Good morning. Welcome to the March 2023 Round-Up! The goal here is to give you a chance to look back at what we talked about and to lean into a couple of topics that are worth some extra discussion.

But before we get into it, some updates: The Column now has a comment section, a new company that is hiring (hello Holocene!), and a new edition of Feedstockland coming out later this week about exploring transport costs and scale.

What we covered in March:

• Mar 1st ($): Evonik's fumed alumina for batteries and bio-based methanol for boats

• Mar 3rd ($): Silicone coatings for EV wires and Dow's SMR update

• Mar 8th ($): Viridus' bio-based ethyl acetate and Solvay's Rusvinyl exit

• Mar 10th ($): Calpine's CO2 capture plans and BASF's aroma ingredients

• Mar 13th: HIF Global and DAC-based electrofuels and crude to chemicals in South Korea

• Mar 15th ($): LyondellBasell might exit EO and Univar was acquired for $8.1bn

• Mar 17th ($): Aramco and Linde want to crack ammonia and Evonik has new sprayable foams

• Mar 20th: Indorama might go partly public and Exxon's big refinery expansion

• Mar 22nd ($): Adani insists on coal-to-PVC and Nouryon is making chlorine dioxide

• Mar 24th ($): CO2-based cement in San Antonio and Albemarle's lithium "flex" site

• Mar 27th: SK Group's latest EAA expansion and more vanadium production is coming

• Mar 29th ($): Saudi Aramco invests in China and depolymerizing polystyrene in Illinois

• Mar 31st ($): LG Chem's new aerogel plant and Micro modular nuclear in Poland

Trends to watch:

1. Both Dow Chemical ($) and Poland's Grupa Azoty ($) are exploring the modular route.

If you've been reading this newsletter for a while, or you've spent a little too long browsing LinkedIn at some point, you've probably heard a vague statistic like "about half of the world's emissions come from making materials". This statement mostly refers to industrial heating requirements, which are particularly relevant to making the chemical process industries more sustainable. (Here's a solid review of some technical solutions, and here's an intro to the topic.)

One partial, but potentially significant, solution to that industrial heat problem is the combined heat and power you can generate with nuclear fission. This isn't some sort of new revelation—Dow Chemical almost made it happen in the late 1960s. What's new is legislation that encourages a nuclear comeback, and the publicly expressed interest in modular nuclear reactors from chemical companies.

2. Interest in electrofuels seems to be rising, but it's complicated.

Electrofuels are a hot topic because they sound really cool, but producing them is notoriously inefficient. HIF Global is a Porsche-owned company that wants to combine green hydrogen with DAC-based CO2 to make methanol, which would then be converted into gasoline with Exxon’s MTG process. It checkmarks all of the narrative boxes: green hydrogen, DAC, CO2 utilization, and it still makes good ole' gasoline.

It's not that electrofuels are wildly infeasible at a small scale, or that there's a 0% chance it can make money, it's just that it doesn't have the potential to replace a meaningful fraction of the demand for gasoline.

3. While CO2 could be used to make chemicals, you can also get a lot more creative. Like with cement!

A really important part of the CO2 capture situation is that we need to do something with the CO2 after we capture it. With enough government incentives, sequestration could make sense, but if companies can't profit from capturing CO2 they won't do it.

Absent the government incentive, the only valuable thing we can do with CO2 is use it for material applications. There's been a lot of talk lately with the utilization of CO2 to make methanol, but part of the problem here is that there is only so much demand for methanol. Even if we replaced all of the carbon monoxide we currently use to make methanol with carbon dioxide, how much CO2 could be captured by that methanol market?

On the other hand, we make a lot of concrete/cement, so figuring out a way to enter that market could be a bigger deal. The Column hasn't covered concrete/cement all that much in the past, but the plan is to start covering it a bit more.

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