Naphtha is one of the noblest feedstocks produced from crude oil: relatively pure, valuable and perfectly suited to steam crackers. Now Europe wants to chemically recycle plastic waste into pyrolysis oil — a dirty, highly variable waste-derived liquid — and blend it into this pure naphtha stream. Pyrolysis oil is so contaminated that crackers generally cannot run on it alone, requiring heavy dilution with conventional naphtha. The result risks degrading feedstock quality, stressing crackers and ultimately affecting the quality of petrochemical products.
Satirically speaking, one could almost say that Europe’s circular-economy policy is trying to sabotage its own naphtha industry: take one of the noblest and purest petrochemical feedstocks we have, mix dirty plastic-waste pyrolysis oil into it, and then call the result progress.