Scrap to Wrap, a New App? NOVA, Enerkem Set Sights on Garbage-to-Ethylene, and How, and Why

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) From Canada comes news that NOVA Chemicals and Enerkem entered into a joint development agreement to explore turning non-recyclable and non-compostable municipal waste into ethylene, a basic building block of plastics.

NOVA Chemicals has committed to enabling 100 percent of plastics packaging is recyclable or recoverable by 2030; and 100 percent of plastics packaging is re-used, recycled or recovered by 2040.

The project

Working together, the companies will research advanced recycling technology to transform hard-to-recycle municipal waste, including items such as plastics, household waste, and construction materials, into ethylene at full commercial scale. Ethylene, produced from waste, would advance a plastics circular economy and help meet consumer brand goals for recycled content in packaging.

Four takeaways from the Enerkem-NOVA project

Direct to ethylene. The technology in question here moves directly from mixed municipal solid waste via syngas to ethylene. At scale, that would be a first.

And is a reason for this project — to screen catalysts, select several for development work. As Enerkem’s VP of Technology Strategy & Deployment, Peter Nieuwenhuizen told the Digest, “we will do work on a few and optimize them, it could be catalyst life, it could be precision of the yield, could be a combination of both, depending on the catalyst selected. The goal is not to make a perfect catalyst, but to make it robust enough for this process, and to find uses for the byproducts.”

Overall, it is projected that it might take up to two years to work through the main technical and technoeconomic challenges.

The strategy of ports and hydrogen. Enerkem has an unrelated project producing green hydrogen under development at the Port of Rotterdam — but is is entirely unrelated, strategically? We think there’s a connection. Enerkem’s processes will need supplemental hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen to power the controlled combustion that makes syngas, and the hydrogen to optimize the hydrogen-to-carbon ratio of the syngas.

The tight circle. There is circular carbon and circular carbon — “how tight is your circle?” is one way to look at it. If you are making a fuel from waste biomass, that’s good, but you are still going to be using the skyfill (if temporarily) for carbon storage, after the fuel is combusted. Here we conceptually are not moving from ground —> fuel —> skyfill —> ethylene, we bypass the petroleum production and bypass the skyfill.

Tired plastic. In this case, conceptually we are moving from old ethylene to new ethylene.

The Enerkem backstory

Enerkem is the first company in the world to produce renewable methanol and ethanol from non-recyclable, non-compostable municipal solid waste at full commercial scale. READ MORE