(206c) Plastic Derived Oil and Bio Feedstock Integration into Refineries: The Key to Unlocking Circular Polymers at Scale

Society is currently facing the dual challenge of minimizing plastic waste while also aiming to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. Aramco and Sabic’s shared vision for the future is that plastic should not end up in the environment, landfills or in our oceans and instead is reused and remade into new products.

We are driving the efforts to create a circular global society, by working with consumers, retailers, recyclers and manufacturers to enable valuable materials to be collected and processed to make new products and identity key large scale plastic sinks while demonstrating that closing the loop on used plastic is achievable. The aim is to produce one million tons of circular products per year by the end of the decade.

We will highlight our key efforts to advance the chemical recycling of hard to recycle mixed plastic waste and introduction of renewable bio based feedstocks to produce lower carbon certified circular polymers. These efforts include the development of novel decontamination, depolymerization and conversion technologies that convert mixed plastic waste into feedstock for refinery catalytic and non catalytic conversion reactors and ultimately for conversion into high value circular plastics through introduction into steam crackers.

We will also highlight our efforts to address the high concentrations of contaminants (chlorine, metals, oxygenates and aromatics) that lead to corrosion and potential catalyst poisoning and the novel approaches we are considering to address these contaminants for large scale integration of plastic waste into refineries and chemical plants.