A blueprint for scale-up: Planning and design lessons from NLR’s flagship energy materials facility

Many research institutions face the gap between laboratory discovery and commercial-scale adoption in advanced manufacturing, energy storage, and polymers. Bret Cummock draws on NLR's Energy Materials and Processing at Scale (EMAPS) facility —a 127,000-square-foot, $224 million flagship building now under construction—to share design evolutions and infrastructure decisions behind a next-generation scale-up research environment. He describes the flexible configurations supporting rapid reconfiguration and industry collaboration, how pilot-scale processing bridges bench research to commercial production, and how electrification and reclaimed water systems advance decarbonization targets. He highlights a range of best-in-class features to inform emerging science capital initiatives at any scale.