costs and risks associated with large-scale projects and the perceived lack technological breakthrough in reducing these costs. It should be noted that capturing CO2 is straightforward, but what we do with it once captured is difficult. Dissolving it in water is inefficient and pumping it into disused oil and gas wells has proven technically impossible because the concrete used to plug the wells degrades over time, causing the CO2 to leak. Our solution uses the shale rock basins that exist all over the world to trap CO2 permanently. We propose to fracture the rock, prop open the fractures with designed glass beads, extract the natural gasses (which can be used of course), pump CO2 into the void, and then dissolve the glass beads, trapping the CO2 in the rock. For every CO2 molecule we extract in the form of natural gas, we will be able to trap up to three in the rock. The cost of sequestering the CO2 would be more than offset by the revenue of the natural gas that would be extracted from the rock as part of the process. A key to being able to accomplish this CCS is that traditional hydraulic fracturing (fracking) cannot be used since water degrades the shale and lowers the amount of CO2 that can be sequestered. Instead, a waterless process was developed by ESRI and successfully trialled in the US. The added benefit of this approach is that no chemical additives are used, and no wastewater is produced. This means that shale gas extraction through non-water stimulation can be developed in an economically viable way that actively reduces the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Swansea University