Jason Hallett, Imperial College London

Jason Hallett is Professor of Sustainable Chemical Technology and holds a Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies within the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London. He also serves as co-Director of the UK’s National Supergen Bioenergy Impact Hub. His research in biorefining, sustainable manufacturing and the circular economy has led to 10 spin-out companies to act as vehicles for the translation of his research into practice. His first spin-out company (Lixea) built a pilot plant which he designed and which was constructed in Sweden, commissioned and operated since 2022. Lixea recently announced a €60m demonstration plant to be constructed in 2027.

What would you like to contribute to the conference?

In this presentation I will discuss our research on commercialisation of ionic liquids. Ionic liquids (ILs) have proven to be highly tunable ‘designer solvents’ capable of a wide range of exciting chemistries. However, industrial application at large scale is hampered by high solvent cost. By lowering the solvent cost (over 99%) we were able to increase the attractive opportunities of ILs for biomass fractionation and later other applications, with a focus on performance and process considerations such as how the ILs maintain solvent stability under long-term processing conditions, that they can be recovered and continue to exhibit very good performance after multiple reuses. These properties highlight that the ILs have the flexibility to be useful for a variety of downstream chemical processing techniques, and for use in other applications as well.