The chemical industry stands at a critical juncture. Ambitious 2050 net-zero targets loom amid geopolitical and economic tensions, yet transformation is no longer a buzzword. It is a necessity. To navigate this complex landscape, Edward Bergen, a lead foresight expert at FutureBridge, engages with Dr. Sarah Hickingbottom, who leads our Chemicals & Materials Practice. Sarah brings over two decades of experience in research, strategic consulting, and innovation scale-up across the globe’s chemical, fuel, and agricultural sectors.Her expertise spans non-fossil feedstocks, supply-chain economics, new technologies, and downstream markets.Notably, Sarah served as General Manager at Circa Group, a start-up chemical company commercializing bio-based, sustainable chemicals. Prior to this, she was CEO of BioVale, a UK non-profit bioeconomy innovation cluster, where she advised entrepreneurs and contributed to circular and bioeconomy strategies at regional, UK and EU levels.
Defining Transformation in the Chemical Industry
Ed Bergen: Welcome, Sarah. To kick this off, we’re going to start with a big question. When we talk about transformation in the chemicals industry, what do we really mean?
Sarah Hickingbottom: That is a big question. What we really mean are the targets for 2050. Thanks to the Paris Agreement, all the COPs, and the work internationally and regionally with the EU Green Deal and the work of countries around the world—India, China, Japan, South Korea to name a few—industry and governments have agreed that 2050 is the year in which we must achieve Net Zero.
| Transformation from that perspective is driven by the idea of Net Zero, greenhouse gases, and particularly CO2. But industry also recognizes that to truly achieve transformation, we must consider a more holistic view, such as water use and pollution, the removal of forever chemicals, microplastics and challenges around toxicity. We have legislation around the world that supports us. In Europe, we have Fit for 55 which sets a goal for 2030 as a great interim point and benchmarks against 1990. It’s the idea of reducing greenhouse gases by 55% versus 1990. We’ve five years left as we sit here today in 2025. |  |
This is where Scope One and Scope Two come in. As we continue the transformation, increasingly, we recognize we have to go way beyond that. Look at entire value chains from feedstocks to final products to their end of life which is where we hit circularity.
The 2050 Milestone and the Urgency of Action
Ed Bergen: We’ve set out so many things right across this whole industry. It’s 2025. We’ve only got 25 more years to get to this 2050 goal. Why are we setting it now? It feels very soon. Why is the milestone 2050? And what if we don’t get there?
 | Sarah Hickingbottom: This milestone was set years ago. We’re talking over a decade, and we’ve been talking about it before that. It’s not a 25-year program. It’s more like 50, 40, 35, depending on where you start. In effect, we agreed as a society internationally with the Paris Agreement and how it is binding. It requires notable ‘transformation’. “The word is nothing short but transformation.” If we are to achieve it, then key industry that contributes – to climate change, climate warming, extreme weather events etc. – you have to do something bold. |
The Green Deal and all the individual initiatives, regulations, and policies that have come out of this in support, are all driven by that 2050 goal.It would be easy to say, perhaps we won’t achieve it. The honest truth is, perhaps we won’t. But we cannot have that attitude. We have to go for it. The chemicals industry is a notoriously slow industry for logical reasons. The capital investment of building new is enormous, and the time it takes to build a plant is long.
I was looking at the energy industry recently about the lack of transformers in Europe. We have that 2030 Fit for 55 goal with five years to go. The reality is you can’t decarbonize, if you don’t have transformers to enable you to transform your energy and there are a limited number of factories, hence a limited supply. The CapEx requirements to build them mean that the factories are saying, ‘pay us upfront, pay us in advance, and we will build the factory and we will supply you with the transformers you need’. But people don’t want to do that. They don’t want to pay five years before they’re going to get the transformer.
We’re in a chicken and egg situation. While I’m talking transformers and energy, it’s applicable to a lot of the innovations in chemicals and materials and the way industry as a whole operates. It’s logical if you’re looking at accounts and books and targets, but it doesn’t necessarily support a 25-year program that’s holistic in its thinking.
Infrastructure and Scalability Challenges
Ed Bergen: It sounds like a lack of infrastructure is a big challenge across the industry. Are we making enough progress with developing this infrastructure, or are we behind schedule? We’ve still got 25 years to get there.
Sarah Hickingbottom: I would say we are behind schedule. Great progress has been made. The chemicals industry has truly embraced the idea of using renewables and moving away from the heavy fuels of 20 years ago. How can we also use efficiencies? And use waste, now burnt for calorific value, elsewhere? By burning you reduce your energy requirement but lose out to the carbon. Certainly, great strides have been made. Where we’ve fallen short is in scaling the new technologies and innovations needed to take us that next critical step forward.
Overcoming Short-Term Challenges and Embracing Circularity
Ed Bergen: So, it is all about scalability? The industry is behind schedule. There’s a lot of work for us to do in the world. I view the world as a bit scary in 2025. There’s a lot going on. There are geopolitical challenges, there’s war. The climate crisis is already having significant impacts, from widespread wildfires to supply chain disruptions—many of them intensified by ongoing geopolitical challenges.
Could you give me an understanding of some of those biggest challenges that you think we’ll need to overcome, probably in the shorter term, so that we can really accelerate this transformation?
| Sarah Hickingbottom: Ed, you’ve highlighted some geopolitical challenges which are the backdrop to the work we’re doing as an industry to transform and meet those 2050 goals. To those, I would add logistical bottlenecks. COVID, now a historical event, brought into the spotlight the threats and risks from globalization of supply. What we really have to do now is de-risk and accelerate. That comes in many facets. Are we looking at regionalisation? I mentioned circularity before. If we create a circular world, and we take the feedstocks that today we’re calling waste and recognize that today we have the technologies to eliminate waste. Whether it be the moldy onion at the back of your fridge, or the plastic bottle that’s sitting in a bin in the town square where you live. No matter what it is, it has a life beyond. “Today’s waste is tomorrow’s feedstock.” |  |
When we say there’s no such thing as waste, today’s waste is tomorrow’s feedstock. We’re also saying, as a society, we’re actually going back to the past. It’s only in the last 80, maybe 100 years post-World War 2, that we have created a world of make, use, and throw away. A linear world. Before that, everyone, unless you were incredibly rich, took every single thing you owned and either prolonged its use until the very last second or repurposed it. What we’re doing is recognizing that we must go back to that. We’ve had a blip in how we’ve treated carbon atoms, things, stuff, and now we need to respect them.
We have the technologies, very clever technologies. People have been spending a lot of money and time over the last 20-30 years to create innovations, our toolbox has been expanded, whereby we can now recycle. We can recycle textiles and separate out mixed yarns so that the output is pure cotton or pure polyester or pure nylon or pure spandex; whatever it might be. And so we could build plants to manufacture new clothes next to where you’ve recycled the old clothes and have these pure materials as yarn for new. This means we could create a future in Europe whereby we don’t need to import, or at least we reduce dramatically, imports from China or India or anywhere else in the world. Because we take our clothes, hopefully we wear them a little bit more than perhaps we are today, but we ultimately recycle them at our population centers, create virgin quality textiles, and then manufacture new clothes and create that circularity.
We reduce risks because we minimize supply chains. But there are challenges to this. I’m talking about a vision based on what technology can enable us to do given what I’m saying is also possible with plastics and food waste. Today there is no such thing as food waste or plastic waste because we can repurpose them into useful products.
Promising Innovations and Future Solutions
Ed Bergen: You’ve already started talking about the different areas of innovation. You talked about plastics, fashion, and how we can start using clothes differently. What are some of the most promising solutions that you’ve been seeing, or spotlight on some of those companies, organizations that are playing around in this space?
Sarah Hickingbottom: I think I’ve just mentioned several of them. Indeed, this FutureBridge program that we’re here talking about is to look at 25. Why 25? Because it is 2025 and we have 25 years until that goal of 2050. So, the number fits very well with where we are, the innovations around supporting circularity, but also changing how we look at manufacturing.
 | What are our feedstocks? I’ve just mentioned plastics, textiles, but we can treat the very air itself that we breathe as a feedstock. As an interesting innovation to showcase, we have fabulous companies, large companies, small startups working on turning CO2 to chemicals, CO into chemicals. But also, with the advent of electrolysis – another innovation that uses electricity to create chemicals and renewables – we can power that electricity to truly make this the world of the future where you can separate water and air. Now, we’re looking at hydrogen, ammonia… the world of all the gases. We then can bolt on different innovations that are looking at extracting pollution from the air and turning them into inks, for example. Again, a lot of these fabulous innovations could be located where we exist. I’m not talking about chemical plants in suburban areas, but repurposing our petrochemical clusters into the world of the future. Those are a few notable innovations. |
I would be remiss if I did not speak to the world of biomass and that includes wood. All of our crops, particularly non-food crops, but also where appropriate, treating food crops as industrial crops. Food versus fuel is something that you and I can discuss on another occasion. Biomass as feedstocks opens the entire world of ‘bio-based’: bio-based chemicals, fuels, products of different descriptions. We’ve been working for a couple of decades quite seriously on opening up cellulosic biomass as well. Using the residues from food crops and wood, great strides are being made at scale to do exactly that. Bio-based chemicals are another tool in the box.
We also have the world of industrial biotechnology. Biotechnology that instead of being applied to pharmaceuticals is applied to chemicals and materials via enzymes, yeast and bacteria. We have advanced so far that in effect, if you have enough time and investment, you can almost create any chemical you really wish. We can go back to the drawing board. Ed, it would be interesting if we discussed this further, perhaps on another occasion.
One of the biggest barriers we have is mindset. It’s ourselves. We now have the tools to “think different” (to steal a phrase from Steve Jobs). If we really can do that, then we can question the fact that today’s chemical and material processes are not perfect. The solvent used in a chemical process isn’t the absolute perfect solvent.
| Instead, it’s the perfect solvent that existed 40, 50, or 60-70 years ago at the right price and volume for the process to work industrially. It might be toxic. It might damage water if it comes into contact with it. It might have polluting effects. But the benefits outweighed those costs at the time these old processes were created. Now we are in a world where we can go back and think again. We have AI, computational chemistry, the ability to redesign the processes that are the most important to us. And with industrial biotechnology and advances in engineering, look at how we could make the perfect solvent, even a personalized bespoke solvent. We can think big and think different and go back to first principles. There are challenges. We have existing infrastructure that’s working today extremely well. We can’t mothball it all immediately and build new or even mothball it the day the new comes on stream because of capital expenditure and other constraints. But we are going to have to make choices and think seriously about how we take innovations and make them a reality at mature scale in the world so that we can accelerate and de-risk and achieve those goals of 2050. |  |
The Key to Reshaping the Industry by 2050
Ed Bergen: Wow. OK, to finish, this has been fantastic. I’m going to ask you one final question. If we were to make you the Queen of the World where you have the funding and no legislation challenges, what would be the breakthrough innovation or the innovation that you would scale and invest in today as one of those that will reshape the industry by 2050?
Sarah Hickingbottom: A benign dictator. What a world to be in. It isn’t actually an innovation because the absolutely fantastic thing that we have already done, (And when I say we, I don’t mean me, I mean society… the amazing engineers, the scientists, the research developers, the academics and the businesspeople who have been doing this for 20-30 years,) have really come through. As a society, if you listen to philosophers, politicians, people out there, they will talk about climate change and the challenges that we face and they’ll say “technology will solve it”. And this is what we’re here for Ed. In this series of discussions and publications, we’re going to showcase some of those technologies that will solve it. We’re going to showcase them, because as we sit here in 2025, I would argue that actually, the world has come through. The world of science, engineering and innovation has risen to the challenge and has put out there a smorgasbord of a hundred… a thousand fabulous new innovations that answer that question: “technology will solve this”.
But the issue is that if you say, ‘technology will solve this’, it will only solve it if it is scaled up, made commercial, and applied in the world. Otherwise, that smorgasbord of technology is simply going to gather dust. What we need is for politicians and the whole world to recognize that we have these technologies, but now we need to change minds. We need to change our financial thinking and timelines, our regulatory hurdles, our attitudes towards feedstocks, market creation, the market pull, the green premium, the switching of brands and consumer behavior to scale up and to recognize that “we have these technologies, now let’s use them”.
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