Ma Yongsheng, Chairman of Sinopec, has remarked that China's petrochemical industry is looking at profound adjustment and transformation in times of change at the forum for petrochemical industry development trends hosted on 22 July 2023 in Beijing.
"As China pledges to peak carbon emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, global and domestic oil demand will also peak, leading to excess produc-tion capacity of major chemical products in China," noted Ma. "The petrochemical industry needs to take the initiative to accelerate transformation in response to the challenges and explore a high-quality development path.”
Sinopec has carried out an ‘energy efficiency improvement plan’ and a ‘green enter-prise action’, taking a holistic approach to implement eight major carbon peaking actions to promote the energy transformation. In 2022, Sinopec recovered more than 1.5 million t of carbon dioxide (CO2). Since it introduced the energy efficiency im-provement plan in 2014, it has conducted 5000 projects that have saved 8.36 million t of standard coal.
Sinopec is also developing green hydrogen. The company’s green hydrogen pilot plant in Kuqa city of Xinjiang, China, is now harnessing solar energy to generate green hydrogen and is the country’s first solar-to-hydrogen facility with a capacity of more than 10 000 tpy. Sinopec has also launched the Inner Mongolia Erdos Wind-Solar Green Hydrogen Project, one of the world's largest green hydrogen-coal chemical projects.
Recently, Sinopec's Yuanba Gas Field, a 7000 m deep ultra-high sulfur biothermal gas field, has achieved cumulative natural gas production exceeding 30 billion m3, which reduces carbon emissions by 40 million t.
The company will continue to pursue efforts in greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction and high-concentration CO2 recovery to further improve resource utilisa-tion efficiency.