Repsol, Axens, and IFPEN have jointly announced the development of a purification technology designed to process plastic-waste-based pyrolysis oil.

First, understand this:

One of the greatest advantages chemical recycling presents is that the waste plastic can be processed without having to do as much sorting. But not sorting still has drawbacks—you can end up with a pyrolysis oil that contains silicon, chlorine, diolefins, and metals. Petrochemical companies prefer to limit the amount of contaminants in their steam crackers, so they often dilute that oil with traditional feedstock and sell renewable polymers with a mass-balance approach.

So, they have a technology?

These three companies developed a process technology that removes those impurities from plastic-waste-based pyrolysis oil. The technology will first be demonstrated at one of Repsol's plants, and then licensed to other operating companies by Axens.

Read the press release here.

US-based oil and gas services company, Baker Hughes, has announced its intent to collaborate with Borg CO2 on a CO2-capture and sequestration project in Norway.

Who is doing what?

Borg CO2 is just a partnership between 18 industry partners to make the port of Borg a future CO2 loading terminal. To do so, Borg CO2 needs to coordinate the CO2-capture from all the sites in the area and make sure there is somewhere to put all of that CO2. That's why the partnership is working with Baker Hughes to capture that CO2 and Equinor, Shell, and TotalEnergies to store that CO2.

Some hard truths:

Those oil majors mentioned above have formed a joint venture a few months ago and put $680 million into it. While right now the plan is to just store all of that CO2 under the Norwegian Continental Shelf, it's easy to imagine how such an infrastructure could enable CO2 utilization in the future (like Covestro's CO2-based polyurethane).

Read the press release here.

Finnish forest industry company, UPM, has selected Siemens Energy to electrify, automate, and digitalize (EAD) the company's upcoming biochemicals facility in Germany.

Some context:

Last October, we saw UPM announce that it had begun construction of this facility. Once the $650 million site starts up next year it will process 220,000 tons of wood into mono-ethylene glycol (MEG), mono-propylene glycol (MPG), and renewable functional fillers (RFF). If you're interested, you can read a little about the history of using wood to produce chemicals here.

Connecting some dots:

On Wednesday we talked about how Origin Materials wants to produce paraxylene from wood. That paraxylene could be converted into PTA by the Amoco process and reacted with the MEG that UPM is going to produce at this site to make PET—one of the world's most popular (and petroleum-based) plastics. While bio-based chemicals don't solve the plastic waste issue, they are more sustainable and produce fewer CO2 emissions.

Read the press release here.