John Sampson, senior vice president of operations, manufacturing and engineering for Dow Chemical, recently discussed the company's roadmap for its Path to Zero initiative.
He highlighted the initiative's successes as well as its plan for the future.
Dow started off its Path to Zero strong by reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 15 percent by 2005, Sampson said, despite the company's continued growth during that same period. The ways it achieved this mark was through tighter integration, more efficient designs and by accessing renewables. Sampson noted that Dow's next target is to achieve an additional 15-percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030, and ultimately to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, in line with the Paris Agreement's net-zero target.
For a company with such a diverse portfolio of products and services, Dow has developed an incremental strategy to reduce its carbon emissions. Among the steps prescribed by that strategy are scaling carbon-efficient manufacturing, replacing end-of-life assets with low-carbon-emitting assets, lower operating expenditures and a higher return on invested capital, increasing renewable power purchases and innovating next-generation manufacturing technologies.
"There's a growing realization that 'business as usual' cannot be sustained," he said, referencing the environmental issues that are increasingly at the forefront of stakeholders' minds.
"The complex environmental, economic and social challenges our world faces cannot be solved by one company, industry or even one country," Sampson cautioned. "Only by working together across value chains, industry and sectors of society can we get to a sustainable future faster. We believe we can accelerate the transition to a sustainable future through collaboration. Collaboration and partnerships will be key."
Even by working together, Sampson acknowledged that making progress toward net-zero relies upon the implementation of new technologies, including a number of technologies that have not yet been invented.
In recognition of that, Dow's Path to Zero includes a multi-generational approach. In the first generation, Sampson said, Dow's plan is to separate a cracking byproduct into CO2 and "clean, circular hydrogen" that can be used as fuel. This, he said, will reduce the CO2 emitted by the cracking process by 25 percent as soon as 2026.
For the second generation, the company plans to redesign the cracker's gas turbines so they can be powered by pure hydrogen or carbon-neutral electricity, further reducing the CO2 emitted by 43 percent by 2030.
The third generation involves Dow's proposed "eCracker," which is a conventional cracker powered only by clean, carbon- neutral electricity instead of combustion fuels. If the company achieves this goal, the implementation of the eCracker technology would reduce the cracker site's CO2 emissions to "close to zero," Sampson explained.
Goals such as the eCracker technology will require massive investment in R&D. In order to prepare for the investment the technology will require before it can be scaled into commercial use, Sampson acknowledged it requires responsible financial stewardship today and that won't come easy.
"We recognize that the Path to Zero will be a challenging transition," he said. "Our goal is to remain flexible while exercising capital discipline."
At the same time, in order to be able to effectuate such significant environmental changes, the company needs to remain viable and continue to grow. "We simply cannot thrive as a business if our customers, communities and planet do not thrive as well," Sampson explained.
The key for reaching the end goal of the path to zero: circularity.
"We believe that 'circular' is a key part of the transition to a prosperous low-carbon economy," he added. Part of Dow's holistic business strategy involves decoupling unsustainable material use from growth. Waste is inefficient, which logically means that circularity is the peak of efficiency - the ultimate goal of any business. Accordingly, the Path to Zero makes business sense, in addition to its ramifications for broader society and the environment.
"The Path to Zero is the right thing to do, the smart thing to do, it is affordable and it is a path to growth," Sampson asserted.
