Electrochemistry

Abstract

The emerging constraints related to energy production, which are already shaking our economies, will undoubtedly increase. Our societies will not only have to produce the tens of terawatts of energy they require while resorting less and less to fossil fuels (a fact that implies that electrical energy will dominate), but will also need to find adequate ways to use and store the transient electrons thus produced. These are considerable challenges that our present world is not ready to fulfill with its current technologies. New technologies will have to be envisioned for the efficient management of the considerable fluxes required, and to this end, Electrochemistry seems to provide some of the most promising and versatile approaches. Electrochemistry will be involved in solar cells, electrolytic cells for the production of hydrogen through water electrolysis or the reductive recycling of carbon dioxide, supercapacitors and batteries for the storage of electricity produced intermittently by solar cells and windmills, as well as in the use of electrons as chemical reagents, and so on. This is a vast program that will require the dedicated and skilled competence of thousands of researchers and engineers, which is in stark contrast with the present status of electrochemistry in many industrial countries, where its main focus is the never-ending fight against corrosion or improvement lead car batteries.