Clean Energy 101: The Chemicals and Climate Connection
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Reducing Emissions from Petrochemicals and Plastics
The Challenge and Opportunity
We must reduce greenhouse gas emissions and waste from the chemicals industry to secure a clean, low-carbon future while growing the global innovation economy.
Chemicals are vital to our everyday lives — and to the energy transition. While the industry accounts for 3 to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and creates a great deal of plastic waste — including single-use plastics that choke our oceans — it also provides critical materials like performance coatings for solar panels, battery components, refrigerants, and blade components for wind turbines.
Due to population growth and chemicals’ role in all aspects of human life and health, the mass of primary chemicals produced could grow 46 percent between 2022 and 2050, even in a net-zero scenario, according to the International Energy Agency.
RMI is working with partners to chart a path toward a low-emissions future by pushing for supply-side emissions cuts, demand-side disruption, and market activation. Our ongoing work in the industry highlights one key need: a shared vision for reducing emissions while supporting emerging market opportunities.
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Clean Energy 101: Reducing Climate Pollution from the Plastics Industry
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Clean Energy 101: All Plastics Aren’t Created Equal
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RMI’s Systems Approach
RMI is one of a few organizations broaching solutions to the climate and health risks of plastics and chemicals, from production to end of product life. We’ve globally mapped the largest direct contributors to climate pollution and frequently track how emissions from fossil feedstocks change over time. And our experts work in key regions around the world to ensure we’re addressing the impacts of the whole global supply chain. Building on these connections and this expertise provides the greatest opportunities to align plastics and chemicals production with a safer climate future. Taking a systems approach to this industry’s emissions reductions isn’t exclusively a climate play. “Recycling” carbon emissions provides the potential to make high-demand products like textiles and fuels — creating jobs and growth in the innovation economy.
Emissions Visibility
Principles for emissions accounting and reporting can enable product differentiation aligned with global market demand and spur the sector’s investment in cleaner, safer technologies. RMI aims to reduce total oil and gas supply chain emissions associated with petrochemical production by distinguishing the emissions intensity of specific plastic sources, adding methane leak transparency, reporting on the amount of nonfossil material in products, and encouraging the highest-quality uses of renewable electricity.
Industry Recalibration
Even if society turned off the tap and stopped using gasoline and diesel today, the oil industry would continue to play a role in producing petrochemicals, including the fiberglass resins used in wind turbine blades and the plastic components of solar panels. As more oil companies invest in petrochemical production to meet changing demand, RMI has identified key decarbonization milestones for the manufacturing industry to mitigate the climate impacts of producing organic chemicals.
Net-Zero Strategy
RMI is accelerating the impact of early adopters and technology disruptors, who chart the course to a low-carbon future and inspire other industrial players to be fast followers. By providing techno-economic analysis of cutting-edge technologies, alternative feedstocks and novel catalysts, and plant-level implementation strategies, we can help the industry unlock low-emissions projects for chemical production at commercial scale.
Demand Reduction
RMI’s oil and gas industry experts have identified that there’s no need to increase conventional refining or primary high-value chemicals capacity if we take advantage of demand-reduction opportunities. We can slow or halt the growth of the fossil plastics industry if we leverage voluntary circular economy, policy, and financial incentives. Through a series of analyses of the textiles, packaging, and building materials supply chains, RMI has detailed the most promising demand-reduction opportunities to cut emissions from the petrochemicals sector.
Climate-Differentiated Products That Meet Global Market Standards
RMI is working across the chemicals value chain to demonstrate that there is a market for climate-differentiated goods and to help activate that market through demand aggregation. By creating mechanisms through which producers can realize differentiated pricing for low-emissions products, we can shorten the timeline to economic solutions and accelerate emissions reductions in the chemicals sector.
Technological Innovation
RMI and Third Derivative launched the Industrial Innovation Cohorts initiative to source, select, and support the most promising innovations in cement and concrete, iron and steel, and chemicals decarbonization. RMI is also developing an Advanced Innovation Roadmap to guide financial and intellectual resources to early stage research and development on the most promising and opportunities for emissions reductions.
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