Transforming the Chemical Industry: Plasma as the Key to a Circular Carbon Economy
The chemical industry faces a double challenge: it must electrify its high energy demand and simultaneously defossilize its raw material base. As carbon remains the fundamental base element for products such as plastics, medicines and textiles, simply doing without it ("decarbonization") is not technically possible. The solution lies in establishing a genuine carbon circular economy.
The Sources of Emissions in the Chemical Industry
A look at the industry's carbon footprint illustrates the need for action: CO2 emissions come primarily from two sources:
- Energy consumption: the majority of process heat is still generated today by burning coal and gas.
- End of life cycle: At the end of their use, products, especially plastics, are usually incinerated, releasing the sequestered carbon into the atmosphere as CO2. The incineration of the world's plastic waste alone causes around 600 million tons of CO2 every year.
Waste as a Raw Material
Waste should no longer be regarded as a fuel, but as a valuable source of carbon. The 350 million tons of plastic waste generated worldwide each year could theoretically cover 60% of the chemical industry's total carbon requirements.
Alternative approaches such as the use of biomass or the direct capture of CO2 from the air (carbon capture) often come up against limits: Biomass competes with food production , while carbon capture requires an extremely high energy input: up to five times the industry's current primary energy consumption. The material use of waste is therefore the most sensible priority, both ecologically and economically.
Plasma Technology: Electrification at the Atomic Level
To make complex and contaminated waste usable again, Cyclize relies on plasma technology. Plasma is an ionized gas that enables extremely high temperatures and reactivities.
In contrast to conventional processes, plasma reforming offers decisive advantages:
- Volume heating instead of wall heating: the energy is transferred directly in the reaction chamber, which facilitates scaling to industrial sizes (MW range).
- High selectivity: While electrolysis is often imprecise with carbon compounds, the plasma efficiently breaks down complex molecules into their atomic components.
- No combustion in the process: As the energy is supplied purely electrically, no part of the waste has to be burned to generate process heat.
Ecological Impact and Economic Efficiency
The balance of the Cyclize process is convincing: the lifecycle emissions of chemical products are substantially reduced through recycling. Compared to the linear economy (incineration), only a fraction of the emissions are produced.
Economically, this approach benefits from rising prices for CO2 certificates and fossil raw materials. In Germany, waste can even have a "negative price" due to disposal fees, which already makes plasma reforming competitive with fossil routes.
In a Nutshell: Agility for Industrial Transformation
The path from lab to industrial scale is complex and requires scaling by a factor of 100,000, which is where agile start-ups like Cyclize are pioneering by quickly bringing scientific findings into application, bridging the gap between waste management companies and chemical producers. The era of incineration is coming to an end and the era of the electrified carbon cycle is beginning.
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The text is an excerpt from a chapter of a book that appeared in the following work: "Zirkuläre Wirtschaft und Nachhaltigkeit in der chemischen Industrie; Herausforderungen, Praxisbeispiele und Lösungsansätze; Suntrop, Carsten / Wagner, Thomas (Herausgeber)"; ISBN: 978-3-527-35363-7; Wiley-VCH, Weinheim.
