# BASF Company radar · 18,464 documents · 2021-01-01–2026-10-20 · updated 2026-10-21 Canonical: https://slate.greyb.com/radar/basf/innovations ## In one minute ### A zeolite catalyst is now specified by where its aluminium atoms sit The environmental catalyst work has moved past composition. One filing claims a chabazite grown from a faujasite source in which paired aluminium tetrahedra sit as third-nearest neighbours, two silicon tetrahedra apart, and defines that arrangement by a two-dimensional silicon-29 NMR signature at −104 to −108 ppm in one dimension and −208 to −212 ppm in the other [1]. The same structural descriptor carries a performance number in a parallel filing: at a copper-to-aluminium ratio of 0.2–0.5 and a silica-to-alumina ratio of 8–40, the material holds at least half its nitrogen oxide conversion after sixteen hours at 850 °C [2]. A rival can match a diffraction pattern and still miss that aluminium distribution. How the cage is built is claimed with equal care. Crystallisation runs from sodium waterglass and sodium aluminate with seed crystals and no organic template at all [3], and the extra-framework aluminium that would block the exchange sites is kept out by lowering the calcination temperature and changing the gas atmosphere around it [4]. The template-free route and the site distribution are two halves of one manufacturing argument. 1. [JP7870459B2](/?paper=JP7870459B2&utm_source=radar&utm_medium=dashboard) 2. [IN202417039353A](/?paper=IN202417039353A&utm_source=radar&utm_medium=dashboard) 3. [CA3026817C](/?paper=CA3026817C&utm_source=radar&utm_medium=dashboard) 4. [US11465134B2](/?paper=US11465134B2&utm_source=radar&utm_medium=dashboard) ### The next move is a €10 billion acquisition, not a plant In September 2026 BASF approached Evonik about a takeover, and Evonik rejected an initial offer of about €22.15 a share — roughly €10.3 billion — as too low, declining to enter formal talks or open its books for due diligence. BASF has not confirmed the figure, described the discussions as exploratory and their outcome as open, and has since indicated it could raise the offer. It has also committed to preserving Evonik's German sites and its no-compulsory-redundancy guarantee, which runs to 2032, in any agreement. North Rhine-Westphalia's state government intervened publicly on jobs and on Evonik remaining independent, and the RAG-Stiftung foundation, which holds just over 40 percent and was already planning to reduce it, has been drawn into direct negotiations. ### The new tonnage goes to the coast and the new specialties stay in Germany Zhanjiang reached full operation in March 2026: €8.7 billion, the largest single investment in the company's history, more than 2,000 employees on site and power contracted from renewable sources. The more informative announcement came a month later, when the aroma ingredients business started menthol and linalool production in Ludwigshafen and a world-scale citral plant at Zhanjiang in the same release, with sixty new jobs in Germany attached to the European half. ### A shell around the crystal carries the specification Copper and iron are co-exchanged into a single chabazite crystal rather than laid down as two successive washcoats, and an alumina layer is then grown over 20 to 100 percent of the crystal's outer surface. That outer layer is a physical barrier, and its thickness fraction is the claim. It also makes the catalyst's performance a function of coating geometry rather than of bulk chemistry, which is the kind of specification a customer's validation loop can measure directly. ### Europe's polyamide 6 chain is being merged rather than fixed On 19 October BASF signed a non-binding memorandum with China's Highsun Holding Group to explore putting their European polyamide 6 activities into a 50:50 joint venture, and to evaluate adding their global extrusion operations outside North America to it. The downstream engineering plastics businesses on both sides are excluded. The chief executive framed it as European consolidation needed for competitiveness. ### One division is being made listable, and it is buying the capability its patents do not cover Shareholders approved the hive-down into BASF Agricultural Solutions Deutschland GmbH at the April 2026 meeting, and by September four banks had been mandated as global coordinators, with the entity to be structured as an SE and IPO readiness targeted for mid-2027. The preparation is administrative more than technical: a governance hub of more than fifty corporate roles in Bucharest, built to run financial reporting, audit and procurement at arm's length from the group. ### The acrylic acid plant is the patented object The oxidation reactor is treated as given, and the claims begin at the hot gas leaving it. Three filings from 2026 run an extraction unit and a cracking column side by side or in series, with two recirculating gas streams returning cracked monomer to the separation column above the point where crude acid is drawn. The residue that would otherwise be burnt is handled mechanically: a vessel with an in-line mill pump that circulates 1 to 100 cubic metres an hour at 1 to 40 bar and 50 to 150 °C so that deposits cannot settle into a blockage. ### The improvement in the numbers is partly a supply disruption, and it is fading Ahead of the 28 October third-quarter call, one analyst note expects adjusted EBITDA of about €1.65 billion against €2.45 billion in the second quarter, attributing the drop to the fading of temporary upstream pricing benefits from Middle East supply disruptions, seasonality, and the normalisation of elevated hedging and trading gains. ## Overview ### The molecule is no longer the asset Read end to end, this portfolio says one thing consistently. The chemistry is treated as known, and the claim is written on everything around it: where the aluminium sits in a chabazite framework and how to hit that distribution without a template, the order in which a washcoat slurry is laid down, the sequence that sends partly evaporated crude acrylic acid straight to an esterifier, the heating schedule at which a charged cathode powder must show two peaks in its oxygen release, the twenty-point colour tolerance on recovered caprolactam. Composition-of-matter claims are now the exception rather than the default, across industrial chemicals, plastics, batteries and crop protection alike. ## What's new BASF spent September trying to become a smaller, more valuable company without becoming a less ambitious one, and the market and innovation evidence point the same way. It moved to buy about €10bn of specialty chemicals and was refused, set its agriculture business on a path to a separate listing, and published innovation that is overwhelmingly about specifications, recovery processes and audit trails rather than new molecules. The unifying bet is that in a European cost environment BASF cannot win on energy, the defensible ground is the specification and the documentation wrapped around a product, not the molecule itself. That is a coherent strategy; it is not yet a funded one. ## Research ### Polyamide 6 recovery is written as a heat and water balance The hydrolysis conditions take a paragraph: 230 to 335 °C at 40 to 140 bar, with no mineral acid and no zinc catalyst, producing a liquid caprolactam at 99 percent purity or better, an APHA colour of 20 or below, and at least 0.1 percent water by weight held deliberately in the product. Everything else in the family is plant design. Three vapour streams at descending pressure are used to heat successive purification stages, and the condensate from them is returned to the depolymerisation reactor. High boilers such as aromatic amines are spun out in a hydrocyclone or knocked down on a demister plate after evaporation. The reaction even tolerates mixed feed, with a polyethylene terephthalate plus polyamide 6.6 to polyamide 6 mass ratio allowed between 0.01 and 2.5, and the crystallised product is specified to an aniline content of 0 to 10 parts per million. ### A cathode powder is defined by how it releases oxygen when heated Several filings stop describing the crystal and describe its behaviour instead. Charge the material to 4.30 volts, heat it from 50 to 600 °C at 5 °C a minute, and the thermogravimetric curve must show two peaks inside the 150 to 350 °C window, separated by at least 20 °C, at a stated height ratio. That is a thermal-runaway fingerprint used as a claim boundary. It is also a measurement a cell maker can repeat, which is what makes it enforceable in a way a composition claim is not. ### Nickel carbonyl shortens the path from black mass to cathode powder Nickel tetracarbonyl is contacted with an oxidising gas below 100 °C to produce nickel oxide particles directly, with the nickel drawn from matte, mixed hydroxide precipitate or black mass after a hydrogen reduction step. Particles under a micron then go straight into the blend with cobalt and manganese oxides and a lithium source. This removes the crystallisation and sulphate route that normally sits between refining and precursor, and it is the clearest case in the area of two process steps being collapsed into one. ### Metal pretreatment now runs in a single acidic bath A zirconium dose of 10 to 200 parts per million, a molybdenum dose of 0.5 to 10 parts per million at a weight ratio between 40:1 and 20:1, a pH of 2.5 to 5.0 and an acid-functional polymer together lay down one conversion layer on aluminium in a single contacting step. The metal loading is fixed in the claim. The organic package is where the work has moved: one filing replaces it with a lysine homopolymer or copolymer alongside zirconium, titanium or hafnium cations, another with a diethanolamine oligomer of two to nine repeat units. The bath specification stays; the additive is the design variable. ### The particulate filter converts soot where it is trapped The washcoat has been pushed inside the porous wall, with the three-way coating sitting in both the inlet and outlet channels and deliberately free of separate zirconium and barium oxide phases so that the wall stays open. Filtration efficiency at low mileage is handled by a second, on-wall layer of boehmite particles, specified to hold 90 percent or better fresh filtration. Durability under condensation is handled by using plate-like crystals that do not agglomerate after water exposure. A further filing goes after the precious metal entirely, coating the filter with iron oxide, manganese oxide or both to burn off trapped soot. ### The crop trait and the spray method are filed as one package The tolerance trait is claimed at the residue level: variants with at least 75 percent identity to a reference sequence, carrying substitutions at positions corresponding to Leu397, changed to aspartate, glutamate or glutamine, and Phe420, changed to valine or methionine. The companion filings claim the spray. A compound of a stated formula is applied to weeds already resistant to PPO-inhibiting herbicides, and the same logic is extended to broomrape in sunflower, where a PPO inhibitor is applied to a crop bred to survive it. The seed event creates the market for the molecule, and the method claim covers the application that follows. ### The product passport is a computation over a data model One filing gathers data from several participants in a production chain, correlates it against a passport data model, and compares the resulting completeness metric to a threshold before a passport can be issued. Another writes the passport into a decentralised registry under a unique identifier with access policies attached, and a third applies the same machinery to batteries specifically. The plant side has an equivalent: a digital twin is validated by comparing the as-built model against a reference model to generate a difference list of clashes and deviating objects for an operator to clear. ### Field trials put a number on spot spraying Ten maize experiments across two seasons, run with a camera-controlled boom at 10 kilometres an hour, produced an average herbicide saving of 25 percent against broadcast application, with a range from 2 to 73 percent, and weed control of 72 to 99 percent with no yield difference. The authors' own conclusion is the useful part: the next gain requires species classification and an economic weed threshold, and neither has been tested in the field. Earlier sugar beet and maize trials found savings of 10 to 55 percent under a zero-tolerance spotting rule. The technology works; the saving depends on how the threshold is set. ## Market ### The demand story for the high-performance plastics has changed customer On 8 October BASF launched GLYTHERMIN, a heat-transfer fluid platform for liquid-cooled data centres, and its DC PG 25 grade qualified as an NVIDIA DSX Ready Coolant for secondary-loop, single-phase cold-plate cooling, with a companion line for the primary loop. Three days earlier it widened the Ultrason polyarylethersulfone range to electrical and electronic parts in AI data-centre equipment, high-speed telecommunications and electric mobility. ### The surface chemistry that is growing sits in Taiwan, not in pretreatment On 20 October BASF signed a letter of intent with Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs to expand its Kuanyin site for advanced semiconductor materials, adding capacity, quality analysis and a larger innovation centre, aimed at manufacturing nodes below two nanometres. ### The spectral portfolio is being monetised in court On 3 September BASF's trinamiX units sued Apple in Texas, alleging infringement of seven patents covering optical skin and material detection used in Face ID across the iPhone 15, 16 and 17 generations and recent iPad Pro models, and stating that Apple did not use the technology when Face ID launched in 2017. ### The barrier chemistry found a channel that did not leave with the coatings sale On 12 October UPM Specialty Materials and BASF announced a collaboration pairing UPM's barrier papers with Joncryl HPB waterborne barrier coating, aimed at recyclable fibre-based food and non-food packaging and framed against the EU packaging and packaging waste regulation. ## Strategy ### The business that was kept is being equipped to screen candidates faster In August 2026 the retained catalysts business licensed CurieOS, a materials-discovery platform built around an atomistic simulation model, to prioritise candidates before any of them is synthesised. Set against exhaust catalyst claims that define a material by its aluminium distribution as read by two-dimensional NMR, this looks like an attempt to widen the funnel upstream of a very slow qualification cycle. The claim is a specification; the software is a way to generate more candidates worth specifying. ### The digital line is aimed at a gate rather than a label The European passport registry is live and batteries are the first product group obliged to use it, which makes this the only line in the portfolio with a customer created by a rule rather than won in a negotiation. The filings have moved accordingly. One has a downstream producer validate an incoming passport against target clearance data and reject the material if it fails, so the passport becomes an admission test rather than a disclosure document. Others have the producer obtain a verifiable credential from an issuer against a defined rule set, so a supplier's claim carries proof instead of assertion. ### Some of the process knowledge is deliberately kept out of the claims BASF sued Duracell in April 2025 over alleged misappropriation of battery confidential information, and a US judge ruled in April 2026 that the case must proceed. Nothing in the public record establishes the merits and the sum at stake is not disclosed. But the suit is consistent with the shape of the battery filings, where the claims define measurable windows — a two-peak thermogravimetric curve, an impurity ceiling, a surface-to-centre metal ratio — while the know-how that reliably lands material inside those windows is held as a secret. ## Areas - Industrial & Performance Chemicals · 6,474 documents - Plastics & Polyurethanes · 5,017 documents - Agricultural Solutions · 2,372 documents - Coatings & Surface Technologies · 1,234 documents - Battery & Energy Materials · 823 documents - Digital & Automation Solutions · 2,304 documents