Is the End in Sight for the Steamcracker?

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The competitors aren’t asleep either. It is not just Asia which is catching up — the European chemical industry now faces competition from India and the oil-rich Gulf States, where the big multinational oil companies are currently constructing integrated chemical complexes which will process the locally produced oil on-site into basic and intermediate chemicals. The situation is further entrenched by the fact that petrochemistry has a technological lead of around 70 years over alternative raw materials. Generations of chemical engineers and process engineers have developed efficient catalysts and constantly fine-tuned processes in order to make them more cost-effective.

But what other raw materials are in the running? And what is the point at which a switch makes sense? What challenges lay ahead in terms of process engineering?

There are a number of options for alternative raw materials. The first option is natural gas, which is comparatively well spread throughout the chemical industry. In Germany, the proportion of chemicals based on natural gas is currently around 8%, with an upward trend. Prof. Dr. Michael Röper, who is responsible for Science Relations and Innovation Management at BASF, forecasts that “in the medium term, the material base will widen from petroleum to natural gas“. In contrast to crude oil, supplies of natural gas will remain available for much longer and are much better for the carbon dioxide balance. Hardly any experts in Europe see much future in the recently much-trumpeted renaissance of coal. “Under the CO₂ regime we now have in place in Europe, cost-effective coal-based chemistry is impossible,“ says Röper. Climate requirements are more relaxed in other countries, which is why chemicals made from coal have almost exclusively been available in China to date. The technological leader in coal gasification and subsequent liquefaction is the South African chemical corporation Sasol, which has used the Fischer-Tropsch method on a large scale since the company was founded in 1950 and is now capable of liquefying natural gas into synthetic fuel in its plant in Qatar.

In the long-term, renewable raw materials like lignocellulose have a huge potential. Availability is virtually unlimited; the material is climate-neutral and is already quite widely used in the chemical industry for the synthesis of fine chemicals, with a share of ten percent. Although some initial steps have been taken towards the development of working wood biorefineries, they are neither technically mature nor competitive. One unresolved issue is for example the question how the lignin which is produced can be used, and there is also still a lack of stable intermediates which are suitable for storage.

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