Summary
Chemical engineering is the engineering of systems—at scales ranging from the molecular to the macroscopic—that integrate chemical, physical, and biological elements to design processes and produce materials and products for the benefit of society. Chemical transformations are at the heart of the technologies that enable modern society, and the work of chemical engineers has affected societies and individual lives around the world. Without synthetic fertilizers made with chemical engineering processes, for example, a Green Revolution to feed the world would not have been possible. Without the invention of Ziegler-Natta catalysts, polyolefins would not exist, and the myriad benefits of plastics would not have been realized. Without the invention of tough, stable polymers such as Teflon® and Kevlar®, the commercial and medical devices made from those polymers would not have emerged. Without the contributions of many chemical engineers, the silicon chips, glass materials, and plastics that make up today’s ubiquitous electronic devices would not have been developed. And without an army of chemical engineers, there would be no oil and gas industry to power the world and no pharmaceutical industry to discover and produce the medicines, therapeutics, and vaccines needed for a long and healthy life. More recently, chemical engineers have contributed to the tools of directed evolution, which has allowed for the engineering of improved function in proteins, metabolic pathways, and genomes.
Unfortunately, the discoveries of chemical engineers have also been responsible for the production of chemicals that will persist in the environment indefinitely, greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change, plastic materials that accumulate in landfills and the oceans, and the chemicals of war that have inflicted long-term or permanent damage on humans and the environment. Thus the field of chemical engineering today faces opportunities and challenges not only to innovate for the future, but also to innovate in ways that repair the unintended consequences of the past.
Chemical engineering is a discipline and a profession that evolved from the roots of industrial and applied chemistry, which in turn emerged from such ancient chemical processes as fermentation and leather tanning. Its academic legacy traces back to the late 1880s, when steam engines still powered the world, and internal combustion was a nascent idea. The world has of course changed since then, and continues to do so at a rapid rate, as illustrated by the pace at which technology is disrupting established practices and organizations. Yet the core chemical engineering curriculum has evolved more slowly over the preceding decades, even as the challenges facing engineers have expanded and become more difficult.
At its most fundamental level, engineering is about solving problems, and it is natural to expect that as one problem is solved, another will emerge or grow in importance. The last time the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine surveyed the challenges and opportunities for chemical engineering—in the 1988 report Frontiers in Chemical Engineering: Research Needs and Opportunities, better known as the “Amundson Report”—the conclusions of that study suggested an approach to developing
new technologies and maintaining leadership in established ones. Given that the pace of change has only increased since the 1980s, and in the face of a rapidly evolving landscape for higher education in general, a fresh look at what new challenges and opportunities lie ahead for both the discipline and the profession of chemical engineering could not be more timely.
Challenges faced today include not only addressing climate change and the energy transition, but also reducing raw material usage and increasing recycling to move from a linear to a circular economy, generating and distributing food worldwide while conserving water and other resources, and creating and scaling the manufacture and distribution of new medicines and therapies. Across all these applications, chemical engineers have opportunities to address today’s most important problems by collaborating with multiple disciplines and engaging systems-level thinking. To leverage these opportunities, now and in the coming decades, chemical engineering will need to define and pursue new directions. To this end, this report details a vision for the future of chemical engineering research, innovation, and education.
To provide a framework for discussion in this report, the study committee examined the role of chemical engineering in addressing key challenges that face society. While several organizations have outlined grand challenges in various areas, this report focuses on the areas of energy and the energy transition; water, food, and air; health and medicine; manufacturing and the circular economy; and materials. Also included is a discussion of tools and techniques with the potential to enable future advances across all of these areas. In addition, the report examines the current state of chemical engineering education and the need for innovation to ensure that the next generation of chemical engineers is equipped to address the challenges that lie ahead. Observations on U.S. international leadership in chemical engineering are provided as well.
DECARBONIZATION OF ENERGY SYSTEMS
Mitigation of climate change is one of, if not the most, pressing problems facing humankind and the planet today. Addressing this problem will require decarbonization of current energy systems, a challenge rendered all the more difficult by the complexity and magnitude of the energy landscape and the resultant inability of any single energy carrier to meet the energy demands of all sectors in the foreseeable future. The field of chemical engineering continues to make important contributions to the scalability, delivery, systems integration, and optimization of the mix of energy carriers that will meet energy needs across different regions and sectors of society with lower carbon emissions and costs. Chemical engineers will enable technological advances at every point in the energy value chain, from sources to end uses, and bring to bear the systems-level thinking necessary to balance the economic and environmental trade-offs that will be necessary to transition to a low-carbon energy system.
The increasing market penetration of electric vehicles for personal transportation, for example, calls for a reimagining of petroleum refineries that were designed to produce gasoline and diesel fuel as their main products. The transition to a low-carbon energy system will require a bridging strategy that relies on a hybrid system consisting of a mix
of energy carriers. Chemical engineering is rooted in the transformation of stored energy carriers into forms that are more convenient and into chemicals and materials, and chemical engineers have an important opportunity to continue applying their skillsets to non–fossil-based energy sources and carriers.
In the long term, achieving net-zero carbon emissions will require significant advances in photochemistry, electrochemistry, and engineering to enable efficient use of the predominant source of energy for Earth—the solar flux. To this end, novel systems will be required to improve the efficiency of photon capture and conversion to electrons; improve the storage of electrons; and advance the direct and/or sequential conversion of photons to energy carriers via reactions with water, nitrogen, and CO2 to produce hydrogen, ammonia, and liquid fuels, respectively.
Successful mitigation of climate change and the transition to a low-carbon energy system will also require chemical engineers to collaborate with other disciplines, including chemistry, biology, economics, social science, and others. In the energy sector, coordination between academic researchers and industrial practitioners, as well as international collaboration, will be crucial to ensuring that solutions are economically competitive and deployable at scale.
Recommendation 3-1:1 Across the energy value chain, federal research funding should be directed to advancing technologies that shift the energy mix to lower-carbon-intensity sources; developing novel low- or zero-carbon energy technologies; advancing the field of photochemistry; minimizing water use associated with energy systems; and developing cost-effective and secure carbon capture, use, and storage methods.
Recommendation 3-2: Researchers in academic and government laboratories and industry practitioners should form interdisciplinary, cross-sector collaborations focused on pilot- and demonstration-scale projects and modeling and analysis for low-carbon energy technologies.
SUSTAINABLE ENGINEERING SOLUTIONS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS
Chemical engineers have historically played a central role in the energy sector, but their contributions have been more modest in solving problems in the interconnected space of water, food, and air quality. Yet while water, food, and air have historically been the focus of other disciplines, chemical engineers bring both molecular- and systems-level thinking to pioneering efforts in this highly interconnected space. The positive impact of chemical engineers will be magnified as they adapt to thinking beyond the traditional unit operation scale to focus at a global scale. A continued increase in the world’s population will lead to increased resource demands, a challenge that is key to defining the future of chemical engineering.
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1 The committee’s recommendations are numbered according to the chapter of the main report in which they appear.
Chemical engineers can support water conservation by both designing higher-efficiency processes and developing methods for using alternative fluids to freshwater. Specific research opportunities range from better understanding the fundamentals of water structure and dynamics to developing membranes and other separation methods. In the domain of water use and purification, U.S. chemical engineers would benefit from collaborations with civil engineers and other scientists and engineers in arid regions that have more experience with desalination.
Global pressures associated with climate change and population growth will require substantial changes in the world’s food sources, a need that chemical engineers can help address through enabling technologies. Specific opportunities for chemical engineers include precision agriculture, non–animal-based food and low-carbon-intensity food production, and reduction or elimination of food waste. Advanced agricultural practices designed to improve yield while reducing demand for both energy and water will require collaboration with other disciplines, as well as systems-level approaches such as life-cycle assessments. A particularly valuable opportunity for collaboration is with researchers who are pioneering initial demonstrations of “lab-grown” foods on small scales.
The Earth’s atmosphere, with its large range of spatial and temporal scales, presents intriguing challenges for chemical engineers. Chemical engineers have contributed to fundamental understanding in this area, and their work will continue to contribute to improving air quality, including through the removal of CO2 and other heat-trapping gases. Chemical engineers have contributed to current understanding of aerosol particles in particular, and will have an opportunity to aid in improving air quality by advancing understanding of the nature and physics of aerosol particles and applying separation technologies, as well as the molecular- and systems-level thinking that will be necessary to address this global challenge. Atmospheric science is already an interdisciplinary field that includes chemistry, physics, meteorology, and climatology, making it a promising area in which chemical engineering can contribute through increased collaboration.
Recommendation 4-1: Federal research funding should be directed to both basic and applied research to advance fundamental understanding of the structure and dynamics of water and develop the advanced separation technologies necessary to remove and recover increasingly challenging contaminants.
Recommendation 4-2: To minimize the land, water, and nutrient demands of agriculture and food production, researchers in academic and government laboratories and industry practitioners should form interdisciplinary, cross-sector collaborations focused on the scale-up of innovations in metabolic engineering, bioprocess development, precision agriculture, and lab-grown foods, as well as the development of sustainable technologies for improved food preservation, storage, and packaging.
ENGINEERING TARGETED AND ACCESSIBLE MEDICINE
There are few areas of science and engineering in which the rate of progress has been, and continues to be, more rapid than advances in biology and biochemistry aimed
at treatments and cures for human illness. Specific contributions of chemical engineers include reactor design and separations, and more recently cell engineering, formulations, and other aspects of drug manufacturing. Since the first attempts to isolate small molecules from biological organisms and control and reengineer cell behavior, the development of biologically derived products has increased, with major advances resulting from recombinant DNA technology, the sequencing of genomes, the development of polymerase chain reaction, the discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells, and the discovery and implementation of gene editing.
All of these challenges present opportunities for chemical engineers to apply systems-level approaches at scales ranging from molecules to manufacturing facilities, and to coordinate and collaborate across disciplines. Opportunities to apply quantitative chemical engineering skills to immunology include cancer immunotherapies, vaccine design, and therapeutic treatments for infectious diseases and autoimmune disorders. The development of completely noninvasive methods for drug delivery represents an exciting frontier of device- and materials-based strategies. Chemical engineers are also well positioned to advance work with sustained-release depots and targeted delivery of therapeutics.
In addition, the demand for monoclonal antibodies, therapeutic proteins, and messenger RNA (mRNA) therapeutics will continue to grow, in part in response to the aging U.S. population. At the same time, the cost to produce biologics and the subsequent cost to the consumer create pressure to improve flexibility and reduce costs so as to increase health care equity while maintaining reliability and stability during manufacturing and distribution. This challenge provides an opportunity for chemical engineers to develop novel bioprocess and cell-based improvements through collaborations with biologists and biochemists.
Recommendation 5-1: Federal research investments in biomolecular engineering should be directed to fundamental research to
- advance personalized medicine and the engineering of biological molecules, including proteins, nucleic acids, and other entities such as viruses and cells;
- bridge the interface between materials and devices and health;
- improve the use of tools from systems and synthetic biology to understand biological networks and the intersections with data science and computational approaches; and
- develop engineering approaches to reduce costs and improve equity and access to health care.
Recommendation 5-2: Researchers in academic and government laboratories and industry practitioners should form interdisciplinary, cross-sector collaborations to develop pilot- and demonstration-scale projects in advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing processes.
FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING AND THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY
Chemical engineering as a discipline was founded in the need to deal with heterogeneous raw materials, especially petroleum, and this need will be amplified in the transition to more sustainable feedstocks. The production and manufacturing of useful materials and molecules enabled by chemical engineers are now creating previously unforeseen problems that must be solved at scale. Chemical engineers play a critical role in manufacturing and can thus contribute to more sustainable manufacturing through efficiency, nimbleness, and process intensification.
A sustainable future will require a shift to a circular economy in which the end of life of products is accounted for, utilizing new developments and advances in green chemistry and engineering. This shift represents another opportunity for chemical engineers to innovate from the molecular to manufacturing scales. The continued drive toward more efficient, environmentally friendly, and cost-effective manufacturing processes will benefit from a wider range of feedstocks for the production of chemicals and materials. The challenge of feedstock flexibility offers chemical engineers an opportunity to develop advances in reductive chemistry and processes that will allow the use of oxygenated feedstocks such as lignocellulosic biomass. Chemical engineers also have substantial opportunities to develop scaled-out, distributed manufacturing systems and innovative, large-scale processes that can compete with the conversion of fossil resources.
Current challenges in process design include the need for improvements in distributed manufacturing and process intensification—areas in which the chemical engineering research community can provide intellectual leadership. Collaborations between academic researchers and industrial practitioners will be important for demonstration at process scale. In the transition from a linear to a circular economy, specific opportunities for chemical engineers include redesigning processes and products to reduce or eliminate pollution, developing new ways to reduce and utilize waste, designing products to be used longer and to be recyclable, and designing processes and products using sustainable feedstocks.
Recommendation 6-1: Federal research funding should be directed to both basic and applied research to advance distributed manufacturing and process intensification, as well as the innovative technologies, including improved product designs and recycling processes, necessary to transition to a circular economy.
Recommendation 6-2: Researchers in academic and government laboratories and industry practitioners should form interdisciplinary, cross-sector collaborations focused on pilot- and demonstration-scale projects in advanced manufacturing, including scaled-down and scaled-out processes; process intensification; and the transition from fossil-based organic feedstocks and virgin-extracted inorganic feedstocks to new, more sustainable feedstocks for chemical and materials manufacturing.
NOVEL AND IMPROVED MATERIALS FOR THE 21st CENTURY
Chemical engineers have a critical role to play in the development of new materials and materials processes from the molecular to macroscopic scales. Their integration of theory, modeling, simulation, experiment, and machine learning is accelerating the discovery, design, and innovation of new materials and new materials processes.
Chemical engineers can contribute to materials development across a range of material types and applications. The combination of molecular-level understanding and thermodynamic and transport concepts yields important insights and enables advances. In particular, chemical engineers have a unique role to play in the continued development of polymer science and engineering because of their understanding of chemical synthesis and catalysis, thermodynamics, transport and rheology, and process and systems design. Chemical engineering is also the logical home for research and development of complex fluids and soft matter. The science and application of nanoparticles by chemical engineers in both industry and biomedicine are rapidly accelerating, offering the opportunity for breakthroughs. Chemical engineers play an essential role in advancing the development of biomaterials for both regenerative engineering and organ-on-a-chip technology, and chemical engineering principles are at the heart of understanding and improving targeted drug delivery both spatially and temporally. Chemical engineering expertise around reactor design, separations, and process intensification is critical to the success and growth of the electronic materials industry.
Recommendation 7-1: Federal and industry research investments in materials should be directed to
- polymer science and engineering, with a focus on life-cycle considerations, multiscale simulation, artificial intelligence, and structure/property/processing approaches;
- basic research to build new knowledge in complex fluids and soft matter;
- nanoparticle synthesis and assembly, with the goal of creating new materials by self- or directed assembly, as well as improvements in the safety and efficacy of nanoparticle therapies; and
- discovery and design of new reaction schemes and purification processes, with a steady focus on process intensification, especially for applications in electronic materials.
TOOLS TO ENABLE THE FUTURE OF CHEMICAL ENGINEERING
Current and future chemical engineers will need to navigate the interface between the natural world and the data that describe it, as well as use the tools that turn data into useful information, knowledge, and understanding. Some emerging and future tools will be developed in other fields but will have a significant impact on the work of chemical
engineers; others will be developed directly by chemical engineers and have an impact in science and engineering more broadly. Some tools and capabilities will be evolutionary, with gradual and predictable development and applications, while others will be revolutionary and will change chemical engineering research and practice in ways that may be difficult to predict or anticipate today. While the list of tools and capabilities—many of which will drive innovation when used in combination—is virtually endless, this report focuses on data science and computational tools, modeling and simulation, novel instruments, and sensors.
Developing tools that synthesize available data in real time and frameworks or models that transform data into information and actionable knowledge could become one of chemical engineers’ key contributions to society over the next decades. It is easy to imagine a not-too-distant future characterized by data-on-demand—where data on anything, at any level of granularity, will be readily and instantly accessible. Such a future suggests profound and exciting opportunities for chemical engineers, who are trained in process integration and systems-level thinking—skills that will be required to synthesize disparate data streams into information and knowledge.
The systems thinking, analytical approaches, and creative problem-solving skills of today’s chemical engineering graduates give them a distinct advantage in using artificial intelligence in real-world contexts. The evolution of artificial intelligence in the next decade will have enormous implications not only for the types of problems chemical engineers will be able to solve but also for how they will do so. Chemical engineers are poised to contribute significantly to the development of modeling and simulation tools that will influence education, research, and industry. They will continue developing and disseminating methods, algorithms, techniques, and open-source codes, making it easier for nonexperts to use computing tools for scientific research.
The increasing operational complexities and decreasing capital investments and economic margins in the petrochemical industry, coupled with stringent environmental and quality demands on the manufacture of specialty chemicals and polymers, will continue to drive increased use of modeling and simulation to run scenarios and test hypotheses. While the pharmaceutical industry currently lags behind the chemical industry in its use of simulation tools, fundamental changes in regulatory requirements are motivating greater use of mathematical models and simulation, especially in the rapidly growing biomanufacturing sector.
Recommendation 8-1: Federal and industry research investments should be directed to advancing the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other data science tools; improving modeling and simulation and life-cycle assessment capabilities; and developing novel instruments and sensors. Such investments should focus on applications in basic chemical engineering research and materials development, as well as on accelerating the transition to a low-carbon energy system; improving the sustainability of food production, water management, and manufacturing; and increasing the accessibility of health care.
TRAINING AND FOSTERING THE NEXT GENERATION OF CHEMICAL ENGINEERS
Chemical engineers are in high demand across most professions and job levels, and chemical engineering provides an excellent foundation for many career paths. The undergraduate chemical engineering curriculum has served the discipline well and has continued to evolve, slowly, in response to scientific discoveries, technological advances, and societal needs. The undergraduate curriculum provides a mathematical framework for designing and describing (electro-/photo-/bio-) chemical and physical processes across diverse spatial and temporal scales. Data science and statistics may be delivered most effectively in a separate course embedded within the core curriculum and taught with specific emphasis on matters of chemistry and engineering. In addition, experiential learning is important, and the majority of industrial and academic chemical engineers interviewed by the committee discussed the importance of internships and other practical experiences. However, there are far fewer internships available than the number of students who would benefit from them, and the density of the core undergraduate curriculum leaves few openings for incorporating an additional hands-on laboratory course earlier in the curriculum.
The current chemical engineering curriculum is well suited to preparing students for a wide variety of industrial roles. Graduate research increasingly encompasses a diverse range of topics that do not all require the same level of traditionally curated knowledge currently delivered in graduate chemical engineering curricula, and so graduate curricula may need to be adjusted. Internships for graduate students are currently rare, and new models will need to address issues of equity and inclusion, suitable compensation, intellectual property considerations, and adequate intern mentoring.
Women and members of historically excluded groups are underrepresented in chemical engineering relative to their numbers in the general population, even by comparison with chemical and biological sciences and related fields. Diversifying the profession will bring valuable new perspectives, and is therefore essential to the field’s survival and potential for impact. At all points along their academic path, chemical engineering students need role models and effective, inclusive mentors, including those who reflect the diversity of backgrounds that the field needs. Leveraging of professional societies and associated affinity groups could provide valuable support for people of diverse backgrounds entering the field, and strong university support for student chapters of professional organizations will improve access and success.
Additionally, the general affordability of community colleges is a major attraction for a diverse body of students, ranging from budget-minded high school seniors to nontraditional students. Increased engagement of transfer students therefore represents an untapped opportunity to broaden participation in and access to the chemical engineering profession.
Both students from 2-year colleges and those who change their major to chemical engineering would benefit from a redesign of the curriculum that would allow them to complete the degree in less time. Better academic and social support structures are needed
to enable successful pathways for these students. New methods that would make it possible to offer portions of the curriculum in a distributed manner, as well as more general restructuring, may require flexibility in curriculum design and changes in university policies and graduation and accreditation requirements.
Recommendation 9-1: Chemical engineering departments should consider revisions to their undergraduate curricula that would
- help students understand how individual core concepts merge into the practice of chemical engineering,
- include earlier and more frequent experiential learning through physical laboratories and virtual simulations, and
- bring mathematics and statistics into the core curriculum in a more structured manner by either complementing or replacing some of the education that currently occurs outside the core curriculum.
Recommendation 9-2: To provide graduate students with experiential learning opportunities, universities, industry, funding agencies, and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers should coordinate to revise graduate training programs and funding structures to provide opportunities for and remove barriers to systematic placement of graduate students in internships.
Recommendation 9-3: To increase recruitment and retention of women and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) individuals in undergraduate programs, chemical engineering departments should emphasize opportunities for chemical engineers to make positive societal impacts, and should build effective mentoring and support structures for students who are members of such historically excluded groups. To provide more opportunities for BIPOC students, departments should consider redesigning their undergraduate curricula to allow students from 2-year colleges and those who change their major to chemical engineering to complete their degree without extending their time to degree, and provide the support structures necessary to ensure the retention and success of transfer students.
Recommendation 9-4: To increase the recruitment of students from historically excluded communities into graduate programs, chemical engineering departments should consider revising their admissions criteria to remove barriers faced by, for example, students who attended less prestigious universities or did not participate in undergraduate research. To provide more opportunities for women and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) individuals, departments should welcome students with degrees in related disciplines and consider additions to their graduate curricula that present the core components of the undergraduate curriculum tailored for postgraduate scientists and engineers.
Recommendation 9-5: A consortium of universities, together with the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, should create incentives and practices for building and sharing curated chemical engineering content for use across universities and industry. Such sharing could reduce costs and advance broad access to high-quality content intended both for students and for professional engineers intending to further their education or change industries later in their careers.
Recommendation 9-6: Universities, industry, federal funding agencies, and professional societies should jointly develop and convene a summit to bring together existing practices across the ecosystem of stakeholders in chemical engineering professional development. Such a summit would explore the needs, barriers, and opportunities around creating a technology-enabled learning and innovation infrastructure for chemical engineering, extending from university education through to the workplace.
INTERNATIONAL LEADERSHIP
America’s scholarly leadership in chemical engineering with respect to both the quantity of research, as measured by numbers of publications, and the quality of research, as measured by citation impact, has decreased significantly in the past 15 years, losing ground to international competitors, particularly China. The United States is in a leadership position in some areas of chemical engineering technology, but lags in many niches compared with various other countries.
The increase in research output from China is a result of large investments in a range of technology areas, many of which are either central or highly relevant to chemical engineering. Similar levels of investment in the U.S. research enterprise are imperative. This report outlines the numerous opportunities for chemical engineers to contribute in the areas of energy; water, food, and air; health and medicine; manufacturing; materials research; and tools development. Without a sustained investment by federal research agencies across these areas, as recommended above, it will be impossible for the United States to maintain its leadership position. At the same time, U.S. chemical engineering will be strengthened through increased coordination and collaboration across disciplines, sectors, and political boundaries. Almost all of the areas of research discussed in this report are multidisciplinary in nature and will require close collaboration between researchers in academic and government laboratories and industry practitioners to develop applications that are economically viable and scalable. Such cross-sector collaborations, as recommended throughout the report, will have additional benefits for graduate student education and faculty member development while also satisfying the need of industry to achieve rapid results.
Recommendation 10-1: Across all areas of chemical engineering, in addition to advancing fundamental understanding, research investments should be set aside for support of interdisciplinary, cross-sector, and international collaborations in the
areas of energy; water, food, and air; health and medicine; manufacturing; materials research; tools development; and beyond, with the goal of connecting U.S. research to points of strength in other countries.
