MOSCOW (MRC) -- Shell announced it has successfully made high-end chemicals using a liquid feedstock made from plastic waste, said Hydrocarbonprocessing.
The technique, known as pyrolysis, is considered a breakthrough for hard-to-recycle plastics and advances Shell's ambition to use one million tons of plastic waste a year in its global chemicals plants by 2025.
"This makes sense for the environment and our business," said Thomas Casparie, Executive Vice President of Shell's global chemicals business. "We want to take waste plastics that are tough to recycle by traditional methods and turn them back into chemicals – creating a circle. These chemicals will meet our customers' growing demands for high quality and sustainable products."
Atlanta-based Nexus Fuels LLC recently supplied its first cargo of pyrolysis liquid to Shell's chemical plant in Norco, Louisiana, USA where it was made into chemicals that are the raw materials for everyday items. Shell is working with multiple companies who collect and transform plastic waste in order to scale this solution to industrial and profitable quantities across its chemicals plants – in Asia, Europe and North America.
Shell is a founding member of the Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW). This not-for-profit organization is bringing together top minds from across the plastics value chain (chemical and plastic manufacturers, consumer goods companies, retailers, converters and waste management companies) and partnering with the financial community, governments and civil society. The AEPW has committed USD1.5 billion over the next five years to help end plastic waste in the environment.
Shell is also working with its retail, business fuels and lubricants customers to help reduce, reuse and recycle plastic packaging.
As MRC wrote before, in mid-October 2019, Royal Dutch Shell Plc restarted the hydrocracker at its 225,300 barrel-per-day (bpd) Norco, Louisiana, refinery. The 40,000 bpd hydrocracker was shut on Sept. 9 for a planned month-long overhaul. A longer than expected restart of the unit stretched the outage to six weeks, the sources said.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polyprolypele (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 1,589,580 tonnes in the first nine months of 2019, up by 7% year on year. Shipments of all PE grades increased. The estimated PP consumption in the Russian market was 976,790 tonnes in January-September 2019, up by 4% year on year. Shipments of PP block copolymer and homopolymer PP increased.
Royal Dutch Shell plc is an Anglo-Dutch multinational oil and gas company headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands and with its registered office in London, United Kingdom. It is the biggest company in the world in terms of revenue and one of the six oil and gas "supermajors". Shell is vertically integrated and is active in every area of the oil and gas industry, including exploration and production, refining, distribution and marketing, petrochemicals, power generation and trading.
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