Catalyst by Design vs. Catalyst by Discovery

Catalysis is a critical enabling science for chemicals and energy. Improvements in catalytic processes across the chemical and petroleum industries increase resource and energy utilization efficiencies and overall environmental footprints. Virtually all of the products used by modern societies for fuels, chemicals, polymers, and pharmaceuticals, as well as for abatement of air and water pollution, depend on catalysts. In the future, cost-effective, environmentally sound utilization of energy resources such as heavy oil will require new catalysts and processes. Other areas such as hydrogen storage and carbon dioxide capture and sequestration could benefit from new abilities to catalyze solid-state reactions.

To meet these challenges, we must advance the field from catalyst discovery to catalyst design. This advance will require not only a new level of understanding of reaction mechanisms and dynamics to specify the structure and properties of the catalyst, but synthetic tools to construct catalysts at the atomic level and spectroscopic and computational tools to probe catalysts in working environments. This demands our ability, as a chemist to design catalytic systems to accomplish any desirable transformation of chemical and energy resources and to minimize undesirable impacts of their utilization. Therefore, catalysis R&D is geared to develop competitive catalysts and processes that are required to meet these challenges. In the current presentation we will identify main challenges, crosscutting issues, and priority directions for research needs in the areas of refining and petrochemicals. Examples from graduate research and client funded projects will be presented to high light the role of a chemist in this area of paramount research.