Carbon-friendly research
These days, we hear a lot about the challenges of excessive carbon emissions so it’s a welcome development indeed when a story comes along about carbon dioxide that is not a waste product but rather a feedstock. At AkzoNobel Industrial Chemicals, in the last four years several projects have focused on what are called “CO2 conversion technologies” to produce new products and develop new production processes using CO2 as a source material. Project managers recognized that in several important fields, including the vital area of catalytic systems, they would need assistance from outside sources.
The result has been a mutually advantageous collaboration between AkzoNobel and SINTEF, a Norwegian research institute. SINTEF has made an essential contribution to this research with what are called “high throughput screening technologies” – methodologies for running a large number of chemical experiments in parallel to increase experimental capacity and speed up catalyst development.
As a result of the collaboration, we’ve assessed over 240 unique catalytic systems and identified 40 that merit further exploration.