Our Approach and Performance

We continue to work towards our ambitious, company-wide, resource-and energy-efficiency sustainability goals: reducing greenhouse-gas, energy, and water intensities by 25 percent, and material-loss intensity by 50 percent, from 2010 levels by 2025.

We have achieved positive results to date by driving a sustainability culture, training employees, and applying operational excellence. We commit to innovation and efficiency improvement, and provide the structure and guidance to achieve it. To do so, SABIC and its manufacturing affiliates rigorously monitor and evaluate performance, with the Corporate Sustainability department reporting the results and striving for continuous improvement. Our Manufacturing corporate function works closely with Technology and Innovation, and Finance on sustainability progress. The overall direction is reviewed twice a year and updated by the CEO and the Sustainability Council.

Through a combination of culture, experience, and commitment, SABIC is poised for long-term success as a sustainable leader in the chemical industry.

Key Metrics and Trends

Changes in performance compared to 2010 in greenhouse-gas emission, energy use, freshwater use, material loss, flaring reduction. Total CO₂ utilization is the absolute usage in 2018. The intensities are based on units per metric ton of external product sales.

OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE

As part of a company-wide commitment to excellence, we strive for better resource intensities throughout our operations. In 2017, we launched the SABIC Certified Energy Expert Program, an innovative in-house training that helps to improve our energy-efficiency capabilities and build a network of experts. To date, 84 people have qualified as SABIC-certified energy experts, up from 37 last year.

As we develop mega-projects globally, we rely on comprehensive sustainability assessments of each proposed project. To date, we have assessed 22 of these mega-projects, and we identified 9 million gigajoules (GJ) of potential energy-efficiency-improvement opportunities for further evaluation.

This year, SABIC adopted the Marginal Abatement Cost of Carbon (MACC) tool to help guide sustainability-and-efficiency project selections. MACC curves are used to identify the relative costs and impacts of initiatives in order to maximize return on investment and prioritize cost-efficient technologies.

At the Jubail and Yanbu facilities of our manufacturing affiliate Gas, we implemented an advanced process control system, reducing consumption by about 56,500 GJ per year.

At our affiliate Kemya in Saudi Arabia, we successfully piloted an energy-optimizer tool in 2017 and rolled out the tool to three additional sites.

At our site in Cartagena, Spain, we introduced new energy dashboards; energy intensity improved by 0.9 percent, even amid planned multi-year maintenance inspections.

At our SAFCO manufacturing affiliate, the energy dashboards previously installed achieved a 15 percent reduction in greenhouse-gas intensity and a 7 percent reduction in energy intensity versus 2017.

We are working to help our affiliates achieve ISO 50001 certification in recognition of their energy-efficiency efforts. The following affiliates and sites have already been certified: Kemya, Yansab, Petrokemya, Sharq, and Hadeed in Saudi Arabia, and Gelsenkirchen in Germany. Ibn Zahr is expecting to be certified in 2019.

SAUDI ENERGY EFFICIENCY PROGRAM

SABIC continues to support the government-led Saudi Energy Efficiency Program (SEEP) to reduce fossil-fuel consumption in Saudi Arabia and improve overall energy efficiency. We work with manufacturing affiliates to. We collect annual data on performance at all of our Saudi sites, and implement energy-efficiency projects. This year, we completed Energy Opportunity Assessments with Ar-Razi, Kemya, Sadaf, Petrokemya, Sharq, and Ibn Rushd.