SPECIALTY GRAND CHALLENGE

published: 18 March 2021

doi: 10.3389/fctls.2021.667675

Heterogeneous Catalysis: Enabling a

Sustainable Future
Xijun Hu 1* and Alex C. K. Yip 2
1
Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong,
China, 2 Laboratory for Energy and Environmental Catalysis, Department of Chemical and Process Engineering, The
University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

Keywords: heterogeneous catalysis, grand challenges, sustainability, hydrogen energy, greenhouse gas emission

GRAND CHALLENGES FOR HETEROGENEOUS CATALYSIS

Over the past decade, catalysis scientists have been at the forefront in addressing various challenges
in climate change, pollution, and sustainable energy. The ever-changing landscape in addressing
these complex and intricately-linked challenges saw many innovative strategies and approaches
being developed by the catalysis community.
At the heart of catalysis science, heterogeneous catalysis drives many critical industrial processes
because of the excellent capabilities of accelerating the rate of reactions with low cost, high
conversion, and product selectivity. The recyclability nature of heterogeneous catalysts enables
green and sustainable manufacturing and avoids the secondary pollution problem. To date,
heterogeneous catalysts play an important part in producing more than 80% of all chemical
products in the world. In 2019, the global catalyst market size was valued at USD 33.9 billion
and was expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 4.4% from 2020 to 2027.
Rising demand for catalysts is evidenced by pillared industries, including energy, environmental
Edited by:
protection, fine chemical synthesis, and bulk chemical production, etc. It is an undeniable fact that
Frank Hollmann,
Delft University of
every breakthrough made in the field of heterogeneous catalysis led to economic success for the
Technology, Netherlands major world economies and improved people’s everyday lives.
Reviewed by:
The heterogeneous catalysis community is instrumental for grand global challenges in energy
Felix Studt, and the environment at a high level. The year 2020 with COVID-19 marked a new normal to our
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology world. We saw fewer cars on the roads, canceled flights, restaurants’ shutdown, unprecedented
(KIT), Germany restrictions on everyday activities, etc. Despite putting our economy to a halt, we used less
*Correspondence: carbon-based fuel and potentially released fewer pollutants to the environment. But what does this
Xijun Hu mean to the post-COVID-19 world?
kexhu@[Link] The overall greenhouse gas (GHG) emission in 2020 was ∼4% less than the previous year.
While this interim result sounds positive environmentally, the 4% reduction in GHG emission
Specialty section: will only contribute to about two-thirds of what is required to meet the annual “1.5◦ C target” (that
This article was submitted to is, to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5◦ C by the end of this century). The implication is
Heterogeneous Catalysis,
that minimizing human activities, such as restricted air travels, mass gathering, and use of petrol-
a section of the journal
powered vehicles, even to a level as strict as what we are going through in the COVID pandemic,
Frontiers in Catalysis
is not sufficient to solve the climate change problem. This event confirms that a more pragmatic
Received: 14 February 2021
approach is needed.
Accepted: 25 February 2021
For the years to come, the holy grail of the environment is still developing sustainable energy
Published: 18 March 2021
that replaces fossil fuels on a significant scale. The challenges include generating renewable fuel,
Citation:
securing solar power and wind energy, production of sustainable electricity, and safe and efficient
Hu X and Yip ACK (2021)
Heterogeneous Catalysis: Enabling a
long-term energy storage (Gong and Luque, 2014). The cost of harvesting sustainable energy was
Sustainable Future. traditionally high compared to fossil fuels. Driven by the state-of-the-art engineering (e.g., wind
Front. Catal. 1:667675. turbines with much higher capacity factors than a decade ago) and policies such as tax credits, we
doi: 10.3389/fctls.2021.667675 saw the generation cost of renewables dropped in the past 5 years. In many places, renewables’ cost

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Hu and Yip Heterogeneous Catalysis: Enabling a Sustainable Future

is comparable or even below that of conventional energy sources functionalities, such as pore size/shape, tunable acidity,
such as oil, natural gas, and coal. Hydroelectric power is now hydrophobicity/hydrophilicity, hydrothermal stability, and
the cheapest source of renewable energy. It is averaged at US$ specifically, good resistance to coke deactivation. Hierarchical
0.05 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) and the cost of offshore wind was zeolites and their designs provide a solution to satisfy such
close to US$0.13 per kWh as of May 2019. Before COVID-19, requirements. New synthesis strategies of hierarchical zeolite,
these renewable options started to become economically viable which are sustainable, environmentally friendly and cost-
compared to the cost of fossil fuels, typically ranging from effective, are essential areas of study in modern catalysis (Jia
US$0.05 to over US$0.15 per kWh. The abovementioned positive et al., 2018).
incentives imply that our research in complementary areas In the past, catalyst characterization was conducted “off-line”
to renewables, such as catalytic biomass conversion, hydrogen from the reaction environment, preventing physical insights
generation/storage, and CO2 capture/utilization, will remain from studying catalytic systems under practical conditions. We
critical for the world in the future. saw in the last decade a rapid development of in situ/operando
Hydrogen is regarded as clean energy and chemical feedstock, characterization tools, which helped researchers to identify the
which can be used for fuel cells, transport fuel, oil refining, and catalyst descriptors and structure-reactivity relations (Choi et al.,
urea production. However, over 95% of the hydrogen currently 2020). As the in situ/operando characterization tools become
produced is derived from fossil fuels, primarily through steam more sophisticated and functional under harsh conditions, e.g.,
methane reforming. Hydrogen can be produced from renewable high temperature and high pressure, we shall see a quantum leap
electricity through catalytic water electrolysis or water-gas-shift in our ability to unlock many new catalysts and catalytic routes.
reaction, but commercial production has challenges in scale- Having a fundamental understanding of how surfaces
up with high demand for electricity (Dawood et al., 2020). catalyze a chemical reaction is an essential component of
CO2 sequestration for mitigation of GHG emission has been heterogeneous catalysis. We can establish predictive modeling
studied for many years, and, again, increased costs and increased strategies for realistic catalysis systems by close-coupling of
risk for CO2 leakage hinder large-scale implementation. CO2 theory and experiments. Computational methods, such as
sequestration is also a waste of potentially valuable chemical molecular dynamics simulation, density functional theory (DFT)
feedstock (CO2 ). We foresee the catalysis community will have calculations, will continue to become the fundamental basis
a strong focus on developing new catalytic processes and new for understanding catalysis and surface chemical reactivity.
catalysts to produce bio-hydrogen from renewable energy sources One of the biggest challenges is still lacking a transient view
and capture CO2 effectively. of heterogeneous catalysis that explains out-of-equilibrium
Scientifically, a successful heterogeneous catalytic reaction processes. The development of computational chemistry
is governed by three fundamental elementary steps, namely methods will produce a toolbox to unravel catalysis complexity
adsorption, surface reactions, and desorption, associated with and reaction mechanisms under different process scenarios
a solid surface. As such, the advancement of heterogeneous (Gaggioli et al., 2019). Research in this area will shape innovation
catalysis is inseparable from the knowledge of surface and in catalysis and lead to more sustainable chemical processes.
interface science, entailing solutions to grand challenges of three The international catalysis community needs to share cutting-
main areas: catalyst design and synthesis, in situ characterization, edge research works with each other proactively in a transparent
and understanding catalysis complexity. manner. By making our knowledge more accessible to the world,
Catalyst design and synthesis is the art of choosing the we will be able to push forward the development of the enabling
right active component to produce the desired chemistry in tools and the engineering foundations needed to address the
catalysis. Precise control of catalytic components on catalyst formidable challenges that we face as we strive to improve
support requires sophisticated synthesis techniques and science everyone’s quality of life.
to scale up and satisfy practical manufacturing. A classic example The Heterogeneous Catalysis specialty section
would be the synthesis of higher alcohol from syngas, which within Frontiers in Catalysis aims to capture the
requires two distinct metal sites in a close molecular distance recent impactful research works in the field, through
on a surface to enable a synergistic catalytic effect (Khan et al., which to provide inspiration and stimulation to
2020). Integration of multiple catalysts in a single environment the community.
also plays a vital part in process intensification.
On the other hand, purpose-built microporous materials, AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
such as zeolites, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), or covalent
organic frameworks (COFs), are important to industrial XH and AY prepared the draft of the manuscript, revised
applications. Taking zeolites as an example, while their catalytic the manuscript, and read and approved the final manuscript.
properties mainly rely on the high surface area and cation- All authors contributed to the article and approved the
exchange capacity, zeolite catalysts usually require multiple submitted version.

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Hu and Yip Heterogeneous Catalysis: Enabling a Sustainable Future

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approach to model heterogeneous catalysis. ACS Catal. 9, 8481–8502. Copyright © 2021 Hu and Yip. This is an open-access article distributed under the
doi: 10.1021/acscatal.9b01775 terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution
Gong, J., and Luque, R. (2014). Catalysis for production of renewable energy. or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and
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synthesis strategies for hierarchical zeolites: bottom-up versus top-down reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

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