By Steven Cohen, Ph.D., Director of the M.S. in Sustainability Management program, School of Professional Studies
The petrochemical industry is deeply embedded in our economy and is likely the future of the fossil fuel industry. As our energy system modernizes and decarbonizes, fossil fuels won’t be burned for energy but will be transformed into a range of substances central to modern manufacturing. Someday, people will be amazed we actually burned these important and finite resources. A study by the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) described the importance of the petrochemical industry to our economy. According to RMI researchers Catherine Huyett, Meghan Peltier, Ankur Dass, Brianne Cangelose, Brian Payer, Hartej Singh, Joseph Fallurin, and Anisha Krishnakumar:
“The chemical industry is a paradox - while it is a significant contributor to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, it is also critical to enabling emissions reduction solutions across sectors and providing materials for modern life. Chemicals and materials systems are integral to daily life, underpinning 96% of all manufactured goods. They are also expected to play a pivotal role in climate action, chemicals will play a role in driving 75% of global energy transition technologies like solar PV cells and EV batteries and components. Despite this potential, the chemical industry remains one of the largest industrial emitters of GHGs, accounting for 38% of all energy-related US industrial emissions, with additional significant contributions from feedstock-related emissions like upstream methane leakage. The industry's scale and complexity are staggering, with global revenues exceeding $5 trillion annually. It encompasses more than 300 companies with revenues of over $1 billion and thousands of smaller firms, collectively producing over 7,000 products. These products are vital to virtually every end market and geography. However, the sector's reliance on fossil fuels as both an energy source and a feedstock poses a dual challenge that must be addressed to achieve a climate-aligned chemical industry.
Their study identified twenty strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, of which ten were judged to be economically and technologically feasible today. While the RMI study focused on carbon emissions, these plants also emit carcinogens into the air and toxic effluents into the ground and water that impair the health of their neighbors. Just as the fossil fuel industry devotes substantial resources to lobbying against regulation, so too does its sometimes subsidiary and always steady customer, the chemical industry. Their anti-regulatory spending does not seem to be coupled with much of an effort to develop and utilize technologies that could reduce their toxic impact without being regulated. Less than two months into Trump 2.0, federal regulation of these poisons is already on hold. Last week, the Trump Administration dropped an effort to enforce environmental rules in Cancer Alley. As Rachel Frazin reported in The Hill last week:
“The Trump administration has dropped a lawsuit that sought to cut toxic emissions from a facility in a highly polluted area of Louisiana known as “Cancer Alley.” In 2023, the Biden administration filed a lawsuit against Denka Performance Elastomer in an effort to get it to cut down its emissions of chloroprene. Chloroprene is a chemical that’s used in the production of neoprene, a material that is used to make wetsuits, hoses and adhesives. The EPA considers chloroprene to be a likely carcinogen. When it filed the lawsuit, the EPA said that Denka’s emissions of chloroprene posed “an imminent and substantial endangerment” to public health… However, the Trump administration voluntarily dropped the lawsuit this week. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declined to explain why… Denka, the company that was being sued, thanked the Trump administration for dropping the case in a written statement, saying it was “lacking scientific and legal merit.”
The anti-regulatory ideology of the Trump administration is perfectly aligned with the mindset of the petrochemical industry, which appears remarkably disinterested in reducing its environmental impact. While the Rocky Mountain Institute is focused on the petrochemical industry’s greenhouse gas pollution, the people living near these plants, largely in redlined racially segregated neighborhoods, are more concerned with the immediate danger posed by toxic emissions. The state and national governments’ shameful indifference to these impacts is nothing new and incredibly consistent.
It is difficult for me to believe that we cannot develop cleaner ways to produce chemicals from oil feedstock. The absence of effective regulation seems to have reduced the incentive for this industry to modernize its production technology. What we know about industries that pollute and are unregulated is that they tend to lack the organizational capacity to innovate. If the current process makes money, they are not interested in change. In contrast, the heavily regulated auto industry produces a motor vehicle today that is highly computerized, more efficient, more electronic, less mechanized, and more reliable than the motor vehicle of the pre-regulatory era. When the engineers hired to work on safety and pollution reduction completed their regulatory compliance work, they turned to the development of new technologies, such as self-driving features that help drivers park and avoid collisions. They also developed hybrid and then fully electric vehicles.
It is possible to apply human ingenuity to petrochemical manufacturing and do a better job of increasing efficiency and reducing waste and pollution. The growing field of industrial ecology has developed a set of rigorous methodologies that can help companies improve their manufacturing processes, reduce pollution, and increase profits. According to the International Society for Industrial Ecology:
“Industrial ecology intersects multiple disciplines, including the natural sciences, engineering, and the social sciences... It offers a growing set of scientifically rigorous quantitative methods and approaches, and today increasingly involves applied data science and scientific programming. Methods and approaches used in industrial ecology include:
- Material flow analysis - the quantification of mass and energy flows in systems ranging from industrial plants to the global economy, including in temporally dynamic states
- Life cycle assessment - the systemic analysis of environmental flows and related impacts that arise throughout the life cycles of products and services, from raw material extraction to end-of-life disposal
- Environmentally extended input-output analysis - a method to quantify environmental footprints based on the exchanges between economic sectors, and with the environment
- Industrial symbiosis - the study of the exchange of waste as a resource among nearby industrial facilities, akin to synergistic physical relationships among biological species…”
The profitable and self-satisfied petrochemical industry sees little reason to change what they are doing and seems more interested in fighting regulation than in protecting the health of its neighbors. In May of 2022, the comedian John Oliver produced a devastating show on environmental racism featuring Cancer Alley. It is better than any piece of journalism I’ve ever seen on the issue, and I continue to use it in my graduate course on sustainability management. While the Biden administration slowly worked to address environmental justice issues, all the halting progress made by his team has now been completely upended by the Trump Administration. This is like other elements of the Trump approach: Attacks on science, erratically imposing and then delaying tariffs, re-carbonizing instead of decarbonizing our economy, and, of course, environmental deregulation. All of this will harm the American economy while disincentivizing efforts to modernize our economy and utilize innovative technologies to reduce costs while improving productivity.
The future of manufacturing and material use is a closed system circular economy that mines our waste stream for resources and closes production systems to reduce waste and pollution. Manufacturing will be increasingly automated, and artificial intelligence will be used to reduce waste and industrial accidents. Petrochemical manufacturers do not seem very interested in innovative production processes; their creativity seems to be limited to developing new chemical combinations that can be sold as new products. The new products may have unintended side effects, but if they increase revenues, these folks are happy. My hope is that somewhere in this huge industry, someone is trying to figure out a way to manufacture with less waste and fewer emissions, lowering costs and increasing profits. Given the absence of regulation, that is the only way to clean up this industry: An upstart competitor who drives the cancer alley dinosaurs out of business.
Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Columbia School of Professional Studies or Columbia University.
About the Program
The Columbia University M.S. in Sustainability Management program offered by the School of Professional Studies in partnership with the Climate School provides students cutting-edge policy and management tools they can use to help public and private organizations and governments address environmental impacts and risks, pollution control, and remediation to achieve sustainability. The program is customized for working professionals and is offered as both a full- and part-time course of study.
