A global analysis of the rise, reign, and retreat of topics in research toward sustainable platform chemicals

Abstract

Platform chemicals—such as olefins, ammonia, aromatics, and methanol—serve as fundamental building blocks for the chemical industry. At the same time, they account for 4% of global CO₂ emissions, highlighting the need for renewable feedstocks, renewable energy, or other alternative approaches to develop more sustainable production routes toward carbon neutrality. Despite substantial research output, we lack a holistic understanding of where innovation is heading. This gap leaves research planning and policy decisions without a quantitative basis for understanding the directions of innovation. A better understanding of how they differ between platform chemicals is critical for delineating policies and strategic plans toward a net-zero future. Our study addresses this gap by providing unprecedented clarity on global research trends in platform chemicals spanning the last three decades since the establishment of the Green Chemistry principles and other subsequent sustainability approaches for chemical systems, showing the rise, reign, and retreat of topics in this area. For this purpose, we develop a novel approach by integrating topic modelling, generative AI, and expert judgment to analyse >90 000 research articles from Scopus, identifying 62 distinct research topics and tracking their temporal and geographical trends. Our results reveal different innovation patterns across the four platform chemicals. Driven by the concepts of an ammonia or methanol economy, research output has increased for these platform chemicals by a factor of 17 and 6 between 2000 and 2024, respectively. This growth has been led by new strategies like photo- and electrochemical routes, which now account for approximately 65% of ammonia-related research. For olefins and aromatics, innovation patterns show less momentum as research has rather focused on optimising available technologies. Reliance on existing alternative routes (based on renewable methanol) and olefins and aromatics’ molecular complexity could explain this lower momentum. Our quantitative findings can help define research priorities for green chemistry and derive the implications of emerging technological trends on industrial systems regarding future electricity, biomass, and feedstock demand.