The 63rd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, dedicated to chemistry, has just ended. 34 Nobel Laureates met more than 600 outstanding young researchers from all over the world in Lindau. They all exchanged knowledge and ideas, shared their enthusiasm for science and established new contacts. The scientific program, dedicated to the Nobel Prize discipline of chemistry, comprised lectures, discussion sessions, master classes and panel discussions. Among the main topics of the 2013 Lindau Meeting were Green Chemistry, chemical energy storage and conversion as well as biochemical processes and structures.

Green chemistry, originated from 1990’s and also known as sustainable chemistry, is the design of chemical products and processes that reduce or eliminate the use or generation of hazardous substances. Green chemistry applies across the life cycle of a chemical product, including its design, manufacture, and use. Green chemistry is increasingly seen as a powerful tool that researchers must use to evaluate the environmental impact of nanotechnology. As nanomaterials are developed, the environmental and human health impacts of both the products themselves and the processes to make them must be considered to ensure their long-term economic viability. The concept of green pharmacy was developed recently based on similar principles.

In this meeting, Robert Grubbs, shared the 2005 chemistry prize with fellow American Richard Schrock and Yves Chauvin of France for ‘the development of the metathesis method in organic synthesis’, gave a talk entitled “Green Chemistry and Catalysis” and demonstrated catalytic processes provide green routes to many old and new chemicals and open new sources of carbon. The conversion of bio-renewable sources of carbon into known chemical intermediates or new materials will often require the removal of functionality (or reduction) since most bio-renewable sources of carbon are over oxidized. This will require new catalytic process to replace those that have been developed using petroleum as a carbon source that are focused on the introduction of functionality instead of its removal. Of the readily available bio-renewable carbon sources, seed oils are the most reduced materials. Since the fatty acids in these systems are mostly unsaturated, they are easy to modify. The cleavage of the double bond by the use of olefin metathesis catalysts results in a hydrocarbon and a functional olefin. The hydrocarbon can be utilized as a fuel or normal petrochemical and the functionalized part can be utilized as a chemical intermediate. This process is now being developed on a significant scale.

In addition to excellent lectures, some useful discussions had also been held by the Lindau Nobel Laureates as Walter Kohn, Hartmut Michel, etc for topics of “Chemical Energy Storage and Conversion”. Alternative physical energy conversion techniques, for example based on hydrodynamic power, wind-propelled generators and photovoltaic devices, are increasingly used to generate electricity, but suitable techniques to directly obtain large quantities of fuels in a renewable way, e.g. to replace gasoline and diesel, are still lacking. Here the exploitation of solar energy has enormous potential. The problem is developing technologies that allow this energy source to be efficiently captured and converted not only to heat or electricity but stored in form of chemical fuels. Chemical bonds are the best way to store energy – by far superior to batteries and mechanical devices. The efficient production of a clean storable “solar fuel” would therefore represent a very important breakthrough in the chemical sciences. Such a fuel must be made from abundant, inexpensive, non-toxic materials such as water, which could be split by light into molecular oxygen and hydrogen (“artificial photosynthesis”). Molecular hydrogen is considered the ideal primary fuel of the future, since its combustion yields only water as waste product. Furthermore it can be converted to many other important energy-rich materials (e.g. with CO2 to methane, methanol, hydrocarbons) for further storage and transport. These compounds also have uses in other industrial sectors.