Pioneering circular economy at work: Wolfgang Hofer makes oil out of plastic waste at his re-oil recycling plant.
© omv.com

Recycling: Trash as a source of oil

We’ve always made plastics out of crude oil. Now we make crude oil out of plastics. A new chemical process is making the environmental problem child—plastic waste—into a raw material of the future.
Written by Alex Lisetz
2 min readPublished on
According to a McKinsey report, a lorry-load of plastic rubbish lands in the sea every minute. That’s a hair-raising environmental sin. But it’s also a pointless waste because the crude oil we can get from plastic waste is worth just as much as the crude oil we drill for at great expense.
Well, not quite just as much. The synthetic crude that Austrian gas, oil and chemical company OMV makes from plastic waste is actually far superior to fossil crude oil. It’s cleaner, easier to refine and 45% more C02 efficient than the competition made of bits of old dinosaur deep underground.
The crude oil produced in the re-oiling process serves as the basis for high-grade synthetic materials.

The re-oil produced serves as the basis for synthetic materials.

© omv.com

“As things currently stand, our prototype can produce 100 litres of synthetic crude oil per minute from 100 kilos of plastic waste,” says Wolfgang Hofer, an advisor for the chemical recycling of plastics at the OMV Schwechat refinery. By 2025/2026, that should rise to 200,000 tonnes of old plastic.

Making new (and improved) things out of the old

The so-called OMV re-oiling process is a complement to existing recycling – carried out by OMV partner Borealis – and comes with additional advantages. The plastic waste no longer needs to be sorted by type and its quality doesn’t decrease when it is recycled, in contrast to recycled paper, for example. On the contrary, the crude oil made from yoghurt pots and crisp packets is such high-grade that Borealis can turn it back into valuable new synthetic materials, even for medicinal products like intravenous bags which require the most stringent purity levels.
OMV does its own recycling. To bring the broken-down plastic waste to the required cracking temperature of 400°C more quickly, the engineers add a solution which is a byproduct of refinery processes. It makes the viscous, molten mass highly fluid and prepares it for the next two stages of the re-oiling process: cracking (breaking long hydrocarbon chains into short ones) and flashing (separating the material you need for further processing).
According to a McKinsey study, 60% of all plastics will be recycled by 2050, at which point our grandchildren will shake their heads in disbelief at the knowledge that we threw our single-use plastics into the sea or onto the garbage tip.