PDC welcomes a new year of innovation #2

As we closed out the year, we’re proud to look back on a year of significant achievements and new partnerships. With about 80 customers and partners, we have successfully launched more than 10 new process developments projects, many of which are centered around our Prosyn technology. This milestone speaks to the continued innovation and trust in our solutions, and we're excited to carry this momentum into 2025.

While these new projects include both B2B collaborations and joint R&D initiatives, the real highlight lies in the collaborative spirit and shared vision driving us forward. For PDC, the new ventures represent a solid pipeline of growth, and while financial outcomes are important, the true value lies in the ongoing traction and continuity of our partnerships. We look ahead to another year of success and innovation.

Thank you to all of our customers, partners, and teams who have made this possible. We wish you a prosperous 2025 ahead!

Imagine your next pair of shoes to be made from a tree? That’s where NEXT-STEP comes in as it aims to develop recyclable products from wood production residues for everyday applications. New biochemical materials will be developed for shoe soles and insulation materials.

NEXT-STEP aims to scale-up and demonstrate a sustainable, resource and energy efficient production route for bio-based building blocks aMVL, 3MdVL and 3MPD from second generation feedstock. NEXT-STEP will further demonstrate the applicability of aMVL, 3MdVL and 3MPD as a chemical building block for end-products, such as PLA based shoe outsoles, a recyclable NIPU foam for shoe midsoles and for insulation material for construction.

The project was kicked off mid November by coordinator AIMPLAS. In this project PDC will be responsible for conceptual process design and related activities. More info here

More biobased news in the Promofer November newsletter, the first one out. We contribute to the PROMOFER project to help address the valorisation of two kinds of feedstock (lignocellulosic biomass and food industry waste) through the improvement of the fermentation processes and downstream purification.

Is AI reliable enough for application in the bio-based industries? AI has a wide range of applications: expert systems, speech recognition, planning and scheduling, computer vision, robotics, automatic reasoning and fuzzy logic (dealing with uncertainties).

The Bio-based Industries Consortium recently organized a webinar for its members followed by a public report with considerations around AI in bio-based industries. PDC and the Prosyn Expert System have been included in the overview as an example. Download the report from here.

One of the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s key promises is “to make the EU the world’s first climate neutral continent by 2050”. The Horizon 2020 Laurelin project aims to develop, optimize and improve the CO₂ hydrogenation process towards production of methanol using disruptive multifunctional catalyst systems in combination with magnetic induction, non-thermal plasma induction and microwave technologies.

The consortium includes 8 partners from 5 European countries, which collaborate with the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the University of Tokyo in Japan. In the project PDC leads the conceptual process design and life-cycle assessment and costing. The collaboration is a litmus test for the potential closer connection between Japan and the Horizon Europe program.

We are PDC. We are an international team of conceptual process design experts with a strong reputation in the industry. Our mission is to help create a lower carbon footprint and a more sustainable process industry.

As a process design innovator with close to 40 years of experience, PDC understands how to support and lead teams through the uncertainties of the conceptual process design flow to reach innovative solutions. The methods we share have, over the years, helped us quickly and effectively design solutions to a wide range of challenges.