Sourced conceptual inventory per tonne of raw (not upgraded) pyrolysis oil from sorted PE/PP waste: yield and process heat from a 2026 JRC review, electricity from a US company survey, part of the gas fired for heat. The oil is a steam-cracker feed after upgrading. No flowsheet; not reviewed.
Raw pyrolysis oil by continuous thermal pyrolysis of mixed polyolefin plastic waste
Sourced conceptual inventory per tonne of raw (not upgraded) pyrolysis oil from sorted PE/PP waste: yield and process heat from a 2026 JRC review, electricity from a US company survey, part of the gas fired for heat. The oil is a steam-cracker feed after upgrading. No flowsheet; not reviewed.
Research outputNot engineering advice and not an approved design: do not use it for construction, operation or safety decisions. What this means
Overview
- Capacity
- per tonne of raw pyrolysis oil (the dataset's basis); no plant size
What goes in and out
In
- Mixed polyolefin plastic wasteFeedstocksorted and pretreated; burden-free under cut-off
Out
- Plastic pyrolysis oilMain product
- Plastic pyrolysis gasCo-productthe gas not fired for process heat
- Pyrolysis charWaste
Utilities: Electricity (a US survey median that includes pretreatment and on-site upgrading)
Life cycle assessment
No footprint assessed yet; the process is part of the life-cycle inventory below.
In the open LCI database (cheme-as-code-atlas-preview-a3c52e4) as Raw plastic pyrolysis oil, not upgraded Preliminary; Plastic pyrolysis gas, Pyrolysis gas not fired in the process, exported as fuel gas Preliminary.
Download it for Brightway, openLCA and other tools.
In the LCI database: system model, datasets and KPIs against the benchmarks
In the LCI database
- Status
- Preliminary 1 unmapped exchange. Some exchanges have no background mapping yet: they are exported unlinked and count no burden, so the inventory is incomplete.
- System model
- attributional, cut-off (methodology 1.1.0)
- Allocation
- energy (physical-energy, from mappings) · product:plastic-pyrolysis-gas 16.1 %, product:plastic-pyrolysis-oil 83.9 %
- Allocation findings
- none
- Change report
- Not available: this build has no change report against an earlier release.
- Dataset pages
- Plastic pyrolysis gas, Pyrolysis gas not fired in the process, exported as fuel gas Preliminary · Raw plastic pyrolysis oil, not upgraded Preliminary
KPI benchmark positions
| KPI | Value | Reference range | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pyrolysis liquid per mass of plastic waste fed to pyrolysis | – kg/kg | 0.6 to 0.8 kg/kg | not evaluated |
| Electricity per t of raw pyrolysis oil No second open figure found (2026-11-05). Read: JRC 2023 EUR 31423 (its pyrolysis inventories are confidential survey data, not published), JRC 2026 EUR 40766 (costs and yields, no electricity), Gracida-Alvarez et al. 2023, doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2023.138867 (refers to ANL-22/37 for the energy data). Not readable: ANL-22/37 (OSTI 1885570 served a bot check) and Jeswani et al. 2021, doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.144483 (HTTP 403). The dataset's value is Benavides et al. 2017, its own source. | – kWh/t | not available | not evaluated |
Maturity and review
Design maturity Concept (claimed): An idea or first flowsheet; numbers are rough. No independent engineering review yet. Automated checks passing is not a review.
Calculation maturity, from the checked evidenceNot assessed
The process has no maturity report (cheme maturity, checks/maturity.json), so no calculation maturity is established.
No level shownThe design maturity (Concept) is the manifest's claim, not evidence. A level appears here once the process's repository holds a current report from
cheme maturity --write.Artifact completeness
Which deliverables exist. They never raise a calculation maturity level: a drawing from unchecked numbers is still unchecked.
Not reported without a maturity report.
Independent review
Not independently reviewed
No independent engineering review yet. Automated checks passing is not a review.
Set by people only. Reaching a calculation maturity level or passing automated checks is not an independent review or an approval.
Where the evidence comes from
- Report
processes/plastic-pyrolysis-1/checks/maturity.json(not in the library)- Method
- How ChemE-as-Code checks the levels (requirement by requirement)
Open items
0 open items · 0 closed
New action itemNew engineering holdNew technical queryNew design changeAll issues
Sources
- Library version
- a3c52e4 (process last changed in a3c52e4)
- Data
- Catalog record (JSON) · CC-BY-4.0
- Files
- View the files on GitHub · change history and authors
References
- Gaudillat, P., Marschinski, R., Saveyn, H. (2026) Economic viability of chemical recycling: current and future perspectives. JRC147061, EUR 40766, Annex A.5 and Tables 3, 5 and 7 · doi:10.2760/6105801
- Garcia-Gutierrez, P. et al. (2023) Environmental and economic assessment of plastic waste recycling. JRC132067, EUR 31423 EN, sections 3.2.2.1 and 3.4 · doi:10.2760/0472
- Benavides, P.T., Sun, P., Han, J., Dunn, J.B., Wang, M. (2017) Life-cycle analysis of fuels from post-use non-recycled plastics. Fuel 203:11-22 (accepted manuscript, OSTI 1353191) · doi:10.1016/j.fuel.2017.04.070
- IPCC (2006) Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, Vol. 2 Energy, ch. 1 Table 1.2 and ch. 2 Table 2.3
- Channiwala, S.A., Parikh, P.P. (2002) A unified correlation for estimating HHV of solid, liquid and gaseous fuels. Fuel 81(8):1051-1063 (the LHV of the modelled (CH2)n feed) · doi:10.1016/S0016-2361(01)00131-4
How to cite
For the data, cite the Process Atlas paper; for the platform that builds and checks it, the ChemE-as-Code paper.
Schweidtmann, A. M. & Weber, J. M. (2026, in preparation). Process Atlas: an open, git-native, reproducible library and life cycle inventory of chemical processes (working title).
For this process: "Raw pyrolysis oil by continuous thermal pyrolysis of mixed polyolefin plastic waste", ChemE-as-Code process library, version a3c52e4.
BibTeX
@unpublished{schweidtmann_process_atlas,
author = {Schweidtmann, Artur M. and Weber, Jana M.},
title = {{Process Atlas: an open, git-native, reproducible library and life cycle inventory of chemical processes (working title)}},
year = {2026},
url = {https://atlas.cheme-as-code.org},
note = {in preparation}
}Schweidtmann, A. M. (2026). ChemE-as-Code: An Open-Source Platform for Agentic AI in Chemical Engineering. arXiv:2611.07947. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2611.07947
BibTeX
@misc{schweidtmann_cheme_as_code,
author = {Schweidtmann, Artur M.},
title = {{ChemE-as-Code: An Open-Source Platform for Agentic AI in Chemical Engineering}},
year = {2026},
eprint = {2611.07947},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2611.07947},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07947}
}