Towards sustainable catalyst production: A prospective life cycle assessment of resource-efficient Ni-CeO2 scale-up across current and future electricity mixes

Scaling up catalytic synthesis from laboratory to industrial scale strongly influences its environmental profile, presenting new opportunities to integrate circular practices into catalyst manufacturing. In this study, a prospective Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is carried out to measure the environmental implications associated with the synthesis of Ni-CeO 2 nanoparticles under three electricity scenarios: the current Global mix, a Business-as-Usual (BAU) pathway according to the IEA Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS), and a fully decarbonized mix aligned with the IEA Net Zero proposal. Solvents and electricity demands are identified as the dominant contributors. The environmental benefits of circular solvent management, resource-efficient process optimization, and electricity decarbonization are systematically evaluated. It is shown that scaling up with process optimization, by integrating higher synthesis yields (up to 90%), solvent recovery (67–75%), and a literature-informed industrial-scale electricity demand, leads to reductions in environmental impacts of 70–90% across most categories. Replacement of fossil-derived methanol with bioethanol and biomethanol is assessed as a strategy for improving solvent sustainability, with biomethanol emerging as the more promising solution for solvent substitution, while bio-ethanol surprisingly leads to deteriorated environmental performance, for the specific production pathways and datasets evaluated. Further comparison is applied across regional electricity mixes (European, German, and French), highlighting the influence of electricity-mix carbon intensity on the resulting impacts. The proposed framework demonstrates how prospective LCA can support the transition towards more sustainable and circular catalyst manufacturing during industrial scale-up.