Who buys pyrolysis oil in Europe

What this tells you as a producer is more useful than the names. Capacity is being built for difficult feed, not easy feed, which means the bottleneck is not volume, it is whether your oil is clean enough and consistent enough to run. Chlorine and silicon decide that. See pyrolysis oil.

• Neste commissioned an upgrading facility for liquefied waste plastic at its Porvoo refinery in Finland, with capacity for up to 150,000 tonnes a year and an investment of roughly EUR 111 million. It was built specifically for difficult streams: multi-layer packaging, mixed and contaminated plastics. Neste has processed liquefied waste plastic since 2020.
• TotalEnergies has processed pyrolysis oil at its Antwerp petrochemical platform since 2020, and started up France's first advanced plastics recycling plant at Grandpuits in March 2026 at around 15,000 tonnes a year.

Producers ask us about Europe first and then immediately about everywhere else, so it is worth naming the largest player. Again: publicly reported activity, drawn from public sources.

• ExxonMobil runs advanced recycling under its Exxtend technology and is the biggest single name in the field by capacity. Its operation at Baytown, Texas has expanded in stages, with a third unit taking capacity to roughly 250 million pounds of plastic waste a year, about 113,000 tonnes, and the company has said it is on track for around 450 million pounds annually across its global sites by the end of 2026, roughly 204,000 tonnes. The output feeds certified circular polymers.
• Asia matters more than European producers assume. ExxonMobil has publicly described pyrolysis oil produced at Baytown being converted into raw materials at its chemical plant in Singapore, and has had Southeast Asian recycling projects in the 2025 to 2026 window. For a producer in Asia or Latin America, freight to Asia can beat freight to Rotterdam.
• The specification does not get easier abroad. If anything the qualifying specifications quoted by major buyers outside Europe are tighter, not looser, and the qualification process is longer. Distance does not rescue a cargo that cannot pass in Europe.

There is a layer between a pyrolysis plant and a cracker that gets left out of most conversations, and it is often the one that decides whether a producer has a market at all. Raw pyrolysis oil frequently does not reach petrochemical specification on its own. Somebody has to upgrade it.

That work is done by refiners and specialist processors rather than by the pyrolysis plant, and it is a real commercial route. Gunvor purifies pyrolysis oil derived from plastic waste at its Rotterdam refining operation and has publicly described supplying cracker-ready feedstock to Dow in Europe. For scale, Freepoint Eco-Systems has an announced arrangement to supply Dow with roughly 65,000 tonnes a year of certified circular pyrolysis oil from a plant at Eloy, Arizona, with the first phase from 2026. That one runs into Dow's United States Gulf Coast operations, not into Europe, and we say so because the model travels even where the tonnes do not: a dedicated aggregator feeding one polymer producer under a long term contract.

• What this means if your oil is not cracker grade. You are not necessarily out of the market. You may be feeding the purification step rather than the cracker, and that is a different buyer with a different specification and a different price.
• Ask which one you are talking to. A purifier tolerates contamination that a cracker will not, because removing it is their business. Being turned down by a polymer producer is not the same as being turned down by the market.
• It changes what you should put in your pack. A purifier wants to know what is in the oil and how consistently. A cracker wants to know it is already clean. Same parcel, two different conversations.

• Eni, through Versalis, is building its Hoop chemical recycling plant on pyrolysis of mixed plastic packaging waste, with a stated processing capacity of 40,000 tonnes a year producing roughly 32,000 tonnes a year of pyrolysis oil, targeted for completion by the end of 2028. Separately it has launched the authorisation process for a biorefinery at Priolo in Sicily for HVO diesel and SAF.
• MOL Group is building a pyrolysis plant of around 40,000 tonnes capacity and has completed a first ISCC PLUS certified production run on recycled-content feedstock at its petrochemical site in Tiszaujvaros, Hungary. Its stated ambition runs to 1.5 million tonnes of plastic scrap feedstock by 2030.
• Read the dates, not just the tonnages. A plant completing in 2028 is buying feedstock and qualifying suppliers well before then. If you are a producer, the qualification conversation for that capacity is happening now, not in 2028. See how to sell pyrolysis oil in Europe.

• Carbon black producers, for tyre-derived heavy fraction. The aromatic content that rules the oil out of a cracker is exactly what they want: see tyre pyrolysis oil.
• Refiners co-processing at low ratio into conventional streams, which is a different conversation from a dedicated unit: see co-processed fuels.
• Fuel blenders and industrial users for material that will not reach petrochemical specification. Lower value, but real and immediate.
• Traders and physical intermediaries who aggregate small parcels into cargo-sized lots. Useful when your volume is below what a major will look at.

Not with an email saying you have pyrolysis oil. Every one of these companies receives those weekly and ignores them.

If you are not sure who to approach, start with who buys pyrolysis oil in Europe, which sets out the companies that actually have capacity and what each one is known to take.

What gets read is a complete pack: feedstock, process, country of origin, monthly tonnage and annual capacity, storage and loading, certification status, a dated laboratory assay with chlorine and silicon on it, and evidence that two or three batches look alike. The full route is set out on how to sell pyrolysis oil in Europe.

And be realistic about scale. A demonstration plant taking 15,000 tonnes a year is not going to build a process around 200 tonnes a month unless somebody aggregates it first. That aggregation is one of the things a broker is actually for.

Everything above comes from what these companies have published about their own activity, and capacity announcements move: plants get delayed, projects get cancelled, and offtake arrangements are rarely public. Treat this as orientation and verify anything you are about to act on.

We name no client of ours anywhere on this site, and we do not claim to represent any company listed here. Read this page as orientation on where capacity exists, nothing more. If a broker tells you they can sell your cargo to a named major, ask them to be precise about what that means before you believe it.