Climate-neutral refinery runs on vegetable, animal and household waste and takes up space

The refinery of the future does not run on petroleum, but uses CO₂ and vegetable, animal and household waste to make a wide range of chemicals. That refinery does require a lot of space. For one factory alone is 800 km² of solar panels and wind turbines.

Chemistry professors Eelco Vogt and Bert Weckhuysen from Utrecht University calculated this this Wednesday. Nature. They wondered: is it possible to have a climate-neutral refinery running by 2050, and what would it take.

Nature thought the idea of ​​the two chemists was important enough to put on the cover. “Their vision deserves attention,” the trade magazine writes in an accompanying editorial. “Industry bosses and policymakers must take it seriously.”

The refinery of the future can no longer run on crude oil (or natural gas), because the fossil fuels produced from it release extra CO₂ in the atmosphere, causing the Earth to warm up. It requires a huge change, the scale of which is “dizzying”, write Vogt and Weckhuysen. “We can expect that the changes expected from the chemical industry will fundamentally change the global economy.”

Traffic becomes electric

In their calculation, the two chemists assume an average refinery, based on the 615 units that existed at the end of 2018, with a combined capacity of 92 million barrels (158.99 liters) of oil per day.

The future refinery will no longer need to produce so many transport fuels (petrol, diesel, etc.), Vogt and Weckhuysen think. Because by 2050, much of the traffic will have become electric. Carbon-based liquid fuels will still be needed for ships, aircraft and heavy trucks. The two chemists choose CO as a raw material₂. This can be extracted from the flue gases of steel and cement factories, for example, or sucked from the air and filtered. This technology is already commercial, albeit on a small scale. CO₂ can be converted into CO (carbon monoxide) and water in reaction with hydrogen. And CO can then be combined, together with hydrogen, into so-called synthetic fuels. KLM and Shell produced synthetic kerosene for the first time three years ago.

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What the future refinery must make more of are all kinds of ‘platform molecules’, such as succinic acid, glycerol, isoprene, ethylene, propylene, which form the basis for products such as paints, plastics, synthetic rubber, sweeteners, resins and so on. demand for it will increase due to population growth, Vogt and Weckhuysen expect. In their plan, plastic and biological waste form the raw material for those basic molecules. Although a lot of research is being done on this, the conversion of plastic and biological waste is not always efficient. A lot of CO can be produced₂ upon release. “But we bring that back to the refinery and use it again to make fuels, for example,” Weckhuysen said by email.

Huge amounts of hydrogen

The fact that the future refinery will take up so much space is mainly due to the enormous quantities of hydrogen that are needed, including for the conversion of CO₂. Because the hydrogen also has to be made climate neutral, this is done in long lines electrolysers, devices that split water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity. In Vogt and Weckhuysen’s plan, half of this will come from solar panels and half from wind turbines. To outline the scale: if you wanted to make the 86 existing refineries in Western Europe climate neutral, the two chemists write, you would need 12 times as much ‘green’ hydrogen as the EU’s already ambitious goal for 2030.

The future refinery not only requires much more space, logistics will also become more complicated. In addition, Vogt and Weckhuysen wonder whether the now highly complex structure of the current refinery, which has evolved over more than a hundred years, with numerous interdependent processes, can simply be recreated in a new climate-neutral version. Ideally, yes. But that requires a stable innovation and investment policy for the long term.

The two chemists are optimistic that science and technology will be able to provide the necessary solutions. But in terms of investments (14 to 23 billion euros for the construction of one refinery), the quantities of critical raw materials required for the construction of all installations and the space for electricity production, the scale of the transition is “unprecedented”.

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