Ethylene Industry Embarks on a New Journey
发布时间：2025-11-25    浏览次数：23

Ethylene Industry Embarks on a New Journey: Production Transformation + Product Optimization

Mounting Challenges and Shifting Landscapes in the Ethylene Industry

Against the backdrop of escalating geopolitical conflicts, rising protectionism, hindered multilateral trading systems, and increasing tariff barriers, the stability of global industrial and supply chains has been severely disrupted. This poses greater challenges to China's petrochemical product exports, enterprises' overseas expansion, and technological innovation.

Domestically, the fundamental trend of long-term economic growth remains unchanged, and the country is still in a period of strategic opportunities. The development of new quality productive forces has injected new momentum into long-term growth. The 2025 Government Work Report explicitly lists "developing new quality productive forces in light of local conditions and accelerating the construction of a modern industrial system" as a key annual task, emphasizing the dual-driver role of technological and industrial innovation to promote quality transformation and kinetic energy conversion in economic development.

Compared with the world's advanced levels, China's ethylene industry still lags in industrial clustering, green and low-carbon development, digital intelligence, product structure, and technological innovation—with prominent structural issues in products. On one hand, homogeneous products face high production costs, unstable quality, and weak competitiveness, leading to low operating rates. On the other hand, high-end products rely heavily on imports with insufficient independent security capabilities, rooted in inadequate basic research. Enterprise R&D is basically confined to "following others," and independent innovation capacity is weak. Coupled with ethylene capacity growing much faster than demand, the profitability of petrochemical products is unlikely to improve in the short term.

Since the 14th Five-Year Plan period, chemical enterprises have faced severe operational challenges, with the commissioning of some new projects further delayed. As the electric revolution in transportation accelerates the transformation from oil refining to chemical production, capacity projections (based on under-construction, planned, and proposed projects) indicate that China's ethylene capacity will exceed 80 million tons by 2030. Meanwhile, affected by the transformation of economic development models and the expansion of absolute output bases, ethylene demand has grown at an average annual rate of approximately 5% over the past five years—down about 4 percentage points from the previous five-year period. It is expected that the growth rate of demand for ethylene and downstream products will continue to slow down.

At the same time, the ethylene industry faces concurrent pressures of carbon reduction and development. On one hand, carbon reduction is a rigid requirement. In October 2021, the National Development and Reform Commission and other departments issued the Action Plan for Strict Energy Efficiency Constraints to Promote Energy Conservation and Carbon Reduction in Key Petrochemical and Chemical Industries (2021–2025) (hereinafter referred to as the "Plan"), setting action goals and key tasks for the green and low-carbon development of the ethylene industry. By 2025, through energy conservation and carbon reduction initiatives, the proportion of petroleum-based ethylene production capacity meeting the benchmark energy consumption level (590 kg of standard oil/ton) should exceed 30%. Currently, the average energy consumption of some capacities still falls short of the baseline target (640 kg of standard oil/ton). The Plan explicitly requires accelerating the phase-out of ethylene plants with a capacity of 300,000 tons/year or less, promoting the R&D, pilot application, and promotion of low-carbon ethylene production technologies, equipment manufacturing technologies, intelligent technologies, energy optimization technologies, and electrification technologies, and revising and improving industrial policies and standards such as the Energy Consumption Quota for Ethylene Plants per Unit Product. On the other hand, China's per capita equivalent ethylene consumption currently stands at 45 kg, leaving significant room for growth compared with major developed countries and regions such as the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. Without effective measures, carbon emissions will increase accordingly. Depending on the raw materials, producing one ton of ethylene typically generates 1–2 tons of carbon emissions. Existing ethylene plants already face arduous carbon reduction tasks, while the rapid development of the industry must address carbon reduction for incremental capacity. Additionally, carbon taxes and carbon tariffs will be implemented by 2030. Therefore, low-carbon development is an inevitable choice for the ethylene industry.

Pathways to Breakthrough: Diversified Raw Material Structure

To balance the safety, economy, and green development of the ethylene industrial chain, it is expected that over the next 10 years, petroleum-based raw materials will remain the mainstay of China's ethylene feedstock, while the proportion of low-carbon raw materials will gradually increase. The ethylene raw material structure will present a diversified pattern including naphtha, hydrocracked tail oil, diesel, propane and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), ethane, biomass, waste polymer materials, carbon dioxide, and methane.

1. Ethylene Production from Waste Plastics

This method has attracted considerable attention in recent years due to its dual benefits of pollution reduction, carbon reduction, and resource recycling. Waste plastics are converted into waste plastic oil through chemical recycling methods such as pyrolysis or catalytic cracking. After purification to remove impurities like chlorine and silicon, the oil is fed into steam crackers to produce ethylene, which is further processed into downstream products such as polyethylene. Companies like BASF and ExxonMobil have built 10,000-ton-scale industrial plants or demonstration facilities using proprietary technologies. However, this route faces challenges: for addition polymers like polyethylene and polypropylene, the reaction temperature typically exceeds 500°C, and the content of impurities such as chlorine and silicon in waste plastic oil is thousands of times higher than that in petroleum products, making purification difficult.

2. Ethylene Production from Biomass

This approach can reduce carbon emissions at the source, mainly through three routes:

3. One-Step Methane-to-Ethylene Technology

This technology offers advantages such as a short process flow, low energy consumption, and utilization of greenhouse gases, mainly including two routes: oxidative coupling of methane (OCM) to ethylene and non-oxidative one-step methane-to-ethylene. Many research institutions worldwide have conducted extensive work in this field, but industrial expectations have not been met. A typical example of the former is Siluria Technologies' 365-ton/year pilot plant built in Texas in 2015 in collaboration with Braskem (Brazil) and Linde (Germany). The Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has conducted in-depth research on the latter, developing a single-site iron catalyst that achieves a methane conversion rate of 48.1% and ethylene selectivity of 48.4% in a single pass.

4. Ethylene Production from Carbon Dioxide

This technology enables resource utilization while reducing carbon emissions. Technologies such as electrochemical reduction of CO₂ to ethylene, CO₂ hydrogenation to methanol, and directed conversion of CO₂ to polyesters have become research hotspots. However, CO₂ is a highly stable molecule, requiring significant energy for decomposition. Thus, continuous improvements in conversion efficiency and reductions in CO₂ reduction costs are needed.

Carbon Reduction Strategies: Green Development of Steam Cracking

Amid global efforts to promote green and low-carbon development, the ethylene industry— as a core sector of the petrochemical industry—has attracted widespread attention for its carbon reduction progress. Steam cracking plants, the mainstream ethylene production process, play a key role in reducing carbon emissions. An in-depth analysis of their carbon emission sources and corresponding reduction strategies is crucial for promoting the sustainable development of the ethylene industry.

Taking mainstream steam cracking plants as an example, carbon emission sources mainly include fuel combustion in cracking furnaces, indirect emissions from thermal and electrical consumption, and flare emissions. Among these, fuel combustion and indirect thermal consumption account for over 80% of total emissions, making process-based carbon reduction a priority.

1. Process Energy Conservation and Efficiency Improvement Technologies

2. Clean and Electrified Process Energy Supply

The replacement of high-carbon fuels (e.g., coal, heavy oil) with low-carbon fuels (e.g., natural gas) depends on China's resource endowments and energy structure. Green hydrogen replacement is a global focus, but its promotion requires solving technical, cost, and safety issues in production, transportation, storage, and utilization. Achieving green electricity-powered heating and energy supply requires not only a major transformation in the energy supply sector but also reforms to infrastructure and process technologies. Currently, high-power electric heating furnaces capable of heating materials above 800°C are still in the R&D stage, requiring technological breakthroughs in long-life, high-power electric furnaces, advanced heating element materials, and sophisticated control systems. Major oil and petrochemical companies have laid out R&D plans for related technologies. The electric cracking furnace technology jointly developed by BASF, SABIC, and Linde has made rapid progress, with the first large-scale demonstration plant commissioned at BASF's Ludwigshafen site in April 2024. However, the development of this route requires addressing economic and safety issues in addition to technical breakthroughs.

Imperatives for Transformation: Key Measures for Transformed Development

In the development of the ethylene industry, intensive and digital production processes, as well as high-end and serialized products, have become key development directions. The goal is to minimize energy and raw material consumption while maximizing plant operational efficiency and production flexibility through process improvements, technology integration, process optimization, digital intelligence empowerment, and molecular management.

1. Crude Oil-to-Ethylene Technology

By reducing intermediate processes, this technology aims to lower investment, cut production costs, improve petroleum resource utilization efficiency, and achieve energy conservation and carbon reduction. It mainly includes two routes: direct steam cracking of crude oil to ethylene and direct catalytic cracking of crude oil to chemicals. The former depends on crude oil quality—ExxonMobil built the world's first commercial plant in Singapore in 2014 using API-43 shale oil, which offers cost advantages due to the significant price gap between crude oil and naphtha. The core of the latter lies in catalysts, with active R&D by enterprises such as Saudi Aramco, Reliance Industries (India), Sinopec, and PetroChina. In February 2024, Saudi Aramco announced that its Shaheen Crude Oil to Chemicals (COTC) project in Ulsan, South Korea, was 55% complete, with commissioning expected in 2026. However, this technology faces the challenge of "small molecules being difficult to crack and large molecules being prone to coking" in the same reaction environment.

2. Digital and Intelligent Operation Management

Digital operations can increase productivity by 3%–5% and reduce costs by 10%–40%, achieving overall optimization of output, energy consumption, and material consumption. In recent years, ethylene producers have completed a certain degree of automation upgrades, including the adoption of DCS, MES, cracking feedstock simulation, and process control systems. However, a large amount of data generated in this process has not been fully collected and utilized due to various reasons. The digital transformation lacks systematic theoretical guidance and successful experience, leaving a gap from the smart manufacturing stage—where new-generation information technologies such as 5G, AI, the Internet of Things, big data, and cloud computing are applied to optimize operational indicators such as plant energy consumption and yield.

3. High-End, Differentiated, and Serialized Product Development

To address fierce market competition, rapidly changing demands, and green development pressures, it is essential to focus on technological breakthroughs, support green and low-carbon development, leverage industrial chain collaboration and digital empowerment, and focus on segmented product tracks to achieve high-end, differentiated, and serialized products. On one hand, it is necessary to reduce reliance on imports of high-end products, which currently fail to effectively support the development of downstream emerging industries. For example, with the release of new ethylene capacity, downstream polyolefin capacity has grown rapidly, but the performance and quality of downstream products have not improved simultaneously. On the other hand, it is crucial to promote supply-side structural reform of products, form full-series product solutions to meet the personalized and customized needs of downstream users, and expand product lines promptly after breakthroughs in individual products. Meanwhile, centering on downstream user demands, existing products should be continuously upgraded and optimized through catalyst innovation, process improvement, or post-modification to promote differentiated and high-end development. Building a "basic + customized" system, optimizing catalyst/additive compatibility using intelligent formulation systems, and forming a pyramid product structure—such as ExxonMobil's Exxtral polypropylene series for automotive applications, which includes hundreds of grades—will be key to enhancing competitiveness.

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