Jurong is an ideal laboratory for looking at ways to reduce emissions and improve sustainability.
- Markus Kraft
For a chemical engineer, Jurong Island is a kind of paradise. The artificial island, built upon seven smaller islands off the Singapore mainland in the 1980s and 1990s, is now home to nearly 100 global petroleum, petrochemical and speciality chemical companies, indicating Singapore’s status as a global crossroads.
All those plants and factories produce a lot of carbon emissions – in fact more than half of global emissions come from industries like those based on the Island. With so many companies in such a small space, Jurong is an ideal laboratory for looking at ways to reduce emissions and improve sustainability. Little wonder that it has become the centre of Singapore’s efforts to cut its emissions intensity by 36% (compared with 2005 levels) by 2030.
“Because Singapore is a city-state, you’re never too far from the people who have the power to enact policy change,” says Professor Markus Kraft. “In Singapore, it’s easier to see the impact that certain changes can have on the carbon footprint of the whole country – it’s an ideal test bed for researchers.
"We can then use our results from Singapore as an example to roll out to other cities and other countries.”
Kraft is Director of the Cambridge Centre for Advanced Research and Education in Singapore (CARES), a wholly owned subsidiary of the University based at Singapore’s Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE), which was established in 2007 with funding from Singapore’s National Research Foundation to encourage collaboration between universities and industry.
The team in Singapore is made up of researchers from Cambridge, local universities and other institutions. Its unique setting, combined with a diverse membership that ranges from PhD students to professors, has enabled CARES, which was established in 2013, to be involved in several research and industry collaborations. The most recent, with fellow CREATE partners, the University of California, Berkeley, the National University of Singapore and the Nanyang Technological University, will develop new ways to transform industrial CO2 emissions into compounds that are useful in the chemical industry supply chain.
Image: Jurong Island
Credit: William Cho
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge