Cleaner chemicals for critical industries: Wesfarmers Chemicals, Energy & Fertilisers (WesCEF)

At WesCEF’s Kwinana site in Western Australia, Blake Hanavan and Karen Zhou are among a highly committed team helping drive significant emissions reductions in heavy industry.

Their focus is nitrous oxide, a lesser-known greenhouse gas that is 265 times more potent than carbon dioxide. It is released during the manufacture of nitric acid – a key ingredient used to make ammonium nitrate, which is used in fertilisers to grow food and in mining to drive Australia’s exports.

Through the deployment of abatement catalysts, emissions from the process are set to be reduced by 98% when rolled out across WesCEF’s three nitric acid plants by 2030.

The work itself is invisible – an invisible and odourless gas and a process hidden in stainless steel reactors.

But the impact is significant in delivering large-scale decarbonisation results for our future.