Is the End in Sight for the Steamcracker?

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BASF SE

DECHEMA e.V.

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Any changes must be commercially viable

To date, the industry has taken a pragmatic stance over the raw materials issue. There is no need to rush things — the chemical industry is responsible for consuming around 15 percent of the world’s petroleum production, while the vast majority is burned as fuel or heats homes. The prevailing attitude seems to be that “the small quantities we need will still remain available for a long time.“ A change from fossil raw materials to e.g. renewable raw materials is not needed in order to guarantee the security of supplies. “We need to think about when exactly it will be commercially beneficial to use alternative raw materials,“ explains Röper from BASF. So, the issue here is competitiveness, technical feasibility and — to some extent — climate protection. According to the company’s senior management, it is difficult to accurately define the point at which it is worth using natural gas or biomass. However, one thing is clear. The gap between the cost of crude oil and the cost of the alternative material will need to be wide enough. In recent years though, the differences between these costs have been shrinking more and more. For example, according to an analysis from Evonik, a ton of carbon costs € 1035 if it is sourced from ethylenes and € 750 if it is produced from glucose. Consequently, financial incentives seem to be decreasing rather than increasing. Decision makers are also relatively unimpressed by the fact that oil prices are very volatile and can fluctuate hugely.

Despite this, the topic of a shift in raw materials is still on the agenda of Evonik, BASF, Bayer and all the rest. All of these companies now subscribe to the attitude that greater flexibility is needed in the long run. For example, a very promising approach is the conversion of butane from natural gas into propane. The specialists in Ludwigshafen are currently trying to crack the problem of catalytically dehydrating propane into propene so that the production of propene can be separated from the steam cracker. However, the example of natural gas also shows that there is still a lot of work to be done by the process engineers before the chemical industry can simply pick and choose its preferred raw materials like a shopper in a well-stocked supermarket. The real sticking point is the relatively inert nature of the main constituent methane. In addition, the amount of energy required for synthetic gas production is also an issue which needs to be addressed by process engineering.

Conclusion: Whatever the makeup of the raw materials mix of the future, before the chemical industry can choose to exploit natural gas, coal or biomass, a number of process innovations will need to be developed, and in particular the new processes will need to be tied in with the existing petrochemical value creation chains.

* The author is an editor of PROCESS.

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