MOSCOW (MRC) -- Sasol Ltd, South Africa's major fuel and petrochemical producer, has raised its emissions reduction targets for 2030 to 30% from 10% previously in a bid to make the company a net zero carbon emitter by 2050, reported Reuters with reference to its CEO's statement last week.
The new targets come as the company faces pressure from investors and environmentalists to take decisive steps at its heavily polluting plants, often described as amongst the continent's worst greenhouse gas emitters (GHG).
Fleetwood Grobler, CEO of Sasol said in an interview with Reuters that the company intends to cut down its GHG emissions from 63.9 million tonnes to about 44.73 million tonnes by 2030, up from 57.5 million tonnes as per its previous target.
"This works on three levers - increase of natural gas as a transition fuel, renewable power source and energy efficiency processes," he said.
The world's top manufacturer of motor fuel from coal consumes around 40 million tonnes of coal annually from its own mines and exports up to 4 million tonnes each year.
The petrochemicals major intends to gradually replace coal, with increased natural gas consumption which will be used as a transition fuel. However, its coal consumption will, at a limited level, would still continue till 2040, he said.
As MRC wrote previously, Sasol's world-scale US ethane cracker with the capacity of 1.5 mln tonnes per year reached beneficial operation on 27 August 2019. Sasol's new cracker, the heart of Lake Charles Chemicals Project (LCCP), is the third and most significant of the seven LCCP facilities to come online and will provide feedstock to the company's six new derivative units at its Lake Charles multi-asset site.
Ethylene and propylene are the main feedstocks for the production of polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), respectively.
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 1,396,960 tonnes in January-July 2021, up by 7% year on year. Shipments of all grades of ethylene polymers increased. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market were 841,990 tonnes in the first seven months of 2021, up by 29% year on year. Supply of propylene homopolymers (homopolymer PP) and block-copolymers of propylene (PP block copolymers) increased, whereas supply of statistical copolymers of propylene (PP random copolymers) subsided.
Sasol is an international integrated chemicals and energy company that leverages technologies and the expertise of our 31 270 people working in 32 countries. The company develops and commercialises technologies, and builds and operates world-scale facilities to produce a range of high-value product stream, including liquid fuels, petrochemicals and low-carbon electricity.
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