LyondellBasell Industries has secured €40 million ($43 million) in European Union funds for its planned chemical recycling plant at its Wesseling,Germany, the company announced in December. The fully electrified plant will be LyondellBasell’s first industrial-scale demonstration facility. The company first announced the project in October 2022 and made its final investment decision in November 2023.
The project was one of 41 selected in the EU Innovation Fund ‘Third Call for Large Scale Projects’. The EU is committing €3.6 billion ($3.9 billion) to fund innovative clean-tech projects to support decarbonization.
The facility will use the LyondellBasell’s proprietary MoReTec technology which produces pyrolysis oil and pyrolysis gas. Unlike most pyrolysis processes, MoReTec technology enables the pyrolysis gas to be recovered rather than consumed as fuel, increasing the yield of the pyrolysis process and displacing fossil-based feedstocks, which lowers direct CO2 emissions.
In addition, LyondellBasell’s proprietary catalyst technology lowers the process temperature and reduces energy. With lower energy consumption, the process can operate completely on renewable electricity.
LyondellBasell said in a Dec. 19 statement that approximately 15 percent of its 2020 baseline scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions come from its electricity consumption. The company has been securing renewable power purchase agreements (PPAs) to meet its target of procuring at least half of its electricity from renewables by 2030. In March, it said it had achieved 70 percent of that target in Europe after it signed five 15-year solar PPAs with Grenergy. The agreements represent about 329,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of solar power annually, equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of more than 90,000 European homes. LyondellBasell has not disclosed how much electricity it would take to power the MoReTec pyrolysis process.
The facility is expected to have an annual capacity of 50,000 metric tons and is designed to recycle the amount of plastic packaging waste generated by over 1.2 million German citizens per year. Construction is planned to be completed by the end of 2025, with start-up scheduled for 2026.
LyondellBasell says the new plant will be the first commercial scale, single-train chemical recycling plant to convert post-consumer plastic waste into feedstock for production of new plastic materials that can be ran at net zero greenhouse gas emissions.
“We are delighted with the EU Innovation Fund support for the development of our MoReTec technology,” said Jim Seward, LyondellBasell executive vice president and chief innovation officer. “Investing in our first industrial-scale advanced recycling demonstration plant will provide us with valuable operating experience and additional technological know-how needed to scale-up and fully commercialize our MoReTec technology.”
The EU Innovation Fund is one of the key tools of the European Green Deal Industrial Plan and is financed by revenues from the auctioning of allowances from the EU Emissions Trading System, the world’s largest carbon market.