Shell's 2023 sustainability report came out in March but is only now that reports are emerging regarding the oil major's inability to achieve its 2025 goal of converting 1 million tonnes of plastic waste a year into pyrolysis oil by 2025. Here's the text from page 45 of the said report.
"Shell is helping to develop a viable plastic circular economy. We are working with partners across the plastic waste value chain, such as the waste management industry and pyrolysis oil producers, to help develop a circular value chain globally.
In 2023, we signed several strategic co-operation agreements with partners to unlock access to plastic waste feedstock and enable long-term storage of pyrolysis oil. Work on our new pyrolysis oil upgrader at the Shell Chemicals Park Moerdijk in the Netherlands continues. The plant, which is expected to start production in 2024, will have the capacity to process up to 50,000 tonnes of pyrolysis oil a year.
While Shell sees customer demand for circular chemicals, the pace of growth globally is less than expected due to lack of available feedstock, slow technology development and regulatory uncertainty. As a result, in 2023 we concluded that the scale of our ambition to turn 1 million tonnes of plastic waste a year into pyrolysis oil by 2025 is unfeasible."
More analysis can be found here from The Guardian. Some of the quotes cited beliow are critical.
"The company has not called attention to this retraction, but it is a “significant” change, said Davis Allen, investigative researcher at the Center for Climate Integrity, which shared the finding with the Guardian. “It’s an acknowledgment that advanced recycling is not developing in the way that companies have promised it will, and are counting on it to,” he said. “That’s pretty meaningful.”
Complaints of insufficient feedstock may seem a surprising when hundreds of millions of tons of plastic are produced each year. But despite what is suggested in marketing materials, postconsumer items such as food packaging and empty soap bottles cannot easily be recycled via pyrolysis. The process works best with clean, homogeneous inputs, but sorting and cleaning plastic is expensive. As a result, most chemical recycling facilities working at scale rely mostly on processed industrial scrap – or “plastic left on the cutting room floor during production”, said Allen.
Today, there is mounting evidence that advanced recycling “often just does not work”, said Judith Enck, president of advocacy group Beyond Plastics and a former EPA regional administrator. Many of the United States’ 11 advanced recycling facilities operate only partially, and two have been shut down altogether.
Shell’s third reason for walking back their pledge – regulatory uncertainty – probably refers to a rapidly changing advanced recycling policy landscape. Many states have recently passed pro-advanced recycling legislation, due largely to lobbying by the powerful industry group the American Chemistry Council, said Enck.
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