Neste has given the final green light to a project that will see the construction of upgrading facilities for liquefied plastic waste at its Porvoo refinery in Finland. https://www.sustainableplastics.com/news/neste-walking-talk-chemical-recycling The company is spending €111 million on installing capacity to upgrade 150,000 tons of liquefied waste plastic per year. Next to building new assets, Neste will also retrofit existing assets at the Porvoo refinery to scale up chemical recycling fast and efficiently. The output - upgraded liquefied waste plastic - will be processed in the conventional refinery, replacing a portion of the fossil resources processed at the Porvoo refinery.
Liquefied waste plastic is the product obtained from pyrolysing plastic waste. Pyrolysis oil tends not to be able to be used as is, but requires three further processing steps - pretreatment, upgrading and refining - to turn it into better quality and usable feedstock for new plastics. By incorporating the upgrading step, Neste can opt to use a lower-quality plastic waste to serve as input feedstock. Following the upgrading step, it is then processed into a high-quality petrochemical feedstock in its existing refinery in Porvoo.
The present 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 euros if fully implemented and is targeting a total capacity of 400,000 tons per year.
“We have developed our capability to process circular raw material at the Porvoo refinery over the recent years and are now set to build a respective facility. The new facility […] is planned to be finalized in the first half of 2025,” said Markku Korvenranta, executive vice president in Neste’s Oil Products.
At the Porvoo refinery, the preparation work was successfully completed during the first half of 2023, enabling the construction work to commence without any delay. Neste’s ambition is to make the Porvoo oil refinery in Finland the most sustainable refinery in Europe by 2030. The company has committed to reaching carbon-neutral production by 2035, and reducing the carbon emission intensity of sold products by 50% by 2040.