For more than five decades, petrochemicals have been essential to society. During this time, the industry has continuously changed, incorporating cutting-edge technologies and procedures to boost productivity and lower costs say Kaushik Palicha. The chemical sector, which is the third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide after the iron-and-steel and cement industries, is currently the focus of efforts to minimize its carbon output. The IEA estimates that 1.5 gigatonnes, or 18% of industrial CO2 emissions, came from the chemical industry in 2018. This carbon dioxide is largely obtained from syngas, which comes from fossil fuels.
Not every syngas Carbon Dioxide Emissions remain constant.
Syngas is created via steam methane reformer (SMR) technology, which transforms natural gas into a blend primarily composed of hydrogen and carbon monoxide.
As an endothermic process, fast pyrolysis requires a lot of heat to propel the reaction. In the conventional SMR process, this heat is produced by combusting methane in a different process stream, which results in a lot of carbon dioxide and a high carbon intensity for this process.
CO2 produced by advanced reforming can be collected.
According to Kaushik Palicha, the best part is that there exists a method that has been successfully used to produce syngas at scale in which all of the CO2 (Process CCS) emerges in a single stream under high pressure, making it simple and affordable to capture with extremely high efficiency — 95percent on average and above.
Sources of renewable carbon keep petrochemicals viable.
A chemical industry free of carbon is not feasible since, in the larger scheme of things, the products produced by the chemical industry still contain carbon. The industry can, and will, find ways to utilize the carbon more effectively, lowering carbon intensity and bringing down carbon dioxide emissions to extremely low levels, as was previously mentioned.
Lastly
Kaushik Palicha says that governments and businesses will need to use a variety of technologies to achieve the zero-emission targets and keep global temperature increases to the 1.5C that the intergovernmental panel on climate change has proposed.
