About Liaoning Binhai Laboratory

Liaoning Binhai Laboratory

Liaoning Binhai Laboratory is one of the two Dalian-seated members of the Liaoning Laboratory system, the four-laboratory provincial research platform unveiled by Liaoning Province on 5 September 2022. Backed by the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, it is the system's laboratory for clean energy and fine chemicals. It is seated in Dalian's Yinggeshi Science City, the new research district being built in the west of the city's high-tech zone, and it was reported as put into use during 2023. Its name — Binhai, meaning coastal or seaside — reflects its Dalian setting, and it is sometimes rendered in English as the Liaoning Coastal Laboratory. Papers carrying its affiliation, concentrated in catalysis, electrochemistry and energy materials, show it operating as the provincial extension of DICP's internationally known catalysis and clean-energy research.

Binhai Laboratory belongs to a deliberate piece of provincial architecture. Liaoning created its laboratory system in its fields of advantage — new materials, equipment manufacturing, intelligent manufacturing, clean energy and fine chemicals — and placed the chemistry and energy half of that system in Dalian, the city that hosts DICP, Dalian University of Technology and one of China's major petrochemical bases. Binhai is the platform through which that Dalian chemistry base is organised for provincial missions in clean energy and fine chemicals.

The Liaoning Laboratory system

The four physical laboratories of Liaoning Laboratory — the Liaoning Academy of Materials, Liaoning Liaohe Laboratory, Liaoning Binhai Laboratory and Liaoning Huanghai Laboratory — were unveiled together on 5 September 2022. Liaoning provincial government reporting at the system's first-anniversary press conference in September 2023 describes the four as built under a novel institutional mechanism across the province's advantageous fields. Provincial planning documents describe the system as built in three directions — materials, intelligent manufacturing, and fine chemicals and catalysis — with the aim of creating new national-level platforms. At the first anniversary the four laboratories together reported 582 researchers, 56 key research projects launched, and 30 scientific and technological achievements converted in Liaoning with a cumulative contract value of 380 million yuan.

The Liaoning provincial government's work report for 2022, delivered in January 2023, lists the Academy of Materials, Liaohe Laboratory, the Coastal (Binhai) Laboratory and Huanghai Laboratory among the platforms that were inaugurated and began operation that year, alongside 22 pilot-scale testing bases built in the province. Binhai therefore entered service as part of the founding cohort of the system, not as a later addition.

Backing by the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics

China Daily reporting on Dalian's science build-out states the laboratory's backing directly: Liaoning Binhai Laboratory, backed by the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is expected to become influential in the fields of clean energy and fine chemicals. DICP is one of China's leading research institutes, internationally recognised for catalytic chemistry, chemical engineering, chemical laser and molecular reaction dynamics, organic synthesis and chromatography. It houses the Dalian National Laboratory for Clean Energy (DNL) — the first national laboratory in the energy research field, subdivided into ten divisions working on efficient conversion and optimal utilisation of fossil energy, clean energy conversion technologies and the economic use of solar and biomass energy — as well as the State Key Laboratory of Catalysis and the State Key Laboratory of Molecular Reaction Dynamics.

The institutional link is visible in the laboratory's own milestones. DICP director Liu Zhongmin's New Year message reviewing 2023 lists among the institute's achievements for the year "the inaugural Academic Committee of the Liaoning Binhai Laboratory", alongside the establishment of the State Key Laboratory of Catalysis. An inaugural academic committee is the standard governance step by which a Chinese research laboratory formalises its scientific direction-setting body, and its placement in DICP's own annual record confirms both the host relationship and that the laboratory's governance was stood up during 2023. Publication affiliations tell the same story: Binhai Laboratory affiliations appear combined with the State Key Laboratory of Catalysis, DICP and the Dalian National Laboratory for Clean Energy, with the Dalian postcode 116023 used by DICP's Zhongshan Road campus.

Yinggeshi Science City

The laboratory's physical home is Yinggeshi Science City, the research district under construction in the west of Dalian's high-tech zone. Dalian's government work report for 2024, delivered by Mayor Chen Shaowang on 6 January 2024, records that in 2023 the construction of Yinggeshi Science City entered the fast lane, the first batch of 235 sub-field laboratories were confirmed to settle in, and "Liaoning Binhai Laboratory and Huanghai Laboratory were put into use". The same report's forward programme undertook that the local characteristic laboratories — Liaoning Binhai Laboratory, Huanghai Laboratory and Dalian Lingshuiwan Laboratory — would be fully put into operation.

Later Dalian reporting describes the scale of the district rising around the laboratories: nearly 300,000 square metres of laboratory projects — including the National Key Laboratory of Energy Catalytic Conversion, the National Key Laboratory of High Performance Precision Manufacturing and Liaoning Binhai Laboratory and Liaoning Yellow Sea (Huanghai) Laboratory — had been capped, and a first batch of 1,891 research talents from 238 subdivided field laboratories had been confirmed to settle in. The report frames Yinggeshi as an important part of Dalian's construction of a regional science and technology innovation centre with national influence, built by relying on the research forces of the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics and Dalian University of Technology. Dalian as a whole was reported to hold 115 national-level innovation platforms.

Research directions: clean energy and fine chemicals

The laboratory's stated fields — clean energy and fine chemicals — align with DICP's two great strengths: catalysis for energy conversion and catalysis for chemical production. Its Dalian setting reinforces the brief. The city hosts a major petrochemical base, including the Dalian Clean Energy and Fine Chemical Pilot Base on Changxing Island, a pilot-scale conversion platform relying on the innovative resources of DICP and Dalian University of Technology, whose settled projects had achieved an incubation conversion rate above 50 per cent, more than 30 pilot scale-up results and more than 50 patent applications. Binhai Laboratory sits at the research end of that same clean-energy and fine-chemicals pipeline, in the province whose planning documents name fine chemicals and catalysis as one of the laboratory system's three build directions.

Funding programme

Binhai Laboratory operates its own funding line, cited in papers under grant codes in the LBLD series — for example LBLD-2024-04, acknowledged in a 2025 review of glycerol electrooxidation, and LBLD-2025-07, acknowledged in a 2026 paper on cascade catalysis. The existence of a dedicated, numbered grant series matters for a young laboratory: it shows Binhai acting not merely as a building or a brand but as a funding body that commissions research, in the same way that its Shenyang counterpart Liaohe Laboratory's LLL-series grants appear in that laboratory's supported papers.

Publication record

The papers carrying Binhai Laboratory's affiliation cluster exactly where its mission predicts.

In energy materials and electrochemistry, a 2025 Advanced Materials paper by Chunmei Jia and Fuxiang Zhang, affiliated to the State Key Laboratory of Catalysis, DICP, the Dalian National Laboratory for Clean Energy and Liaoning Binhai Laboratory, reported a hydrogen-bonded organic crystal achieving anhydrous superprotonic conductivity at high temperatures, stable in boiling water, concentrated acid and air at 300 °C, and demonstrated in a hydrogen–oxygen fuel cell prototype — described as the first experimental evidence of such a crystal operating in a practical high-temperature electrochemical device. A review on the electrooxidation of glycerol to formic acid, published in ChemSusChem in 2025 with authors affiliated to the State Key Laboratory of Catalysis and to Liaoning Binhai Laboratory in Dalian, surveyed catalyst design strategies — heteroatom doping, vacancy engineering, interface engineering and component engineering — for converting a biodiesel by-product into a high-value chemical in coupled systems.

In catalysis for chemicals, a paper on engineering aluminium-pair-enriched hierarchical zeolites through desilication, with a Liaoning Binhai Laboratory affiliation among its DICP-linked authors, reported enhanced carbon dioxide adsorption and improved catalytic activity in Wacker oxidation and methanol-to-olefin reactions — core fine-chemical and petrochemical processes. A 2026 paper on programming cascade catalysis in multielement dual-heterostructured catalysts through gradient adsorption potentials also carries the laboratory's affiliation and its LBLD-2025-07 funding. And in carbon dioxide conversion, a 2026 Journal of the American Chemical Society paper on dual-channel covalent organic frameworks that decouple gas and ion fluxes for acidic CO₂ electroreduction lists Liaoning Binhai Laboratory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Dalian among its affiliations; the work reported 49.1 per cent ethylene Faradaic efficiency at industrial current density in acid. Taken together, the record shows the laboratory's name attached to fuel-cell materials, electrocatalysis, zeolite catalysis and CO₂ conversion — the working substance of a clean-energy and fine-chemicals laboratory.

Role in Dalian's innovation build-out

Dalian's official reporting groups Binhai with the small set of laboratories through which the city is building its innovation identity: Liaoning Binhai Laboratory, Liaoning Huanghai Laboratory, a coastal and offshore engineering laboratory, a life health laboratory, a low-carbon catalytic technology study centre and a membrane technology research centre. City leadership has framed the group as part of making Dalian a foremost region for industrial infrastructure improvement and a pilot area for economic and social development. Within that group Binhai is the clean-energy and fine-chemicals anchor, and the one tied to the city's strongest single research institution.

Assessment

Liaoning Binhai Laboratory is a provincial laboratory with a national-grade host. Unveiled in September 2022, governed through an academic committee inaugurated in 2023, housed in the new Yinggeshi Science City and put into use that year, it extends the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics' catalysis and clean-energy strength into Liaoning's provincial mission structure. Its early publication record — fuel-cell proton conductors, glycerol electrooxidation, hierarchical zeolites, cascade catalysis and acidic CO₂ electroreduction, supported by its own LBLD grant series — is consistent, specific and squarely within its clean-energy and fine-chemicals brief.