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Good chemistry: Carl Mesters’ life of fast reactions

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When the Nobel Committee awarded its 2007 medals, the Peace Prize winners — Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — stole the limelight. For Carl Mesters, however, it was another award winner who stood out.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Gerhard Ertl, professor emeritus at Berlin’s Fritz-Haber Institute, for his lifelong study of catalysis and pioneering work on reactions between chemicals and solid surfaces. Ertl’s many achievements include deepening the understanding of why the ozone layer is vanishing, and helping to develop catalytic converters to clean up exhaust emissions from cars. “The prize recognises a field of chemistry that often receives little public attention, yet has transformed lives in so many ways,” observed Catherine Hunt, President of the American Chemical Society.

For Mesters, Shell Chief Scientist Chemistry and Catalysis, the award was especially meaningful. Like Ertl, Mesters has devoted his career to the understanding and development of catalysts. And Ertl’s work has underpinned some of the major advances in catalysis at Shell in recent years.

The ability of catalysts to speed up chemical reactions is essential to almost all industrial processes. Typically less than one centimetre long and only a few millimetres in diameter, thousands can fit into a small jar. Yet they are at the centre of solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing society: in particular, tackling pollution and increasing energy efficiency — which in turn can reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Catalysts help turn hydrocarbons into useful products, and at increasingly faster rates. They enable the commercial-scale production of countless day-to-day items — detergents such as soaps and shampoo, plastics, pharmaceuticals and fertilisers — and less polluting transport fuels. They can be crucial to the success of multi-billion dollar energy and petrochemicals projects.

Their importance is growing, too. With the end of easy-to-access oil, the need to explore new resources to meet the world’s mounting demand for energy is increasing. New oil and gas fields, however, often pose challenges. They can be rich in sulphur, for example, while tighter regulations against traffic pollution mean transport fuel must now contain less sulphur. Environmental concerns are also forcing the reduction of noxious emissions from refineries, chemicals plants and power plants. These include sulphur dioxide that causes acid rain, which pollutes lakes and forests. Catalysts are critical to meeting these challenges.

Inspiration and passion

Mesters clearly relishes his role as one of seven chief scientists at Shell. He prefers the laboratory to the office. He especially enjoys the ambassadorial aspect of the job — talking to university students and fellow professionals about his work and the challenges the energy industry faces. Known for refusing to wear ties and his reluctance to wear a suit, even when presenting his work to an industry conference, he believes in encouraging originality and the unconventional approach. His restless energy and enthusiasm motivate his colleagues, says Herman Kuipers, Regional Manager Innovation and Research for Shell Global Solutions. “I’ve had many healthy scientific fights with him over the years because catalysis is extremely complex and he is full of ideas. Carl inspires his colleagues — and is inspired.”

As a small boy growing up in the Netherlands, Mesters had no doubt about what he wanted to be. Where some boys might collect toy cars, he preferred experimenting with chemicals. He liked watching how they reacted when mixed. He concocted exotic mixtures in the garage of his home using chemicals bought at a pharmacy, or supplied by his father, a maintenance technician at a chemicals plant. His parents encouraged his interest — though they sometimes worried about the strange smells coming from the garage and waited for the bang. “If I made the same mixtures now, I’d have to file an incident report,” he says.

Today Mesters is a leading authority on catalysts with more than 50 patents to his name. As he explains the intricate workings of these miniscule objects, his passion and enthusiasm shine through. A catalyst is a unique mix of metal — cobalt or copper, for example — anchored on a ceramic base and coated with a special blend of chemicals. It contains many pores invisible to the naked eye, each carrying this composition.

Mesters describes how the catalyst accelerates reactions by breaking up and reforming chains of atoms to build the molecules needed for a particular product, converting solids to liquids or gas, or gas to liquids, for example. As the reactions happen at surface level, the more surface area there is, the more effective the catalyst. So a small jar of catalysts — like the one Mesters waves around as he speaks in his third-floor office in Amsterdam — can have the total surface area of a soccer pitch.

Now 51, Mesters developed a fascination for catalysis at Utrecht University, where he graduated in physical chemistry. He went on to complete a PhD under the guidance of John Geus, who was the university’s Professor of Inorganic Chemistry and Catalysis. Geus, who today works as a consultant for Shell and still lectures, recalls that Mesters stood out even as a student. “He was very enthusiastic and innovative. Unlike many of the other students, he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind and express his ideas. And he had plenty of those.”

After his PhD Mesters needed a job. His first interview with Shell did not go well, he thought. But he was invited back for a second. Most people would avoid awkward questions in such circumstances, but he asked why Shell was one of several international oil companies then operating in apartheid South Africa. To his surprise, he found his interviewer prepared to engage in a frank discussion. Moreover, he got the job, and in 1984 started work in a research department in Amsterdam specialising in catalysis.

Making strides

The team Mesters joined at Shell was dynamic and pioneering. The oil crises of the 1970s created a need to explore ways of producing fuels from other sources, such as coal. Mesters could apply his skills to basic research in catalysis. Within a couple of months, says Geus, Mesters had produced a new copper-based catalyst for converting coal to synthetic petrol. (Shell later dropped the idea in favour of producing diesel, but Mesters still keeps a jar of the petrol he helped produce.) Later he spent two years at Shell’s research laboratories in Houston, Texas, where he improved catalysts used to produce ethylene oxide, an essential building block for synthetic fabric, plastic bottles and anti-freeze. He also developed a new catalyst to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions from Shell chemicals plants. Geus says Mesters earned a reputation for innovation across the industry.

Mesters returned to Amsterdam in 1991. As the oil price fell during the following years, investment in research also dropped. When oil prices recovered, funding for research revived - a timely boost for Mesters, who sees the continued development of better catalysts as critical to the energy industry’s response to the challenges ahead.

“Shell’s future is in the difficult stuff,” he says. “The easy things everyone can do.” For example, the heavy tar-like crude, or bitumen, from Canada’s oil sands contains 6% sulphur, compared to North Sea oil’s 1%. Yet to comply with emissions regulations, diesel produced from the bitumen must contain no more than 10 parts per million sulphur. “That’s a few orders of magnitude of change, and it’s all done by catalysts in a reactor.”

New gas fields, he adds, also contain increasing amounts of highly-toxic hydrogen sulphide. Again, catalysts are crucial to dealing with this.

Indeed, if it were not for the increased efficiency and production rate advanced catalysts make possible, many energy projects would not be so commercially viable. For example, oil sands bitumen can be more economically converted into high-value light petroleum products because of new catalysts developed within CRI, Shell’s commercial catalyst company.

A new catalyst was also central to Shell’s plans to build a massive gas to liquids (GTL) project in Qatar called Pearl GTL, which will produce synthetic diesel and other products from natural gas. Mesters was part of the team that developed an advanced catalyst which doubles the output of the catalysts already in use at Shell’s first commercial-scale GTL plant at Bintulu, Malaysia. That meant that Shell and its partner in the Pearl project, Qatar Petroleum, could plan a plant capable of producing 140,000 barrels of GTL products a day — compared to Bintulu’s daily output of 14,700 barrels of products — making it by far the biggest GTL plant in the world when it starts operations around the end of the decade.

In these advances and many others, Mesters says he has benefited from Gerhard Ertl’s work to develop greater understanding of the way molecules react at the surface under varying temperatures and pressures.

Solutions

Despite the world’s rapidly rising energy demand and growing concerns over climate change, Mesters remains optimistic. He believes solutions are possible. For instance, one idea he has explored would involve causing a reaction between carbon dioxide (CO2) from power plants and refineries and a commonly-found mineral, iron-magnesium silicate, to form a carbonate. With the right temperature, pressure and other conditions the process takes just a few hours or even minutes. Mesters believes that in some circumstances it could offer a partial solution to rising CO2 levels.

Mesters is known for his impatience, but when it comes to seeing ideas through, he’s prepared to wait. His track record is evidence of what he calls “healthy technology”: the ability to start with an idea and then pursue it through the development chain to commercial reality. He has a confidence in both his talent for invention and his deep knowledge of the fundamental chemistry and physics underlying catalysis, qualities he shares with Ertl.

“Considering the huge increase in energy demand the world faces and the environmental challenges involved, I have no hard basis for feeling optimistic about the future,” Mesters admits. “I simply believe we have to be inventive enough to find solutions, and we will.”

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