Opportunities for Catalysis in The 21st Century. A report from the Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee

Chemical catalysis affects our lives in myriad ways. Catalysis provides a means of changing the rates at which chemical bonds are formed and broken and of controlling the yields of chemical reactions to increase the amounts of desirable products from these reactions and reduce the amounts of undesirable ones. Thus, it lies at the heart of our quality of life: The reduced emissions of modern cars, the abundance of fresh food at our stores, and the new pharmaceuticals that improve our health are made possible by chemical reactions controlled by catalysts. Catalysis is also essential to a healthy economy: The petroleum, chemical, and pharmaceutical industries, contributors of $500 billion to the gross national product of the United States, rely on catalysts to produce everything from fuels to ''wonder drugs'' to paints to cosmetics. Today, our Nation faces a variety of challenges in creating alternative fuels, reducing harmful by-products in manufacturing, cleaning up the environment and preventing future pollution, dealing with the causes of global warming, protecting citizens from the release of toxic substances and infectious agents, and creating safe pharmaceuticals. Catalysts are needed to meet these challenges, but their complexity and diversity demand a revolution in the way catalysts are designed and used. This revolution can become reality through the application of new methods for synthesizing and characterizing molecular and material systems. Opportunities to understand and predict how catalysts work at the atomic scale and the nanoscale are now appearing, made possible by breakthroughs in the last decade in computation, measurement techniques, and imaging and by new developments in catalyst design, synthesis, and evaluation