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Archive | April, 2007

Are coal-to-chemicals projects in China a load of nonsense?

By on 30 April, 2007 in China, Economics, Projects, Technology

Maybe, if the mystery blogger at the excellent http://www.theoildrum.com/ site knows what he is talking about. I’ve pasted in his arguments below. You need to register at this site, which takes only a few minutes, if you want to get into the wider debate about how energy issues will have a critical bearing on all [...]

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Liveris defends strategy after a very tough few weeks

By on 27 April, 2007 in Australia, Olefins, Polyolefins, Styrenics

Imagine having to sack two of your senior management team after unauthorised takeover discussions. And then imagine just a few weeks later being forced to announce a 20% reduction in first quarter earnings. Andrew Liveris, Dow CEO (continuing our Dow theme – see below), is having a hard time of it. Mind you, life is [...]

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Dow fit with Reliance makes the most sense

By on 27 April, 2007 in India, Middle East, Olefins, Polyolefins

Reliance is building the world’s first cracker that will be entirely fed by off-gas from its huge refinery expansion at Jamnagar. This technology has been used before, but never on this scale because nobody has had enough refinery capacity to run a cracker 100% on very cheap off-gas. The Dow strategy includes looking for cheaper [...]

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Don’t read this if all you care about is today’s C2 price

By on 26 April, 2007 in Business, China, Environment, Markets, Olefins, Polyolefins

The International Energy Agency has further brought forward its forecast on when China will become the world’s biggest polluter to 2007 from 2010. Only three years ago, they were predicting not before 2025! Coal-fired power stations are big cause of rising greenhouse gas emissions in China, says the IEA. Will this result in a harder [...]

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Two optimistic views of the future

By on 23 April, 2007 in Business, China, Economics, Olefins, Polyolefins, Projects

The eternal optimists at Nova Chemicals presented a very bullish view of olefins and polyolefins markets at their recent results meeting.Aaron Yap, trader with Integra, was also equally bullish at the ICIS Asian Polymers Conference in Shanghai last week – see Download file In short, Aaron believed that demand growth would hold up downstream while [...]

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A new era of globalisation?

By on 11 April, 2007 in Business, China, Economics

I was chatting to my good friend and contact Paul Hodges of International eChem yesterday.He believes we’ve entered globalisation part II, where the impact of higher raw material prices will trigger harmful inflation. As Ben Bernanke has pointed out, oil prices are 40% higher than would otherwise have been the case without the recent boom [...]

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This is not the time to behave like an Ostrich

By on 9 April, 2007 in Business, China, Economics, Environment, Projects

The United Nations report on climate change, released last Friday, warned of 50 million made homeless as a result of global warming by as early as 2010. Reports such as this will serve to pile even more pressure on the big polluters including, of course, China – the mothership of chemical demand growth. Any investor [...]

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