Reinvent oil refineries for a net-zero future

If the world embarks on a path to replacing fossil-fuel refineries with netzero ones, this change must be mandated or incentivized."chemicals and materials from biomass and recycled plastic, and synthetic fuels from carbon dioxide and hydrogen, instead of from crude oil.It would be necessary to capture CO 2 from existing activities that produce a lot of the gas, such as cement manufacturing, or directly from the air.The hydrogen would come from electrolysing water.The entire process would need to be powered by renewable energy -and is estimated to require ten times as much energy as existing refineries require.In their plan, the authors pose urgent questions.Some are for researchers.Some are for policymakers.Some are for industry.Ideally, answers would come from discussions involving all of these stakeholders.A key question relates to the energy needed to power refineries.Creating refineries powered entirely by renewables will be a huge challenge.Refineries run continuously, but renewable sources are not always available; for example, solar energy in darkness, or wind energy on a calm day.Technologies that can produce or compensate for energy fluctuations, at the required scale, are still in development.Refineries' essential role in the manufacture of drugs and everyday household products also needs to be addressed.For the latter, consideration must be given to the need to reduce humanity's material footprint -an aim of ongoing talks on the United Nations plastics treaty.Cost is a third question.Building alternative refinery capacity at large scales won't come cheap.Here, the obstacles are mostly considerations for decision-makers, rather than technological barriers.In terms of cost, the authors calculate that replacing one oil refinery with technology compatible with net-zero goals would cost between €14 billion (US$15 billion) and €23 billion.They estimate that the total cost of converting the world's refining capacity by 2050 would be between €320 billion and €520 billion per year.That is a large sum -although it is on existing scales of public and private industrial investment.If the world decides to embark on a path to replacing fossil-fuel refineries with net-zero ones, this change must be mandated or incentivized.To unlock the required funding, the authors call for policies including the implementation of carbon taxes and removal of fossil-fuel subsidies.There will be resistance -not least from fossil-energy companies and their advocates -that will almost certainly slow the authors' timetable.We don't know what the world will look like in 2050.In some future scenarios, fewer refineries might be needed.Some researchers have proposed that ammonia could be produced without the emission of CO 2 and used as a fuel for internal combustion engines used in long-distance shipping.That would require less refinery capacity, although large amounts of energy would be needed to generate the hydrogen required to produce the ammonia.The research community knows enough to start imagining different versions of the future, and recognizing just how hard it might be to reach them before it's too late.A little over a quarter of a century is a very short period for this scale of technological change.As such, we must take the next step and, following the authors' advice, evaluate and develop the processes that ensure we reach net-zero targets as soon as and in the most effective way possible.