Recapping Future Days: Catalysts 2026

What will define the next decade of catalysis, and how can analytical insight accelerate innovation? On September 22, our Future Days live studio event returned to explore the answers to this question.

Across six sessions, speakers from catalyst manufacturing, standards development, and analytical science tackled the questions shaping the field: how to scale up proven technologies, why partnerships and standards are essential to getting there, and how analytical insight can speed up innovation. The stakes are high: with approximately 90% of commercially produced chemical products relying on a catalyst at some stage of manufacture, the next decade of catalyst development will have a critical impact across many industries.

If you couldn’t join us live, here are the highlights. You can also catch up on the full event here.

In the first three sessions of the event, our expert guest speakers examined why proven technologies take so long to reach industrial scale.

Dr. Maurits van Tol, former CEO of Johnson Matthey Catalyst Technologies, opened with the big picture: as the global population grows, demand for chemicals and energy will keep rising. The catalyst technologies needed to produce low-carbon chemicals and fuels at scale largely exist and can be licensed, but deployment is too slow. Maurits discussed how private sector actors can work together with governments and regulators to accelerate this process. He also looked ahead to next-generation catalysts designed with high-throughput experimentation, AI, and even quantum computing.

Next, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Christian Seidel, Chief Advisor at Wohlers Associates, powered by ASTM International, argued that adoption needs comparable performance data, reproducible characterization, and accepted qualification routes, and shared key lessons from the additive manufacturing industry.  Because standards are written “for users, by users,” he invited the community to join the ASTM Committee D32 on Catalysts and bring data to interlaboratory studies.

Bringing the perspective from the plant, Dr. Matthew Rayner, Senior Specialist in Analytical Excellence at Ketjen, shared the story of Ketjen’s Amsterdam operation, which has called the city home for around 200 years and has made catalysts since 1953. Ketjen employs advanced analysis at every stage of catalyst production, from XRF and XRD to gas adsorption and mercury porosimetry. The goal isn’t identical results every time, Matthew explained, but catching variability before it reaches the customer.

Unlocking next-generation catalyst technologies with advanced characterization

With the market context set, the second half of the event delved into the chemistry of catalysis, and the analytical tools that reveal it.

Ignacio Garcia, General Manager PID at Malvern Panalytical, made the case for catalysis as the unsung enabler of a circular industry. Catalysts can be used to turn waste CO₂ into methanol, and biomass into fuels and chemicals. The core challenge of these processes is balancing catalyst activity, selectivity, and stability. That starts with understanding which atoms are in the active site, how small structural changes shift performance, and why catalysts deactivate, since improving lifetime is often as important as improving activity. Operando techniques such as XRD and Raman spectroscopy, combined with AI and automated reactor labs, will help answer these questions faster.

Stepping in for Dr. Hadeel Hussain, Dr. Jan Gertenbach, Market Development Manager at Malvern Panalytical, showed how X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) can now be performed in the lab on the Empyrean multipurpose diffractometer. XAS reveals what diffraction can miss: the near-edge region (XANES) shows the active metal’s electronic state, and the fine structure (EXAFS) its local coordination. Synchrotrons remain essential for frontier experiments, Jan noted, but lab XAS changes the cadence, enabling more samples to be screened, references to be measured alongside unknowns, and better-prepared beamtime.

Closing the presentations, Dr. Luca Lucarelli, Senior Application Scientist at Malvern Panalytical, called for a shift from discovering catalysts to engineering catalysts – and this begins with understanding gas-solid interactions. Physisorption and mercury intrusion porosimetry characterize the pore structure that influences activity, while chemisorption quantifies accessible metal sites – though Luca cautioned that accessible sites aren’t necessarily the same as catalytically active ones. Temperature-programmed techniques (TPD, TPR, and TPO) then reveal acid–base sites, metal-support interactions, and regeneration behavior. Luca also looked ahead to the catalyst technologies that could cut reliance on precious metals and advised on the analytical techniques needed to get there.

Key Q&A insights

After each talk, our experts answered questions from the audience. Self-driving labs came up repeatedly in the Q&As: at Johnson Matthey, Maurits explained, cobots already work alongside scientists, though machine learning on clean data delivers the most value today. Climate tech startups were advised to team up with larger licensors and build pilot plants big enough to generate meaningful scale-up data.

In a closing rapid-fire round, the panel agreed that breakthroughs will likely come from combining established players’ data with startups’ ideas, and that anyone not using AI in chemical development risks falling behind. Taken together, the discussions pointed to a common thread: promising catalyst technologies need better data, closer collaboration, and faster learning loops to reach scale.

Thank you to everyone who joined us live and sent in questions. We look forward to welcoming you to the next Future Days!

Missed a session? All six presentations, plus the live audience Q&As, are available to watch on demand on our Future Days: Catalysts webpage, where you can also get in touch with our experts about your own catalyst challenges.

Let’s stay connected

Malvern Panalytical helps catalyst developers understand their materials at every stage. To stay up to date on Future Days and all our other specialist content, follow our Malvern Panalytical Energy Transition & Catalysis page on LinkedIn.