From hazard recognition to circularity: A deep dive into the chemicals industry with Stephen Reynolds

Posted: April 04, 2025

As the industrial world adapts to meet the demands of the moment, the chemicals industry is stepping into a pivotal role—quietly undergirding everything from the energy transition to the production of everyday goods. To better understand where the industry is headed, we sat down with Stephen Reynolds, a veteran chemical engineer and operations expert, for a wide-ranging conversation. From safety and circularity to AI and green innovation, he offers a clear-eyed view of both the challenges and the opportunities ahead.

Let’s begin with the big picture. What is your outlook for the industry?

Reynolds: One thing to realize is that the chemicals industry is everywhere and that it touches nearly every other industry in our world. They add trillions of dollars to the global GDP, and they add hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of jobs around the world.

The chemicals industry is also at the forefront of innovation for green energy and green materials. All the lithium for batteries, for instance—which will play a crucial role in the energy transition—have to be processed into high-purity compounds before they can be put into battery cells. This happens in chemical processing plants. Similarly, all the specialty materials—carbon fibers, specialized thermoplastics, engineered silicas—for the new cars and wind turbines are manufactured through chemical processes.

So we have our part to play in the future of sustainable industry. We'll have our bumps and bruises along the way as we navigate higher energy costs and demand and market shifts, but we'll just have to be ready for those changes and roll with it for a while.

What are some of the main challenges the industry is facing?

Reynolds: Since I'm a chemical operations guy by background, I can't start any chemicals conversation without talking first about safety. We see headlines in the news every once in a while, that this plant had an incident or caused a shelter-in-place chemicals release. So I would still lead with personnel safety and regulatory compliance as core challenges for the industry, which poses a problem for companies as we’re seeing a generation of workers retire.  Witnessing these safety and environmental events in the industry adds further difficulty and complexity to attracting and retaining new talent.

Our main goal as chemical professionals is to have our teams be safe and leave work each day. We also want to be good neighbors and good stewards of our environment and our communities.

So in an effort to keep workers safe, are you seeing companies invest more heavily in asset reliability and predictive analytics to make sure that equipment is up and running?

Reynolds: Yes. From a digital standpoint, we want to be great at hazard recognition. We’re using the most advanced analytics and AI to get out in front of potential hazards in process equipment. I think that's taken the edge off and allowed us to learn from our mistakes in the past, and that's creating a safer environment for our people.

In terms of sustainability, what are the top priorities for the industry? Is the focus more on reducing energy use, tracking emissions, minimizing waste, or moving toward designing for circularity?

Reynolds: The answer is “yes.” It depends on the process that we're speaking to. The chemical industry is wildly diverse, and that's one of our challenges. There are two main routes to reducing our carbon footprint, and that's process innovation or process remediation.

For the commodity processes, the chemistry is well-known, and the processes have matured over many years. In these cases, we might look to capture the carbon on the backside – the legacy scrubbers and the more modern carbon capture units. Of course, we’ll continue with energy management and optimization to reduce our overall consumption.

For the newer processes—where the innovation's truly happening in chemicals—they’re designing the processes to actually have a lower carbon footprint. Paints and coatings are a great example. Producers are working on new processes with less solvent or different solvents, to reduce emissions and lower their overall carbon footprint.

Could you talk a bit more about how the industry is approaching circularity?

So the question becomes, how do we redesign those additives for those properties that customers need while making them more circular? There will be whole engineering fields opening up for that. We’re always going to have a customer spec. It's our job as manufacturers to satisfy that need in a sustainable way.

The next step will be chemically recycling plastics for a truly circular loop. That's where the innovation really is. We understand the chemistry for the most part—conversion back to feedstock, depolymerization back to monomers, or dissolution into new polymers. Now it's really about making it commercially viable, scalable, and cost-effective.

Nobody wants to spend $15 on a box of Ziploc bags because it went through the circular loop and double manufacturing. Consumers are also going to have to be engaged and aware, so they’ll embrace that change, and there will need to be policy decisions to support it.

How is automation and AI changing the industry? It's disrupting quite a few industries, and I'm not sure what the effect has been in chemicals.

Reynolds: I’d say the industry has matured in automation, particularly in big commodity chemicals. We've been incorporating automation for decades. Advanced process control and safety instrumented systems have come a long way, enabling tighter quality control, automated startup and shutdown, automated transitions, enhanced energy efficiency, etc.

What about where AI fits into chemicals operations?

Not only is it going to alert us to problems and upcoming events—we can pose questions to it. For instance, an operator can ask the AI, “Hey, I'm seeing this. What should I do about it?”

The AI would then be able to respond with knowledge of past examples, such as the last incident of this type and then provide troubleshooting recommendations. We're going to interact with the operations data in this way going forward. From an operations standpoint, our decisions are going to come that much faster and be that much better.

 On the design side, AI is already being used to find those new process routes for chemistry that hasn’t been invented yet, and that opens the door to all kinds of fun things.

We wrote an article last fall about using AI to design drugs with active pharmaceutical ingredients that break down faster once they’re in waterways.

Reynolds: We're going to see AI innovate the chemicals industry as well. We’ll be able to tell AI:

“I need the carbon footprint of my product to be as close to 0 as possible. What does that chemistry look like? Or, what's the molecule I need to have similar properties for this finished good?” And as we incorporate those ideas, we’ll design the product. We'll just see that design phase become much more interesting and even faster than it is today.

To close out our discussion, could you talk about how you ended up as a chemical engineer?

Reynolds: I think this ties in with how we are attracting new folks to the industry. For me, I had a knack for chemistry in high school.  I had an excellent chemistry teacher that basically guided me in this path. He said, “Look, you can either take the chemistry route, and go all the way to get a PhD, or if you like working and seeing things made, go into engineering.” And so I went into engineering, and it's exciting every day. It's a great industry to be engaged in.

Want to learn more about how chemical companies are driving profitability while meeting sustainability demands?

Read AVEVA’s latest ebook, “Closing the loop: How industrial intelligence drives profitability and circularity throughout the chemicals life cycle.”