Catalysis: facing the future

Abstract

Abstract Most of the chemical reactions used to produce the molecules and materials that our societies need—for example, in the petrochemical and pharmaceutical industries, the synthesis of plastics and other materials, and the production of foods and drinks—make use of catalysts. These speed up the rate at which atoms and molecules rearrange themselves into new forms, and provide a degree of control over the shape and form of those rearrangements. Catalysts let us drive a chemical reaction in a selected direction, in preference to others that could occur. In this way they turn chemistry from crude cookery into a rational and precise form of molecular engineering. And always we can draw inspiration, and sometimes borrow tricks, from the delicate and precise catalytic processes that occur in nature, where enzymes carry out processes in aqueous solution and at mild temperatures and pressures that often we struggle to achieve with far more extreme conditions—such as the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen into useful forms. It is often claimed that this particular catalytic process—the Haber–Bosch process for converting nitrogen into ammonia, discovered just over a century ago—has, by making possible the synthesis of artificial fertilizers, had a greater effect on humankind than any other single chemical innovation. It is what allows us to feed the world. Yet while nature performs this reaction using soluble molecules (enzymes) as catalysts, the Haber–Bosch process uses powdered iron (plus some additives). The reactions between nitrogen and hydrogen take place on the surface of iron particles: this is so-called heterogeneous catalysis, involving surface chemistry, rather than the homogeneous catalysis of enzyme reactions, in which the catalysts are soluble molecules. Both homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis are essential to the chemical industries. National Science Review spoke with two of the foremost practitioners of the latter field—Nobel laureate Gerhard Ertl of the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin, Germany, and Avelino Corma of the Institute of Chemical Technology (ITQ) at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain—about the current status of research in catalysis and prospects for the future.