The chemical sector is the largest industrial energy consumer and a key GHG emitter.  Current decarbonisation options in this sector have focused on “upstream measures, closer to the producer”. However, in this article, Peter Levi addresses one of the main obstacles in assessing the impact of downstream, demand-side mitigation options: the “lack of publicly available material flow data” for the sector’s main flows. 80 chemicals (the 18 chemicals mostly responsible for energy consumption and GHG emissions and their derivatives) and 65 processes are analysed by fully balancing the entire complex network. The result is a step towards enabling “concurrent consideration of material and process energy efficiency options in the global chemical sector”.

Peter Levi and Jonathan Cullen