MOSCOW (MRC) -- BASF says it is investing EUR16.0 million (USD18.9 million) into Pyrum Innovations (Dillingen, Germany), a technology company specialized in the pyrolysis of waste tires, said Chemweek.
The investment will support the expansion of Pyrum’s pyrolysis plant at Dillingen and the further rollout of the technology, the company says. BASF and Pyrum anticipate that production capacities of up to 100,000 metric tons of pyrolysis oil derived from waste tires could be built up within the coming years together with additional partners. BASF will use the pyrolysis oil from end-of-life tires as an additional raw material source next to oil from mixed plastic waste, the use of which is the long-term focus of the company’s ChemCycling project, it says.
Pyrum is currently running a pyrolysis plant for end-of-life tires that can process up to 10,000 metric tons/year of tires and it will add two more production lines by the end of 2022, BASF says. Most of the pyrolysis oil produced by Pyrum’s plant will be used by BASF to make chemical products for mainly the plastics industry, it says. Pyrum intends to build additional tire pyrolysis plants together with interested partners, to accelerate the path toward the use of Pyrum’s technology in serial production.
"With the investment, we have taken another significant step towards establishing a broad supply base for pyrolysis oil and towards offering our customers products based on chemically recycled plastic waste on a commercial scale,” says Hartwig Michels, president/petrochemicals at BASF.
The company says that according to a life-cycle assessment carried out by the consulting company Sphera (Chicago, Illinois) on behalf of BASF, products made from pyrolysis oil by using a mass balance approach have the exact same properties as products manufactured with primary fossil resources. In addition, they have a lower carbon footprint than conventional products.
As MRC reported earlier, BASF has restarted its No. 1 steam cracker in Germany following a maintenance turnaorund. Thus, the company resumed operations at the plant on September 30, 2019. The plant was shut for maintenance in mid-August, 2019. Located at Ludwigshafen in Germany, the No. 1 cracker has an ethylene production capacity of 235,000 mt/year and a propylene production capacity of 125,000 mt/year.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing PE and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's overall PE production totalled 1,712,400 tonnes in the first seven months of 2020, up by 58% year on year. Linear low density polyethylene (LLDPE) accounted for the greatest increase in the output. At the same time, overall PP production in Russia increased in January-July 2020 by 24% year on year to 1,063,700 tonne. ZapSibNeftekhim accounted for the main increase in the output.
BASF is the leading chemical company. It produces a wide range of chemicals, for example solvents, amines, resins, glues, electronic-grade chemicals, industrial gases, basic petrochemicals and inorganic chemicals. The most important customers for this segment are the pharmaceutical, construction, textile and automotive industries. BASF generated sales of EUR59 billion in 2019.
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