We have all seen the images of plastic waste in the ocean, forming an island of bottles, bags, medical equipment and similar discarded items.
While the threat of this pollution is absolutely real and undeniably alarming, the deeper message these images convey is not necessarily true.
"The bottom line is you are left with the feeling that plastic is bad," said Gary Piana, plant manager for Chevron Phillips Chemical (CPChem). "But plastic is good. We need plastics. Plastics enhance the quality of life that we have, and they continue to give us opportunities that we wouldn't have without them."
CPChem views the future of the industry and its business plan as a balance between the "good and bad" struggle in manufacturing plastics.
"Our products, and many of our competitors' [products], feed into the quality of life," Piana said. "As the middle class grows across the world, the demand for those products continues, and it continues to grow."
Recent estimates indicate the middle class represents the majority of the world with a population of over 3.2 billion people.
"There are currently over 140 million people joining the middle class globally on an annual basis," Piana said. "That is about 4.8 times the population of Texas. That's a huge growth in the middle class, and the middle class accounts for approximately 30 percent of all economic growth."
Five people enter the middle class every second, Piana continued, with nine out of 10 people coming from Asia, a major growth area of the world.
"With these kind of growth numbers and the demand for our products, we see a bright future for what we produce," Piana said.
With these opportunities for procurement, materials and services, CPChem plans to grow and continues to supply the needs and demands of the growing middle class, Piana explained.
"We are poised to meet these demands through our U.S. Gulf Coast Petrochemical Project II," he said. "We expect the final investment decision on that project sometime in 2022. It is approximately an $8 billion investment that supports 9,000 construction and 600 full-time jobs in the area."
The Gulf Coast project consists of a 2,000-kilotons-per-annum (KTA) ethylene cracker and two high-density polyethylene (HDPE) units at 1,000 KTA each.
"There's much opportunity and growth there," Piana said.
CPChem is simultaneously working on the Ras Laffan Petrochemical Project with its partners at Qatar Energy, formerly Qatar Petroleum. This is another multi-billion dollar investment that will result in 14,000 jobs for construction workers and 500 permanent jobs at that location. The Ras Laffan Petrochemical Project consists of a 1,900-KTA ethane cracker as well as two HDPE units that yield a combined capacity of 1,680 KTA.
"We also produce hexene, which goes into our polymer production and is key to a lot of the properties of many of our products," Piana said.
CPChem also has a world-scale plant in its Baytown facility. It's CPChem's largest domestic manufacturing facility with over 900 direct employees and 1,200 contractors, and the site produces ethylene, polyethylene, alpha-olefins and 1-hexene.
CPChem is in the process of constructing another plant near its Sweeny complex in Old Ocean, Texas, to address the global 1-hexene demand that is growing significantly. This project will manufacture 1-hexene, a key component in producing high-performance plastics with construction set to begin in 2023.
Visiting at the Industrial Procurement Forum in Pasadena, Texas, are, from left, Gary Piana and Heather Betancourth of Chevron Phillips Chemical, Thomas Brinsko of BIC Alliance, Anna DeVault of ExxonMobil and Chad Burke of the Economic Alliance Houston Port Region. BIC Alliance and the Economic Alliance Houston Port Region hosted the forum, and Piana served as the event’s keynote speaker.
"This project will bring 600 construction jobs and 50 full-time positions to that region, further opportunities for growth and investment, and new procurement bids and services," Piana said. "That is how CPChem plans to contribute to the growing demands of the middle class."
Bread bags and piping
Discussing why plastics are important and why we need them, Piana pointed to vegetables commonly found at any neighborhood grocery store.
"If cucumbers are left unwrapped and unprotected, they stay fresh for about three days. With plastic wrap, they stay fresh for about 13 to 17 days," he said. "One of the ways we are going to feed a growing world and middle class is to have technology that enables us to keep food safer and fresher for longer. That's one of the main benefits of our products."
Piana also cited the packaging on a loaf of bread as being more than meets the eye.
"That packaging is one of the most outstanding items in innovation in the history of mankind," he said. "When you look at the packaging of a bag of bread, there is more to it than you see."
Plastic products are four times lighter and require half as much energy to produce as other competing products, he said. The nominal thickness for a bread bag is one and a quarter millimeters, or one and one-quarter thousandths of an inch.
"There's not a lot of material required to make it," Piana said. "It is strong, but there's not a lot of energy required to produce it."
Another thing people don't necessarily realize when they're looking at a bread bag is it's a multi-layer fabrication.
"There are normally two skin layers - an inside skin and outside skin. Then there's a core layer between, so there's a minimum of three layers, yet it's only one and a quarter millimeters in its overall thickness," Piana said. "The multi-layering allows you to compound special properties into it, such as moisture barriers and air barriers to keep the products fresh, and other things to make sure the product doesn't discolor in some cases.
"Obviously, with the inside layer, you don't want to contact or modify the appearance of the food at all. You have to be able to print on the outside layer.
"These are some of the reasons why plastics packaging is superior."
In addition to food packaging, another good example of how CPChem brings value to everyday life is the manufacturing of plastic piping.
"We have a company called Performance Pipe that produces polyethylene pipe," Piana said, explaining that the relative differences between polyethylene pipe versus concrete are myriad.
For example, 20-foot-long stormwater piping weighs 600 pounds, but its concrete equivalent tips the scale at 22,500 pounds. Furthermore, the polyethylene pipe doesn't leak, compared to concrete, which settles and cracks. A 10-mile polyethylene water pipe can save nearly 450,000 gallons of water from leaking per year.
"For reference, the average American household consumes about 300 gallons of water per day," Piana said. "This is one more way in which plastic enhances our lives."
Sustainability and advanced recycling
CPChem's overall sustainability strategy, Piana said, consists of several focus areas.
"We are focused on climate change and how we as a company can reduce our carbon footprint and become a better worldwide citizen," he said.
Citing the company's record of proactive engagement, Piana said that CPChem has always been "very engaged in the communities we serve where we have facilities, and we're branching out to other parts of the world."
CPChem was a founding member of the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, a nonprofit organization that aims to make 100 percent of U.S. plastic packaging recyclable or recoverable by 2030.
Piana touted advanced recycling as a unique concept that closes the circular market loop. Advanced recycling promotes a circular economy "or, in our case, circular polymers," he said. "You have got chemical production, transportation and distribution, customers, end users, collection and post-use. In the past, much of that collection went to landfill or incineration. This process would cycle it back to manufacturing facilities, prepare it for re-injection into one of our facilities and start the cycle all over again."
Because of their potential to repeatedly recycle post-use plastics into new materials, Piana noted that polymers produced through advanced recycling are often referred to as "circular polymers." Using circular polymers, advanced recycling converts plastic waste into valuable base liquids that can become new petrochemicals.
Piana considers advanced recycling to be nothing short of the "vision of the future for our industry."
"Based on customer feedback, there is a global demand for products made from recyclable materials," he said. "Customers of our new product will be proud knowing they purchased certified, sustainable polyethylene resin that contributes to reducing plastic waste."
This approach complements traditional recycling by converting a range of difficult- to-recycle plastics into important building blocks for new chemicals, Piana said. "This is what we want, and it aligns with our goals and objectives and those of our partners and customers as well."
Advanced recycling is sustainable, versatile, clean and safe, "and it is the right thing to do for many reasons," Piana said. "It positions our industry for a sustainable future to grow and continue to add value to our lives and be good corporate, community and world citizens.
"We care very much about the communities we live in, the people in those communities and the environment. We all want to leave the world in a better place than we found it, and this is the right way to approach that from our industry."
According to Piana, advanced recycling also makes good business sense.
"There is a demand for the products, and we can help elevate the quality of life for the world with the products we produce," he said.
