Australian success at the 2011 IChemE awards

The Australian flag was waving at this year’s IChemE awards held earlier this month in Birmingham, UK, with the Australian Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) winning the Sustainable technology award.  Other Australian entries to receive highly commended and runner-up status were Qenos (Water award) and John Zhu from the University of Queensland (Innovator of the year award)

Attending the ceremony to accept the award recognising CSIRO’s Magsonic process for handling magnesium was Leon Prentice.

Prentice said that magnesium is the lightest of all structural metals which makes it an attractive material.  However, magnesia requires a huge amount of energy and is labour intensive, environmentally harmful and uneconomic: “CSIRO’s Magsonic process promises a better way of producing magnesium, which it is highly energy efficient, cost effective and environmentally friendly. It will have significantly less environmental impact than the existing magnesium production process.

One of the biggest challenges is how to safely recover the highly explosive magnesium powder. That challenge led us to develop a new safety system based on explosion diversion," says Prentice.

Qenos was highly commended in the Water award category for its work on developing a sewerage solution at its Altona ethylene production facility that was threatened by drought.  Qenos identified and worked with a local sewerage plant to develop recycled water fit for purpose to supply 90% of the sites requirements. 

John Zhu from the University of Queensland was runner-up in the Innovator of the year award category for his work on direct carbon fuel cells that uses coal to directly produce electricity through fuel cell reaction, potentially doubling energy efficiency and halving CO2 emissions compared with the conventional coal-fired plant.  Zhu has also developed a novel catalyst to produce hydrogen from natural gas at near room temperature with zero CO2 emissions by selectively heating the catalyst with a microwave.