In the ever more global commercial arena, catalysis becomes ever more central to the competitiveness of individual products, companies, industries, and countries. Those who develop new cost-effective catalysts and biocatalysts that improve the yields of products, cheapen or simplify processes, enable vendors to meet customers needs more quickly and precisely, open up attractive products previously too costly for the marketplace, or reduce the amount of pollution produced during manufacturing processes will gain clear competitive advantages.

In economic terms, catalysts add an estimated $2.4 trillion of value worldwide to raw chemical ingredients as scores of industries transform them into petroleum products, synthetic rubber and plastics, food products, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals, or as they control vehicle and industry emissions. In the United States, over 20 percent of all industrial products amounting to an annual value of $500 billion involve catalysis. The worldwide market for catalysts themselves, which come in forms as disparate as biological enzymes (specialized proteins) to fine metal powders to complex inorganic compounds called zeolites, amounted to about $7.8 billion in 1993 and is expected to rise to nearly $11 billion by 1998. Catalysis is very big business.

Improving catalysts and catalysis processes promises several important payoffs downstream in manufacturing. New catalysts that are more precisely designed than ones in present use can maximize desired products while minimizing byproducts. New catalysts will enable engineers to produce the same products using less expensive feedstocks or even to replace feedstocks based on non-renewable and depletable resources, such as petroleum, with renewable ones, such as grains or switch grass. Another payoff, one that analysts predict will grow in relative importance in the coming years, will come from catalysis technologies that reduce pollution by obviating the need for organic solvents, eliminating troublesome byproducts that subsequently need to be disposed of, or converting pollution that is produced during manufacturing processes into more benign forms.

Pollution prevention and abatement catalysts like these will play increasingly large roles in reducing the costs of environmental compliance while making products more attractive to environmentally concerned clientele.

Leap-frog advances in catalysis of the sort targeted in this ATP focused program only can come from research of uncommon technical difficulty. At the bottom of every catalytic process are complex physical and chemical dramas playing out on tiny scales, often at arresting speeds and under surveillance-unfriendly conditions common in industrial processes, factors that traditionally have made scientific study and design of catalysis technologies extremely challenging, costly, or technically impossible. Yet it is precisely this sort of knowledge and investigation that harbors the greatest potential payoffs. Those who know more about catalysis and harness that knowledge into new and better catalysis technology will be the ones with the right stuff in tomorrow's commercial and environmental contexts. The industry-led approach facilitated through the ATP program is to improve the integration of catalysis and biocatalysis design and development with new process technology and chemical manufacturing. Said differently, the goal is a generic strategy for more cost-effective and efficient R&D for arriving at good catalysis solutions to any particular industrial problem.