Industrial energy use and carbon emissions reduction in the chemicals sector: A UK perspective

Industrial energy, materials and products: UK decarbonisation challenges and opportunities

“…It sits on the boundary between EI and NEI industrial sectors. Physical outputs are moved around on an international scale within or between major companies that are truly multi-national [55]. The industry is also highly focused on private R&D and protective of information, which means that data availability is particularly poor.…”

“…This high technology sector takes full advantage to modern developments in electronics and information and communications technology (ICT), such as for the automatic control of chemical process plants and automation in the use of analytical instruments [55]. The scale of operation of chemical firms range from quite small plants (of a few tonnes per year) in the fine chemicals area, where high purity is required, to giant ones in the petrochemical sector [55]. Batch production is employed by SMEs where small quantities of chemicals (up to around 100 tonnes per annum) are required.…”

“…Information on energy use [28], emission conversion factors [53] and process emissions [54] need to be combined in order to determine the total emissions. A number of sub-sectors were found to dominate GHG emissions from the industrial sector in the UK [15], and this suggested Pareto-like priorities for bottom-up studies [1,15,[46][47][48]55,56]: steel (25%), chemicals (19%), cement (8%), food & drink (7%), paper (6%), plastics (6%) and so on. Thus, just six sub-sectors account for 71% of UK emissions.…”

“…Chemicals represents a complex collection of products covering a wide range of feedstocks, processes and products [48]: advanced materials, cleaning fluids, composites, dyes, paints, pharmaceuticals, plastics, and surfactants [55]. It sits on the boundary between EI and NEI industrial sectors.…”

“…The UK chemicals sub-sector gives rise to the highest industrial energy consumption [48,55]; mainly due to low temperature heat processes (30%), electrical motors (19%), drying/separation processes (16%), and high temperature heat processes (11%) [47]. Chemicals represents a complex collection of products covering a wide range of feedstocks, processes and products [48]: advanced materials, cleaning fluids, composites, dyes, paints, pharmaceuticals, plastics, and surfactants [55].…”