- DOE and ANL have launched the National Science-at-Scale Collaborative to help U.S. firms move critical materials and chemical manufacturing tech into domestic production faster
- Participating companies will get access to Argonne’s Materials Engineering Research Facility
- The effort grew out of a DOE roundtable where companies laid out barriers to manufacturing
The Department of Energy and Argonne National Laboratory, or ANL, have established a joint initiative aimed at shortening the time it takes American companies to bring critical materials and chemical manufacturing technologies into commercial production.
ANL said Wednesday the National Science-at-Scale Collaborative, backed by DOE’s Office of Critical Materials and Energy Innovation, or CMEI, will pair companies with Argonne researchers to address the technical hurdles that often stall promising technologies.
Audrey Robertson, assistant secretary of energy and head of CMEI, said the United States cannot compete globally unless new technologies reach domestic production lines faster — the gap the collaborative is built to close by tying together the department, its national laboratories and the private sector.
What ANL Resources Will Industry Partners Gain Access To?
Companies joining the initiative will tap Argonne’s Materials Engineering Research Facility, where project teams can run simulations, apply artificial intelligence, rapidly synthesize candidate materials and trial new production methods on pilot-line equipment.
“American manufacturing has an opportunity to lead the next generation of innovation in critical materials and chemical processing,” said Paul Kearns, director of Argonne.
“The National Science-at-Scale Collaborative will help connect discovery, engineering and deployment in ways that strengthen U.S. competitiveness and advance our economic security,” he added.
What Prompted the ANL-DOE Initiative?
The collaborative emerged from a roundtable convened by CMEI, where executives from the chemical and critical materials industries discussed the obstacles they face in domestic manufacturing and explored how government partnerships could help. Companies at the table included Aclara, Albemarle, ATALCO, BASF North America, Chemours, Dow, Entegris, Exxon Mobil, Orbia and Standard Lithium.
