Finland-based oil refining company Neste has announced that it has now concluded its second series of industrial-scale processing runs with liquefied waste plastic at its refinery in Porvoo, Finland. The process produces Nest Re, a feedstock that can be used on its own or in a blend. As a drop-in alternative, Neste Re is subsequently turned into new plastics by Neste’s partners.
To date, aiming to establish how different types of waste plastics behave during chemical recycling in the refinery processes, the company has processed close to 3,000 tons of liquefied waste plastic in six different runs. The runs have been conducted on existing refinery equipment built for crude oil refining, as Neste is still in the process of creating facilities specifically for processing liquefied waste plastic.
The liquefied waste plastic for the runs has been sourced from multiple suppliers that are part of a supply network Neste has continuously expanded. These include US-based Alterra Energy, in which Neste holds a minority stake, as well as Finland-based Wastewise, with which Neste recently cooperated to chemically recycle cross-linked polyethylene (PEX) waste from pipe production into new PEX pipes. The ccompany targets “hard-to-recycle” waste plastic which would otherwise have ended up in incineration or landfill.
Neste is ‘walking the talk on chemical recycling, said Heikki Färkkilä, vice president of Chemical Recycling at Neste. “Our processing runs provide us not only with valuable knowledge on the technologies, but also serve as a proof of concept: chemical recycling can be done on an industrial scale. Our focus continues to be getting from individual processing runs to continuous operation.”
These efforts are also taking place within the scope of Project PULSE (“Pretreatment and Upgrading of Liquefied waste plastic to Scale up circular Economy”), which aims to implement proprietary technologies to pretreat and upgrade liquefied waste plastic and integrate these technologies into Neste’s refinery operations in Porvoo. While unprocessed liquefied waste plastic is feasible in limited campaign runs, for scaling up to continuous processing pretreatment and upgrading is a crucial step: liquefied waste plastic contains impurities and chemical compositions that can lead to risks of corrosion, process inefficiency and poor end-product quality. Project PULSE, funded by the European Union, aims to reach a pretreatment and upgrading capacity of 400,000 tons per year by 2028. In this way, Neste will transition its Porvoo refinery into a renewable and circular solutions site - a transformation in which liquefied waste plastic would play an important role. The company has indicated it may end crude oil refining by the mid-2030s.