Neste has given another step to expand its plastics chemical recycling capacity at its Porvoo refinery in Finland.
One year after announcing a €111 million investment to scale up liquefied plastic waste processing at Porvoo, Neste is adding new logistics infrastructure towards that goal.
At the refinery’s harbour, Neste is building an unloading arm with a heating system as well as highly corrosion-resistant pipelines to connect the harbour with dedicated storage tanks. This infrastructure will heat Neste’s feedstock, which is required for it to stay in liquid form, unlike with regular crude oil. In addition to the unloading arm and pipelines, Neste is also building a vapour recovery unit, contributing to emission control of the operations. The infrastructure is expected to be completed in 2024.
“The transformation of our Porvoo refinery into a renewable and circular solutions hub will require many individual steps and adjustments,” said Jori Sahlsten, senior vice president of refinery and terminal operations at the Porvoo refinery in Neste’s oil products business unit. “The new logistics infrastructure is one of these steps. It puts us in a good position to process larger and continuous volumes of liquefied recycled raw materials. This will be needed when we start using the new upgrading unit, which is able to process 150,000 tons of liquefied waste plastic per year.”
The investment is part of a broader project called Pulse (Pretreatment and Upgrading of Liquefied waste plastic to Scale up circular Economy), which has received an EU Innovation Fund grant of €135 million if fully implemented and is targeting a total capacity of 400,000 tons per year. The activities are projected to allow Neste to phase out the use of virgin fossil feedstocks by the mid 2030s.
Neste is currently building a liquefied waste plastic upgrading unit at the Porvoo refinery as part of Pulse, which is expected to be operational during 2025.
The unit will liquefy mixed plastic waste in a thermochemical liquefaction process, which turns it into pyrolysis oil that is used in Neste’s traditional oil refineries. In a steam cracker, Neste’s feedstock can be used on its own or in a blend and is reportedly a drop-in solution suitable for existing production infrastructure.