MOSCOW (MRC) -- Neste, the world’s leading provider of renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel and an expert in delivering drop-in renewable and circular chemical solutions, today announced that it has acquired a minority stake in Alterra Energy, an innovative chemical recycling technology company, said Hydrocarbonprocessing.
Neste’s equity investment supports Alterra Energy’s expansion. The collaboration between the companies will include joint technology development and global technology licensing, enabling the partners to collaborate in commercializing Alterra’s proprietary thermochemical liquefaction technology in Europe.
The companies are working together towards a global rollout of Alterra’s liquefaction technology with a strong initial focus on Europe, a leading market in the global transition towards making plastics value chains fully circular. With this, the companies aim to accelerate the adoption of chemical recycling and develop capacity to turn hard-to-recycle plastic waste into high-quality, high-performance polymers and chemicals. The collaboration of the companies supports Alterra Energy’s target of commencing the construction of a state-of-the-art liquefaction site in Europe during 2021.
Alterra’s existing industrial-scale waste plastics liquefaction plant in Akron, Ohio produces commercial volumes that can already be refined and upgraded into high-quality feedstock for plastics and chemicals. This, together with Neste’s refining capability, enables sustainability-oriented brands globally to start introducing recycled content into their products and offerings.
"Collaboration with Alterra Energy strengthens Neste’s ecosystem of partnerships that are aimed at accelerating the transition to a circular plastics economy. It demonstrates our commitment to continue developing the chemical recycling industry by supporting some of the leading companies in commercializing promising technologies. This partnership also supports Neste’s aim of building new business growth based on chemical recycling, while marking another significant step towards our target of processing more than one million tons of plastic waste from 2030 onwards,” says Mercedes Alonso, Executive Vice President, Renewable Polymers and Chemicals at Neste.
“The Neste-Alterra partnership will unlock the full potential of the circular economy, bringing our technology to more partners around the world, creating a cleaner planet,” said Alterra’s CEO Frederic Schmuck. “Neste is a world leader in renewable and circular solutions and its endorsement of Alterra's proprietary process is both extremely rewarding and validating.”
As per MRC, Neste is planning to restructure its refinery operations in Porvoo and Naantali, Finland. The company is exploring the shutdown of its refinery operations in Naantali and focusing the Naantali site on the terminal and harbor operations, as well as transforming the Porvoo refinery operations to co-processing renewable and circular raw materials.
As MRC informed earlier, last year, Exxon Mobil Corp announced it will lay off about 1,900 employees in the United States as the COVID-19 pandemic batters energy demand and prices.
We remind that ExxonMobil has undertaken a planned shutdown at its cracker in Singapore. The company halted operations at the cracker for maintenance on September 14, 2020. The cracker was expected to remain off-line till end-October, 2020. Located at Jurong Island, Singapore, the cracker has an ethylene production capacity of 1 million mt/year and a propylene production capacity of 450,000 mt/year.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 2,220,640 tonnes in 2020, up by 2% year on year. Only shipments of low density polyethylene (LDPE) and high density polyethylene (HDPE) increased. At the same time, polypropylene (PP) shipments to the Russian market reached 1 240,000 tonnes in 2020 (calculated using the formula: production, minus exports, plus imports, excluding producers' inventories as of 1 January, 2020). Supply of exclusively PP random copolymer increased.
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