Environmental Protection Agency recognition

University of Delaware chemical and biomolecular engineer Dionisios Vlachos has received the United States Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) 2024 Green Chemistry Challenge Award in the academic category, for developing new, renewable-based technology to produce lubricant base oils from plant or food waste biomass instead of petroleum-based substances.

The EPA Green Chemistry Challenge Awards recognize "chemical technologies that incorporate the principles of green chemistry into chemical design, manufacture and use."

Lubricant base oils are used in many applications, including machinery and vehicles. In addition to using renewable feedstocks, the UD-developed process eliminates some hazardous chemical compounds, including corrosive acids, used in the traditional synthesis of these materials.

Vlachos, Unidel Dan Rich Chair in Energy and director of the Delaware Energy Institute, and his team were recognized by the U.S. EPA at a live awards ceremony on September 26, 2024, in New York City as part of Climate Week NYC.

Renewable energy research leader

Vlachos is internationally known as a leader in renewable energy research and catalysis. In his current role as director of the Delaware Energy Institute (DEI), Vlachos coordinates the efforts of over 20 affiliated researchers tackling research across a broad swath of clean energy solutions, industrial decarbonization, green manufacturing of chemicals, and plastics recycling.

As founding director of the Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation (CCEI), a U.S. Department of Energy-designated Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) at UD from 2009-2024, he led a research team from UD and nine U.S. partnering institutions in developing catalysts with the chemical muscle to convert wood chips, corn stover and other biomass into the sugars and oils for making fuel and useful chemicals.

One outgrowth of this work is the ability to make synthetic base oils from renewable feedstocks that would otherwise go to waste, providing a green alternative to crude oil products. Lubricant base oils make up about 75-90% of commercially formulated lubricants. These types of lubricants represent about a $160 billion market.

Renewable solutions for lubricant base oils with different properties is one small piece of addressing our environmental carbon footprint, Vlachos said. It's not just the materials used to put the chemistry together, either. It's also the processes used to create those chemistries and considering ways to make those processes more renewable so that they are less environmentally taxing.

Traditionally, lubricant base oils have been synthesized from petroleum-based materials. The new process uses bio-based feedstocks, and recent developments have allowed the researchers to use sugars as the starting point instead of fatty acids. Fatty acids can be used in the food chain or in biodiesel, so sugars are preferred as a synthetic feedstock to avoid ingredients that compete with renewable fuels and even fuel. The UD-developed method uses a solid catalyst, which reduces the amount needed and avoids hard reaction conditions of existing bio-based lubricant production.

Vlachos credited his many collaborators with having a hand in this work - colleagues, researchers and students, both inside and outside UD. Several current students continue to improve aspects of the technology.

Importantly, the technology started at UD in the Vlachos lab/CCEI was licensed in to RiKarbon, a sustainable carbon technologies company, based in Newark, Delaware. Today, RiKarbon is advancing the manufacturing of biolubricant base oil toward commercialization.

Closing the gaps

Over the next decade, Vlachos said green chemistry approaches will help researchers confront many problems and fuel a brighter future for our world. In his own work, this includes continued work on biorenewable lubricants but also efforts to improve plastics circularity, textile recycling and more ecofriendly pesticides, to name a few examples.

It is in these gap areas - between where society is and where it needs to go - that Vlachos thrives.

"I like to be in the gray … where we don't know what to do or how to do it. Take these lubricants. We had no idea how to make them, how they were going to work, but I see that as a challenge," said Vlachos. "You succeed once, then a second time, and then you develop this resilience. You fail, and this is okay, and you keep on working."

He pointed to new tools in artificial intelligence and robotics as advances with the potential to speed solutions along. Automation, for example, will enable researchers to screen methods or materials faster, reducing the timeline for scaling viable technologies for commercialization.

This speed is necessary, Vlachos said, because "We cannot wait for a century to fix a problem."

True progress also will involve thinking globally.

"These are huge scales for the scientific community to handle if we are to meet the demand of the future," said Vlachos. "There are still a lot of exciting things ahead to tackle."