Neste invests in industrial scale liquefied plastic upgrading facilities

Neste, a Finnish producer of sustainable aviation fuel, renewable diesel and feedstock solutions for the polymers and chemicals industry, has invested in the construction of liquefied plastic upgrading facilities. The 111-million-euro (approximately $121.5 million) investment will allow Neste’s Porvoo refinery in Finland to upgrade 150,000 tons of liquefied plastic per year. Upgrading, along with pretreatment and refining, are the three processing steps in turning liquefied plastic into feedstock for new plastics.  

Construction of upgraded facilities is part of Neste’s “Project Pretreatment and Upgrading of Liquefied waste plastic to Scale up circular Economy,” or PULSE, project. It targets a total processing capacity of 400,000 tons of liquefied plastic per year and has received a European Union Innovation grant of 135 million euros (approximately $147 million) if fully implemented. With the conclusion of Neste’s second series of industrial-scale processing runs in March, the company has processed approximately 3,000 tons of liquefied plastic since 2020.  

“We are walking the talk on chemical recycling,” says Heikki Färkkilä, vice president of chemical recycling at Neste. “Our processing runs provide us not only with valuable knowledge on the technologies but also serve as a proof of concept: Chemical recycling can be done on an industrial scale. Our focus continues to be getting from individual processing runs to continuous operation.”  

Pretreatment and upgrading of liquefied plastic allow the company to increase flexibility in processing lower-quality plastics into high-quality petrochemical feedstock in its Porvoo refinery. In addition to the new construction, Neste will retrofit existing equipment to scale up chemical recycling. The upgraded liquefied plastic can then be processed in the conventional refinery in lieu of a portion of the fossil resources currently being processed.  
 
“We have developed our capability to process circular raw material at the Porvoo refinery over the recent years and are now set to build a respective facility,” says Markku Korvenranta, executive vice president of Neste Oil Products. “The new facility, processing 150,000 tons of liquefied waste plastic, is planned to be finalized in the first half of 2025.”