The petrochemical giant promotes its new Baytown facility near Houston as a model for solving the world’s glut of used plastic. But ExxonMobil won’t say how much goes into making new plastic—or ends up burned as climate-warming fuel.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/01112023/missing-equations-exxonmobils-advanced-recycling-operation/
BAYTOWN, Texas—ExxonMobil’s vision of recycling plastic begins here at its massive petrochemical complex, and in many ways, so does that of the city of Houston and its nearly two-year-old recycling collaboration with the oil industry.
It’s a vision that remains murky at best. The details are obscured by cheery promotional videos trumpeting environmentally friendly concepts and by corporate claims of the need to protect proprietary technology.
Since last December, ExxonMobil has touted its “advanced recycling” facility here in Baytown, which began operating commercially that month, as one of the largest in North America and potentially the first of others designed to support a “circular economy.” The intent, the corporation says, is to enable its customers—manufacturers and retail brands that use plastic for everything from bottles to car bumpers—to claim they are using plastic with recycled content in order to meet consumer-driven sustainability goals.
Unlike mechanical recycling, which can only be used for a narrow range of used plastics, advanced (or chemical) recycling is billed as suitable for all types, since it breaks them down into basic chemicals that can be used as pure feedstock for new products. ExxonMobil says the proprietary process used at Baytown will both reduce the need to extract new virgin fossil fuels to make petrochemicals for plastics and cut back on the amount of unrecycled plastic going to landfills.
Yet the company has declined to reveal some of the most basic information about the new facility, including the source of the plastic waste it has been recycling and just how much new plastic it makes from old plastic. Nor will it comment in detail on the chemical process it uses.
Outside experts say they believe the yield of new plastics is very low, and certainly only a tiny fraction of the plastic material that ExxonMobil continues to manufacture from petrochemicals.
In response to questions from Inside Climate News, the company acknowledged that not all the plastic waste it accepts at Baytown gets recycled into new plastic and that at least some gets turned into transportation fuels—something that its announcement about starting up the facility and its online description of the technology do not mention.
Yet waste-to-fuel operations are hard to describe as sustainable or “circular,” a term that generally indicates that raw materials are used over and over, not just once or twice.
The shortage of specifics furnished about the Baytown operation has left environmental advocates and some academic experts confused or highly skeptical about ExxonMobil’s plastics recycling claims. More broadly, it has raised suspicions about advanced recycling itself, which the chemical industry is aggressively advocating as a key solution to runaway plastic pollution as the United Nations seeks to negotiate a global plastics treaty by 2024.
All of this is focusing attention on the Baytown Complex, a jumble of tanks, pipes, stacks, flares and other equipment sprawling across more than five square miles along the 50-mile-long Houston Ship Channel. Described as one of the largest refinery and petrochemical operations in the world, it has been the target of a bitter legal battle over air pollution and permit violations for over a decade. For some neighbors, the advanced recycling operation is just one more component to worry about.
As the big fish in the Houston Recycling Collaboration, a public-private partnership formed in early 2022 to dramatically boost plastics recycling, ExxonMobil casts the recycling operation as a plus for all involved.
It will “play an important role by breaking down plastics that could not be recycled in traditional, mechanical methods,” said Karen McKee, president of ExxonMobil’s Product Solutions company, in announcing the start-up. “We are collaborating with government, industry and communities to scale up the collection and sorting of plastic waste that will improve recycling rates and help our customers around the world meet their sustainability goals.”
The company also claims benefits in the climate change arena: Every 1,000 tons of plastic waste that it processes will result in a decrease of 19 percent to 49 percent in greenhouse gas emissions, when compared with those generated by processing the same amount of fossil-based feedstock, ExxonMobil says.
No Breakdown of What Comes In or Out
When the petroleum giant announced late last year that it had started commercial-scale advanced recycling operations at the Baytown Complex, 25 miles east of Houston, it said it was assessing similar facilities at its operations in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Beaumont, Texas; and Joliet, Illinois, as well as at sites in Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands and Singapore, with a goal of processing 1 billion pounds of plastic waste per year globally by 2026.
Hinting at ExxonMobil’s potential in the advanced recycling arena, the Minderoo Foundation, an Australian nonprofit whose causes include battling the plastic glut in the world’s oceans, ranks ExxonMobil as the largest producer of virgin polymers used to make the single-use variety.
Beyond declining to identify the sources of the plastic it is processing or the volume of new plastic it is making, ExxonMobil does not specify how much is turned into fuel. Earlier this year, in a new “draft national strategy” to prevent plastic pollution, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reaffirmed that it does not regard the conversion of plastic waste to fuels, or energy production, to be recycling.
In its December announcement, ExxonMobil said the facility would be capable of processing 80 million pounds of plastic waste annually. Pressed for details on the fate of all of that plastic, including how much of it was being turned into fuel, a company spokeswoman, Julie King, would only say that about 90 percent of the processed plastic waste coming into the Baytown operation is turned into “the same basic molecules used today to make a range of products.”
In a written statement, she said that the used plastic is jointly processed with other feedstocks to produce a product range that includes “new plastics, chemicals such as butyl rubber, and transportation fuels.”
As for the undisclosed source of the incoming plastic, the city of Houston has confirmed an environmental watchdog group’s discovery that products tossed into bins at Houston’s two new “all plastics” recycling sites are not going to the Baytown facility.
Based on public information about the Baytown Complex, the company’s patents and its likely technology, Jan Dell, an independent chemical engineer and consultant and the founder of The Last Beach Cleanup, a nonprofit that works on reducing plastic pollution, estimates that no more than 25 percent of the incoming plastic waste could be converted into feedstocks for new plastics.
The site’s technology is based on pyrolysis, she said, in which plastic waste is subjected to intensive heat in an environment of low to zero oxygen and broken down chemically. In January, the federal government’s National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado concluded in a research paper that only 1 to 14 percent of the plastic sent through pyrolysis or a parallel process, gasification, can be retained as plastic.
At the time, a spokesman for the American Chemistry Council, an industry lobby group, countered that those conclusions were out of date and that “investments and technological improvements” in the technology were “helping scale up a circular economy for hard-to-recycle plastics to be remade over and over again.”
Dell and others argue that whatever amount of new plastic feedstocks ExxonMobil creates from waste plastic, it pales in comparison to what the Baytown Complex is producing. In Dell’s estimation, the company’s output of plastic feedstocks in Baytown derived from waste plastic is “trivial”—meaning it would amount to just 0.2 percent of the complex’s yearly production of feedstocks for plastics.
A Handy Accounting Method
To track the molecules of plastic waste that enter its Baytown Complex and estimate what happens to them, the company has turned to an accounting practice known as “mass balance,” which is intended to trace and certify circular polymers and relies on guidance from the industry-backed International Sustainability and Carbon Certification system. The system, which has been around since 2006, also offers sustainability certifications for sectors like biofuels and agricultural crops. ISCC members include some of the world’s industrial behemoths.
But critics say the certification system lacks transparency and allows for unsupported claims of circularity and sustainability.
When applied to chemical recycling, for example, a technique within the mass balance approach known as “free attribution” allows companies like ExxonMobil to estimate that as much as 100 percent of those recycled molecules went into new plastic production instead of subtracting what went into climate-warming fuel products, Dell said.
As a result, companies can virtually segregate all so-called recycled plastic into a limited amount of pellets and sell them at a premium, as 100 percent recycled plastic, when they actually contain only a very small percentage of recycled content, she said.
In a report to Congress last year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology found “many unsettled issues, ill-defined terms, and conflicting objectives” in the application of mass balance accounting to plastics.
In an interview, Kathryn L. Beers, the manager of NIST’s “circular economy” program, said she stood by that assessment, while emphasizing that mass balance accounting systems can be a “powerful tool”—essentially, a starting point for pushing companies to adopt more sustainable practices as requirements become more stringent.
Still, Beers said, to some extent, the public’s acceptance of such accounting figures involves trusting companies, which she said cannot divulge every detail of their processing for competitive reasons.
“Even a perfect mass balance system is not going to make all of the data public,” she said. “There is data buried in the assessments that reveals information to competitors about the processes that are being used.”
For critics of the fossil fuel industry, such trust does not come easily.
Reporting by Inside Climate News has shown that even when ExxonMobil was at the forefront of denials that climate change was underway in recent decades, contradicting a growing scientific consensus, its own scientists had long since confirmed that greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels were warming the planet and posed catastrophic risks to humanity.
ExxonMobil also continues to fight lawsuits from cities and states over its role in contributing to those emissions.
In comments in April to the Federal Trade Commission, which is reviewing its policies on environmental marketing claims by corporations, environmental groups including Greenpeace and Beyond Plastics urged the government to crack down on mass balance reporting—including the corporate practice of reallocating or spreading estimates of recycled content among multiple plastic manufacturing facilities. It is “a model that could lead to massive greenwashing” through “creative accounting,” the groups argued.
Critics Question Climate Benefits
ExxonMobil’s goals for expanding its chemical recycling of plastic waste to 1 billion pounds by the end of 2026 “may sound like a lot,” said Terry Collins, a professor of chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University who focuses on developing sustainable solutions. But he says it is dwarfed by the industry’s overall global plastic production.
Collins is also a founding member of the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty, a group of experts involved in a push by the United Nations to negotiate a global plastics pact. Diplomats negotiating the technical guidelines for another treaty, the 1989 Basel Convention on the management of hazardous waste, have fought over the merits of chemical recycling, and a vigorous effort to influence delegates is expected from environmental and industry groups at the next round of UN plastics treaty talks in Nairobi, Kenya, on Nov. 13-19.
Collins calculates that ExxonMobil would need to build more than 300 facilities with the capacity of its Baytown operation to process all of the plastic it makes at its far-flung plants. Globally, he said, more than 10,000 such facilities would be needed to process all of the plastic produced on the planet.
Although the ExxonMobil plant has not released any estimates of the current or future emissions from its Baytown chemical recycling facility, Collins said that in general, such operations can emit “forbiddingly toxic” substances in addition to posing the risk of fires and explosions.
In essence, Collins maintains, no solution to the global plastics crisis makes sense “without dramatic cuts to the production of virgin plastics” in the first place.