SABIC, BP collaborate at chemical complex in Germany

BP and SABIC (Saudi Basic Industries Corp.), Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, have signed a new agreement to work together at the Gelsenkirchen, Germany, chemical complex. The companies say the new collaboration will help to increase production of certified circular products that take used mixed plastics to make feedstock, reducing the amount of fossil resources needed in the petrochemical plants at the site.

The news closely follows a late February announcement involving SABIC and a United Kingdom-based firm called Plastic Energy and their joint effort to build a chemical recycling plant in the Netherlands.

SABIC says certified circular polymers are part of its Trucircle portfolio and are produced using advanced recycling to convert low-quality mixed and used plastic into pyrolysis oil. According to a news release from the company, the oil will be processed at BP’s Gelsenkirchen refining site and then used by SABIC in its Gelsenkirchen polymer plants to produce certified circular products. The company says the final material has identical properties to virgin-based polymers and allows plastics to be recycled multiple times, with no loss of properties or characteristics.

Polymer production using the alternative feedstock started at the Germany site earlier this year after successful trials in December 2020, SABIC reports.

“SABIC is committed to helping to create a new circular economy where plastic never becomes waste. Advanced recycling allows us to increase the production of more sustainable materials and use our planet’s resources wisely while reducing the use of conventional approaches such as landfill and combustion. Advanced recycling has a crucial role to play in the current recycling mix as it can capture value from plastic waste streams that have traditionally been ignored or discarded,” says Fahad Al Swailem, vice president of PE & Sales at SABIC. “We continue to increase our collaborations with upstream suppliers and downstream customers, and this new initiative with our long-term partner BP takes us one step further to achieving our vision.”

According to SABIC, it has collaborated with BP “for decades” at the Gelsenkirchen site, which SABIC says is the starting point for the value chain of the chemical industry’s network in the northern Ruhr area. The refining and petrochemicals site in Gelsenkirchen plays an important role in the chemical industry in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. BP also operates one of the largest olefin plants in Germany with a production capacity of about 2 million metric tons per year.

“This is an important milestone in our vision of achieving up to 30 percent of our ethylene and propylene production from sustainable, recyclable raw materials by 2030,” says Wolfgang Stückle, vice president of Refining and Specialties Solutions Europe & Africa at BP. “It is a fantastic achievement on the part of the Gelsenkirchen team, after more than a year’s preparation, to set up the new initiative with our partners at SABIC. At the same time, it is what BP’s recently announced Net Zero strategy is all about.”

According to BP, it released its Net Zero strategy in 2020 in an effort to become a net-zero company by 2050 or sooner.

SABIC says the certified base chemicals from BP and the certified circular polymers from SABIC are recognized through the International Sustainability and Carbon Certification plus (ISCC+) scheme that certifies content and standards across the value chain from source to end product. The ISCC+ certification works on what is known as a “mass balance system,” meaning that for each metric ton of circular feedstock fed into the cracker and substituting for fossil-based feedstock, a metric ton of the output can be classified as circular.