After Years of Success, We Look Into the Future

The Accelerator—January 2025 »

It's an exciting time for the Chemical Catalysis for Bioenergy Consortium (ChemCatBio), and I'm honored to step into the role of director. First, I want to extend a huge thank you to Josh Schaidle for his leadership, from the inception of the consortium through its growth over the past eight years. And more personally, I'd like to acknowledge his guidance over the past two years while I served as deputy director. Josh was instrumental in positioning the consortium as a central hub of knowledge at the intersection of catalysis and bioenergy research. Today, ChemCatBio has an h-index of 53, with over 180 publications. We have published five Technology Briefs to summarize and contextualize recent advances and insights in catalytic technologies in an interactive, easy-to-read format. We've hosted 13 public webinars, and we maintain strong partnerships across industry, academia, and the national laboratories, exemplified by the more than 150 individuals who have directly contributed to the consortium's success.

I remember when the consortium first came together in 2016, and we were building partnerships across the national laboratories to work on pressing needs for a variety of transformations in biomass conversion catalysis. Through the years, we set substantive goals and made significant advancements in pathway-specific technology and toward addressing overarching challenges in catalysis science. We've worked closely with our funding sponsor, the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO), to bring ChemCatBio's considerable cross-discipline expertise to bear on the Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) Grand Challenge and made great strides in advancing several fuel pathways toward commercialization.

Now, in the third year of our current research and development (R&D) cycle, we are nearing the culmination of these efforts. We've advanced the adoption readiness of multiple SAF pathways by using engineered catalyst forms and realistic process streams to produce liquid fuels for aviation fuel property testing. Over the past six years, we secured more than $30 million in additional project funding to advance technologies developed within ChemCatBio, establishing the consortium as a force multiplier by delivering value beyond the initial investment from BETO. As we look to the future, we are preparing to leverage the consortium's considerable tools, capabilities, expertise, and devoted research staff to innovate new catalytic pathways to access fuel and chemical products that will impact the bioeconomy.

—Dan Ruddy, ChemCatBio Director

The Accelerator covers the latest in ChemCatBio events, funding opportunities and solicitations, publications, new technologies and research projects, research teams, and more.