Global petrochemical industry needs creativity, collaboration for carbon pricing: ClimateWorks' director

This content is part of the WPC 2025 series, in which we explore key themes from the 40th annual World Petrochemical Conference.

Both financial and industrial coalitions will be crucial to enabling carbon pricing and industrial innovation in the petrochemical industry, said Rebecca Dell, senior director of the Industry program at the Climateworks Foundation on March 20 at the World Petrochemical Conference by S&P Global.

"Companies will always underinvest in innovation, especially in mature low-margin commodity industries," Dell said, "public funding is a must."

She reiterated that sustainably aligned generation, transmission, transportation and storage all require large, expensive infrastructure projects. However, these only work out if multiple firms contribute finances and capacity.

"It is hard for a single company to do this," said Dell as she sought to clarify how ready the petrochemical industry is for carbon pricing and successful decarbonization. Planned industrial clusters are an attempt to solve this problem; however, it can take a long time to negotiate ways through this, she said.

With regards to industrial collaboration, Dell described the case as, "a classic chicken and egg problem."

"Nobody will commit to infrastructure without customers or capacity, yet no buyers will commit without reliable and dependable infrastructure," she said.

Under carbon pricing, the intensity of electricity's greenhouse gas emissions has declined steadily in Europe, according to data from the European Environment Agency. However, honing in on manufactured and industrial products, Dell cautioned that the picture is "comparatively less inspiring," believing that more useful comparisons highlight that emissions across countries have not declined.

Before carbon pricing can work we need clean alternatives to current production prices at, "close to parity," concluded Dell, and "every path requires clear, credible and reliable accounting."

The most effective pricing mechanisms will be easily verifiable by external parties, tracking data such as final emissions, total energy consumption, or total product volume. Above all, creativity and collaboration will be crucial to progress, said Dell.