Climate change is the greatest challenge of the 21st century. Swift and resolute action is needed to ensure that the targets agreed in the Paris Climate Agreement can be achieved. We stand by this responsibility. In many areas, products and innovations based on chemistry are the key to a climate-neutral future – from insulation foams for energy-efficient buildings, lightweight construction components and battery materials for e-mobility to sustainable agriculture.

At the same time, we are working intensively to significantly reduce the carbon footprint of our production and thus of our products. Our target: Net zero emissions by 2050.¹ We have set ourselves an ambitious milestone on this path. By 2030, we want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25% compared with 2018 – while growing production volumes in parallel. Compared with 1990, this would translate into a reduction of around 60%. We are intensely pursuing our climate protection targets with investments of up to €4 billion by 2030. Our focus here is on five strategic levers:

• Grey-to-green: We are increasingly meeting our electricity needs from renewable sources. In 2022, the share of green power was 16%.
• Power-to-steam: In the future, we will increasingly rely on electrification and energy recovery in steam generation, for example, through the use of heat pumps or e-boilers.
• New technologies: We are developing pioneering carbon-free and low-carbon production processes, especially for emis­sion-intensive basic chemicals such as hydrogen, olefins and aromatics.
• Bio-based feedstocks: We are increasingly replacing fossil resources with alternative raw materials. In 2022, for example, we procured around 1.2 million metric tons of renewable raw materials.
• Continuous opex: We are working to further improve the energy and process efficiency of our plants. In 2022 alone, BASF implemented more than 500 operational excellence measures.­

We want to play an active and responsible role in shaping the transformation toward a climate-neutral society. This also requires a political and regulatory environment that promotes innovation in climate protection, makes it possible to develop new processes that are competitive internationally and, above all, resolutely drives forward the expansion of renewable energies. Initial estimates suggest that at the Lud­wigshafen site in Germany alone, we would need three to four times more green electricity than in 2021 to fully implement new, low-carbon electricity-based production processes. To meet this demand, we are investing in our own power assets and are increasingly buying green electricity on the market (make & buy approach).

We are also addressing the question of how climate change affects our sites. In Ludwigshafen, for example, we have been implementing a range of climate resilience measures for dealing with low water levels on the Rhine River since 2018, including an early warning system, multimodal transportation concepts, smarter management of cooling water and the development of an innovative type of barge for very low water levels. These measures already proved successful during the dry period in summer 2022.

• More information on energy and climate protection