Driving Innovation from Lab to Commercial Scale with Clariant's Custom Catalysts

Catalyst innovation starts small - often a new formulation discovered in an R&D lab. Scaling up such early-stage catalyst recipes to full commercial production is challenging, requiring specialized equipment and expertise. As an established leader in industrial catalysts, Clariant offers custom manufacturing services to bridge this scale-up gap.

With over 70 years of experience spanning almost every type of heterogenous catalyst application, Clariant provides the knowledge and capabilities to transform lab recipes into commercial-scale products. Key benefits for customers include speed, flexibility, and access to production-scale trials without large equipment investments.

A recent collaboration with Air Company, an innovative carbon utilization start-up, demonstrates Clariant’s custom catalyst capabilities in action. Air Company developed proprietary technology to convert CO₂ emissions into sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), methanol and ethanol. After an initial lab-scale catalyst discovery, the company partnered with Clariant for rapid scale-up.

Clariant’s specialized equipment and experienced team enabled optimizations in drying and in water consumption. This allowed a 4.6x increase in product throughput and 8x faster processing time compared to the baseline recipe. Following successful scale-up trials in Clariant’s pilot plant, the partners now target to commercialize the technology in 2025.

This case study highlights the power of collaboration between start-ups driving cutting-edge innovations and established industry leaders like Clariant with the expertise assets to rapidly transform ideas into commercial reality. With dedicated custom manufacturing capabilities globally, Clariant helps customers realize the full potential of their catalyst IP by taking lab-scale concepts to industrial production.

Get in touch to learn more about accelerating your catalyst scale-up with Clariant's custom manufacturing services.