Petrochemical Industry Doesn't Get It: Wall St Doesn't Care About Their Greenwashing, Or Anything That Might Cost More

[hatrack]

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A dramatic moment came early in the conference. “Is green hydrogen dead?” Mark Eramo, copresident of S&P Global Commodity Insights, asked Bob Patel, a former CEO of LyondellBasell Industries and W. R. Grace. Patel is a current director of Air Products & Chemicals, which recently pulled out a pair of projects to make green hydrogen via water electrolysis powered by alternative energy. “It’s difficult to see a business model today without subsidies,” Patel said. For all sustainability projects, he said, factors like technology, subsidies, and regulations create uncertainties, and investments should be able to stand up to them. “If you can’t see a path to a clear, self-sustaining economic model over—let’s say over 5–10 years, maybe not 0–5—then likely it is not something you should be doing.”

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John Roberts, a stock analyst with Mizuho Americas, said in a presentation at the conference that Wall Street has soured on sustainability. He brought up four plastics sustainability start-ups—Danimer Scientific, Loop Industries, Origin Materials, and PureCycle Technologies—that raised nearly $3 billion in total when they went public at the beginning of this decade. “Wall Street can throw a lot of money at something very quickly when they get excited about it,” Roberts said.

The stock prices of all four companies have since dropped to a small fraction of their peak values—an indication that they were unable to meet Wall Street’s lofty expectations. Danimer even filed for bankruptcy in March. “Part of what is going on with these recycling, circular sustainability plastics companies is just a lack of enthusiasm for sustainability broadly,” Roberts said, pointing to dismal stock performance for solar and lithium firms. Wall Street is now focused on artificial intelligence and data centers, he said.

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As it weathers the current downturn and braces for a possible trade war, the US petrochemical industry also is confronting longer-term threats. Since the early 2010s, the US has had a cost advantage predicated on the shale oil and gas boom and the resulting abundance of cheap ethane extracted from natural gas liquids. At the conference, Kurt Barrow, vice president of oil, fuels, and chemicals research at S&P, said production of natural gas liquids should soon plateau. From 2005 to 2025, US supply rose by 95%. He forecast that the next decade will see only a 12% increase. By the 2030s, ethane production will peak—particularly in areas that supply the petrochemical industry with feedstock, such as the Permian basin in Texas. If ethane ability does indeed level, the impact could be profound.

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https://cen.acs.org/business/petrochemicals/Petrochemical-makers-fret-over-future/103/web/2025/04

[NNadir]

1. One of the necessary conditions for dying is being alive.

To my mind the question asked according to the piece, "Is 'green hydrogen' dead?" Is something of a joke, since it's absurd to argue that 'green hydrogen' was ever a viable entity except as a marketing tool to greenwash fossil fuels.

If the fossil fuel funded marketing effort to brand fossil fuel products as "green hydrogen," which includes the slick videos we see here about hydrogen, is defunded by the fossil fuel companies, we can be spared them, which in my view wouldn't be a bad thing.

[hatrack]

2. I don't even think it rises to the concept of dying in utero . . . .

They seem shocked, shocked that the banks that were happy to abandon climate "goals" no longer give a shit about their putative "green" technologies.

Sorry if I sound sour of late, but my tolerance for bullshit can no longer be measured without violating Heisenberg's Law.

[NNadir]

3. Actually it's been still borne for more than half a century. Some how people haven't noticed how dead its been.

I don't think highly of the guy at all, but even a muddled thinker like Joe Romm understood as much, having written The Hype About Hydrogen in 2003 flying in the face of his fellow fool and sometime collaborator Amory Lovins, who was promising hydrogen HYPErcars would be in show rooms within a year or two around the same time.

It's funny how they both focused on hype.

Here we are, two decades later. Hydrogen is still made from fossil fuels with exergy destruction, and people are still trying to say that the three card Monty shell game is "green."

What's annoying is that this late in the game there seems to be some confusion as to whether any of this ersatz "debate" has anything to do with the accelerating collapse of the planetary atmosphere.

It doesn't.