Electric cracking for petrochemicals production likely to take over a decade – Dow CEO

NEW YORK (ICIS)–Electric cracking (e-cracking) for production of petrochemicals will likely take more than a decade to implement, Dow’s CEO said on Wednesday.

“Long term, electric steam cracking is under development, but to put it into context, we can do hydrogen today at an equivalent capacity of what might be an 850 megawatt (MW) power plant,” said Jim Fitterling, CEO of Dow, at the company’s Investor Day media conference call.

This compares to Dow building a 25MW electric steam cracker pilot plant today, he noted.

Dow is working with Shell to develop e-cracking. In e-cracking, electricity would be used to heat cracker furnaces rather than natural gas. If that electricity comes from renewables such as solar and wind, it would largely decarbonise the process.

Dow and Shell are building their e-cracking pilot plant in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

“It’s going to take more than a decade to see electric steam cracking or advanced batteries to be able to help us handle it. And I doubt we’ll have the amount of alternative energy to help us make that transition,” said Fitterling.

Dow will not use e-cracking at its new 1.8m tonne/year net-zero carbon emissions cracker in Fort Saskatchewan, Canada planned for start-up n 2027.

Instead, a key element to bring the cracker to net-zero carbon emissions will be converting off-gases from the cracker to hydrogen through an Auto-Thermal Reformer (ATR). The hydrogen would be used to fuel the cracker, and potentially also fuel power and steam production. Meanwhile, CO2 from the process would be captured onsite and then transported and stored with third party CO2 infrastructure.

Dow is also working to reduce CO2 emissions at its Terneuzen, Netherlands cracker site by 40% by 2030 through the use of clean hydrogen and carbon capture and storage (CCS), along with the replacement of some gas turbines with electrical motor drives, which is separate from e-cracking.

To implement e-cracking at Terneuzen’s 600,000 tonne/year cracker would require around 450MW of green power, said Dow chief technology officer A.N. Sreeram at Dow’s Investor Day.

Focus article by Joseph Chang