Ángel Galán Martín

• Environmental and Chemical Engineering
• Beatriz Galindo distinguish researcher at University of Jaén

The first nationally determined contributions to the Paris Agreement include no mention of the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) necessary to reach the Paris targets, leaving open the question of how and by whom CDR will be delivered. Drawing on existing equity frameworks, we allocate CDR quotas globally according to Responsibility, Capability and Equal...

Reducing inequality is essential for sustainable development, yet our understanding of its many dimensions and driving forces is still limited. Here we study the global distribution of 25 environmental burdens encompassing natural resources (water, materials and land use) and air emissions, all related to activities underpinning human welfare. We f...

The difficulties in climate change negotiations together with the recent withdrawal of U.S. from the Paris Agreement call for new cooperative mechanisms to enable a resilient international response. In this study we propose an approach to aid such negotiations based on quantifying the benefits of interregional cooperation and distributing them amon...

Quantifying the level of sustainability attained by a system is a challenging task due to the need to consider a wide range of economic, environmental and social aspects simultaneously. This work explores the application of data envelopment analysis (DEA) to evaluate the sustainability ‘efficiency’ of a system. We propose an enhanced DEA methodolog...

The new European Union's Common Agricultural Policy will cover the period from 2015 to 2020. Significant novelties in the payment scheme have been introduced which may potentially encourage farmers to implement changes at the farm level by meeting certain environmental requirements in return for support payments. The mandatory requirements, commonl...

Biorefineries are pivotal in advancing sustainability, yet most studies remain confined to laboratory scales, lacking comprehensive industrial-level analyses. In this work, the laboratory experiments are scaled up to design and assess the techno-economic and environmental implications of a multiproduct biorefinery system producing antioxidant extra...

Extra-virgin olive oil is a high-quality product from the Mediterranean basin. Its production is associated with the generation a huge quantity of biomasses. These biomasses contain interesting bioactive compounds such as mannitol, phenolic compounds like hydroxytyrosol and oleuropein, and triterpenic acids. This chapter first gives an overview of...

Biorefineries will be strategic players in achieving the circular economy and sustainability goals. This work presents a comprehensive review of the last decade of research on the Environmental and Techno-Economic...

Pretreatment processes — recognized as critical steps for efficient biomass refining — have received much attention over the last two decades. In this context, deep eutectic solvents (DES) have emerged as a novel alternative to conventional solvents representing a step forward in achieving more sustainable processes with both environmental and econ...

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) will be a key component of the climate change mitigation efforts to achieve the carbon-neutrality goals. Hence, a comprehensive assessment of the CDR potential at national and local levels is crucial to identify regional opportunities and deploy practical actions timely. This study focuses on the potential function of o...

Carbon capture and utilisation (CCU) provides an appealing framework to turn carbon emissions into valuable fuels and chemicals. However, given the vast energy required to activate the CO2 molecule, CCU may have implications on sustainable development that are still poorly understood due to the narrow scope of current carbon footprint-oriented asse...

Greenhouse gas removal (GGR) technologies can remove greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Most of the current GGR technologies focus on carbon dioxide removal, these include afforestation and reforestation, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, direct air capture, enhanced weathering, soil carbon sequestration and bioch...

Energy systems analysis supports in designing and operating reliable and cost-effective energy solutions to a range of sectors, including power, heating, mobility, and industry. Notwithstanding the wellbeing and prosperity implications for current generations, it becomes increasingly clear that our current global energy system has profound impacts...

Meeting the 1.5 °C target may require removing up to 1,000 Gtonne CO 2 by 2100 with Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs). We evaluate the impacts of Direct Air Capture and Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (DACCS and BECCS), finding that removing 5.9 Gtonne/year CO 2 can prevent <9·10 ² disability-adjusted life years per million people an...

Green methanol could play a major role in decarbonising both the chemical and energy sectors. While techno-economic and environmental studies on green methanol following a life-cycle perspective are available, its social implications from a supply-chain standpoint remain largely unexplored. In order to fill this gap, this work presents the first so...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a tool that allows assessing the potential environmental impacts of processes, products, or systems along its entire life cycle. LCA is a standardized methodology that follows the ISO 14040/14044 standards, which constitutes a power decision-support tool for engineers, scientists, governments and industry in the quest...

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) will be essential to meet the climate targets, so enabling its deployment at the right time will be decisive. Here, we investigate the still poorly understood implications of delaying CDR actions, focusing on integrating direct air capture and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (DACCS and BECCS) into the European...

Carbon dioxide removal options have been identified as key to achieving the climate change target laid out in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is particularly attractive because it is capable of providing negative emissions and a reliable energy source. We here explore the complexity of the infrastructures...

Green hydrogen, i.e., produced from renewable resources, is attracting attention as an alternative fuel for the future of heavy road transport and long-distance driving. However, the benefits linked to zero pollution at the usage stage can be overturned when considering the upstream processes linked to the raw materials and energy requirements. To...

The global agenda is undoubtedly determined by the planetary success of achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs). Both public and private institutions show great efforts towards the full integration of the SDGs in their own agendas. Ultimately, national governments are responsible for the effective budget allocation for sustainable develo...

The petrochemical sector will play a crucial role in developing low-carbon transition technologies, but the in-dustry also contributes a significant proportion of greenhouse gas emissions. Momentum is building to helpreduce the carbon footprint of this hard-to-abate sector, particularly through replacing fossil carbon feed-stocks with carbon from b...

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) will be essential to meet the climate targets, so enabling its deployment at the right time will be decisive. Here, we investigate the still poorly understood implications of delaying CDR actions, focusing on integrating direct air capture and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (DACCS and BECCS) into the European...

Meeting the Sustainable Development Goals and carbon neutrality targets requires transitioning to cleaner products, which poses significant challenges to the future chemical industry. Identifying alternative pathways to cover the growing demand for chemicals and fuels in a more sustainable manner calls for tight collaborative programs between exper...

The design of sustainable supply chains, which recently emerged as an active area of research in process systems engineering, is vital to ensure sustainable development. Despite past and ongoing efforts, the available methods often overlook impacts beyond climate change or incorporate them via standard life cycle assessment metrics that are hard to...

The world-wide sustainability implications of transport technologies remain unclear because their assessment often relies on metrics that are hard to interpret from a global perspective. To contribute to filling this gap, here we apply the concept of planetary boundaries (PBs), i.e., a set of biophysical limits critical for operating the planet saf...

The global food system inextricably connects human health and environmental integrity. It holds the transformative capability to significantly reduce levels of environmental degradation, caused by current food production practices, and alleviate the ‘triple burden’ of malnutrition, existing due to food consumption patterns. System-wide transitions...

Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is gaining broad interest as an effective strategy to go beyond carbon neutrality. So far, most of the work on BECCS focused on power systems, while its application to the transport sector has received much less attention. To contribute to filling this gap, this work investigates the potential of BE...

Methanol from captured CO2 provides a more sustainable alternative to gasoline due to its low carbon footprint, yet it requires a large amount of renewable energy that could be used instead to decarbonise the electricity mix. A techno-economic and environmental analysis of methanol produced from captured CO2 and renewable energy is conducted to she...

As humanity's impact on the environment continues to increase, it brings with it an increased risk of abrupt and nonlinear changes at the global scale. The Planetary Boundaries framework, introduced in 2009, identifies a safe operating space for several processes deemed critical to the continued stability of the Earth system. At a national level, c...

In our recently published work, we incorporated planetary boundaries in the optimization of the United States (US) power sector in 2030. Yang claims there is a double-counting error in our results and encourages us to minimize direct emissions instead of life cycle emissions in our model. Here, we argue that Yang's main criticism based on the risk...

The recently emerged Planetary Boundaries framework establishes global limits to human activities in order to avoid highly deleterious events that could shift the current state of the Earth. Here, for the first time we address the strategic design of sustainable supply chains (SCs) considering their absolute sustainability level using PBs. To this...

In this work we provide a perspective on Process Systems Engineering (PSE) in the context of sustainability, reviewing the main tools available and describing major applications in sustainability problems spanning multiple scales, from molecules, through chemical plants, and finally the enterprise and macroeconomic levels. After highlighting the po...

Correction for ‘Powering sustainable development within planetary boundaries’ by Ibrahim M. Algunaibet et al. , Energy Environ. Sci. , 2019, 12 , 1890–1900.

University rankings have become an important tool to compare academic institutions within and across countries. Yet, they rely on aggregated scores based on subjective weights which render them sensitive to experts’ preferences and not fully transparent to final users. To overcome this limitation, we apply Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to evaluat...

Current energy systems models focus on cost minimization with a bound on some greenhouse gas emissions. This limited environmental scope can lead to mixes that are not consistent with our sustainable development. To circumvent this limitation, we here make use of the concept of monetization and life cycle assessment to quantify the indirect costs o...

Biomass resources offer a very promising alternative to fossil fuels for the sustainable production of electricity, fuels and chemicals. Nevertheless, the problem of deciding on the best use of biomass is highly complex, as many potential feedstocks and conversion pathways exist, each one displaying different economic and environmental performances...

The concept of planetary boundaries identifies a safe space for humanity. Current energy systems are primarily designed with a focus on total cost minimization and bounds on greenhouse gas emissions. Omitting planetary boundaries in energy systems design can lead to energy mixes unable to power our sustainable development. To overcome this conceptu...

This article presents a framework for combining data envelopment analysis with process systems engineering tools, aiming to improve the sustainability of chemical processes. Given a set of chemical processes, each characterized by performance indicators, the framework discriminates between efficient and inefficient processes in regard to these indi...

Assessing the level of sustainability of a system is challenging, since sustainability studies need to cover simultaneously a wide range of economic, environmental and social aspects. In this work we explore the use of data envelopment analysis (DEA) to assess the extent to which a system adheres to sustainability principles. We proposed an enhance...

Assessing the level of sustainability of a system is challenging, since sustainability studies need to cover simultaneously a wide range of economic, environmental and social aspects. In this work, we explore the use of data envelopment analysis (DEA) to assess the extent to which a system adheres to sustainability principles. We proposed an enhanc...

Meeting the growing food demand with minimum impact on the environment is a major challenge to face for ensuring a more sustainable food production. To tackle this problem, in this article we present a novel systematic method for agriculture planning that optimally allocates rainfed and irrigated cropping areas, thereby enhancing food availability...

Quantifying the level of sustainability attained by a system is a challenging task due to the need to consider a wide range of economic, environmental and social aspects simultaneously. This work explores the application of data envelopment analysis (DEA) to evaluate the sustainability ‘efficiency’ of a system. We propose an enhanced DEA methodolog...

Moving towards a more sustainable energy system is a major goal of modern societies that aim to minimize the dependence on fossil fuels and the associated anthropogenic impacts. In this article, the combined use of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is applied to analyse the environmental performance (eco-efficiency) of...

The new European Union's Common Agricultural Policy will cover the period from 2015 to 2020. Significant novelties in the payment scheme have been introduced which may potentially encourage farmers to implement changes at the farm level by meeting certain environmental requirements in return for support payments. The mandatory requirements, commonl...

Moving towards a more sustainable energy system is a major goal of modern societies that aim to minimize the dependence on fossil fuels and the associated anthropogenic impacts. In this article, the combined use of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is applied to analyse the environmental performance (eco-efficiency) of...

Water scarcity is a major environmental problem worldwide with a large impact on the degradation of ecosystems and resources. Particularly, in arid and semiarid countries water consumption causes significant environmental impacts on natural resources, ecosystems and even human health. Most production systems create water shortages which affect natu...

Water consumption in arid and semiarid countries is unsustainable and causes degradation of ecosystems. In Spain, almost 75 percent of all the freshwater consumption corresponds to the agricultural sector. In this backdrop, the reduction of freshwater use in agriculture is essential to ensure a sustainable development of future generations and to r...