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Chemicals and the Economy

PetroChina offer $1bn for INEOS European refining JV

INEOS have today announced that PetroChina have made an “irrevocable offer of $1.015bn for a 50% share in its European refining business“. This is an excellent price, given the current weak performance of the European refining industry. INEOS’ negotiating team have clearly done a superb job in ensuring that PetroChina looked beyond these difficulties, and […]

INEOS plans refining/technology JVs with PetroChina

The Falkirk Herald, INEOS’s local newspaper in Scotland, has had to wait a long time for its ‘scoop’ of June 2009 to be confirmed. It had reported then that INEOS was in talks with PetroChina about the future of the Grangemouth refinery. As PetroChina noted at the time, “downstream business has a poor margin nowadays […]

UK media speculate over Ineos asset deals as EBITDA doubles

A week ago, the BBC carried a report that PetroChina had completed “preliminary work” on a possible bid to buy a stake in Ineos’ Grangemouth refinery. The BBC quoted Ineos as confirming it was in talks with “a number of parties” over the future of Grangemouth, whilst cautioning that “the discussions with interested parties are […]

Ineos talks of PetroChina deal for Grangemouth

The ‘Falkirk Herald’, based close to Ineos’s Grangemouth facility in Scotland, is not normally the place that the blog would look for news of the potential sale of a major part of the world’s 4th largest chemical company. However, that is what happened today, when the ‘Herald’ reported that Grangemouth site manager Gordon Grant had […]

Shanghai stock market crashes

China is well worth watching at the moment. Quietly, away from the headlines, the Shanghai stock exchange has been collapsing. It is now down 44% since its October peak, and fell over 5% on Wednesday. This matters to the chemical industry for two reasons: • The immediate cause of Wednesday’s fall was news that Sinopec […]

ExxonMobil regains top place

After 5 months, ExxonMobil is once again the world’s largest company by market capitalisation. PetroChina had overtaken it last November, but has since lost half its value in China’s stock market decline. Today, PC is worth $453bn, versus EM’s $455bn. China’s stock market has lost 25% so far this year. But PC has been particularly […]

Gazprom moves further into petchems

Gazprom is becoming a player to watch in petchems. For decades, observers have speculated that Russia might increase its petchem activity. A recent comment by Gazprom deputy CEO, Valery Golubev, seemed to bring this concept closer to reality. He said that Gazprom aimed to increase its ethylene production by 350% to 7.66 million tonnes (MT) […]

Buffett sells PetroChina

I mentioned PetroChina in the very first blog entry, when the stock was trading at $155 in New York. It seemed to me to typify the new mood of confidence that I was finding as I travelled in Asia on the 10th anniversary of the Asian financial crisis. Little did I think that just 3 […]

Shenhua shares double on IPO

Coal-to-chemicals just took a further step towards becoming a major source of chemical production once again. Yesterday, major coal producer Shenhua Energy listed on the Shanghai stock exchange, and saw its shares jump 93% to value it at $173bn. Shenhua is the world’s second largest seller of coal, after the US’s Peabody Energy, and it […]

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