🏭 Gasifying shredded cars

Eastman's car gasification project, Orion's new cogeneration unit, and cyclohexane.

April 24, 2023

TOGETHER WITH

Good morning. Are you a chemical engineer who works with solids? The latest Feedstockland is about how sustainable raw materials tend to be solid, and how scale might play out differently than we're used to. Expert opinions welcome!

From the condenser:

· Eastman's car gasification project

· Orion's new cogeneration unit

· MOTD: cyclohexane

PLASTIC RECYCLING

Eastman gasified non-recyclable car waste

American chemical company, Eastman Chemical, in partnership with USAMP and PADNOS, demonstrated that Eastman's gasification process can handle automotive shredder residue (ASR).

The issue at hand:

While single-use plastics get the most attention (because they're thrown away after a single use), multi-use plastics eventually face the same fate. The same thinking applies to the plastic used in our cars, which usually ends up in the dump with what remains of the car. As a result, some 25 million tons per year of non-recyclable automotive waste (which we call ASR) goes to waste. We're mostly talking about stuff like plastic dashboards, body parts, seat belts, and airbags, but contaminated with various inorganic matter.

Where Eastman comes in:

PADNOS supplied a "plastic-rich fraction of ASR" to Eastman, and Eastman gasified it to produce a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen (that's syngas). Gasification isn't a new process, but gasifying waste is relatively new—it's a lot like what Fulcrum Bioenergy is doing, except Eastman is targeting a specific waste stream instead of general municipal waste, and Eastman wants to use the syngas to make chemicals and materials instead of using it to make fuels.

Zooming out:

A lot of what makes recycling difficult isn't the recycling process itself, or the recyclability of the materials; instead, it's about how difficult it is to separate materials prior to processing. If those separation costs are too high, then the complete deconstruction of waste (via gasification) might be the only viable means of making the waste useful again.

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SPECIALTY MATERIALS

Orion got a new cogeneration unit

Carbon black producer, Orion Engineered Carbons, just installed a new cogeneration unit at its site in Ivanhoe, Louisiana.

Some context:

Orion's big thing is the production of carbon black—a solid form of carbon (aggregated carbon nanoparticles) that is sold as powder or as pellets. Since this stuff can be made from a bunch of different feedstocks (natural gas, acetylene, coal tar distillates, vacuum oils, etc.) and in a bunch of different ways, it comes in a bunch of different varieties. Some of those varieties work great as a reinforcing filler in tires, some work great in dyes, and others work great in lithium-ion batteries.

Okay, so cogeneration?

Making carbon black often involves the partial combustion of some hydrocarbon, followed by the separation of the resulting solid nanoparticles from that hot smokey gas. The gas contains steam from combustion, plus some extra steam from water injection into the reactor, and Orion will now use that steam to power a turbine on-site (to produce its own electrical power).

Zooming out:

Using that steam to heat other processes only makes sense when there are processes that operate at lower temperatures. If the steam is more useful as a means to make electricity for the site, then that's going to be the option they go with. In this case it sounds like part of Orion's motivation was to make power on-site less reliant on the grid, so maybe there are some other reliability drivers at play as well.

Some more headlines

  • Perstorp Japan is officially a trader with storage, certified by ISCC PLUS

  • Nalgene is now using Tritan Renew for half of its bottle-making plastic demand

  • Technip Energies and Casale are combining some of their hydrogen tech

  • BioBTX and Agilyx are working together on upgrading pyrolysis oil to BTX

  • Nan Ya's ethylene glycol plant in Point Comfort, Texas is about to restart

Molecule of The Day

Today's MOTD is the one you've been asking for… cyclohexane.

This molecule is the one responsible for making you draw that weird chair confirmation thing in organic chemistry. Cyclohexane, unlike its resonant cousin benzene, was first produced by synthesis (as it wasn't found naturally occurring in coal). Today, the world produces cyclohexane by hydrogenating benzene in the presence of the same catalyst Murray Raney used to hydrogenate vegetable oils in the 1920s.

About 10% of the world's benzene is used to make cyclohexane, so annual production of cyclohexane is roughly 6 million tons each year. Virtually all of that cyclohexane is used to make cyclohexanol and cyclohexanone, which, in turn, are mainly used to make caprolactam (45%) and adipic acid (22%). Both adipic acid and caprolactam are primarily used to make nylon.

The cyclohexane market is fairly fragmented—the main producers don't produce much more than the minor producers. In any case, the companies producing cyclohexane are typically those who produce benzene or those nylon precursors. Think of BASF, CP Chem, and ExxonMobil.

The reboiler

  • Podcast: Check out this episode on education, talent development, and diversity in the chemical industry.

  • Article: It’s hard to understand the petrochemical industry without knowing in's & out's of the 'enes.

  • Book: You need to understand the forces behind the oil industry to understand the chemical industry. Daniel Yergin's The New Map does a great job breaking it down.*

The bottoms

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