Scientists disrupted by Iberian blackout pitch ten principles for chemistry resilience

WHAT do you do when a severe blackout throws your scientific conference (and the whole Iberian peninsula) into turmoil? You use the experience to write a research paper about the ten principles needed for chemicals and chemistry resilience, of course.

“Ensuring resilience requires a combination of chemistry and process engineering,” says Martyn Poliakoff, chemistry professor at Nottingham University who has co-authored the paper along with the students who organised the disrupted conference. “We need chemists and engineers not only to work together but also to have a real dialogue to develop the new thinking to turn the vision of resilience into reality.”

The Portuguese Young Chemists Meeting in Faro on 28 April had to be abandoned as a power cut across Portugal and Spain, lasting for more than ten hours in some areas, threw everyday life into chaos. Without power, traffic lights went out, snarling up traffic. People in Madrid were trapped in the city’s subway. Food couldn’t be bought because ATMs and electronic card payment systems had gone dark. Fuel pumps were inoperable. People were stranded and unable to buy essential goods.

The power cuts spread disruption through industry and research too. Across the peninsula, chemicals manufacturing shut down, sensitive experiments at laboratories were interrupted and costly research infrastructure and ongoing reactions were compromised.

For the scientists assembled in Faro, the event posed an urgent and previously underexplored question: in the push for greater sustainability can an increasingly electrified and decentralised chemicals enterprise also be resilient?

Ten principles for resilience

“Engineers can facilitate the transition to a more resilient chemistry by developing inherently interruptible processes, using modular systems, and embedding resilience into design specifications from the outset,” says co-author Javier García-Martínez, former president of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). “These are practical examples of how engineers can lead the change based on the principles we propose.”

The co-authors have proposed ten principles for more resilient chemistry – with the first letter of each spelling out the word ‘resilience’.

In their paper, the authors outline in broad terms what is needed to better guard against disruption. This includes developing processes and products that rely on elements like iron and silicon that are plentiful and evenly distributed. And using flow reactors that bolster safety and efficiency.

“A resilient chemical industry must rely on a diversified portfolio of renewable feedstocks, not only to reduce dependency on fossil resources but also to safeguard against single-point failures,” they write. They highlight Braskem as a good example of this because the Brazilian chemical company’s process for producing bio-derived polyethylene can use sugar from various sources.

Chemists need to take a systems view of how their scaled-up process might be compromised by disruptions in power and water supply, natural disasters and climate change, and supply chain disruptions. They point to the importance of HAZOPs to identify hazards and the use of digital twins to model how a system responds to such disruption.

They call for processes to be designed to work in as wide a range of safe operating conditions as possible so that only the largest changes in conditions would force operations to cease.

“Designing chemical processes with interpretability in mind is a multidisciplinary challenge which should begin with the fundamental chemistry. Then, chemical engineering techniques such as modular or batch-based operations, integrated thermal management systems, and robust process controls can be implemented to significantly reduce vulnerability to disruptions in feedstock, utilities, or external supply chains,” they write.

“Moreover, digital twins, advanced process control, and predictive maintenance tools can help identify safe pause points and optimise restart protocols, making flexible operations more achievable.”

Elsewhere they say the next generation of the chemicals workforce should be trained to enable them to cross boundaries between disciplines, acquire skills through lifelong learning and take a more holistic approach to problem solving.

García-Martínez said: “We should not see resilience as a constraint, but as an opportunity to reimagine how chemistry can serve society under all conditions. The ‘resilience’ principles are an invitation to rethink our assumptions, redesign our systems, and re-educate ourselves for a world that is anything but predictable. We hope this piece will open doors to new conversations – and practical changes – in both academia and industry.”

In this video, Martyn Poliakoff, whose YouTube channel Periodic Videos has had more than 290 million views, shares his experience of the blackout and how it put his engineering skills to the test

The paper is published in Green Chemistry.