ExxonMobil partners with CF Industries in first Louisiana project for new "low carbon" division

ExxonMobil has agreed to capture and permanently store up to 2 million metric tons of CO2 emissions annually from CF Industries’ manufacturing complex in Donaldsonville, said the company.

It’s the first Louisiana project for ExxonMobil’s new Low Carbon Solutions division and ExxonMobil’s first effort to help a third-party company decarbonize its operations, says Dan Ammann, president of ExxonMobil Low Carbon Solutions.

Ammann declined to share details about the value of the investment or any new jobs associated with the project. CF Industries has previously announced plans for a USD200 million CO2 dehydration and compression unit at its Donaldsonville facility to enable captured CO2 to be transported and stored. ExxonMobil will transport the captured CO2 for permanent storage in Vermilion Parish, the companies say.

ExxonMobil also signed an agreement with EnLink Midstream to use EnLink’s transportation network to deliver the CO2. The 2 million metric tons of emissions captured annually will be equivalent to replacing approximately 700,000 gasoline-powered cars with electric vehicles, the companies say.

The project announced today involves CF Industries’ existing operations in Donaldsonville and is unrelated to a possible USD2 billion facility at the site, explains Chris Close, who directs the company’s corporate communications. Once sequestration begins, CF expects to produce 1.7 million tons of “blue” ammonia annually for uses including power generation and marine shipping, Close says.

Ammann acknowledged that carbon storage can be controversial and says the company will address any concerns with residents and regulators. ExxonMobil says it will spend $15 billion to lower carbon emissions over the next five years, and local company leaders want the Capital Region to attract as much of that investment as possible. “We have a lot of other interested parties in Louisiana and across the Gulf Coast that are interested in this kind of solution,” Ammann says.

“Louisiana’s chemical industry is at the forefront of reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” Louisiana Chemical Association President Greg Bowser says in a prepared statement. “For 50 years, carbon capture and storage has proven to be a safe way to prevent carbon emissions from ever reaching the atmosphere."

“This unprecedented, large-scale, low-carbon partnership is a key milepost on Louisiana’s path toward a brighter future for our climate, our economy and our people,” Gov. John Bel Edwards said in a prepared statement. “The collaboration and innovation to bring carbon capture and storage technology forward at this scale reaffirms our state’s ability to grow our economy without sacrificing our long-term emission-reduction goals to net zero by 2050."

We remind, ExxonMobil is gradually shutting down its 235,000 barrel per day (bpd) Fos-Sur-Mer refinery in France as a result of ongoing strike action. Walkouts caused the gradual shut down of Exxon's 240,000 bpd Port Jerome-Gravenchon oil refinery and Notre Dame de Gravenchon (NDG) petrochemical site in France on Sept. 20 before spreading to Fos-Sur-Mer 24 hours later.
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LyondellBasell and 23 Oaks Investments, Leiferde/Lower Saxony, Germany, signed an agreement to create Source One Plastics, a joint venture that will build an energy efficient, advanced plastic waste sorting and recycling facility in Germany, said the company.

Using renewable energy from wind and biomass, the new unit is designed to process the amount of plastic packaging waste generated by approximately 1.3 million German citizens per year. This waste is not recycled today and is mostly incinerated.

The Source One Plastics facility will produce processed waste that will provide a material part of the feedstock for an advanced recycling plant that LyondellBasell plans to build at its Wesseling, Germany, site. Using LyondellBasell's proprietary MoReTec technology, this plant will be the first commercial scale, single-train advanced recycling plant, designed to demonstrate its capability for further scalability. LyondellBasell already operates a semi-industrial scale MoReTec plant at its Ferrara, Italy, site.

LyondellBasell's new plant is designed to convert hard-to-recycle post-consumer plastic waste into feedstock for new plastic materials. Once in operation, it will enable recycling of most types of plastic materials such as multi-layered food packaging items or mixed plastic containers. The final investment decision on this project is scheduled for the coming months. Both projects contribute to LyondellBasell's sustainability ambition to end plastic waste in the environment.

"We are committed to supporting our customers to meet their demand for renewable and circular solutions," says Yvonne van der Laan, LyondellBasell Executive Vice President, Circular and Low Carbon Solutions. "To truly achieve a circular economy, we have to find creative solutions to meet society's needs. We are taking an important first step into the upstream side of the business to secure access to plastic waste that we will convert into new plastic materials at our advanced recycling plants. This will enable us to meet our circularity ambition and produce two million tonnes of polymers from recycled or renewable resources annually by 2030."

23 Oaks Investments is a strategic solution provider in the upcycling of post-consumer recycled (PCR) plastic waste with extensive experience in the plastics industry. The Source One Plastics joint venture will provide a broad portfolio of services including waste procurement, sorting, and pre-treatment to deliver feedstock suitable for producing high-quality PCR material for a range of applications.

"With our global experience at all levels of the circular economy and our extensive knowledge in all areas of the plastic recycling value chain combined with our strong hands-on approach, we feel we have right mix of competencies to make Source One Plastics a success," says Kai Hoyer, Managing Partner of 23 Oaks Investment. "Together with LyondellBasell's commitment to expand on its circular polymer product offering and its work to develop advanced recycling into an industrial scale technology, 23 Oaks can contribute its part to make this a reality."

In addition to its advanced recycling semi-industrial scale plant, LyondellBasell holds a 50% share in Quality Circular Polymers (QCP). QCP uses a mechanical recycling process to produce premium plastic pellets from post-consumer packaging waste for use in such applications as electrical appliances, washing detergent bottles and suitcases.

We remind, LyondellBasell and Genox Recycling have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to establish a joint venture (JV) to build a plastics recycling plant in Zhaoqing, Guangdong Province with a planned start up in 2023. The plastic recycling plant will use mechanical recycling technology to recycle post-consumer plastic waste and produce new polymers sold under the LyondellBasell CirculenRecover product portfolio.
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According to the approved preventive maintenance schedule issued by the RoK Ministry of Energy, the preventive maintenance campaign commenced at the Atyrau Refinery on 1 October 2022, said the company.

The process facility maintenance will be performed on a stage-by-stage basis. The Atyrau Refinery’s units operate according to the two-stream oil refining pattern and are shut down and started alternatively. Thus, the refinery will not be completely shut down. The refinery will continue to operate at the 50–70 % capacity during the maintenance, generating and shipping the target products.

In October to November, it is planned to refine 692,000 tonnes of oil. The average daily refining rate will be 11,347 tonnes, which corresponds to 68 % of the refinery’s design capacity. The average daily oil product generation volume will be as follows: 2,400 tonnes of motor gasoline per day, 2,600 tonnes of diesel fuel per day, 240 tonnes of jet fuel per day and 170 tonnes of liquefied gas per day.

The preventive maintenance at the Atyrau Refinery will be carried out according to the Industrial Safety Law On Civil Protection of the Republic of Kazakhstan to ensure safe and reliable operation of the process, power generation, compression and dynamic equipment so as to achieve the design performance, improve the environmental parameters and inspect the automation equipment.

The following works will be performed on the units during the scheduled maintenance: catalyst change-out, internal inspection, inspection and examination of reactors, tanks and vessels, columns, heat exchangers and pipelines.

The Atyrau Refinery’s ramp-up to stable operation is also scheduled on a stage-by-stage basis by the second ten-day period of November 2022.

As a reminder, the plant maintenance was previously expected to commence in September 2022. However, in order to stabilise the situation on the fuel and lubricants market, the maintenance was postponed to 1 October 2022.
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Shares in Brazilian petrochemical producer Braskem SA jumped more than 20% on Tuesday after local newspaper O Globo reported that U.S.-based asset manager Apollo made a new, higher bid for the company, as per Reuters.

According to the report, Apollo is willing to pay 50 reais per share of Braskem, which is controlled by state-run oil firm Petrobras and conglomerate Novonor, up 25% from Apollo's previous bid.

Responding to requests for comment by Reuters, Novonor and Petrobras said that they had no new information about a sale of their stakes in the firm.

Braskem shares ended up 20.4% at 33.58 reais on Tuesday, the top gainer on Brazil's Bovespa stock index, which dropped 0.96%. At its current share price, Braskem is valued at about USD4.5 B.

As per MRC, Braskem, the market leader and a pioneer in the production of biopolymers, entered into an agreement for the acquisition of shares and the subscription of new shares in Wise Plasticos S.A., a company engaged in mechanical recycling. Braskem will acquire an equity interest of 61.1% in the share capital of Wise for an estimated amount of RD121 million, part of which will be used to expand its current production capacity by two-fold to around 50,000 tons/year of recycling by 2026.

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BASF will invest in a new world-scale Neopentyl Glycol (NPG) plant with an annual production capacity of 80,000 metric tons at its new Zhanjiang Verbund site, China, said the company.

With the new NPG plant expected to come on stream in Q4 2025, BASF’s global NPG capacity will be boosted from 255,000 metric tons to 335,000 metric tons annually, strengthening its position as one of the world’s leading NPG manufacturers. Currently, BASF has NPG production facilities in Ludwigshafen, Germany; Freeport, Texas, United States; as well as Nanjing and Jilin, China.

Vasilios Galanos, Senior Vice President, Intermediates Asia Pacific, BASF, said, “Investing in an NPG plant at the Zhanjiang Verbund site will enable us to support the growing demand from customers in Asia, particularly in the field of powder coatings in China. Leveraging the synergies arising from our unique Verbund model and top-notch technologies, we are confident that our investment in the NPG plant will enhance our competitive edge mainly in China, the world’s largest chemical market.”

“We are responding to the growing demand of Chinese customers for environmentally friendly powder coatings. We will step up the construction of the new NPG plant to support the growth of our business partners, while expanding our footprint and sustaining our position as a leading supplier in this vast market,” added Anup Pandey, Director, Business Management, Acids & Polyalcohols, BASF Intermediates Asia Pacific.

Boasting high chemical and thermal stability, NPG is an intermediate mainly used in the production of powder coating resins, which are particularly successful in the construction industry and for coating of household appliances. Due to their low volatile organic compounds (VOC), powder coatings enable their users to comply with VOC emission standards by reducing the release of VOCs by up to 50% compared to liquid coatings. Other applications for NPG include the manufacture of lubricants, plasticizers and pharmaceuticals. For example, it is used as a building block in the synthesis of hormones, cardiovascular drugs and painkillers.

BASF and Hannong Chemicals are planning to establish a production joint venture “BASF Hannong Chemicals Solutions Ltd.” BASF will hold 51% and Hannong Chemicals 49% shareholding, in the proposed joint venture. The joint venture will combine BASF’s strong technology and product innovation capabilities with Hannong’s highly efficient production capabilities to supply best-in-class non-ionic surfactant products to BASF and Hannong Chemicals, each with their own sales and distribution network, enabling the two companies to cater for increasing market demand.
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