Ending Mercury-Based Chlorine Production In Europe

At a chemical plant in Lavéra, about 30 miles west of Marseilles in the south of France, yellow earthmovers motored into action earlier this fall. Similar projects are getting under way at facilities in the Belgian port of Antwerp, Ibbenbüren in northwest Germany, and several other industrial European towns.

The chemical companies behind these projects are racing to meet an end-of-2017 deadline in Europe to switch to a mercury-free method of manufacturing chlorine and caustic soda. But not every company that uses mercury is willing to pay the price of conversion. When the construction dust settles in 2018, Europe’s chlor-alkali industry could look very different.

Chlorine and caustic soda are manufactured commercially by electrolyzing a sodium chloride solution in a series of cells. The first such plants, built in the 1890s, employed a graphite anode at which chloride ions shed electrons and combine to form chlorine gas. At a mercury cathode, sodium ions pick up electrons and form sodium metal. After dissolving in mercury, the metal reacts with hydroxyl groups from water to form sodium hydroxide, or caustic soda.

Over the years, the environmental consequences of manufacturing with mercury became all too apparent, and the mercury-cell process began to be replaced by diaphragm and then membrane technologies. But the 125-year-old process is still employed today, and nowhere more so than in Europe.

According to Euro Chlor, the European chlor-alkali industry’s trade association, about 23% of the Continent’s production capacity, some 30 plants, is based on mercury technology. In the U.S., by contrast, just two plants use mercury, and one of them, operated by Ashta Chemicals, is in the process of converting to membrane technology.

For years Europe’s industry vowed to end mercury-based production by 2020. But late in 2013, the European Commission (EC) released revised best-available-techniques standards that deem the process no longer adequate. The rules also target production of chlorine and caustic soda with asbestos-containing diaphragm cells. Publication of the rules started a countdown to the end of mercury-based production.

“The deadline is the 11th of December, 2017. This is the ‘D-Day,’ ” says Stein Raae, global director of the chlor-alkali and vinyls practice at the consulting firm IHS Chemical.

It’s a timetable that is not being embraced by all firms, according to Åke Eriksson, business development manager for sustainability services at Golder Associates, an engineering firm that, among other things, helps companies decommission old industrial facilities. “I think everyone was prepared for a stop date, but few thought it would be enforced to this particular date,” he says.

Eriksson anticipates some political wrangling to push the deadline out or establish a transition period. Still, companies are scrambling to get conversion projects off the ground.

Kem One announced the Lavéra project in April 2014, putting the price tag at $170 million. Evonik Industries and AkzoNobel disclosed in July 2014 that they were in talks about building a membrane-cell plant to replace AkzoNobel’s mercury-based facility in Ibbenbüren. The firms finalized their plans in June 2015.

Other decisions were made even more recently. Vynova said in August that it will convert its mercury-cell plant in Tessenderlo, Belgium. Inovyn followed in September with an announcement about its site in Antwerp. BASF revealed last month that it will convert its remaining mercury-cell facilities in Ludwigshafen, Germany.

Separately, Dow Chemical has told local authorities that it will modernize its plant in Stade, Germany—Europe’s largest chlor-alkali facility—to use asbestos-free diaphragms.

Companies are collectively spending billions of dollars on the projects at an unfortunate time for the European chlor-alkali industry. Demand for the sector’s main derivative, polyvinyl chloride, has fallen along with the construction industry, which is the main buyer of PVC. Manufacturers are plagued by high energy prices.

Indeed, three of the companies undertaking conversions—Kem One, Inovyn, and Vynova—were created out of assets cast off by bigger firms that were disenchanted with the chlorine and vinyls businesses.

Kem One is the former chlorovinyls business of the French specialty chemical firm Arkema. A $1 billion-per-year company, it spent time in bankruptcy in 2013 before being acquired for a mere $14 million. Inovyn was formed earlier this year through the combination of businesses owned by Solvay and Ineos. Vynova, in turn, was created out of plants that the EC forced Solvay and Ineos to sell to pass antitrust muster.

Given the European industry’s financial woes, not every site will be converted. Inovyn said soon after it launched earlier this year that it will close its mercury-based plant in Runcorn, England, the largest in Europe. The company hopes to meet its needs from membrane facilities in Runcorn that it co-owns with Vynova.

And while Inovyn is converting the Antwerp site, the company hasn’t revealed plans for mercury chlor-alkali plants in Stenungsund, Sweden, and Torrelavega, Spain. Inovyn tells C&EN that it is evaluating its chlorine strategy in light of the new regulations and the firm’s recent formation.

Other companies in Spain—notably the Spanish chemical maker Ercros, which operates two mercury-cell plants—have yet to show their hands. “We will be watching Ercros’s and Inovyn’s decisions on their plants in Spain with interest,” IHS’s Raae says.

Those that are converting shouldn’t expect a smooth road, Golder’s Eriksson cautions. Chlor-alkali plant decommissionings are notorious for yielding unfortunate surprises. Eriksson, who has been involved with four mercury-cell shutdowns, has seen companies encounter unexpected soil and groundwater contamination by mercury, a dense liquid that tends to follow gravity pathways deep into the ground.

“You may think you’re into a conversion project, but at the same time you are in a large remediation and cleanup program,” he says.

Myriad other hurdles loom. For example, disposing the hundreds of tons of mercury that collectively reside in Europe’s chlor-alkali cells will not be easy, Eriksson adds. The preferred form of internment identified in the EC’s best available techniques, he notes, is reaction with sulfur and disposal in unused German salt mines.

“Understand that the capacity to process and deposit waste in these repositories is limited,” he says. Industry executives point to Germany’s Remondis as the only European firm with the capability to safely dispose mercury-contaminated materials.

Nonetheless, companies that want to remain in the chlor-alkali business have no choice but to press ahead. Pierre Fauvarque, strategy and purchasing director at Kem One, says his firm’s engineering contracts are in place and its needed equipment has been ordered.

To Fauvarque, the benefits of converting are clear. “One, we get rid of mercury. Two, we improve the cost of production,” he says. To the consternation of its competitors, Kem One will have help from the French government in the form of a $17 million grant and a $90 million loan.

Fauvarque is confident that Kem One’s new capacity will be up and running by the end of 2016, comfortably ahead of the EC deadline. For companies that made their decisions later, however, the timetable will be tighter.

Vynova, for example, is still finalizing engineering and purchasing contracts, according to Johan van Den Broeck, the firm’s commercial director. The process would have begun earlier, he notes, had it not been for delays caused by the complex transactions that created Inovyn and Vynova.

Van Den Broeck hopes to sign all agreements by Dec. 1 and have engineers on the Tessenderlo site by the beginning of 2016. His goal is to complete the conversion by the end of 2017, but he knows it will require focus. “Let’s not fool around,” he says. “It’s going to be a tight timeline.”

IHS’s Raae, meanwhile, has been running the numbers on the industry impact of the mercury phaseout. He estimates that the EC directive targets about 3 million metric tons per year of chlorine capacity. He also figures that plants that aren’t yet the subject of conversion announcements are likely to be closed. “The sand is about to run out of the hourglass,” he says.

Those plants represent between 1.0 million and 1.2 million metric tons of capacity. But because they use older, less efficient technology, their owners have been operating them at low rates in recent years. By IHS’s calculation, Europe’s net loss in chlorine production will be no more than 400,000 metric tons out of overall production of close to 10 million metric tons last year. “That’s not as dramatic as it looked originally,” Raae notes.

Still, chlor-alkali executives are looking forward to better times on the other side of what they acknowledge will be a costly and uncertain two years. Between the decrease in capacity and an increase in efficiency, the industry should be in better shape post-2017, according to Kem One’s Fauvarque.

“Overall, we think the chlor-alkali industry in Europe is going in the right direction and should be more competitive,” he says.

And taking the long view, Raae credits the global chlorine industry for its sweeping embrace of energy-efficient membrane manufacturing technology. In 1990, membrane plants represented about 18% of the world’s production capacity. By the time Europe’s mercury phaseout is complete, the figure will be close to 80%.

“This is one of the most dramatic events in the history of the chlor-alkali industry,” he says. “It’s what we call an industrial revolution.”