Catalyst Market Research Catalyst Industry Status Analysis
Catalyst technology is one of the key technologies in industrial production and daily life, which can significantly improve the efficiency of chemical reactions and is widely used in three major fields: petroleum refining, pharmaceutical and chemical industry and environmental protection, and one of the core work of innovation in chemical industry is innovation in the field of catalysis. Catalysis has been taken as a priority development area in the new century. According to statistics, about 90% of industrial processes require the use of catalysts, for example, chemical, petrochemical, biochemical, environmental protection, etc. As an indispensable chemical raw material in industrial production, catalysts accelerate the rate of chemical reactions because they reduce the energy required for the reaction while increasing the efficiency of the reaction.
Catalysts can improve the reaction efficiency and reduce the energy required for the reaction while also meeting the requirements of protecting the environment, thus their role in petroleum, chemical and environmental protection fields is becoming more and more important. Overall, China’s catalyst industry has made great progress at this stage through continuous development, but there is still a gap with the international advanced level.
Catalysts are widely used in petroleum refining and petrochemical, natural gas, chemical fertilizer, coal gas, environmental protection and many other industries. Due to the deteriorating ecological environment in China, environmental protection will be gradually strengthened, and the demand for catalyst products and technologies from downstream industries will continue to grow. The capacity and start-up rate of downstream industries show a positive correlation with the demand for catalyst products.
Due to the relatively late start of research on environmental protection catalysts in China, there is still a gap between the R&D, production and application of new advanced environmental protection catalysts in China and other developed countries such as Europe, America and Japan, and many advanced materials and high performance catalyst production technologies have been monopolized by multinational companies for a long time. There are great similarities in catalytic technologies involved in catalysts; fine chemical catalytic technologies for the synthesis of high value-added chemicals and pharmaceutical intermediates are relatively fragmented and slow in development, and are now being strengthened; catalytic technologies for the purpose of environmental governance and environmental protection have been widely emphasized.
At present, imported products occupy a major share of the domestic catalyst market, and with the improvement of production capacity in China’s catalyst industry, there is a broad prospect of domestic substitution in the future. Special molecular sieve application scenarios are broad, and the market size of catalysts in environmental protection catalysts and energy chemical and fine chemical fields continues to expand. The domestic catalyst industry is currently at a low level of development, with a large number of enterprises, serious product homogenization and intense competition, which is mainly concentrated in the low-end market.
In China, environmental protection catalysts are highly valued by governments at all levels and supported by the national industrial policy. The state has issued a number of policies to encourage the development and innovation of environmental protection catalysts, and industrial policies such as “National Key Support for High and New Technology Fields”, “New Material Industry Development Guide” and “Notice on Demonstration and Application of Fuel Cell Vehicles” provide clear and broad market prospects for the development of environmental protection catalyst industry.
In the New Materials Industry Development Guide jointly issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Finance, environmental catalyst materials such as catalytic materials for motor vehicle exhaust and industrial waste gas purification are listed as key strategic new materials urgently needed for key application areas. The global market size of pollution emission control catalysts is expected to increase from USD 21.1 billion in 2019 to USD 30.5 billion in 2024. With the strengthening of environmental pollution control in China, China has a broad market space for environmental protection catalysts.
What is the outlook trend of the industry in 2022? To know more detailed analysis of the industry, please click to view the “China Catalyst Industry Competition Analysis and Development Prospect Forecast Report 2021-2025” published by China Research Institute.
