Energy Transition Now Podcast – Episode 17 “Why PetChems won’t save oil demand”

David Linden: Hello everyone, I’m your host, David Linden, the Head of Energy Transition for the Westwood Global Energy Group, and you’re listening to energy transition now where we discuss what the transition really means for the oil and gas and the broader energy industry. Today, we’re going to be looking at petrochemicals and why they may or may not save oil demand, and that could be seen by some, maybe as quite controversial. So that’s why it’s great to have David Hughes, the CEO of New Normal here with us, 35 year veteran if I’m allowed to say that, of the global petrochemicals industry, with us today. Hello, David.

David Hughes: Hello, David. Good to be with you.

David Linden: Yes. As as you as everyone will know, it’s now two, Davids. So I hope it doesn’t get too confusing.

David Hughes: We’ll try and remember who we are.

David Linden: Absolutely. David, though, thanks for taking the time. I guess just to begin with you, I introduced you as the CEO of New Normal, and I’m sure not everyone knows who you are and what you do, et cetera. So maybe just to get the ball rolling, if you could just talk us through what what you guys do and how you do that?

David Hughes: Yeah. So a new normal is a boutique consultancy. There’s about 10 of us working there, focusing mainly on the chemical industry, not entirely, but mostly on the chemical industry. And we’re all chemical industry veterans. I think it’s still true that even with 35 years experience I’m the youngest one of the team, so that gives you some idea of the of the people we have in the team. In case people have heard of us in the past, we called ourselves International E-Chem. We change the name to New Normal about two years ago, reflecting the change in the mood in the industry and the things that we, we think are important. It was before the pandemic, but everybody is talking about the new normal now after the pandemic, and maybe later on, we’ll talk about the impact of the pandemic on demand for plastics, for polymers and for chemicals in general. So that’s New Normal. Over the past couple of years, we’ve focused increasingly on two topics really the energy transition and the issue of plastic waste and recycling. My history, as you said, I’ve been 35 years in the industry. I started with ICI, the UK chemical company, and ended up with Sabic, the Saudi Arabian chemical giant running a number of their global businesses. So that’s my background.

David Linden: Perfect.Thanks, David. Yeah, we’ll pop your bio onto the onto the page as well. So folks want to see a little bit more then you’ll see it there. If you’re the youngest with 35 years experience, obviously there’s quite a bit that’s happened during that period of time to the industry. Could you maybe just take us back just to kind of how has that industry evolved and if people don’t quite know what petrochemicals maybe is? If you could just give us a very brief basic one-o-one, what is the kind of petrochemicals industry and how has it evolved over the last, well, I don’t want to say just 35 years, but sort of in recent history.

David Hughes: In recent history, well, it is a relatively young industry. I guess it. It grew after the Second World War. There was a chemical industry before the First World War, before the Second World War. But but the industry we know now really grew after the Second World War as the common polymers were invented. So the common polymers, polyethylene or polythene, as we call it, polypropylene PVC, PET, the things that we use in everyday life were invented by the chemical industry, largely after the Second World War, and that growth became enormously rapid as the population grew after the Second World War with a baby boom, as incomes grew and the chemical industry, we like to say, built today’s life. If you look at the stuff around you today, literally everything that isn’t glass or wood or metal, is plastic. And that’s the the thing which has transformed life from the world we were in Victorian times and for thousands of years before, to today’s modern world. So we’re very, very proud of the chemical industry and that we have produced products that people want and need and use. It’s only recently, I think that we’ve realized that that comes with a price and it comes with a price in terms of environmental issues and in particular plastic waste and single-use plastics and so on, and that the world is now waking up to that the the chemical industry has to transform to live for the future and find a new role for itself in the future. We’re very, very optimistic about the product demand. We still think that people want the products that we make, that there are no alternatives to many of our products and they are the most environmentally friendly solution. But we have to solve this problem of plastic waste and the carbon footprint of the industry to some extent as well. The chemical industry is largely the – that I talk about – is largely the polymer industry. There are other liquid chemicals and methanol and ammonia and things like that. But the most of the time, I think, for the rest of today, we’ll be talking about the polymer industry. And just to give a sense of scale, and I think in tons and we always have to convert tons and barrels. But I tend to think in tons, the largest of the chemicals, is ethylene. Ethylene is a gas, but it is used largely for polyethylene polythene and there’s about 160 million tonnes of ethylene produced in the world every year, of which 100 million a little bit more goes into polyethylene. So that’s the kind of scale of business that we’re talking about. And in total is about 300 million tonnes of solid plastic made in the world every year.

David Linden: And if I was to sort of convert that into a different scale, so a lot of people that I work with talk about how many million barrels of oil are currently being consumed, if you would convert that into sort of, maybe a rough percentage you could have to sort of stick to the barrel if you see what I’m saying.

David Hughes: Yeah. So where does the chemical come from? It comes largely from oil in the form of naphtha. Yeah, naptha is fed to various chemical plants, the biggest of which is the ethylene cracker. And about six percent of world oil demand goes into the chemical industry in the form of naphtha going into crackers. And then on top of that, there’s a relatively small amount but important in certain geographies of ethane coming out of the gas separation units and ethane can also be turned into ethylene very cheaply and conveniently. So wherever there is ethane coming out of out of gas, then that ethane is typically converted into ethylene as well.

David Linden: It’s interesting to hear all those different, different names. I have a background in the natural gas industry originally. And there’s a lot of overlap between, you know, ethylene, ethane and listening to all these different names and how they come across. And it’s interesting when you also said methanol ammonia. So suddenly anyone who’s interested in hydrogen starts talking about methanol and ammonia when they didn’t have to or need to before it kind of shows you the overlap between those industries. But what I did find interesting was when we when we first spoke, I guess on this topic, you mentioned that sort of chemicals is a is a leading indicator for the global economy in some ways, right? You might tell me that’s not necessarily true anymore, but is it actually simply because it’s so fundamental in that sense. To everything we do is that right?

David Hughes: Absolutely. So, you know, as we as I kind of said in my preamble, it’s everywhere right. And whether you’re buying consumer durables, you know, fridges and freezers and cars, cars are the second biggest consumer of the chemical industry. Construction is the biggest consumer for the chemical industry, followed by automotive or whether you’re talking about day to day stuff and food and drink and packaging and all of those things, all of those drive chemical demand and chemical demand drives the chemical availability drives those businesses. So there’s a very, very strong correlation between chemical activity and overall activity, as measured by GDP. The American Chemistry Council, the industry body in the U.S., used to publish a set of statistics every month on the occupacity in the chemical industry, and that correlated extraordinarily well with global GDP three or six months down the down the track. Unfortunately, they’ve stopped producing those statistics now. But nonetheless, you know, the chemical industry is so central that if you understand the chemical industry, you understand what’s going on in the global economy and vice versa.

David Linden: So I remember when when I first got into the, I guess, the global sort of energy market mix sort of moving out of my sort of natural gas hat and putting more global market hat on and looking at all the different competing fuels, et cetera, et cetera. And as I went through that journey year after year, people liked to talk about petrochemicals as a real opportunity, a growth opportunity and those sorts of things. And so when they talked about the future of that industry, but also how important it was a) as you say, for the economy, but b) also for the oil industry as a whole, it was always that petrochemicals are going to be so important for the future of this industry. So let’s try and, let’s try and access that more. That’s our future growth engine, et cetera, et cetera. What’s your sort of view of, let’s say, the last few years how people have been thinking about the industry and the future growth of that industry was that was that basically GDP equals chemicals demand with big growth in Asia. Therefore, there must be a big market out there on my simplifying it too much.

David Hughes: I mean, I think you’re you’re broadly there. The chemical market was growing up at multiples of GDP because he was playing catch up right and demand was there. As I said, it’s a relatively new industry. Industries like PET, PET is the is bottle polymer the thing that goes into your coke bottle. But the same chemical is what makes polyester fiber and polyester clothes, and this is a derivative of a chemical called xylene, which will otherwise end up in gasoline. If we didn’t take it out of the chemicals that the chemical industry. PET growth could be 10 12 15 percent a year in the in the 90s, as Asia caught up as bottle demand grew in the West as we were replacing aluminum and glass in cold bottles as we got a fad for drinking water and carrying a bottle of water around with us. And as Asian people became richer and bought new clothes, which tended to be polyester clothes rather than cotton clothes. Then demand was really very, very high and you have multiples of GDP for almost all of the chemical chains. That has slowed down now, and most of the major chemical chains are kind of at GDP rates of growth, now. Little bit higher, a little bit lower, depending on the market, so that that period of explosive growth as we substituted older products with plastics, that’s stopped. And I think now we have to get a little bit more granular if we want to understand chemical demand growth, you know, because packaging sectors are clearly growing now in a different way to consumer durable sectors. What’s happening in the automotive sector and so on? You know, I think if we really want to understand chemical demand, we have to dig a bit deeper. But that demand growth is there. The question is. Where will it be met from, what will actually produce that, is it going to be the conventional oil or gas-based petrochemicals? Will it be new bio-based petrochemicals? Will it be recycling? Will it be reused? Will people stop in fact, buying some of this stuff? Will we see reverse substitution or will we see us going back to some more natural products or glass or aluminum or whatever it may be? But there have been people, of course, even quite recently suggesting the petrochemicals can still save the oil industry in some sense. Not to, you know, spoil the plot. But my answer would be probably no, because it’s just too small. Right? It’s only six percent of oil demand, right? So even if that grows by 50 percent, it’s still a relatively small percentage of oil money.

David Linden: And I guess you started to allude to it there as well. The sector is already changing, right, so that where’s demands coming from now. I do wonder whether it might be useful to go through one or two of those specific sectors and just talk about what is changing. You mentioned the automotive sector. You mentioned how different plastics are using consumable goods et cetera. Could we maybe just take one or two of those and sort of walk through what’s happening there that sort of indicates change?

David Hughes: Well, I think the the sector, which is most clearly under change is the packaging sector, single-use plastics and the world is asking yourself two questions, I think. One is, is it sensible that we have billions of dollars of infrastructure digging oil out of the ground and refining it, putting it through chemical plants, putting it through packaging through polymer plants, putting it through warehousing for it to be turned into a plastic bag, which is used for literally 10 minutes and then thrown away. Does that fit with the zeitgeist of the world? Increasingly, I think not. And that’s not just a European issue. I often hear, “Oh, this packaging, single-use plastic thing. This is a European issue.” It’s not a European issue. It’s very definitely a Chinese issue. It’s very different. For example, Kenya was one of the first countries in the world to impose penalties for using single-use plastic bags. If you’d like to guess you could, you could try and guess what the penalty for using, using or giving away a single-use plastic bag in Kenya is. Would you like to guess?

David Linden: I don’t know. No idea. Imprisonment.

David Hughes: It is imprisonment. Maximum of four years, four years in prison. Now, whether anybody has ever been imprisoned for four years, I don’t know. But, you know, there you go. Kenya, not what you would have thought of as the most environmentally conscious country in the world has some incredibly stringent rules about plastic waste. So plastic waste is one issue. Yeah, so well, single-use plastic. Does it make sense to use our natural resources to produce something which is used for literally 10 minutes? And secondly, when we have used it for ten minutes, David Attenborough told us very emotionally in Blue Planet 2 that that plastic ends up in the ocean and it sits in the ocean for hundreds of years and it kills things. And a McKinsey study a few years ago did some extrapolation and said that by 2050, if we carry on as we are today, there will be more weight of plastic in the ocean, than there will be weight of fish in the ocean. Now that’s simply unacceptable. So, so the packaging industry sees itself, you know, squeezed from both ends. It’s squeezed at the front end, what are the resources – we still need carbon atoms, right? The chemical industry is fundamentally putting carbon atoms together with other things to make the things that we want, so we still need carbon atoms. Where will those carbon atoms come from; oil and gas or somewhere else? And at the end of life, what are we going to do to stop the material ending up in the ocean or being buried and still being in the ground, as you know, 300 years later? So that’s the issue facing the polymer industry. The packaging industry. And the answer to those is that the chemical industry and a pile of new entrants are looking at both ends of that problem. OK, there’s a study, there’s a German institute called the Nova Institute very respected institute. They were commissioned by Unilever, so the packaging companies, the brand owners are really critically interested in this. Unilever commissioned a study from the Nova Institute a couple of years ago, and they suggested that by 2050 there would be, in fact, no fossil carbon going into the plastics chain. That even though there would be massive demand growth, that demand growth in the future, in fact, all of the demand would be met either by recycling in their model, they have about 50 percent of the plastics that we use going into recycling, about 25 percent coming from bio sources, saying using bio feedstock to make conventional all new polymers and 25 percent coming from some form of other carbon and things like Fischer-Tropsch processes that put together CO2 with hydrogen to make polymers or make new chemicals from that route. That would create the other 25 percent in the Nova Institute scenario for 2050.

David Linden: OK, that’s really fascinating. I mean, it seems to me sounds very similar right to the general energy transition, which is we’ve got a problem, we’ve got some way to get to by 2050, but it requires a bunch of innovation and by the sounds of it regulation, mindset change, et cetera, et cetera. From this industry here, though, how far? Because there’s lots of studies like this, I’m assuming. I mean, this is obviously one particular one you’re referencing, but how far down the road are we really going? How strong is this driver? Because it seems like Unilever saying we should do this and we know Unilever has been pretty, you know, we had the podcast just before this that we talked to Sally Walker, who talked about values-driven versus value-driven, right? So she recognized that a lot of companies need some of those values in them because they need to jump-start what they think about how they do the transition versus purely just value driven, right? Is this driven by values, or is this actually driven by commercial reality and or regulation, that’s coming out. That’s saying, look, you’re ultimately going to have to do this. So here is you, not your imprisonment necessarily, but your penalty of sorts if you play?

David Hughes: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a very, very interesting question. It seems to me that this the drive for change could come from three places. It could come from you and me. It could be our individual choices when we go into a shop as to what we choose to buy. It could be the brand owners making those choices for us. The Unilever’s the Danone’s, the PepsiCo’s of this world. Or it could be regulation. It could be governments making those choices. And at the moment, it feels like it is largely the brand actually driving this all of the major brands. All the major packaging brands have signed up to a set of commitments that together form a thing called the new plastics economy. And if you go to https://www.newplasticseconomy.org/, I think it is. You’ll see the companies that have signed up to these principles and the principles themselves, which include recycling targets, but also total removal of fossil carbon out of the packaging chain. So the brands are driving this, not individual consumers. I don’t think it will ever be individual consumers. But the brands are extremely conscious of this. Coca-Cola said to us privately, you know, they are obviously huge buyers of packaging in particular PET, that we talked about before. They said “We will never buy more fossil-based PET than we buy today, that we’ve hit the peak of that. That’s it. On the other hand, if you can give me recycled or bio PET, I will buy as much of that as you can give me. And frankly, I don’t care about the price.”

David Linden: Wow. Now why is that, just do this to stop you there is that just because actually, in the grand scheme of things, in terms of the cost of the overall manufacturing process, it’s too small.

David Hughes: Yes, it doesn’t matter to them. OK. In fact, they’re also indifferent to material because they typically don’t own their own bottling plants so they can switch very quickly because they just tell their suppliers what to do. They don’t have their own capital tied up in it. They don’t have their own bottle manufacturing plants, their own bottling plants. So there they can switch very rapidly. It’s of zero cost to Danone, to say “I’m now going to go to, you know, different type of packaging”, because they don’t care. So it’s all about brand. It’s all about brand for these guys. And they have decided that their brand will not have this material in it. And then regulation is important, of course, but it tends to follow public opinion rather than lead it in some of these things, you know. And here the EU is ahead of the game, and you may be aware that there is now an 800 Euro per tonne penalty put on any non-recycled plastics used in packaging as it rolled out, as we speak now. And that, roughly speaking doubles the price of the plastic 800 Euros a tonne is not far off the cost of the average cost of polyethylene packaging anyway. Yeah. So the EU is imposing a tax. Any non-recycled content in packaging is subject to this 800 euro tonne penalty. And you know, that does focus people’s minds pretty quickly as well, right? So there is a lot going on both from the brands and from the regulator that is pushing in this direction. But it turns out it’s a hard problem, right? Recycling plastics is a really, really tough problem. It’s easy for a couple of things. Coke bottles are actually pretty easy because they are a single polymer. They are just PET. And everybody in the world knows what the coke bottle looks like. And waste recycling is actually still quite a manual process. So there are actually people who are at the end of the day pulling waste plastic out of the conveyor belt of waste. And if they see a coke bottle, they know that’s PET. The other one that’s easy to recycle is plastic milk bottles, those white plastic milk bottles? Those are made of a chemical that are a form of polyethylene called high-density polyethylene. They’re also a single material. They’re also big enough to be able to physically pull that out of the waste so they get recycled. But your little bits of plastic, your crisp packets, your plastic bags, those are the problem. The problem for two reasons. One, they blow about the tiny thing is they’re difficult to get hold of, but two, they are typically more than one plastic. So your crisp packet, is actually probably five layers of plastic sandwiched together just for fun with a layer of aluminum in there. That’s what gives you that silver color. The aluminum. Is that a stop to stop oxygen, I think. But you’ll have a layer of plastic that’s to stop oxygen in and out, a layer that’s to stop CO2 in and out, a layer that’s to stop moisture in and out, and the layer that you can print on. And then they’re all sandwiched together. And that makes you a plastic bag or your, you know, crisp bag or whatever and recycling that is a nightmare.

David Linden: So okay, that’s fascinating. It kind of tells you one thing, so yeah, that’s extremely complex, which a) might mean that that part of it is a bit like we talk in the energy world right, about the hard to decarbonize sectors. This is the hard to or the wicked problem that you’ve got in the chemicals world is that there are different ends of the scale. You know, the Coca-Cola bottle does the electrification, but you cannot do that. On the other end of the scale is the really hard to abate type stuff. But what I also thought was interesting there is this is everyone’s being pushed to do recycling that you can’t recycle all of it. That sounds like maybe be a supply crunch as well.

David Hughes: And that’s why in the Nova study, only 50 percent of the plastic in 2050, in their model comes from recycling. Because there’s an inevitable leakage in this right or almost inevitable leakage.  So you still need some top-up quantities, and it could be that those top-up quantities are coming from oil and gas like today. But that oil and gas will only have 50 percent market share rather than a 100 percent market share. But it could be zero market share if this other stuff about bio based feedstocks, which is technically possible, economically unattractive. But, technically possible and some of the stuff about carbon capture and, you know, CO2 chemistry could also happen in the next 20 years. But it’s starting from a zero base today. And I think the challenge for, this is a challenge for chemical companies today, and it will be even more so I would guess for your sector of oil and gas players, is that this recycling or this bio based stuff is inevitably smaller scale than the flows that we’re used to handling, right? We don’t, as a chemical industry, you know, we don’t get out of bed if it’s less than a million tons a year, whatever the equivalent is in your barrels a day, right? But recycling takes place on a local basis. It will never make economic or environmental sense to haul plastic waste around the world that will not be societally acceptable. And therefore you’ll, you’re going to collect the plastic waste in a location and even a large city. London will not be producing a million tons of plastic waste to you, right? It might be producing 100,000 200,000 tonnes of plastic waste a year. So you now have to recycle on a local basis, which means setting up small, much smaller scale facilities than they used to doing it. And the chemical industry is really struggling to get his mind around that. How does it operate? Is it even in its business model? Can it be bothered? And the danger is that there are people out there who can be bothered and actually maybe the chemical industry just loses this business because it, you know, it couldn’t be bothered today to set up these small things that don’t move the needle today. These things today don’t move the needle for chemical company.

David Linden: This is just listening to this fascinating. You just need to replace the words. And it’s the same as like oil and gas companies getting into EV charging. It’s a bit like why, it’s so small scale. It’s, you know, it’s actually we have to get involved in local, distributed networks and all this type of stuff. Why, it’s worth nothing. And of course, only some companies are doing that, and others are saying, that’s definitely not my business. But are they going to miss out on the business of the future? Because, how is the car going to be charged? You know, how is the infrastructure going to work? And if you’re not in it, then you know you’re not producing electricity, you’re not supplying, you’re not being part of the network, et cetera. So it’s an interesting debate, which is very similar, and they’re very clear lines drawn between companies who feel this is their future versus others. And again, it’s the same thing, is this all just a European thing? Well, actually, I think if you look at the kind of roll out of charging infrastructure in China, it’s a very different story. But it’s just very interesting to hear because it’s essentially the same argument in a different part of the value chain as well.

David Hughes: So we’re seeing a pile of entrepreneurs that are there. It’s a bit of a wild west going on in terms of technologies to do this rather difficult trick that we were talking about before. But interestingly, we are seeing the retailers get involved in this, so Schwartz Group, who I think they the fourth biggest retailer in the world, they own Lidl and a number of other people. They’re piling into this in a really powerful way because they can control the recycling. They can get people to bring their waste plastics back to the shop. It means giving up shop space for this, which they don’t like, but they get their hands on clean waste before it’s been mixed with all the other rubbish, which is in the waste, and picked up contamination, they can have clean waste. If you can get clean waste, that’s half the problem. So, you know, we’ll see nontraditional chemical companies come into this space, just as I’m sure you see nontraditional companies coming into the new energy space as you’ve been, as you’ve been talking about it.

David Linden: I have a slight bias, so my wife works in the circular economy side of things, and she often talks about the ability just to reuse, replace, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, this is essentially a sub sector or sub, I guess subsector of that in that sense. But it also talks about other sort of ways of thinking about the problem. One is it’s typically more local and there’s you say that that’s essentially what’s happening here is a lot more of a local question local problem, but is also the idea almost all of something as a service so that people don’t own the plastic. Let’s just say they simply borrow it for their use and then hand it back. And that works. And I think the classic example I remember being bounded around is the Phillips did the sort of services a light at Schiphol airport, one of the terminals. And, you know, Schiphol don’t own any of the light bulbs, none of the infrastructure, et cetera. All they say is, you know, “Your contract is to produce light, give me the light”, right? And then they do the service around that, which means they can actually have full ownership control of the value chain. And if breaks, they fix it, et cetera, and get paid for that. And I’m assuming right, that’s what people are thinking about here. Maybe, right? I mean, if you think about I grew up in Germany originally, it was quite normal to take your bottle down to the local supermarket and recycle it. And I couldn’t call it a circle economy per say, 100 percent, but essentially, that’s what it feels like, the target should be right?

David Hughes: Yeah, I mean, that’s really interesting to talk of that. We do see a little bit of this service concept coming into the chemical industry in a totally different piece of the industry. I was working with a company who produces a a solvent which is used in metal cleaning. So if you’re making a car, you want grease-free metal. So this is a solvent that produces, you know, grease-free metal. It’s quite nasty solvent. So these days, instead of people selling the solvent to the metal bashers, they sell a service which is “I will clean, five tons of metal, or, a thousand square meters of metal plate” or whatever it is. “And I’ll bring in the solvent handle the solvent, and I’ll take the solvent look back and I’ll clean it.”. And so instead of selling tons of product, they now sell a service which is clean metal for making cars from. So we do see this service-based concept coming in to the chemical industry in small ways, right? But in the main, we’re still about selling tons, right? It’s still about selling tons today.

David Linden: Yes. We’ll have to get two barrels one day.

David Hughes: But yeah, it’s about seven and a half barrels per ton, something like.

David Linden: Seven and a half barrels per ton. Guess I should know that probably. Alright, David. That was fantastic. Very interesting indeed. I think we’ve pretty much come to the end of our time here. Thank you so much for sharing that. Fascinating. Certainly, what’s happening in the, I guess, the petrochemicals industry and just bizarrely how it seems to align quite a lot with what’s happening in the, I guess, the energy transition as a whole as well. So a really interesting talk. Thank you.

David Hughes: Yeah. Thank you. Enjoyed it.

David Linden: Perfect. And thanks everyone for listening as well. Hope you enjoyed it. Please subscribe. Give us a good rating and share with your friends. Talk to you next time.

 

 

 

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