ARPA-E’s RFI: Accelerating Catalyst Development for Net Zero Applications

The purpose of this Request for Information (RFI) is to solicit input for a potential ARPA-E program focused on accelerating the heterogeneous catalyst development cycle for incorporation into reactors, devices, equipment, unit operations, and process technology applications relevant to the U.S. 2050 net zero goals. These material development cycles can take decades to complete, starting from the discovery scale at milligram quantities and finishing at the development scale with kilogram quantities. ARPA-E is interested in decreasing the length of development cycles (Figure 1) to months while capturing significant energy efficiency increases, emissions reductions, and/or precious metal reductions. Major bottlenecks in the process include inefficient discovery, irreproducible multi-scale synthesis, laborious characterization, narrow design space optimization, irrelevant performance evaluation, and impractical integration (i.e., not “drop-in”) of heterogeneous catalysts into emerging technologies.

To view the RFI in its entirety, please visit https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov.