There has been talk about chemical recycling by pyrolysis since at least the 1990s and the story is some combination of: (1) the energy consumption is high, (2) the output is a mixture of low value products (“mixture” is a bad smell in uneconomical energy tech such as Fischer-Tropsch) , so… (3) the economics wouldn’t be great if everything went right, but… (4) environmentalists fight to stop it because they think it is dirty, and (5) they struggle to get the plant working and stay working.
Also pyrolysis in general is one hell of an el dorado in the energy industry right up there with the liquid metal fast breeder reactor. Look in the literature in the 1970s or early 2000s and you’d think the world would be full of plants making clean low-cost energy from coal or biomass but there have been few projects and when they do happen they wind up like…
so anybody who is advocating for this kinda has to explain why this time will be different.
I think the processes talked about in the article are lower energy and produce higher valued products, people do have them working in the lab but commercialization is even further away than pyrolysis.
There has been talk about chemical recycling by pyrolysis since at least the 1990s and the story is some combination of: (1) the energy consumption is high, (2) the output is a mixture of low value products (“mixture” is a bad smell in uneconomical energy tech such as Fischer-Tropsch) , so… (3) the economics wouldn’t be great if everything went right, but… (4) environmentalists fight to stop it because they think it is dirty, and (5) they struggle to get the plant working and stay working.
Also pyrolysis in general is one hell of an el dorado in the energy industry right up there with the liquid metal fast breeder reactor. Look in the literature in the 1970s or early 2000s and you’d think the world would be full of plants making clean low-cost energy from coal or biomass but there have been few projects and when they do happen they wind up like…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/06/29/150681/clean-coa...
so anybody who is advocating for this kinda has to explain why this time will be different.
I think the processes talked about in the article are lower energy and produce higher valued products, people do have them working in the lab but commercialization is even further away than pyrolysis.