hte celebrates its 20th anniversary

hte celebrates 20 years of business this year. From a start-up with seven founding members, the company has developed into a market leader for high throughput technology in chemical catalysis and process research with more than 300 employees.

hte has developed a technology platform that contributes to a highly efficient research environment. It enables faster and more productive research and testing of catalysts and the development of processes for the chemical and petrochemical sector and the oil industry. Digitalization plays an important role here and poses new challenges to research and development. hte’s software products solve these challenges and support researchers in structuring, analyzing, and visualizing the large amounts of data that are generated in high throughput experiments in a simple and integrated way.

hte's service portfolio comprises research cooperations in the laboratories in Heidelberg as well as integrated plant and software solutions that enable customers to implement high throughput workflows in their own laboratories. Through its offering, the company contributes to overcoming the global challenges of our time, such as protecting the environment and climate, energy efficiency, and mobility, as the following success stories show:

• hte was involved in developing the dry reforming process for the environmentally friendly production of syngas in a German research cooperation. Dry reforming natural gas to generate syngas enables the industrial and economic use of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and significantly improves energy efficiency.
• Together with BP, hte accelerated the commercialization of the Fischer-Tropsch process. This process is used to convert syngas into synthetic fuels and lubricants. During the collaboration, hte’s technology platform has been continuously refined and advanced for the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis reaction. This allowed BP to perform a large number of rapid and precise data for the scale-up of catalysts and processes.
• Furthermore, hte supports companies from the energy and refining sector in the research and development of catalytic processes for a more efficient utilization of raw materials and in the manufacturing of clean fuels. In developing a new styrene catalyst for CRI / Criterion, hte enabled a significant increase in the number of catalysts tested through the use of a 48-fold reactor system. Ultimately, CRI was able to present a product to the market that allowed customers to further optimize costs and performance in their styrene production.Prior to this, hte supported CRI with the market launch of two new catalysts: AstraCat Gold and AstraCat Select.
• Numerous refineries also commission hte as an independent service provider for testing and benchmarking of commercial refining catalysts.

“For the future we want to continue to expand our current market position. Our concept for digitalization of research and development in the field of catalysis will play an important role in this. Yet our greatest asset is our employees. The pleasure they take in their work and their agile can-do mentality, their passion and expertise are what make us what we are. This gives us the confidence of knowing that our success will continue in the future,” said Dr. Wolfram Stichert, founding member and CEO of hte GmbH. “We would also like to take this opportunity to thank all of our customers for their reliable partnership over the last two decades and look forward to taking on more challenges together.”