Sustainability
Climate Protection
Living large. CO2 in chemistry.
Chemistry is one of the most energy-intensive industries. We need to use a lot of energy to turn crude oil and natural gas into basic chemicals. These are then processed by other manufacturers and industries into products for consumers.
As a result, our CO2 footprint is quite large. That may not sound good at first. However, we use energy sources very efficiently. Many of our materials have been designed so that they can be processed at lower temperatures, for example, and are more durable and more efficient. People who use our products often end up using less energy. That's good for the CO2 balance and ensures that we are better prepared for the major climate challenges of the future.
20 million compounds: Carbon is the most versatile chemical element and can form a huge number of stable, complex molecules. No other element is as diverse. It is the very basis of our lives: cells, proteins, DNA. Carbon is also the basis for plastics, solvents, paints, and much more. Chemistry without carbon is impossible. How does decarbonization work? We always need carbon in chemistry. But if it is not fossil-based but bio-based or recycled, it helps us become climate neutral.
How does it work? Let's look at three topics from our everyday lives:
How BASF plans to reduce its CO2 emissions
Industry accounts for a significant proportion of CO2 emissions. Although we at BASF have already done a lot to reduce emissions, further ideas and methods are required. We see three major levers for this: 1. Using green energy, 2. Incorporating alternative raw materials in production, and 3. Intelligently linking production processes.
We are embarking on the path to green transformation together with our markets and our customers. The BASF Verbund benefits us greatly in this regard with its high level of integration of value chains.
Energy supply has always been a key factor in the success of a chemical production site. Many chemical processes, such as steam cracking, synthesis, and distillation, require a great deal of energy. Until now, this energy has mostly come from crude oil and natural gas. In the future, it will come from renewable electricity. We are already supplying several sites with electricity from renewable sources.
For the 2025 fiscal year, we were able to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by significantly more than 1 million tons of CO₂ through the use of electricity from renewable sources.
🔥 Steamcracking
Using heat or catalysts this process breaks down large molecules from crude oil into smaller molecules which can be used more efficiently. This is done using heat or catalysts. For example, this process yields gasoline or gases from heavy oil.
🧪 Synthese
A new substance is produced from several substances. This happens, for example, in the production of plastics. Put simply, new substances are "cooked" from different ingredients.
💧 Destillation
Liquids with different boiling points are separated by evaporating them one after the other. The mixture is heated, the vapor is collected and then cooled again.
BASF is building its new Zhanjiang Verbund site in China as a model for sustainable production with operations based on 100% renewable electricity. At our second-largest site in Germany, in Schwarzheide, we generate electricity from solar fields on land that does not yield sufficient agricultural returns. The electricity flows directly into production, thereby reducing the load on regional power grids.
With its OASE® blue technology, BASF removes CO₂ from exhaust gases – for example, from power plants, cement plants, waste incineration plants or even ships. The system manages to filter out over 90% of the CO₂. It is particularly efficient because it consumes little energy and chemicals – as confirmed by tests. The captured CO₂ can even be so pure that it is suitable for applications in the food industry.
Steam can also be generated using renewable energy: we need steam to operate reactors and other equipment to distill and to produce hydrogen. Therefore, the world's largest industrial heat pump is being built at the Ludwigshafen site to gradually reduce the use of fossil fuels.
Raw materials with potential
Renewable raw materials, renewable resources, biomass: what exactly are they? Renewable raw materials are all natural things that renew themselves – sunlight, wind, or plants.
Renewable resources are part of this: These are plants or parts of plants such as wood, rapeseed, or sugar that are cultivated to make products for example, for packaging or cleaning agents. Biomass is anything that consists of living or dead plants and animals – i.e., wood, straw, organic waste, or manure. Biomass can be burned to generate energy or used as a raw material for new products.
Oil and gas remain important raw materials, but today they can be partially replaced by biomass, bio-based intermediate products and green hydrogen. But why is this an advantage? Coal, oil and gas, the fossil fuels, increase the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere because when they are burned, they quickly release carbon dioxide that has been stored for millions of years. Biomass is completely different. It only releases as much CO₂ as was bound in the natural cycle shortly before.
Let's look at an example. The outdoor specialists at VAUDE have used an innovative BASF material for a new bicycle backpack:
To produce our polyamide plastic Ultramid® ZeroPCF, we use electricity from wind power and replace naphta with bio-naphta from used cooking oil and natural gas by biomethane. We have developed a method that allows us to calculate exactly how much of the environmentally friendly raw materials are required and thus being fed into our value chain: this is called mass balance and is officially certified. The resulting polyamide 6 has a product carbon footprint (PCF) of zero. It works just as well as the conventional one – and is more environmentally friendly.
Car sharing saves money for everyone involved: you can share the running costs for tires, repairs and much more. We also use this principle in chemistry. The BASF Verbund is a large network of many production plants. What one plant produces goes directly into the next as a raw material. This saves BASF energy, raw materials and CO₂ and enables it to work in a particularly efficient and environmentally friendly way.
We are constantly developing new zero-emission and low-emission processes. To evaluate these new technologies and use them for more sustainable chemistry we build test facilities. We need major levers to become climate neutral by 2050: two of these are carbon capture & storage and the electric steam cracker (eFurnace).
Air Liquide and BASF have been partners at our Antwerp site for 50 years. Since 2021, both companies have been working on the large-scale Kairos@C project, which is funded by the European Union. They aim to significantly reduce CO2 emissions from production in Antwerp by using carbon capture & storage (CCS). CCS is the capture and storage of carbon dioxide.
Here is how it works: CO2 is captured during production, dried, compressed, liquefied and transported via pipelines to a storage site. There it is stored deeply underground. This could result in the world's largest liquefaction plant and make an important contribution to decarbonization in Europe. However, this will not come for free: all parties involved along the value chain will ultimately have to contribute to the costs.
Within two years, BASF, together with its partner companies Sabic and Linde, has built the world’s first large-scale demonstration plant for an electrically heated steam cracker furnace – known as an eFurnace – in Ludwigshafen. Until now, steam crackers have only been powered by natural gas to split raw gasoline into olefins and aromatics. These are the basic raw materials for numerous chemical processes and products. Using electricity from wind or solar energy instead of natural gas saves up to 90% CO2.
Products with a proven lower CO₂ footprint
We have been publishing our CO2 footprint since 2008. According to this, we have already reduced our emissions by 4.9 million tons of CO2 since 2018. Many of our customers want to offer sustainable products to consumers – and above all, they want to be able to prove they do.
How our customers benefit
But how can we prove to our customers the reduced CO₂ emissions when selling our products? The answer is SCOTT:
With our Strategic CO2 Transparency Tool, or SCOTT for short, we calculate the CO2 footprint of our products (Product Carbon Footprint, or PCF for short) for over 40.000 products at over 230 locations. From cradle to gate. We also use this in the innovation process. This allows us to immediately calculate how changes in production processes affect the PCF – and thus develop more environmentally friendly products more quickly.
