Heads together for a better climate – part 2
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Climate protection is right at the top of the OMV agenda and many employees work, day in day out, to keep OMV’s carbon footprint as small as possible. Here we present four of them and their projects.
Reducing carbon emissions in our industry requires state-of-the-art technologies. The way we use and dispose of resources needs a fundamental rethink. The OMV heads we present below are behind projects in which complex technologies are developed, tested and implemented. They search for and find answers to questions like “How can we bring used cooking oil, plastic waste or even CO2 back into the production cycle and use them to make high-value products?” and “What can we learn from Mother Nature?”.
Green Diesel
Gudrun Kollmitzer is ensuring that the new Co-Processing plant in our Schwechat Refinery Anlage will be good to go on time. From 2023 it is set to produce biodiesel – compared to pure fossil diesel, this should save up to 360,000 tonnes of CO2 each year. That is equivalent to the emissions of a car driving 60,000 times around the equator.
More on Green Diesel.
We are constantly looking at alternative sources of feedstock for our fuels. A lot is being done worldwide in this area. What’s important for us is to stay on the ball and to evaluate for each of the highly promising developments whether the availability and product yield are right for us for each of the different feedstocks.
Gudrun Kollmitzer, OMV Refining & Marketing
Keeping plastics in the loop
Günter Stephan is well aware of the challenges as well as the huge benefits of mechanical plastics recycling. At the OMV subsidiary Borealis, he ensures that plastic is returned to the production cycle in order to produce new plastic with a lower carbon footprint.
More on keeping plastics in the loop.
Plastic is too valuable to dispose of after use. That’s why we give it a second life in our mechanical recycling plant and make new plastic out of it.
Günter Stephan, Mechanical Recycling, Borealis
Exploiting plastic waste as a resource
Sometimes plastic simply can’t be mechanically recycled – and that’s when chemical recycling is the best option for turning used plastic back into a resource. That’s exactly what Michaela Fraubaum does in the OMV ReOil plant in the Schwechat Refinery: Used plastic becomes synthetic crude oil, which can then in turn be used to make new plastics.
More on how plastic waste becomes a resource.
In our ReOil plant we process used plastic that can’t be recycled any other way and turn it into synthetic crude, which is then in turn used to make high-quality plastics. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
Michaela Fraubaum, OMV Schwechat Refinery
CO2 as a resource
For some processes, it’s not possible to prevent CO2 but instead of releasing it into the atmosphere, you can capture it and turn it back into a precious resource, for example for high-value plastics. This process is called “Carbon Capture & Utilization” (CCU) and the best guy to explain how it works is chemist Sorin Ivanovici.
More on CO2 as a resource.
We use CO2 as a resource by bringing it into a loop using Carbon Capture Utilization in order to then make renewable plastic.
Sorin Ivanovici, OMV Refining & Marketing
These and many other employees work on their projects with a great deal of knowhow and passion. And in doing so, they are helping us to keep on reducing our carbon footprint and get steadily closer to a climate-fit future.