BASF invests €20 million into Quantafuel, a specialist for pyrolysis of mixed plastic waste and purification of pyrolysis oil. The investment will be facilitated via the subscription of new shares and via the grant of a convertible loan. The companies aim to further develop Quantafuel’s technology for chemical recycling, consisting of an integrated process of pyrolysis and purification, towards optimizing the output for the use as feedstock in chemical production. In a second step, Quantafuel plans to license the jointly developed technology to other parties.

Quantafuel plans to start up a pyrolysis and purification plant with a nameplate capacity of approximately 16,000 tons per year in Skive, Denmark, by the end of 2019. BASF will have a right of first refusal to all pyrolysis oil and purified hydrocarbons from this plant for a minimum of four years after the start-up of production. BASF will use these secondary raw materials in its ChemCycling^TM project. BASF started this project in 2018 with the aim to process recycled raw materials obtained from plastic waste in its production Verbund. At BASF’s Ludwigshafen site, the recycled raw materials will be fed into the production Verbund, thereby partially replacing fossil resources.

Once the Quantafuel plant in Denmark reaches full capacity, BASF aims to deliver first commercial supply volumes of Ccycled^TM products. These are products based on chemically recycled plastic waste. To increase commercial offers, the parties furthermore aim to build jointly owned plants to produce purified hydrocarbons via chemical recycling.

• BASF SE, Ludwigshafen, Germany
• Quantafuel, Oslo, Norway