Green Hydrogen & e- for specialties

Goal & Activities

The Dutch chemical industry derives a significant part of its turnover from chemical semi-finished products and specialties with diverse applications from automotive parts, packaging, paint and coatings to pharma, food and agro. The production of this huge variety of chemical products is currently still dependent on petrochemicals and multi-step chemical transformations, which generate a lot of waste and consume a lot of energy. The main goal of this program line is to develop new chemical transformations that are cleaner and consume less raw materials and energy through the use of green hydrogen, renewable resources and direct application of green electrons. This will have a major industrial and societal impact and change a significant portion of our current chemical processes. The use of green hydrogen and green (bio-based) feedstocks will enable a “double greening” of the chemical industry. In a second approach, sustainably generated electricity is directly applied (bypassing the initial H₂ formation) to develop clean redox-based chemical transformations and electrochemical-based industrial processes for the production of specialties.

• Scope:
  This WP aims to manage the direct use of renewable H₂ and bio-based feeds for:
  Development of stable and poison-resistant catalyst materials to convert food and agricultural products and their derived intermediates into fully renewable products, in a variety of hydrogenation processes, to replace methane-based H₂
  Demonstration of new process technology by integrating efficient hydrogenation catalysis and (pre)treatment of biomass technologies to convert food and agricultural products into renewable intermediates and monomers for e.g. food ingredients, specialty chemicals and pharmaceuticals.
• Activities include:
  Development of more stable and poison-resistant catalysts, more efficient reactor technologies; Production capabilities for renewable chemical platforms
  Demo of integrated catalytic reactor concepts, which are capable to convert renewable H₂ and food, agriculture

When the package starts and is opened, you will find more information on the NWO website.