FANCY THAT?:

Ebara, the Japanese industrial machinery and plant engineering company, is working on technology to produce environmentally friendly turquoise hydrogen. It is also promoting its method of gasifying and recycling plastic waste.

"Turquoise" hydrogen is created using methane pyrolysis, the thermal decomposition of natural gas (mostly methane) into hydrogen and solid carbon that can be sold rather than sequestered. [...]

More than 20 years ago, Ebara and Ube Industries, a Japanese chemical company, developed a pressurized gasification technology to recycle plastic waste into chemical feedstock. Known as the Ebara Ube Process (EUP), it has been used since 2003 by Showa Denko, another Japanese chemical company.

Now, with plastic waste becoming a major global environmental issue and the Japanese government having recognized hydrogen and ammonia produced from used plastic as acceptable non-fossil fuels, EUP's time has arguably come.

As noted by JGC, one of Japan's and the world's leading industrial plant engineering companies that licensed the process in 2020, "EUP continues to be the only technology for gasification chemical recycling in the world with a long-term track record of commercial operation."

Ebara believes that EUP "will help significantly increase the percentage of waste plastics that are recycled. It decomposes waste plastics that are composed of different materials and impurities, which presents difficulties for other recycling methods, and recycles them into a variety of chemicals, such as ammonia, methanol and olefin, enabling them to be reused as raw materials for plastics, rubber, and chemical fibers."

It can also produce hydrogen for local consumption.

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