Plastics Circular Economy And Green Chemistry
The Polymerist is a free newsletter that publishes twice a week with one in-depth article on Tuesdays and a roundup and honest analysis of what happened in the world of chemicals on Fridays. Join the subscriber list to get free updates with honest analysis from someone with a PhD in chemistry from the industry. First time here? Consider subscribing:
I was planning on doing a 4th theme around Agriculture and/or Advanced Materials, but the amount of news coming out of the Green Chemistry and Circular Economy Area is a bit overwhelming. I’m also going to take a different attempt on how Friday emails are structured today. I really enjoy reading called Letters from an American by Heather Cox Richardson. Let me know what you think.
Advanced Recycling
SABIC announced back on Jan 21st that they were starting construction on an advanced recycling plant with Plastic Energy. The goal of the plant will be producing SABIC’s TRUCIRCLE brand of plastic, which is derived from upcycled plastic waste. The goal of the plant is to use low value mixed plastic waste that would be bound for a landfill or incineration. From SABIC’s press release.
SABIC, a global leader in diversified chemicals, along with partner Plastic Energy, a pioneer in chemical plastics recycling, are set to start the construction phase for the unit, which will be based in Geleen, the Netherlands and is expected to become operational in the second half of 2022. The project will be realized under a 50-50 joint venture called SPEAR (SABIC Plastic Energy Advanced Recycling BV) and is being executed with a Top Sector Energy Subsidy from the Ministry of Economic Affairs in the Netherlands.
This is a significant step towards realizing advanced recycling and its happening in Geleen, which is where Avantium is also building their FDCA plant that I talked about a few weeks ago. Avantium has since entered into a partnership agreement with Worley to build their FDCA plants in exchange for about 10 million euros of equity. If SABIC and Plastic Energy can get commercial production of a truly circular plastic from plastic waste that is competitive on price and performance then I think this will be a monumental step towards a true circular economy. There are going to be a lot of hurdles here, but if this SPEAR joint venture (sounds like it’s out of Marvel doesn’t it?) is mildly successful then its going to be a real race in more capacity.
Less Steam Crackers As a Result
In a related note John Richardson had a good post on how there will be few if any new steam crackers started after 2030 in ICIS. There are two main reasons John cites as why there will be less new steam crackers. The first is that the policy situation for the US with the Biden administration will likely follow in the footsteps of Europe in an effort to stick to the Paris Climate accords. China has also declared that it will become carbon neutral before 2060. There is still demand for ethylene crackers in developed and developing countries for the next decade:
The monster developing country in this mix is of course China. China was responsible for 17% of global ethylene growth in 1999-2019, which is forecast to rise to 30% in 2020-2040. Volume-wise, China’s increase is estimated to be from 11% to 22%. By both measures, China will become the biggest of the countries and regions in the world. China’s dominance in some of the ethylene derivatives, including polyethylene (PE) and ethylene glycols, will be even greater.
The second reason John cites for a lack of new steam crackers is the push for advanced recycling of plastics.
Think of the life cycle of a typical plastic pellet. Oil and gas are dug out of the ground, refined, turned into ethylene and then, say PE. Oil, gas, naphtha, PE and other polymers are often shipped around the world. Compare this to a chemicals recycling plant where the feedstock and final end-use products are all local.
I think that a lot of petrochemical companies around the world will start to realize that the plastic “waste” that clogs the ocean and landfilled will actually be the starting materials of the future. We are starting to see this with SABIC, Total, Agilyx, and Neste to name a few. I don’t think its far fetched to think that by 2030 we will have a significant amount of plastic waste being turned into new plastic or other chemicals.
Roadmap for Plastic Innovation via the Department of Energy
The US Department of Energy has released a roadmap for plastic innovation in late 2019, but According to Doris Guzman of The Green Chemicals Blog there are four strategic goals of the roadmap are the following:
Deconstruction: Develop biological and chemical methods for deconstructing plastic wastes into useful chemicals.
Upcycling: Develop technologies to upcycle waste chemical streams into higher-value products, encouraging increased recycling.
Recycle by Design: Design new, renewable plastics and bioplastics that have the properties of today’s plastics, are easily upcycled and can be manufactured at scale domestically.
Scale and Deploy: Support energy- and material-efficient domestic plastics supply chain by helping companies scale and deploy new technologies in domestic and global markets while improving existing recycling technologies such as collection, sorting, and mechanical recycling.
There are still funding opportunities available so if you are a professor or a post-doc looking to get some money from the new administration this could be a good opportunity. Doris also writes that:
The Plastics Innovation Challenge will also position the United States as a global leader in the design and implementation of advanced plastics recycling technologies and in the manufacture of new plastics that are recyclable by design.
I think the United States is already behind Europe here. The private companies looking to commercialize new chemical technologies from biomass such as Avantium and Carbios are ahead of US companies. I believe the academic institutions have more funding and are better positioned to commercialize new research into commercial success through government funding. I remember touring the almost completed facilities of AgroParisTech out in the middle of a sugar beat field with Florent Allais when I was a graduate student. They were going to have new lab space near the Bazancourt Pomacle biorefinery with access to pilot reactors and engineering support for scale up of new chemistry. I realized that they had all the tools needed to develop their own bio-economy in France and that it was going to be a reality.
I whole heartedly believe in the government funding academic and helping to de-risk industrial research, but I feel that this roadmap is a bit too late based on what I’ve seen in the news coming out of the industry. Perhaps I am a bit biased. I want to see the DOE pushing the boundaries on what is considered commercially viable. Having well trained scientists and engineers that can work in the chemical industry, but more ideally start their own companies with these sorts of lofty goals is worth having and I think helps push the industry towards a better future. I want to see more aggressive targets and more funding for the DOE and the EPA from the Biden administration in the coming years.
One thing that I think would be innovative at the government level would be to get many of these promising new technologies platform chemicals through the regulatory process with the EPA once they are discovered in the academic labs. One issue you have in the chemical industry is the long lead time of getting a new chemical on the TSCA inventory and approved by the EPA. I think is is probably because the EPA is understaffed or underfunded. Understanding biological toxicity for wildlife or human life could also be done relatively quickly at the academic level too and this data could be published in academic journals, which should also help speed up the regulatory process. Having new molecules already on the TSCA list would be one less barrier to entry for any start-up or large company looking to commercialize a new technology. The plastic innovation challenge can be found here.
Eastman’s Methanolysis of Polyethylene Terephthalate
One bright spot for the US is that Eastman is going to build a 250 million dollar methanolysis plant at their headquarters in Kingsport TN. The concept of methanolysis that Eastman wants to do is to use methanol under pressure with polyethylene terephthalate to depolymerize PET. Methanolysis of PET would produce dimethyl terephthalate and ethylene glycol, these starting materials could then be repolymerized to form PET and methanol and then the process could be started again for other PET waste. According to a Times News article by Hank Hayes:
Utilizing the company’s polyester renewal technology, the new facility will use more than 100,000 metric tons of plastic waste that cannot be recycled by current mechanical methods to produce premium, high-quality specialty plastics made with recycled content. This process of using plastic waste as the main feedstock is a true material-to-material solution and will not only reduce the company’s use of fossil feedstocks, but also reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 20-30% relative to fossil feedstocks.
It also seems that Eastman has been working on methanolysis of PET for quite some time and it has samples of presumably pilot product are out to customers already. If Eastman can get their product through the required regulatory requirements for food contact they will be in a good position to capitalize on riding the green wave of circular plastic to increase value to their shareholders.
Sustainable Platform Chemicals
While it may seem that advanced recycling of plastics is solely focused on making new plastic there are also important chemical feedstocks that can be produced such as benzene. Covestro received their first shipment of circular benzene from last month from Total. They do not go into details of how Total was making the benzene, but my guess is it is through some sort of pyrolysis technology. Covestro will be using the benzene to make aniline, which they will then use to make methylene diisocyanate in order to make polyurethanes. Benzene is also a key chemical to making cumene, a precursor to phenol and acetone. I wrote about phenol a few weeks ago and how it is critical for making phenolic and epoxy resins.
If we can get a circular economy based on benzene, ethylene, propylene, butadiene, isoprene, and the methanolysis process from Eastman we could make a large amount of the commodity plastics and specialty polymers that the world uses. If we reach enough capacity and get the supply chains right for plastic recycling the polymer and plastics industries become much less dependent on oil. The next ten years are going to be really exciting I think.
Circular plastics are not the only things making headlines. Doris Guzman also reported early this month about bio-naptha production via hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO). Doris has an excellent summary of what HVO is and who is already using it:
For those who are not familiar with the HVO process, it also involves the co-production of naphtha (in this case, tall oil-based naphtha), which can be used to manufacture chemicals and plastics. UPM’s Lappeenranta Biorefinery, with annual capacity of 130,000 tonnes of HVO production, has been supplying bio-based naphtha to chemical companies such as SABIC, Dow and INEOS, where they can blend it in their petrochemical crackers and use the mixed petro-bio naphtha as raw material for the manufacture of chemical/monomer intermediates. These intermediates are typically certified under the mass balance system to prove that it can trace a degree of ‘renewability’ in their feedstock.
UPM Biofuels is a based in Finland and they have plans to expand to Kotka, Finland and Rotterdam, Netherlands. Steam cracking naptha from UPM can produce the olefin feedstocks needed for specialty plastics and rubbers. The UPM Lappeenranta site’s capacity is impressive, but we will definitely need more if we want to see the supply chain pivot away from oil which seems more uncertain everyday.
Interested in keeping up with the oil news? I’ve been attempting to editorialize and condense it at the start of every month. My Jan-Feb issue is here.
If you liked this newsletter and what I am trying to do here I would appreciate if you can share this with your social networks. Tag me on twitter at @tpolymerist or on Linkedin @The Polymerist and I’ll give you a follow/like on either social network.
Tony
email tips to polymerist@substack.com
Thoughts about this format for The Polymerist? If you like the shorter headline driven newsletter let me know. My goal here was to provide more opinion and a better overall reading experience. If you want super short bullet points on daily chemical news there is a great newsletter called The Column that you can check out that publishes three times a week.
I am going to focus on trying to be a better writer here for the future.
Affiliate Links - This is an experiment. Hate this section? Let me know.
Want to Find Other Interesting Newsletters? Try Findka - I’m trying to drive traffic to my own newsletter here.
Interested in being here? Email me. As with anything here this is an experiment and if you hate it let me know and I’ll remove it.
The views here are my own and do not represent those of my employer nor should they be considered investment advice.
This is also all provided to you free of charge so pay me back by subscribing and/or sharing with your friends and coworkers who are chemically inclined. Have any strong opinions? Let me know in the comments or just reply to this email.