Welcome to the Linley Lab
We are an interdisciplinary chemical engineering research group at McMaster University focused on developing and testing functional materials for environmental and sustainability applications.
Recent News
10/04/2024
Stuart has been awarded an NSERC Discovery Grant to pursue his research program on solar reforming!
30/01/2024
Stuart's new review on solar reforming published in Nature Reviews Chemistry
10/08/2023
Positions are open for Master's and PhD students! Check the Opportunities page for details!
10/07/2023
The Linley Lab goes live
Sustainability
Our every day life is made possible through thousands of different chemicals - everything from your dish soap to your t-shirts are derived from oil-based chemicals. The expansive chemicals industry accounts for 30% of industrial energy use and 14% of global oil demand, half of which is used as feedstock material. Much of what we create was never intended for perpetual use: every year, consumers discard 2 billion tonnes of waste, of which 1.4 billion tonnes goes directly to landfill.
Some of our most materially wasteful commodities are fuels. By producing fuels from fossil feedstocks, every year we release 8.1 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalents into the atmosphere. Even our leading fuel replacement, H2 is carbon-positive, with 95% of hydrogen on the market produced from methane:
To improve the sustainability of our economy, we need to consider how industry and consumer waste can be chemically reformed to create new commodities. This 'circular economy' treats waste as a resource and uses renewable sources of energy to limit emissions and create value.
The Linley Lab is working on direct sunlight-powered solutions for sustainable production of fuels and chemicals from waste carbon to reduce the environmental impact of industry. Our core interest is solar reforming, a photocatalytic process that uses electrons from waste carbon to produce high-energy molecules like H2.
