There’s truth behind the saying: limitation is the mother of creativity. When a process is working well, why would you change it? But when it’s confronted by unavoidable challenges, it can either be a reason to fail or an opportunity to grow. So when the Monument Kallo team faced catalyst availability issues due to supply chain constraints, they chose to get creative — not only finding an alternative, but also achieving a domino of big wins. 

Kallo’s Isomerization process, (a distinct chemical conversion process) requires a special catalyst operating at high temperatures — one of which Monument had been relying on China-based production for many years. But recently, the ability to obtain that specific catalyst became a real challenge due to the current global supply constraints, requiring the team to seek alternative solutions.

“We anticipated these types of limitations, but when it really became a pressing issue, we started working with our suppliers to look into other catalysts,” Jack Sinnema, Sr. R&D Leader at Monument Kallo, explained. “They suggested an alternative in Europe known as an A35 catalyst, and so we began testing the product in our lab to see if it would be a successful substitute. And it was.” 

The best part of this win was that with the new catalyst, they could not only fill in the gaps of the supply chain issues, but also enjoy the ROI of a product that costs 30% of what it used to, resulting in a few hundred thousand in cost savings overall.

Even further, the older DT catalyst that was used costs 5x more, so by replacing it, Kallo experienced major cost savings in that process too.

So why stop there? The team started thinking about how the new catalyst could positively impact other processes. They began with the BDO-to-THF conversion, a process that was suffering from corrosion when the homogeneous catalyst system was applied. 

As a result of the A35’s success in the Isomerization process, the team opened an investigation into using it to address this corrosive process — and were able to successfully de-bottleneck it to give us more flexibility.

And the wins didn’t end there. Perhaps the most exciting consequence of the initial replacement efforts was the emergence of a whole new capability in the Ether field.

With a new, big-name customer looking to Monument to produce Ether from their C8 alcohol streams, the Kallo team was able to utilize the new catalyst to provide them an alternative to their current processes that would elevate their internal operations — all while initiating an entirely new type of partnership with Monument.

“These are customers in the synthetic alcohol field who we weren’t able to serve prior to this new addition to our product capabilities and offerings,” Jack explained. “When this customer request came in, we immediately initiated R&D investigations, and after two different trials over the course of a year and a half, we had remarkable success.”

Not only was the A35 catalyst a suitable, more cost-effective substitute in their current processes, but it also freed up their current catalyst for other more profitable business capabilities. As for Kallo, this one client success story was just the beginning of a whole new route to linear alcohol opportunities. 

“In a sense, it was innovation by crisis,” Jack shared. “We turned a challenging situation into exciting opportunities by being open to new solutions and creatively problem solving — and it was such an incredible team effort. Between our R&D and QC scientists in the labs, process engineering, to our supply chain and production teams, to our marketing/sales endorsed by our Business Leader, Peter Michielsen — it was a collective push to seek new alternatives, get it tested and approved, and then get it sold. This collaboration helped cultivate new innovations, growth possibilities, and a lot of cost savings — and there’s only more to come.”