At COP30, chemical companies push biobased climate solutions

Belém, Brazil—On the sidelines of the COP30 climate summit, representatives from chemical companies Braskem, Mitsubishi Chemical, Sekab, and others have been gathering with technology experts from the United Nations, various national governments, and nongovernmental organizations to discuss one of the toughest climate issues: how to decarbonize their industry.

Biobased alternatives to fossil fuels rose to the top of the conversation this year, buoyed by the fact that the host country is a major player in this industry.

In the run-up to the summit, the Brazilian COP30 presidency announced an initiative, Belém 4X, to quadruple the use of biofuels and biogas, hydrogen, and other alternative fuels by 2035. The effort has generated significant buzz, and more than 20 other countries have signed on. But it has also raised concern over the risks of increased biofuel production contributing to deforestation, displacing food production, and infringing on Indigenous peoples’ land—particularly in the Amazon rainforest, where COP30 is taking place.

Of the “hard-to-abate” industries—chemicals, steel and cement—chemicals are the furthest behind, according to attendees.

“These sectors provide the foundation of modern life—from the fertilizers that feed us to the materials that house, heal, and connect us—but they are also among the largest and fastest growing sources of industrial greenhouse gas emissions. So these are high stakes for us,” said Noura Hamladji, deputy executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), at a Nov. 12 panel discussion organized by her agency’s technology executive committee, along with the UN Industrial Development Organization and the government of Japan. “Without deep transformation in how we produce and how we use chemicals, we cannot achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement.”

‘No time to wait’ on chemical sector emissions

The technical discussions about the chemical industry—taking place in tucked-away conference rooms and pavilions—have been quiet and sparsely attended, a world apart from the chaotic conference and demonstrations happening outside. But tackling greenhouse gas emissions from chemical manufacturing is crucially important to limiting global warming.

“There’s no way we can avoid addressing this sector,” Dietram Oppelt, chair of the UNFCCC’s technology executive committee, said at the Nov. 12 event. Reaching climate neutrality by 2050, in line with the Paris Agreement goals, requires addressing the chemical industry “now or yesterday,” Oppelt said. “There’s no time to wait.”

Primary chemical production accounts for roughly 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the International Energy Agency. Chemical manufacturing is the largest industrial consumer of fossil fuels, because it relies on oil and gas both as a feedstock for end products and as a source of energy for the manufacturing process.

A big challenge to decarbonization is the sector’s complexity.

“The chemical industry is not 1 product or 10 or 100 products. It’s tens of thousands of distinct industries manufactured by companies across the globe, using the fuels and feedstocks and the resources available within their regional economies,” Carolina Riedo Sartori Almeida, innovation and sustainability adviser for the Brazilian Chemical Industry Association, said at the Nov. 12 event.

Biobased alternatives already growing, but face pushback

Multiple companies that already specialize in biobased products were present at COP30, including Brazil’s Braskem. The company’s priority for the summit is getting support for laws and regulations that help biobased products compete with fossil fuel-based ones, according to Roberta Manzini, Braskem’s industrial decarbonization manager.

Many environmental advocates are concerned about more land being used for biofuel and industrial products when there’s a need to produce food for a growing population and at the same time conserve forests and other natural ecosystems for other species.

According to Manzini, the sugarcane Braskem sources for its biobased products is grown on land in the south of Brazil that was already degraded.

There are some limited cases for using plants as fuel, says Amanda Hurowitz, senior director of the forest commodities team at Mighty Earth, an environmental advocacy organization. “The issue is when you get to these industrial scales,” she tells C&EN. “We want our forests standing and our ecosystems intact.”

In addition, the chemical industry isn’t the only one vying for biobased alternatives. The transportation sector, especially aviation, is also turning to biofuel to replace fossil fuels.

“There’s a scalability problem there,” says Chris Malins, director of Cerulogy, a low-carbon fuels consultancy. “There’s not enough biomass production in the world to replace all the fossil fuels,” Malins tells C&EN. “You’re adding demand to a system which it’s pretty safe to say already has been quite highly stressed by the amount of demand that’s on it.”

We need to manage these growing and competing demands by improving efficiency and also simply by reducing use, Malins says.

He adds that the commonly used accounting systems for carbon emissions have gaps when it comes to land use, and that according to his research, the use of biofuels has likely increased greenhouse gas emissions in some cases due to people clearing land to grow these crops for these fuels.

Hydrogen hype, with caveats

Many of the discussions on decarbonizing industry also focused on hydrogen—especially green hydrogen, which is produced with renewable energy. But cost remains a barrier.

“Technologically, it works, and projects are expanding, but deployment remains limited compared to the hype,” Alessandro Sanches Pereira, the cofounder of Instituto 17, a nonprofit focused on the energy transition, says in a statement to C&EN. He has also contributed to reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

While low-carbon hydrogen is an important option for some chemicals and hard-to-abate industrial processes, Sanches Pereira cautions that it should be used in a targeted way, and only as a last resort after investments in efficiency and electrification. It’s not the “Swiss Army knife of decarbonization,” as many at COP30 have presented it, he says. In addition, there’s a risk that companies use the idea of low-carbon hydrogen as a storytelling tool rather than as a tool for building a concrete decarbonization plan.

No single solution

There isn’t a silver bullet for decarbonization in the chemical sector, summit attendees pointed out. But companies are exploring a number of different measures.

The International Council of Chemical Associations (ICCA) commissioned a report laying out possible pathways for the industry to reach climate neutrality. The report covers multiple options, including greater use of biobased feedstocks, low-carbon hydrogen, recycling of plastic waste, and carbon capture.

“The chemical industry being so late to the sustainability party, it really has to happen everything, all at once,” said Eva-Marie Byberg, executive vice president and chief sustainability and strategy officer of the Swedish biobased chemical manufacturer Sekab, at the Nov. 12 event.

The ICCA’s goal is for the industry to avoid relying on carbon offsets or credits, according to Daisuke Kanazawa, a member of the council’s carbon neutrality task force and an advisor at Mitsubishi Chemical’s Sustainability Planning Department. He also researches the industry’s carbon-neutral transition at the University of Tokyo. Whether individual companies achieve this goal is another question, Kanazawa tells C&EN. “Most large companies have some kind of climate goals. No question about that,” he said at a follow-up event on Nov. 13 that was also hosted by the UN agencies and Japan.

In the US, companies that are members of the American Chemistry Council publicly report their greenhouse gas intensity—a measure of greenhouse gas emissions per unit of output—as part of the association’s Responsible Care program.

Some companies in chemicals and other heavy industries are investing seriously in climate action, but “others are still more in the ‘narrative’ phase than the transformation phase,” Sanches Pereira says. “If you ask whether the [chemical] sector as a whole is aligned with a 1.5–2 °C pathway, the honest answer is not yet.”