Global chemical companies are now operating as ecosystems ensuring sustainability

In the next decade, the chemical industry will continue to change rapidly. Chemical companies must adapt quickly to maintain competitive advantage, overcome challenges and embrace new market opportunities.

This paper describes the three trends of chemical industry in the next few years, which are worthy of attention.

1. Sustainable development and circular economy

The supply of key raw materials and energy is becoming increasingly tight. The increasing impact of emissions and waste disposal has led to stringent environmental regulations by different agencies

At present, global chemical companies are operating in the form of ecosystem to ensure sustainability and economy, so as to reduce energy and resource consumption. The key nodes of these ecosystems – raw materials, chemical production, application and end-users – focus on the substitution of raw materials to maximize the use of renewable energy, energy recovery, recycling and reuse of end-users, so as to achieve the goal of circular economy and realize value maximization and resource conservation. Here are some examples:

Bio based plastics: although fully inserted or bio based plastics cannot be composted or biodegradable, they are fully recyclable and designed to “insert” into existing recycling systems without compromising quality and increasing the cost of the recycling process.

Battery material recycling: it is expected that the battery material recycling market will be driven by more and more adoption of electric vehicles and more and more recycling regulations.

Improving the efficiency of wind turbines: about 11% of Europe’s electricity demand comes from wind power, which is expected to reach 25% by 2030. Changing to px35 carbon fiber with increased length will improve blade efficiency without increasing too much load, thus increasing the power generation of each wind turbine.

2: Digitization

Digitalization is leading the innovation of all major industries, and the chemical industry is not lagging behind in embracing the power of digitalization and its role in innovation. Digital technology will help chemical companies in many aspects, such as obtaining key data and drawing insights from it, achieving higher output at lower cost, arranging preventive maintenance to reduce downtime, and promoting accurate inventory planning to prevent stock out.

Digitization is expected to lead to increased revenue and lower costs, while increasing the industry’s EBITDA margin by 9%. Although many companies have begun to take advantage of the advantages provided by mobility and the Internet of things, machine learning and blockchain are expected to be major breakthroughs in the chemical industry. Take a look at the following specific examples to see the trend in action:

Driving efficiency of artificial intelligence: manual color matching is very time-consuming. BASF automotive renovation solutions uses artificial intelligence and neural networks to match car colors according to customer requirements.

Sensors and the Internet of things will change Logistics: Dow Chemical uses networked sensors to monitor temperature, humidity, vibration and light from thousands of transports a day. The real-time data of the sensor is input into the event management software, and the software will give an alarm in time in case of any abnormality.

The key to staying ahead in cooperation with technology giants: total has cooperated with Google to develop artificial intelligence cloud solutions, using machine learning to analyze the application of underground oil & gas exploration, such as image production forecast, automatic analysis of satellite images, analysis of rock sample images.

Perfect machining: mikrosam ad (Macedonian) and other companies have developed automation systems to manufacture high-quality composite shapes for the aerospace, automotive, shipping, oil and gas and pipeline industries.

1. Innovation and accelerated globalization

Demand for chemicals in emerging markets continues to grow as their working age population remains a huge driver of the chemical industry. The shortening of product life cycle and the upsurge of product commercialization accelerate the pace of globalization.

Last year, most of the mergers and acquisitions in the global chemical industry took place between companies that provide commodities, intermediates and special materials. Most of these transactions took place in the United States and China. In the past 20 years, production facilities have mainly shifted to Asia. However, with the advent of shale gas in the United States and coal to olefin technology in China, it will be very interesting for chemical manufacturers to see how things go.

Consider the following examples of innovations:

New manufacturing process: carbon fiber composite manufacturers and automobile manufacturers are exploring ways to increase the application of composite materials in automobiles. Faurecia (France) has developed a “one-off” manufacturing process for composite parts, which not only improves the quality, but also reduces the cost and cycle time.

To rationalize the price of composites: plasticomp, Inc. commercialized its new hybrid long glass and carbon fiber composites in two kinds of thermoplastic polymer matrix, thus reducing the cost of carbon fiber composites without compromising its advantages of high performance.

Advanced insulation materials: compared with the traditional thermal insulation materials, aerogel and phase change materials and other thermal insulation materials will achieve a two digit growth rate in terms of energy saving and thermal comfort.