Hydrogen & green e- for specialties

A substantial share of the Dutch chemical industry’s revenue is derived from chemical semi-finished products and specialty products with diverse applications. The production of this broad array of chemical products is still reliant on petrochemicals and multi-step chemical transformations. This generates a lot of waste and requires a great deal of energy.

What do we hope to achieve?

This theme focuses on creating new and cleaner chemical processes that consume fewer resources and require less energy. We will achieve that by using green hydrogen, tapping into renewable energy sources, and applying green electrons directly.

This will have major industrial and social ramifications, and will transform many of our existing chemical processes. The chemical industry can achieve a ‘double greening’ by combining green hydrogen with green (bio-based) raw materials.

The second phase focuses on using renewably generated electricity directly (bypassing initial H₂ formation) to develop clean, redox-based chemical transformations and electrochemical-based industrial processes for the production of specialties.

The goal of this theme is to:

• Manage the direct use of renewable hydrogen and bio-based raw materials to develop stable, poison-resistant catalytic materials that convert food and agricultural products, along with their intermediate products, into entirely renewable products, through various hydrogenation processes, replacing methane-based hydrogen.
• Showcasing a novel process technology that integrates efficient hydrogenation catalysis with biomass treatment (and pre-treatment) technologies to transform food and agricultural products into renewable intermediates and monomers used in food ingredients, specialty chemicals, and pharmaceutical products, for example.

How do we intend to achieve that?

We will achieve that by developing:

• Stable, poison-resistant catalytic materials, and more efficient reactor technologies.
• Production capacity for sustainable chemical platforms.
• By showcasing integrated catalytic reactor concepts designed to convert renewable hydrogen, along with food and agricultural products.

The call is now open, all information on the website of NWO