Expediting net-zero - bridging research and industry

Dr Martin W Carroll, a UK-based independent management consultant and Senior Advisor to MATcelerate ZERO partnership, on the importance of filling the project gap between universities and industry.

To make a successful energy transition and achieve net-zero within meaningful timescales, new materials innovations will be required to enable decarbonisation in hard-to-abate sectors, such as energy generation and storage, chemical production, transport, and the built environment. However, new materials typically take more than 30 years to reach the market at scale, as evidenced by lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles. To have a significant impact on reducing CO₂ emissions before 2050, the development and adoption of new materials needs to accelerate.

In the UK, much university research has been, and continues to be, funded to address these sectors’ needs, including the materials challenges, with very promising or even game-changing results.

At a government level, there has been increased recognition that the development of new materials will be key to achieving the net-zero goals. In recent years, the UK Government has increased funding for university research in advanced materials, setting up facilities such as the Faraday Institution and the Henry Royce Institute, which are enabling the discovery of innovative net-zero materials.

However, despite these investments and the efforts of individual companies and industries with research and innovation initiatives, it is often extremely difficult for them to become aware of such breakthroughs from universities and have the opportunities to evaluate these early-stage innovations effectively.

Equally, neither do all the academic researchers nor the universities themselves have sufficient industry understanding, experience, networks or technical facilities to be able to demonstrate how these new advances can be integrated into end products and scaled-up through the supply chains.

Creating commercial propositions around new material technologies that are attractive to industry, and also manage technical and commercial risks, is a major challenge. The reasons for this are two-fold. Firstly, scale-up and the integration facilities and expertise that would enable market validation are generally not found in universities. Nor are there established pathways, nor a connected materials ecosystem, to provide access to this required expertise, unlike other sectors such as the pharmaceutical industry.

Secondly, it is challenging to get investment from the venture capital community for materials commercialisation because the time to market is very long, integration challenges cause market uncertainty, and the capital costs of the required scale-up infrastructure are often high.

These two interconnected challenges mean that materials development is slow and laborious. Mass-market timescales in excess of 30 years are common.

Solutions are urgently needed to bring together funding and industry knowledge and expertise with the most transformative materials innovations from universities, to accelerate their commercialisation. Support exists for the later stages of the commercialisation process, e.g. Innovate UK funds, but for the very earliest stages there is limited support (e.g. Impact Accelerator Accounts, Higher Education Innovation Fund).

The new MATcelerate ZERO initiative is a multi-university programme being set up by the Universities of Cambridge, Manchester, UCL, Oxford, Imperial and Bristol, and supported by the Henry Royce Institute. The aim is to work closely with materials-intensive industry partners to help them achieve their net-zero targets in the required timeframes.

This new industry-university partnership aims to deliver relatively short (12-24 months) demonstrator projects focused on key proof points identified by industry as essential to de-risk technologies and create opportunities attractive to the industry partners.

Industry partners will help define and select projects to receive funding from a central fund to which they contribute, in exchange for facilitated, preferential access to the new innovative opportunities and option to commercialise, sharing financial, technical and commercial risks. Further advantages will come from opportunities for talent development, closer ties with world-leading academic institutions and the kudos from taking a leading role in the transformation to net-zero.

We are working with prospective industry partners to start the pilot phase of the initiative this year, with six universities and up to five industry partners. When proven successful, the vision is to scale up across many more university and industry partners.

Although there are several exceptional examples of materials technology translation and commercialisation, through both high-tech spin-outs and corporate research, when viewed across the UK landscape, materials innovation has been relatively slow to provide economic impact through business uptake when compared to other technologies – such as information and communication and pharmaceuticals.

This is a shortcoming that the country must address urgently given the broad range of businesses that depend on the production, processing and application of materials. Accelerating materials translation and commercialisation will accelerate realisation of the economic and societal benefits of these technologies.