Staring at a pile of freshly cut beechwood, forestry manager Johannes Brodowski wonders if he is looking at the future of Germany’s chemicals industry.
A local factory would use Brodowski’s trees and other organic material — instead of climate-harming fossil fuels — to make chemical products used to manufacture items ranging from packaging to car tires and fleece jackets.
“The innovative part of the whole thing is that a new product is getting made,” Brodowski said. “Namely, chemical materials that were originally made from fossil fuels and now can be made from renewable sources.”
Photo: AFP
Finnish group UPM Biochemicals unveiled its 1.3 billion euro (US$1.51 billion) biorefinery in Germany’s eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt this year, taking a big risk at a difficult time for the sector.
Germany’s traditional chemicals industry has been battered by high energy prices and cheap competition from Asia, with national output now at its lowest level since 1995.
Still, UPM thinks now is the right time to try, and get chemical giants to break with fossil fuels and switch to renewable biomass, in this case wood which grows abundantly in the region.
Photo: AFP
“With local supply chains, we can be competitive and meet the needs of international markets,” UPM site manager Harald Dialer said.
The opportunity is large: About 80 percent of German chemical products rely on imported fossil-based materials, said Paul Muennich of Agora Energiewende, an energy-transition think tank.
UPM has signed a supply contract with the forest-rich state of Saxony-Anhalt, making use of beech tree branches and twigs for chemical processes in its refinery.
As a result, beech wood production in this corner of Saxony-Anhalt could go up by 20-30 percent, Brodowski said.
He said that the plant uses tree branches, which are less commercially viable than trunks and usually incinerated in factories.
The wood is processed at the Leuna Chemical Park, home to more than 100 different firms.
Most of the factories give out the smell of rotten eggs, but inside some areas of the UPM site, a sweeter smell fills the air.
Wood chips are treated until they burst “like popcorn,” turning into a slurry that is fermented in huge metal tanks, UPM spokesman Martin Ledwon said.
At the end of the process, two types of products emerge: liquids used to make clothing or bottles, and a brown powder that can replace carbon black, a powder used as a filler in tires and other rubber products.
The UPM site should reach full capacity by 2027, with annual output of 220,000 tonnes of chemicals.
That would mark a rare bright spot in Germany’s otherwise stagnant chemicals industry — a trend thrown into stark focus in Leuna where the US group Dow Inc is to soon close two plants.
Opening the plant was a “very bold decision,” Dialer said, adding that the COVID-19 pandemic had doubled the timeline and the associated costs of the project.
UPM would like to count on help from the German state, highlighting that its project is more ecologically sustainable than oil-guzzling plants that also accelerate climate change.
However, the federal government led by conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz, which took power in May, has been less enthusiastic about environmental and climate protection than its predecessors.
When the project was launched in 2020, sustainability was “more at the center of the debate,” Dialer said.
In his view, Germany and the EU should support European industry by imposing quotas on what he says are cheap but often environmentally damaging imports of Chinese chemicals.
Muennich also said that government intervention with subsidies or tariffs would be “necessary to shift from fossil fuel to sustainable biomass.”
ENERGY ISSUES: The TSIA urged the government to increase natural gas and helium reserves to reduce the impact of the Middle East war on semiconductor supply stability Chip testing and packaging service provider ASE Technology Holding Co (日月光投控) yesterday said it planned to invest more than NT$100 billion (US$3.15 billion) in building a new advanced chip testing facility in Kaohsiung to keep up with customer demand driven by the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. That would be included in the company’s capital expenditure budget next year, ASE said. There is also room to raise this year’s capital spending budget from a record-high US$7 billion estimated three months ago, it added. ASE would have six factories under construction this year, another record-breaking number, ASE chief operating officer Tien Wu
The EU and US are nearing an agreement to coordinate on producing and securing critical minerals, part of a push to break reliance on Chinese supplies. The potential deal would create incentives, such as minimum prices, that could advantage non-Chinese suppliers, according to a draft of an “action plan” seen by Bloomberg. The EU and US would also cooperate on standards, investments and joint projects, as well as coordinate on any supply disruptions by countries like China. The two sides are additionally seeking other “like-minded partners” to join a multicountry accord to help create these new critical mineral supply chains, which feed into
For weeks now, the global tech industry has been waiting for a major artificial intelligence (AI) launch from DeepSeek (深度求索), seen as a benchmark for China’s progress in the fast-moving field. More than a year has passed since the start-up put Chinese AI on the map in early last year with a low-cost chatbot that performed at a similar level to US rivals. However, despite reports and rumors about its imminent release, DeepSeek’s next-generation “V4” model is nowhere in sight. Speculation is also swirling over the geopolitical implications of which computer chips were chosen to train and power the new
Intel Corp is joining Elon Musk’s long-shot effort to develop semiconductors for Tesla Inc, Space Exploration Technologies Corp and xAI, marking a surprising twist in the chipmaker’s comeback bid. Intel would help the Terafab project “refactor” the technology in a chip factory, the company said on Tuesday in a post on X, Musk’s social media platform. That is a stage in the development process that typically helps make chips more powerful or reliable. The chipmaker’s shares jumped 4.2 percent to US$52.91 in New York trading on Tuesday. The Terafab project is a grand plan by Musk to eventually manufacture his own chips for
RSS