CatCost: A Free Tool for Rapidly and Accurately Estimating Catalyst Manufacturing Costs (Text Version)
This is the text version of a video about CatCost, a free online tool that quickly and accurately estimates pre-commercial catalyst manufacturing costs by incorporating innovative decision-logic with industry-standard methods into a user-friendly platform. CatCost improves research efficiency and reduces commercialization risk by identifying cost drivers in catalyst production, enabling better R&D decisions to accelerate technology adoption into the marketplace.
Video opens with a shot of male researcher in a white lab coat, crossing the screen carrying a brown jug. A female researcher, also wearing a white lab coat, then walks towards the camera carrying small items in her hands.
Josh Shaidle: So, why should anybody care about a catalyst and the cost of a catalyst?
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Video shows montage of people working, agriculture processes, and crops.
Josh Shaidle: Well, across the world about 85% of the chemical products that we touch and…
Video cuts to woman in a grocery store selecting cleaning products from a shelf.
Josh Shaidle: …engage with on a daily basis go through a catalytic process to generate those…
Video cuts to a female researcher in a white lab coat working at her bench.
Josh Shaidle: …materials. Further, the catalyst industry is a multi-billion-dollar industry and
Video cuts to close-up of a male researcher inspecting a jar with brown fluid in it.
Josh Shaidle: …it's growing because of the need to incorporate new resources and new…
Video cuts to female researcher looking at her computer screen, which displays code; a finger points to something on screen.
Josh Shaidle: …feedstocks into our economy today. And so, this tool enables you to accelerate the…
Josh Schaidle, Director of the Chemical Catalysis for Bioenergy Consortium and NREL researcher, appears on-screen.
Josh Schaidle: …rate at which new catalysts and new materials are developed to convert these…
Video cuts to female researcher works at a glove box.
Josh Schaidle: …emerging feedstocks into fuels, products, and chemicals.
Video cuts to close-up of the same female researcher injecting a yellow liquid into a small, glass tube.
Fred Baddour: CatCost is a free and…
Fred Baddour, CatCost Principal Investigator and NREL researcher, appears on-screen.
Fred Baddour: …publicly available tool for estimating the cost of pre-commercial catalysts. We developed CatCost to enable…
Video cuts to man wearing hard hat and checking gauges in a bioenergy lab.
Fred Baddour: …catalyst researchers to understand economics…
Video cuts to two men wearing hard hats referring to a control panel in a bioenergy lab.
Fred Baddour: …around scaling up a process. So, the costs associated with manufacturing any material are very very different dependent on scale and so, when you're…
Fred Baddour, CatCost Principal Investigator and NREL researcher, appears on-screen.
Fred Baddour: …transitioning materials from the laboratory to commercial scales there's a large unknown and uncertainty associated with the cost of preparing them.
Josh Schaidle, Director of the Chemical Catalysis for Bioenergy Consortium and NREL researcher, appears on-screen.
Josh Schaidle: As a researcher myself, one of the things that gets me most excited about this tool…
Video cuts to a male and female researcher, seated, referring to data displayed on several computer monitors mounted in front of them.
Josh Schaidle: …is the insight gained by bringing together known and established…
Video cuts to close-up of data displayed on several computer monitors.
Josh Schaidle: …methodologies for estimating cost and…
Video cuts to over-the-shoulder shot of a female researcher looking at data displayed on several computer monitors.
Josh Schaidle: …the innovative decision-making logic that we've built into the tool, streamlining that information together…
Josh Schaidle, Director of the Chemical Catalysis for Bioenergy Consortium and NREL researcher, appears on-screen.
Josh Schaidle: …and giving that insight to people broadly across the community to help us accelerate our R&D.
Video cuts to screenshot of someone navigating the CatCost tool.
Fred Baddour: One of the major differentiators of CatCost is that it enables a rapid and accurate assessment of the economics of the material.
Fred Baddour, CatCost Principal Investigator and NREL researcher, appears on-screen.
Fred Baddour: There are a number of different ways that researchers are able to assess the economics around their process and their synthesis…
Video cuts to female researcher carrying two bottles of brown liquid over to her male counterpart. The two examine the bottles.
Fred Baddour: …however, these often take weeks or months to perform with full teams of
economic advisors. What CatCost does is…
Video cuts to screenshot of data within the CatCost tool.
Fred Baddour: …delivers a lot of the same accuracy on a drastically reduced time scale.
Kurt Van Allsburg, CatCost Lead Developer and NREL researcher, appears on-screen.
Kurt Van Allsburg: The intellectual property requirements of the catalyst industry pose some unique challenges and opportunities that we wanted to address with the CatCost tool.
Video cuts to screenshot of the CatCost tool.
Kurt Van Allsburg: For example, we designed the tool so that no user information is ever…
Video cuts to tracking shot through the servers of a supercomputer.
Kurt Van Allsburg: …transmitted to our servers. Even if you're using the web tool, everything is…
Video cuts to close up of a man’s hands typing on a computer keyboard, a bar graph is sitting on the table next to the keyboard.
Kurt Van Allsburg: …stored locally in your browser.
Video cuts to two female researchers standing, looking at a computer screen together.
Kurt Van Allsburg: And we also designed it so that users can input…
Video cuts to close-up of data entered into the CatCost tool.
Kurt Van Allsburg: …their own company in-house data for a more accurate estimate to their own…
Kurt Van Allsburg, CatCost Lead Developer and NREL researcher, appears on-screen.
Kurt Van Allsburg: …situation. In other words, catalyst researchers are able to get the customization that they're interested in without compromising any of the security of their data.
Fred Baddour, CatCost Principal Investigator and NREL researcher, appears on-screen.
Fred Baddour: One of the primary benefits of CatCost is that we can…
Video cuts to male researcher, wearing a white lab coat, entering data into a computer screen; bottles and plastic tubing are in the foreground.
Fred Baddour: …envision this working very seamlessly in the current workflow of a catalyst…
Video cuts to close-up of three bottles containing an off-white liquid, connected to a number of valves and plastic tubes.
Fred Baddour: …researcher because of the ease-of-use and the accuracy of this type of tool…
Video cuts to close-up of a researcher’s hand entering data into a computer screen.
Fred Baddour: …and the type of estimates that are delivered by CatCost, catalyst researchers…
Fred Baddour, CatCost Principal Investigator and NREL researcher, appears on-screen.
Fred Baddour: …are able to make these estimates, streamline them, and be able to make decisions real-time, based on the cost of their materials.
Video cuts to close-up of a finger pointed to a laptop monitor, which is displaying the CatCost tool.
Fred Baddour: Ultimately, no tool exists in the public domain that offers the accuracy, flexibility, and ease
Josh Schaidle, Director of the Chemical Catalysis for Bioenergy Consortium and NREL researcher, appears on-screen.
Josh Schaidle: Overall, in industry and academia, in the national lab complex…
Video cuts to close-up of a researcher’s hand, wearing black latex glove, depositing a rust-colored powder into a glass vessel.
Josh Schaidle: …this tool improves research efficiency, which means we're getting…
Video cuts to female researcher, wearing a white lab coat, connecting a plastic tube to a glass vessel.
Josh Schaidle: …greater value from dollars put into catalyst development.
Video cuts to wide shot of a male researcher, wearing a blue lab coat, checking equipment in a bioenergy lab.
Kurt Van Allsburg: As we look to the future, we hope that CatCost becomes…
Video cuts to close-up of male researcher's gloved hands checking valves.
Kurt Van Allsburg: …an integral part of the way that catalyst R&D is done.
Kurt Van Allsburg, CatCost Lead Developer and NREL researcher, appears on-screen.
Kurt Van Allsburg: Research is always going to take you to unexpected places and we want to ensure that through CatCost, economic insight is part of the equation.
Video cuts to the three interviewees working in the lab. Text appears on-screen: Learn more: catcost.chembio.org