Visiting a modern petrochemical plant makes you feel incredibly small. Enormous compressors roar incessantly, distillation columns tower high above your head, large pipelines full of oil and gas criss-cross the site. Heat radiates from inspection hatches in the furnaces in which the hydrocarbons are heated to 850°C to make the molecules crack. It’s easy to get lost in alleys of ducts and pipes, which to an untrained eye, all look the same.
Large tankers moor at the quay to unload cargoes of oil and gas and trucks leave at the other end, filled with plastic pellets. Tall chimneys release large plumes of flue gases from burning gas and unwanted by-products, using the energy to run the processes at the plant. At night a flare watches over the plant like a bright eye. This is where gases are combusted in case of an emergency or unexpected shutdown of parts of the plant. It’s always burning with a small flame.
Around the world, around the clock, the plastics we use every day are produced at facilities such as these on an almost incomprehensible scale. A scale so large that some suggest we now live in an era best labelled the plasticene.
And as the climate crisis worsens, plastics production at plants like these is ballooning. Modern lifestyles and practices are intimately entwined with the use of plastics. Our phones, computers, food packaging, clothes and even renewable energy technologies, such as wind turbine blades and the cables that connect them to the power grid, are all, to a large extent, made from plastics.
This means plastic demand is likely to grow for decades to come – not least in developing countries, which will account for the bulk of future demand growth. In 1950, the global production of plastic was estimated to be a mere 2 Mt (million tonnes). In 2015 this had grown to 380 Mt, and along a business-as-usual trajectory it will reach 1,606 Mt by 2050.
Unless mitigated, this growth will also incur a substantial increase in global greenhouse gas emissions – from 1.7 Gt (billion tonnes) of CO₂-equivalent (CO₂e) in 2015, to 6.5 GtCO₂e by 2050. It has been forecast that plastics and other petrochemicals, such as fertilisers and solvents (plastics make up close to 45% of the output of the sector) will become the largest driver of oil demand, accounting for almost 50% of the growth in oil demand by 2050, according to estimates by the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Why? Because the raw materials behind plastics and other petrochemicals are fossil fuels. As traditional demands for oil – vehicle fuels – are declining as the transport sector is increasingly electrified, the oil industry is seeing plastics as a key output that can make up for losses in other markets. Investing in plastics has therefore become a key strategy for fossil fuel firms.
