What are the challenges for the chemical industry today?

 What are the challenges for the chemical industry today?

 


The chemical industry is undergoing huge changes worldwide. As we have seen above, one concerns the emergence of Middle Eastern countries and China, India and Brazil as manufacturers of chemicals on a mammoth scale, for their own consumption and also for export worldwide. 





Companies in these countries are also investing in plant in the US and Europe whilst US and European companies are investing in plant in these large emerging countries, making the industry as a whole totally international in the way it conducts business. 


The challenge for companies in the US and Europe is to cut their costs while ensuring that they conform to the best practice in protecting the environment. This concern about the environment is discussed in the separate units on individual chemicals.




A new revolution beckons. As oil and natural gas become ever scarcer and more expensive, chemists are searching for new feedstocks to supplement or even replace oil and natural gas. And they are rediscovering the virtues of coal (still in huge supply, even though it is a fossil fuel that cannot be replaced) and biomass.


Thus we are coming full circle. In the late 19th and the first part of the 20th centuries, the organic chemical industry was based largely on coal and biomass. Coal was heated strongly in the absence of air to form coal gas (a mixture of hydrogen, methane and carbon monoxide). 


A liquid (coal tar) was formed as a by-product which contained many useful organic chemicals, including benzene, and the solid residue was coke, an impure form of carbon. Coke was the source of what we now call synthesis gas. Steam was passed over it at high temperatures to yield carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Another source of organic chemicals was biomass. 







For example, the source of many C2 chemicals was ethanol, produced by fermentation of biomass. C3 and C4 chemicals such as propanone and butanol were also produced on a large scale by fermentation of biomass.

Since then, from the 1940s onwards, the industry has found better and better ways of using the products from the refining of oil to produce not only all the chemicals mentioned above but many more. An example is the growth of the petrochemical industry, with the array of new polymers, detergents, and myriad of sophisticated chemicals produced at low cost.


Perhaps therefore the greatest challenge lies in finding ways to reduce our dependence on non-renewable resources. Thus, as oil and natural gas supplies dwindle, we must find ways to use the older technologies based on biomass to produce chemicals in as an environmentally acceptable way as possible, in terms of energy expended and effluents produced. For example, some ethene and a range of polymers, as well as very large quantities of ethanol, are now being produced from biomass.


Another challenge is reduce our dependence on non-renewable resources to produce energy. The easiest way to do this is to find ways to run our chemical plants at lower temperatures with the aid of catalysts or using alternative routes. This has already begun in earnest and over the last 20 years, as noted in the last section, the consumption of energy per unit of product has been falling at an average of about 6% in the EU and about 2.5% in the US per year. In consequence, the emission of carbon dioxide has fallen per unit of product by 68% and 40% over the same time scale.






The new technologies based on nanomaterials will also be to the forefront in future advances in the chemical industry and it will be important to ensure that the production of these revolutionary materials is safe and of economic benefit.


The chemical industry has many challenges in the 21st century which must be overcome in order to remain at the heart of every major country. It is only through this that the industry can help society to maintain and improve its standard of living and do so in a sustainable way.


Much of the data used in this unit is derived from published work by CEFIC (Conseil Européen des Fédérations de l'Industrie Chimique, The European Chemical Industry Council) and the American Chemical Council.



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