Buying a pyrolysis plant: machines, costs and selling the oil

Published prices from the main Chinese manufacturers span roughly eleven thousand dollars for small batch plants to around half a million for large continuous lines, with most serious tyre and plastic installations landing between fifty and three hundred fifty thousand before installation and permits. The machine quote is the anchor, not the budget.

The best Chinese manufacturers build equipment that runs worldwide, and China sets the market's price benchmark. Judge the supplier the way you judge any industrial vendor, reference plants, oil analyses from running installations, materials and certification, service commitments in the contract. Geography does not decide quality, specification discipline does.

Batch suits smaller feedstock flows with lower capital, continuous suits plants chasing consistency and volume. Because buyers pay for repeatable analysis, continuous running usually wins on oil value, when the feedstock supply justifies it. Match the machine to the feedstock you can secure, not the reverse.

Roughly 4 to 4.5 tonnes of oil from 10 tonnes of tyres, and 6 to 8 from clean polyolefin plastics, the rest leaving as char, gas and water. Those yields are the plant's revenue physics, and every business plan should be checked against them honestly.

When three things align, secured feedstock at the right price, a machine that holds its specification, and a buyer for the oil at a price that covers capital and operations. The profitability question is an offtake question wearing overalls, which is why we say arrange the oil buyer before the deposit.

Environmental permits for emissions and waste handling, industrial operating licences, pressure vessel and safety certifications, and waste management authorisations where feedstock arrives as waste. Permitting is country and site specific, and it outlasts the equipment negotiation, start it first.

Yes, when the oil enters under the right classification, waste procedures or product customs rules, with the analysis, REACH position and certificate chain in order. We place plant output from Asia into European buyers routinely, the file leads the tanker.

If the oil will carry recycled content claims into chemicals and fuels, yes, and planning the certification during construction costs weeks, retrofitting it after commissioning costs months. The certificate is part of the plant's revenue design.

You can and should, qualification runs on projected specification and samples from the supplier's reference plants, and the offtake you sign early is the financing you raise cheaper. Buyers walk with projects all the time, ours among them, bring the file early.

The size your feedstock security and your oil buyer support, in that order. Undersized plants disappoint investors, oversized plants buy feedstock at panic prices, and the right size is a supply contract question before it is an equipment catalogue question.

Negotiate spare part packages, wear part schedules, commissioning support on site and response times into the contract, and check the reference plants' uptime stories yourself. Warranty is a contract clause, service is a relationship, buy both.

The feedstock you can secure for years, clean polyolefin plastics for oil yield, tyres for capacity and the recovered carbon black side stream, each with different buyers for the output. The machine follows the feedstock, the oil buyer follows the machine, plan in that order.

We do not sell or represent machine makers, and we say so plainly, but we will tell you whether the oil the machine is specified to make will sell, at what specification and what price level. That is the half of the decision the supplier cannot answer, and it is the half that repays the loan.