MOSCOW (MRC) -- Repsol (Madrid, Spain) will invest EUR18.3 billion (USD21.8 billion) between 2021 and 2025 to accelerate the company’s energy transition toward its long-term goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, reported Chemweek.
The company says it will decarbonize its asset portfolio and establish a new operating model, with EUR5.5 billion of the total investment by 2025 to be spent on low-carbon and renewable energy businesses. Repsol’s current organization will evolve into four business areas: upstream, customer, low-carbon generation, and industrial - which includes its chemicals, refining, and biofuels activities. In 2019 Repsol’s chemicals sales volumes totaled 2.8 million metric tons.
“We will be more efficient and increase our renewable energy objectives as well as our manufacture of products with a low, neutral, or even a negative carbon footprint. We will promote circular economy initiatives, develop new energy solutions for our customers, and boost cutting-edge projects to reduce the industry’s carbon footprint,” says CEO Josu Jon Imaz.
Repsol says the new strategy will be “highly flexible” in the current macroeconomic environment, with the next two years focusing on ensuring its financial strength and efficiency, while also prioritizing energy transition and renewable projects. From 2022 onward the focus will increasingly shift toward the acceleration of growth, it says. The low-carbon business also includes the possible involvement of partners or investors, or a potential stock exchange listing, to “decisively accelerate the achievement of objectives and guarantee a higher return from our operations,” it adds.
The strategic plan will see the industrial business maintain its competitiveness, adjust its capacity, build new carbon-neutral platforms, and reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by more than 2 million metric tons/year, it says. Repsol’s seven large industrial sites in Spain, Portugal, and Peru will become multi-energy hubs, with the four key pillars for their transition being the circular economy, renewable hydrogen, energy efficiency, and the capture and use of CO2. Repsol says it aims to be a leader in renewable hydrogen in the Iberian Peninsula by achieving production of 400 megawatts by 2025, with the target of over 1.2 gigawatts in 2030. “The capture and use of CO2 will also be key to this transformation process,” it says. Investments in its industrial business will be kept at an average of EUR900 million per year, it adds.
Repsol is aiming to cut its CO2 emissions by 12% in 2025, 25% in 2030, and 50% in 2040. The company first unveiled its 2050 net-zero goal in December.
As MRC informed earlier, Repsol has just selected Axens Vegan technology for its first production plant for advanced biofuels in Spain at its Cartagena refinery. This new plant will be capable of producing 250,000 TPA of biodiesel, biojet, bionaphtha, and biopropane. Repsol’s project outlines Axens’ expertise in hydrotreated vegetable oils (HVO) and its commitment to power sustainability in transport.
We remind that Repsol shut down its cracker in Tarragona (Spain) for maintenance in the fourth quarter of 2019. The turnaround at this steam cracker, which produces 702,000 mt/year of ethylene and 372,000 mt/year of propylene, was pushed back from Q3 2019. The exact dates of maintenance works were not disclosed.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 1,594,510 tonnes in the first nine months of 2020, up by 1% year on year. Only high density polyethylene (HDPE) shipments increased. At the same time, PP shipments to the Russian market reached 880,130 tonnes in the nine months of 2020 (calculated using the formula: production minus exports plus imports, excluding producers" inventories as of 1 January, 2020). Supply increased exclusively of PP random copolymer.
Repsol S.A is an integrated Spanish oil and gas company with operations in 28 countries. The bulk of its assets are located in Spain.
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