Our Carbon Management

We want to live up to our responsibility for climate protection. One way we do this is with our products, which enable our customers to lower CO₂ emissions. But that is not all: We also become more efficient in our production and energy use, we will increase our use of renewable energies and we will accelerate the development and deployment of new CO₂-free processes for the production of chemicals.

In recent decades, BASF has already achieved a considerable reduction in CO₂ emissions by optimizing energy generation and production processes as well as systematically reducing emissions of nitrous oxide. We continue these efforts and we are also gradually replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy sources in our electricity purchasing. Moreover, to cut our greenhouse gas emissions dramatically, BASF researchers are intensively working on fundamentally new low-CO₂ emitting production technologies.

How can we build a more climate-friendly chemical industry? 

We are optimistic that these technologies can be implemented from 2030 onward. Our primary goal here: We want to prevent CO₂ emissions from occurring at all. Further options, such as the use of biomass, CO₂ or waste as a raw material for chemical production will also increasingly play a role. However, the potential of sustainably available biomass is finite.

BASF expects that this switch to climate-neutral production processes will lead to a sharp increase in electricity demand at the group’s major sites, including the largest production site in Ludwigshafen, in the coming decade. From around 2035, the group’s electricity demand is expected to be more than three times higher than it is today.

A precondition for the transformation of chemical production is the reliable availability of large quantities of renewable electricity at competitive prices. Regulatory framework conditions are also essential for making this transformation economically feasible.

What our researchers say