Beale’s Andrew Lecture focuses on CO2 hydrogenation catalysts

ANDY BEALE, professor of chemistry at University College London (UCL), has been awarded IChemE’s 2025 Andrew Medal and Lecture.

Beale received the accolade and delivered the lecture as part of the UK Catalysis Conference, which took place on 8–10 January at Loughborough University. Chris Hardacre, who presented Beale with the medal on behalf of IChemE, noted: “Andy has carried out novel, highly impactful interdisciplinary work that underpins understanding, design, and formulation of new catalysts. His work brings new understanding of relationships between catalyst structure and performance and is being commercialised by spinout companies. It is widely applicable to catalytic processes and takes understanding of catalysis to a higher level.”

Beale’s research focuses on using spectroscopic and scattering methods to understand how the structure of materials, particularly heterogeneous catalysts, influences their performance. This has given fundamental insight into real industrial problems and led to the creation of two spinout companies – one a chemicals characterisation and analysis consultancy, the other focusing on methane and nitrogen oxides removal in the marine sector.

Beale used the Andrew Lecture to share his work on using advanced X-ray methods for determining structure-activity relationships in catalysts for carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide hydrogenation. His work seeks to understand how the structure of a catalyst and the interaction between the catalyst and its support affect catalyst performance. His lecture focused on how this could be applied to catalysts used to convert carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide to hydrocarbons, which could be used as an alternative to fossil fuels in a broad range of industrial and transport applications.

Marc-Olivier Coppens, who chaired the Andrew Medal judging panel, said: “Andy is a highly worthy winner of the Andrew Medal, by demonstrating how fundamental insights gained by creative, deeper-probing catalyst characterisation and imaging methods could advance industrial processes that are crucial for sustainable development, and it is fantastic how he leverages entrepreneurship to that effect.”