Decarbonizing specialty chemical manufacturing: opportunities for electrochemists

Abstract

To meet global decarbonization goals, the chemical industry faces the challenge of dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions even as demand for chemical products continues to grow. This challenge is amplified by the sector's reliance on petroleum-based hydrocarbons as both fuel and feedstock. Electrochemical synthesis is widely viewed as an attractive method to decarbonize chemical manufacturing through the use of low-carbon electricity to drive redox reactions. Presently, much of the work in this area is focused on electrochemical strategies to produce commodity chemicals. In this work, we make the case that developing electrosynthetic methods for specialty chemical manufacturing is another attractive entry point for electrochemical process design. We further outline the results of a scoping study aimed at assessing the potential to decarbonize the production of several organic compounds that are widely used in specialty chemical manufacturing by using electrochemical reactors. Our approach entails mapping the supply chain for each compound back to its petrochemical feedstock, identifying opportunities to incorporate electrochemical transformations along the supply chain, and estimating the potential for decarbonization through the adoption of electrosynthetic schemes. The results show there already exist significant opportunities to decarbonize specialty chemical transformations today, even under very conservative assumptions about process efficiency and the carbon intensity of the input electricity.