This is interesting news given the rising focus on the use of renewable electricity as well as electrolysis processing in chemical manufacturing. Major petrochemical players, Dow and Shell, recently announced their partnership in developing electric cracking technology specifically for use to electrify ethylene steam crackers. Today’s steam crackers use fossil fuel combustion to heat their furnaces, making them CO2 intensive.  The partners are looking to use renewable electricity to heat steam cracker furnaces as one of the routes to decarbonise the chemicals industry.

Innovation project teams located in Amsterdam, Terneuzen, the Netherlands, and Texas, U.S., are focused on designing and scaling ‘e-cracker’ technologies. They will work in the coming years to first prove out process technology innovations in laboratory and pilot operations and to then scale to commercial crackers.

This reminds me of Gevo’s recent instalment of two wind turbines at its biorefinery in Luverne, Minnesota. Up to 5 MW of renewable electricity will be supplied to the biorefinery which will enable Gevo to produce hydrocarbons (especially jet fuel) with low-carbon intensity score under California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard.  Gevo believes that the only way to make very low carbon fuels (zero or negative GHG footprint) is to use renewable feedstocks for the carbon source as well as using renewable sources of energy to operate their bio-ethanol/isobutanol facility.