Bioenergy Technologies Office

CatCost Online Tool Offers Insight Into Catalyst Manufacturing Cost and Environmental Impact

CatCost combines industry-standard cost estimation methods and resources into an intuitive suite of tools to bring actionable cost insight to every step of catalyst research and development. Photo by Dennis Schroeder, NREL

The road to the commercial adoption of new catalytic materials can be long, expensive, and fraught with risk. Often, the early identification of these costs is overlooked because there are few resources in the public domain available to researchers.

Scientists from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL) Catalytic Carbon Transformation and Scale-Up Center have sought to reduce these early-stage barriers by developing CatCost, a free and publicly available cost estimation tool that gives researchers the information they need to make informed research and development decisions.

In a recent paper published in Nature Catalysis, NREL scientists demonstrated the functionality of CatCost with a case study evaluating the manufacturing costs and environmental impact of three high-performance catalysts for the conversion of biomass to fuels and chemicals. The research was done in collaboration with the Chemical Catalysis for Bioenergy Consortium, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy Bioenergy Technologies Office.

Learn more about their findings on environmental and economic benefits possible by replacing existing zeolite-based catalysts with more stable catalysts.