Chemicals industry struggles to kick its fossil fuel habit
June 10 - In May, Europe passed a milestone in its drive to decarbonise: the opening of the world's first commercial scale e-methanol plant, at Kasso in Denmark.
European Energy's facility will produce 42,000 metric tonnes of the liquid fuel for the shipping industry, cutting emissions by as much as 95%, as well as low-carbon plastics for drugmaker Novo Nordisk and toymaker Lego to use in their products.
Instead of using hydrogen derived from natural gas, three Siemens electrolysers convert renewable energy from Europe's largest solar park into green hydrogen, which is combined with CO2 captured from the local biogas plant to create the synthetic fuel.
Excess heat generated from the plant will be used to warm 3,300 households in the local area.
But Kasso, and a smattering of other e-methanol plants around the world, are rare examples of disruptive green innovation in an industry that remains heavily reliant on fossil fuels.
The $3.5 trillion industry produces primary chemicals such as ammonia, methanol and ethylene, which are omnipresent in our daily lives: they are in 96% of manufactured goods in sectors ranging across healthcare and agriculture to construction, transportation and textiles.
The sector accounts for 5-6% of global greenhouse gas emissions – running a close third behind steel and cement – but could steam ahead of them, as its emissions are on track to more than double by 2050 with no intervention, according to an analysis by the Rocky Mountain Institute.
A 2022 report by green systems change firm Systemiq and the Center for Global Commons says the fact that the industry also supplies building blocks for the energy transition means the chemicals sector has the potential to reinvent itself as a climate solution, even to go carbon negative, if it can substitute fossil-fuels feedstocks with sustainable sources and ramp up the use of carbon capture and storage.
Circular approaches such as reusing and recycling chemicals, meanwhile, could reduce total demand for chemicals by up to 31% by 2050, the report argues.
Indeed, more than 70% of the world's top 100 chemicals producers have committed to carbon neutrality by 2050, and even more have set interim targets through the Science Based Targets initiative, according to S&P Commodity Insights.
But a new report from Planet Tracker, which benchmarks the climate transition performance of eight of the world's top chemical companies, finds that only two: French industrial gases firm Air Liquide and Australia's Incitec Pivot, have credible targets.
Brianne Cangelose, a manager in Rocky Mountain Institute's climate-aligned industries programme, says the industry's complexity and ubiquity means decarbonisation pathways aren't straightforward. 'There's no silver bullet for chemicals – we need a myriad of solutions to effectively reduce emissions from the sector,' she says.
Most impactful, however, will be scaling up the development of cleaner sources of hydrogen, which is a core building block of many chemicals and is already widely used in the chemicals industry as a reagent in chemical reactions. It could also provide an alternative process heat source to natural gas.
Hydrogen is colour-coded depending on how it is made. Today, that is primarily from steam reforming of natural gas (grey) and gasification of coal (brown). There is also blue hydrogen, where the CO2 from grey hydrogen is captured and stored, and pink hydrogen, made using nuclear energy to power electrolysers, which split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.
Only when electrolysers are powered by renewable energy such as solar and wind can hydrogen be considered green.
The problem is that less than 1% of all hydrogen produced today is green, due to the high relative cost of renewable energy.
Those costs will only increase in the near term, with the Trump administration vowing to cut $15 billion in renewable energy funding, and threatening trade tariffs on China and countries in South-east Asia, where 80% of U.S. solar module imports came from in 2023.
Under the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act, $7 billion in funding was allocated to establish seven regional hubs to speed development of cleaner production of hydrogen in the U.S.
But while the first tranche of funding was delivered before Biden left office in January, Politico reported in March that four, in primarily Democratic-learning states, are slated to be axed by the Department of Energy under the new Trump administration.
However, among those whose funding is expected to be safe is the HyVelocity Hub on the Gulf coast in Texas, where one-third of U.S. hydrogen production capacity is located.
Although most of the technology focus will be on blue hydrogen production through CCS, the hub includes Orsted Energy's planned e-methanol facility, which will be powered by onshore wind and solar projects, and uses captured CO2 to create a liquid fuel for marine and aviation applications.
In Europe, one startup that claims to have made a breakthrough in affordable clean hydrogen production is U.K.-based HiiROC, which has developed a thermal plasma electrolysis technology to convert methane into hydrogen, without CO2 emissions.
The company says its process is as cheap as steam methane reforming (SMR) and can produce hydrogen using a fraction of the energy required by water electrolysis. It also creates a valuable by-product, carbon black, which can be used in commercial applications such as tyres, rubbers, plastics and inks, as well as in the construction industry.
HiiROC has raised more than 40 million pounds from investors including Melrose, Wintershall Dea, Centrica, HydrogenOne, Hyundai, Kia and Cemex, which announced late last year that it would deploy HiiROC's low-carbon hydrogen solution at scale at its cement plant at Rugby in the UK.
Another technology option for the chemicals industry is to electrify energy-intensive processes, such as steam cracking. Electrification has the potential to reduce CO2 emissions by at least 90% compared with using fossil fuels, according to BASF.
Last year BASF, SABIC and Linde inaugurated the world's first large-scale demonstration plant to use electricity for its steam cracking furnaces that produce ethylene and propylene. Three years in the making, the demonstration plant at BASF's Verbund site in Ludwigshafen, Germany, is powered by 6 megawatts (MW) of renewable energy and will test two different heating concepts.
Dow has also been investigating the viability of e-cracking, along with Shell. In June 2022, it began operations at an experimental e-cracking furnace in Amsterdam, aiming to test equipment that could be retrofitted to existing gas-fired steam cracker furnaces. It was planning to install a multi-megawatt pilot plant this year.
In the U.S., meanwhile, Dow and advanced nuclear reactor developer X-energy have applied to build a grid-scale nuclear installation in Texas to produce clean power and industrial steam to decarbonise manufacturing at Dow's 1,900-hectare Seadrift site.
However, Bernd Elser, global chemicals lead at Accenture, points out that the potential for renewable energy to decarbonise chemicals production will be restricted by the sheer amount of energy needed. Analysis carried out by the consultancy in 2022 found that the European chemicals industry alone would need additional renewable energy installation of 3.2 petawatt-hours, some five times that energy generated in the EU today, at a cost of around 1 trillion euros.
'This translates into wind turbines covering the whole of Spain, or solar panels on the full land area of Ireland,' he says. The electricity produced also needs to be sold at a competitive price, he adds.
The European Chemical Industry Council has warned that the industry is 'at breaking point', facing energy prices five times that of the U.S. and substantial costs of meeting EU green regulations, including phasing out of restricted chemicals.
Firms including Dow and LyondellBasell are reported to be reassessing their European footprint, including shutting down some facilities, as a result.
They are urging the Commission to expedite the rollout of the affordable energy component of its recently announced Clean Industrial Deal.
RMI's Cangelose acknowledges that the cost of more innovative decarbonisation technologies is challenging for the chemicals industry.
'It's a very capitally intensive, somewhat risk-averse industry, with really slim margins, so it's a challenging place to rapidly adopt innovation,' she says.
'It's really going to be a question of how much money we can funnel towards research and development to get these earlier stage technologies off the ground.'
There is certainly growing demand for greener chemicals, according to Accenture, whose research found that more than half of consumers are motivated to purchase eco-friendly products, and often willing to pay a premium price for them.
One example is in the home and personal care sector, where products with bio-based or sustainable ingredients grew at a rate more than double that of overall growth.
Accenture predicts that demand for bio-based chemical products will increase by around 70% through to 2028, rising from $340 billion in 2023 to $570 billion - a rate 4.5 times greater than conventional products.
Desire to capture this growth, along with the regulatory push provided by the EU Green Deal and the bloc's Emissions Trading Scheme, will push the European industry along a more sustainable path, Elser says.
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