2023 Raymond G. Thorpe Lecture

From Ice to Fire – Using Chemical Engineering Science to Explore Sustainable Water, Energy, And Food Applications.

Many of the environmental, social and economic challenges we face today are connected to how we provide food, energy and water.  To ensure a sustainable future, cleaner, lower carbon intensity methods of providing food, energy and water must be accessible, affordable and deployable at scale.  While well intended, often the solutions that are currently being implemented fall short of meeting these goals.  They frequently have unintended environmental or health consequences because they are not sufficiently integrated into a system using a full life cycle approach.  This presentation highlights my personal journey from Cornell to MIT to Los Alamos and back to Cornell to explore more sustainable approaches for treating toxic chemical wastes, to produce scalable, carbon-neutral energy from geothermal resources and from food and agricultural wastes.  My experimental and theoretical research projects have dealt with transformative processes in aqueous media over a wide range of temperature, pressure and density conditions from near water’s ice point (0^oC,1 bar) to its supercritical region at temperatures (>500^oC, >350 bar).  All of this work has relied heavily on connecting fundamentals in thermodynamics, reaction chemistry, and transport, beginning with my introduction to chemical engineering by Professor Ray Thorpe when I was an undergraduate at Cornell in the 1960s.