In its first deal since splitting from DuPont on Apr. 1, Dow has signed an agreement with Petronas Chemicals Glycols to collaborate on a carbon project at Petronas’s ethylene oxide (EO) plant in Kertih, Terengganu, Malaysia.

The project will support Dow’s official carbon partnership with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that was announced in September 2017 and will run to 2020. Dow and the IOC are using sports as a rallying platform and starting point to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across specific value chains.

“The goal of the Dow-IOC partnership is to advance the adoption of better technologies and processes and demonstrate resource efficiency and more sustainable practices across different industries and markets,” explained Nicoletta Piccolrovazzi, global technology & sustainability director at Dow Olympic & Sports Solutions.

Petronas’s plant in Malaysia is Dow’s first customer for its Meteor EO-Retro 2000 (MR2000) high-selectivity catalyst, which improves the performance of the EO production process while reducing energy consumption. Dow said the catalyst’s higher selectivity to EO converts more of the ethylene feedstock to the oxide, thus reducing the formation of CO₂.

In a typical world-scale EO plant, Dow estimates that its MR2000 catalyst enables emissions reductions that are comparable to taking more than 10,000 cars off the road every year. 

As part of the carbon project, Dow and Petronas will work together to quantify and obtain third-party verification of the climate benefits. This, said Dow, will help enable a positive climate legacy and balance the IOC’s operational carbon footprint. It added that the agreement is among the first of many similar joint efforts to implement decarbonization projects in areas such as infrastructure, transportation, packaging and manufacturing.

As the official carbon partner of the Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia, in 2014 and in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2016, the US company said it had already delivered third party verified greenhouse gas reductions amounting to 3.64 million t of CO₂ equivalent as of June 2018.