At most, carbon capture equips 34% of production facilities in the chemicals industry (Figure 13.5). In net-zero scenarios, petrochemicals is the area where this transformation occurs the earliest, with the bulk of facilities (to be equipped over the entire time horizon) upgraded before 2030. Fertilizer is also included in this early CCS conversion, although only 19% of facilities are adapted (compared with about half for petrochemicals). Interestingly, both these early changes show up in CP30 results, in contrast with other sectors discussed above where CP30 is insufficient to trigger CCS conversions without additional constraints, suggesting a lower cost for carbon capture in chemicals on the shorter term.
Figure 13.5 – Chemicals production across scenarios #
Net-zero scenarios manage to obtain reductions by reducing production early on, maintaining 20% lower production levels over most of the horizon, compared with REF and CP30. While CCS rapidly increases its role after 2025, it provides at most 33% of the reduction (a share reached in 2035), after which reductions increasingly derive from fuel switching and lower production levels in NZ50 (Figure 13.6). By 2060, only 26% of the reduction in NZ50 compared with REF comes from carbon capture, while fuel switching and lower production levels have grown to 41% and 32% of reductions respectively.
Figure 13.6 – Emission reductions in chemicals production (NZ50) #
