For Mitch Toomey, a prime example of the role the chemical industry plays in championing sustainability without compromising operational viability can be found in most hotel rooms.
A small sign in the room encourages guests to be mindful and do their part by hanging and reusing towels, allowing the staff to only replace towels left on the floor.
"So of course, that’s great sustainability, but it also decreases exponentially their laundry costs. They get to enjoy a consumer benefit of seeming to be conscious of the impact that their operations have," said Toomey, VP of sustainability and responsible care for the American Chemistry Council, leading the strategic implementation of EHS&S.
"But by engaging the customer in the process, they end up saving money because they’re not using as much laundry detergent, water, heat, etc. So, it’s a small example, but I think it’s representative of the fact that there is no inherent conflict between being sustainable and being commercially sustainable."
Toomey said though new technologies are always continuing to evolve, a sustainable business model must be one that thrives in that sector while remaining profitable.
Celanese and Mitsui JV: A case study in sustainability that pays
Fairway Methanol JV facility near Houston
The chemical industry offers the benefit of a no one-size-fits-all structure, Toomey said, and opportunities lie in different avenues to find a solution-oriented approach.
"Think of the weight of a car, for example — it takes more fuel to motivate a car that’s heavier than one that’s light. And so our industry can create high-strength materials out of advanced materials and plastics that reduce the weight of the car, thereby increasing the fuel economy of that car. But that’s not because we’re in the lightweighting business," Toomey said. "We are in the ‘figuring out business’ of what is that characteristic that’s driving your costs and how can we help you buy clever materials to reduce that."
Innovations including AI can help lower emissions and increase energy efficiency, Toomey said, but carbon capture may have a bigger impact. Carbon capture can help reverse the effects of climate change by capturing CO2 from the atmosphere.
Point-source carbon capture — which involves capturing CO2 directly from industrial emission sources before it enters the atmosphere — is focused on preventing emissions from contributing to global warming at the outset.
One recent example of carbon capture innovation is Fairway Methanol, a 50-50 JV between Celanese and Mitsui & Co., located at Celanese’s Clear Lake facility near Houston. Toomey said the project captures 180,000 mt of CO2 annually and converts it into 130,000 mt of a new product that wouldn’t have been possible unless the companies sourced and bought CO2 from elsewhere.
"So, this is the technology of carbon capture. People have been thinking about it for a while, hoping on it for a while, but now we’re seeing engineering and build outs. And I think that we, especially in this country, have plentiful natural gas, which is a much lower carbon fuel than something like coal, but there still is an emission."
"The decision shouldn’t be, should we use it or not? It should be, can we use it sustainably? Can we use it without the emissions? Can we use the upside of all that amazing concentration of power and energy within that feedstock, but stop the emissions? And so, the new calculus is, how can you continue to use things but not perpetuate the negative consequences of those things?"
The key, Toomey said, is just making sure that it’s not producing a lot of emissions.
"I don’t think it’s necessarily a competition, because wherever we go, if you look at the oil and gas members themselves, they are starting to get into renewable fuels as well. It’s kind of a large growth opportunity for everybody, and it’s not going to displace anything, it’s only going to add on top of it."
