Green materials demand can be lifeline for Europe’s chemical industry - report

The European chemical industry faces a structural disadvantage compared to regions rich in oil and gas like the United States and the Middle East, but it could benefit from targeted policies that create large-scale demand for green materials and strategies that break its dependence on fossil-based supply chains, according to a report by the Wuppertal Institute. The sector is “at a critical juncture, facing a structural squeeze between high energy and feedstock costs and the urgent requirements of the transformation towards circularity and climate neutrality”, the researchers said. 

The chemical industry uses large amounts of fossil fuels as raw material for countless products such as plastics, and needs large amounts of energy to do so. As one of Europe’s largest industrial sectors, it faces intense cost pressure because of relatively high energy prices, and is also one of the hardest to decarbonise. 

Germany’s chemicals industry said earlier this year it faces “perhaps the worst crisis since the post-war period” as the country launched a Chemicals Agenda 2045 to help the struggling sector, which focused on lowering energy prices and also included a “carbon action plan” for the implementation of carbon capture and storage or use (CCS/CCU).

The report explores the sector’s competitiveness challenges and the circular economy measures that could provide a much-needed boost. "The transformation of speciality chemicals with its estimated 75,000 products is a particularly daunting challenge,” said Lukas Hermwille, co-head of the Wuppertal Institute’s Transformative Industrial Policy Research Unit. 

“While speciality chemicals are still Europe's competitive strength, they are technically very difficult to recycle. Moreover, their production is almost completely dependent on integrated fossil supply chains." Targeted investments in research and development are therefore required to decouple speciality chemicals from fossil feedstocks – a move that would ensure the competitiveness of the chemical industry in a decarbonised economy.

The researchers point out that the EU chemical industry has historically compensated for the disadvantages of high energy and feedstock costs through deeper integration and industrial synergies in so-called "Verbund" clusters – a form of collaboration in which one company’s waste becomes another’s raw material, which are particularly common in Germany. These clusters are critical for the specialty chemicals that provide Europe's competitive strength. Yet massive new investments are required to further boost productivity, something currently hindered by high investment risks and geoeconomic uncertainty. The report therefore calls for government policies aimed at unlocking necessary capital by providing “market-shaping instruments that create predictable, large-scale demand for green materials”. 

Such policies would enable markets “to value not only the physical properties of the chemicals produced but also environmental and sustainability attributes associated with their production”. The report points out that the EU single market “provides the critical mass necessary to sustain the initial, high-cost steps of industrial transformation and allows first-movers to gain global experience”.