February 2009 Archives

It's Spring, and the petrochemical industry's thoughts have turned to .... babies.

From the fertile loins of the industry come babies in droves. The Blog's inbox is constantly on the verge of crashing from the weight of baby photo attachments.

The new crop is here.

Click here for more on "Chemicals II: the next generation"

ICIS polymers editor Linda Naylor sits in the sun and reflects on the insulating properties of polymer cups ...

During my recent sailing holiday to Antigua, I had the opportunity to test the insulation properties of polypropylene and polystyrene cups. On the second day of the England-West Indies test match (cricket) at the nation's beloved Recreation Ground in St John's, the polypropylene beer glasses ran out and were replaced by polystyrene ones.

I can wholeheartedly endorse the cold-retaining properties of polystyrene over polypropylene. Our Carib beer stayed cold for only a few minutes in the polypropylene cups, while the polystyrene version kept them cold for much longer. And the polystyrene punnets also kept the goat curry warm at lunchtime!

The result in the cricket match was a draw, however.

An announcement on the DeWitt website shows that its usual pre-NPRA conference in Houston in March has been pulled in favour of an on-line event:

DeWitt & Company has modified its 34th Annual World Petrochemical Conference. Given that so many companies are deciding to restrict or ban travel during these troubled times, DeWitt has decided to bring its 34th Conference and our views and vision to you directly. We have thus deferred our plans with the Hotel ZaZa until 2010. We will adopt the technology of the Internet to present our PowerPoint Presentations along with our verbal discussions of critical issues through streaming FLASH technology and offer simply a web access ticket and a CD.

The rival pre-NPRA Houston conference from CMAI is showing 418 delegates signed up, although even this is markedly down from the same time last year.

It's my fellow ICIS blogger Simon Robinson on ICIS TV in front of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and introducing Informex, a week-long exhibition and conference dedicated to innovations in chemistry.

Reading the papers in a leisurely fashion on the train to visit the ICIS Heren offices in Holborn, central London, I see that there are chemicals galore in the news today.

The first reviews for the long-awaited film of "Watchmen" are out, and being a dark and grisly tale of super-heroes battling the forces of evil, there is plenty of Spandex on display.

In a year in which Lego's brightly coloured plastic bricks won construction Toy of the Year, profits have proved resilient in a market where parents have been falling back onto good value, practical toys. Despite the evidence all around that children prefer Playstations, Wii and mobile phones, parents are defiantly buying Lego, particularly the Star Wars themed sets.

I was impressed with this excruciating introduction:

"Mr Knudstorp, a former management consultant, has been quietly dismantling Lego and rebuilding its blocks into a sounder structure."

Bearing in mind the rate at which chemical prices have fallen in the last few months, this piece on "The Prisoner's Dilemma" shows plainly the sheer inevitability of downward price spirals:

"The scenario is that two suspects are held by the police who do not have enough evidence for a successful conviction and hope to convince one or other to break ranks and testify against his fellow inmate. The police separate the suspects and make both the same offer.

They are told that if one of them testifies against the other and the second remains silent, then the betrayer will be freed but the silent accomplice will get a ten-year term in jail.

If both keep silent they will both serve just six months on a reduced charge but if each betrays the other they will go down for five years apiece.

The dilemma is that each is better off confessing than remaining silent but if both confess, the outcome is less good than if both had remained silent ...

The most obvious parallel in business is pricing. Does one player (or retailer) betray a competitor by reducing prices in the hope that the competitor will go out of business? And does the competitor follow suit, so that both make less money?

Even if the competitor believes his product reflects value for money at its current price, his dilemma is whether to maintain the price and risk losing market share, or cut the price and his profits."

The most read January postings on ICIS Chemicals Confidential according to Hitbox.

1 Barack Obama's Lego Inauguration

2 Hummer UK sales drop to one

3 NPRA 2009 attendance expected down

4 Europe's gas_pipelines

5 Death of CDs spells doom for polycarbonate

6 Fuchem - new chemicals b2b company

7 Dark matter down a potash mine

8 EPCA Berlin 2009 opening party at Mercedes World

9 Even the walls have ears

10 One trader down - Cox leaves Trammochem

11 Polypropylene chair on design classic stamps

The new boss of Reed Elsevier and hence ICIS has an industry background which includes "the oil, consultancy, healthcare and construction sectors," according to this profile of Ian Smith in today's Financial Times. "Mr Smith started his career at Shell," the article continues, heralding his arrival as chief executive in March.

Reading this on the way to today's ICIS Baseoils training seminar in London, reminds me that it was at exactly this time last year that I read on the train to the 2008 Baseoils conference about Reed Elsevier's intention to sell off Reed Business Information, parent company of ICIS.

I've just popped in to the ICIS training "Introduction to Baseoils" seminar at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London, where tomorrow's World Baseoils conference is going to be held. You can tell it's IP Week, because there are oil company names on all the hotel suites listed on the screens in the lobby.

Baseoils isn't really my field, but there were some cracking good papers this afternoon, particularly the unlikely sounding "Hybrid processing schemes for base oils" paper, delivered with great sparkle by speaker Amy Claxton from My Energy in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, and which I caught after lunch.

She's from Texas and a very enthusiastic speaker who really knows her subject, speaking all day without looking at her slides, and with some interesting props including some reindeer antlers. I was very taken with some of her Texan expressions, talking about "cracking the crap out of it," and "those lucky dogs with their highly paraffinic crudes," and "Those fuels guys don't want to share their stuff with us." One slide was entitled, "All crudes are equal but some are more equal than others," and when I asked her if her students were enjoying it she said, "I don't know, but I always have a blast."

The airline Air France-KLM blamed fuel hedging for its heavy third-quarter losses, and announced that it would be scrapping the disastrous strategy in 2009.

While crude oil prices fell from the $140s/barrel to $47/barrel, the airline's fuel hedging policy had cost it €288 million in the third quarter of 2008, according to this article in the Times today.

As soon as Air France-KLM announced on Friday that it would be abandoning the policy, its share price rose by nearly 4%.

"Datawatch: Women's sympathy with husbands and boyfriends who complain of having a cold runs out after five minutes. A fifth say they feel no sympathy at all.

Source: Lemsip."

 

 

This Private Eye spoof advert for Bargain Britain expresses perfectly the sinking feeling in the stomach of the UK-based business traveller.

So fellow petchem folk, I urge you to get on those planes with your petrodollars and petro-euros and come and visit us here in the UK. Bring your families too.

Check out the refinery at Fawley, then rent that cottage in Cornwall. Drop in on the refinery and polymer plants at Grangemouth, then tour those whiskey distilleries in the Scottish Highlands.

There's never been a better time.

The ICIS training seminars are in Amsterdam this week, and since everyone in the petchem industry is expecting this year to be a tough one for attendance on external courses and at conferences, it is very gratifying that both the Beginners' and Advanced courses are sold out.

Attendance figures from all the major industry conferences in the final months of 2008 were down, and that looks set to be the case for the big events in the first quarter of 2009, with companies showing every sign of continuing to cut back on business travel.

In the conference room of the NH Caransa hotel on Amsterdam's Rembrandtplein, delegates from distributors, traders and consumers of petchems, plus a couple of bankers, are debating the hot topics of the day. They embark with great enthusiasm on designing some very innovative projects, spending their investors' (hypothetical) billions with easy abandon.

They are analysts, economists, from procurement, customer service, business management and sales. Each batch of petchem students has its own personality, and this one is the most inquisitive by far - their keen questioning plays havoc with our time-keeping.

For great art within a short distance of chemical plants, it's hard to beat Amsterdam. Just a few kilometres from the chemical hubs of Rotterdam, Sittard and Antwerp, you can see:

(Photos from the Rijksmuseum website.)

My friend Robert tells me that last Tuesday when most Londoners stayed home in the snow, the first person to arrive in his central London office for a meeting was a guy who'd come in from Paris by Eurostar. Ha ha, we guffaw, it's easier to commute from Paris to London than from the suburbs and home counties into the centre.

But this tale belies the reality of these short hop one or two-hour cross-border trips which you think will allow you to be in Paris/Brussels/Frankfurt in time for lunch. The journeys work well on paper, but as in chemical price reporting, there's a world of difference between paper deals and physical deals.

This week's simple hop from London Heathrow T5 to Amsterdam for the ICIS training seminars is plagued with delays:

11.20 board plane, sit on tarmac for 45 minutes

12.05 announcement that plane is missing an unspecified piece of equipment so we must all get off

12.10 get off plane

12.45 board new plane, sit on tarmac for 40 minutes

1.25 take off into clear blue sky with not a breath of wind

3.15 (local time) arrive Schipol

On a side note - is there no stopping the transformation of Schipol airport from a mere hub into a holiday destination in its own right? On my way back from the last ICIS training seminar in Rotterdam, when my flight was delayed by 4 hours, I discovered that the airport now has a XpresSpa. And now there are posters everywhere announcing the arrival of a casino IN THE AIRPORT!)

Reidun Polden is to leave Integra Marketing in the first week of February, the company announced on Tuesday.

Reidun was trading ethylene and propylene at Integra at its offices in Belgium.

"Reidun will be returning to Norway for personal reasons, and we wish her all the best," said Gina Fyffe, executive director olefins.

Nando Flipse will join traders Trammochem as part of the aromatics trading team as of 1 March 2009, a company spokesman announced on Friday.

Flipse, formerly with INEOS in the UK, will be working out of Trammochem's Altendorf, Switzerland office.

Andy Brice from ICIS Chemical Business (first on the left in photo) was invited to host an online chat for students from 13 secondary schools around Europe on the role of chemicals in everyday life ...

On a cold, wintry morning last month, I arrived in Brussels, Belgium, at Cefic's headquarters to experience first hand their efforts in encouraging students to pursue a career in the chemical industry.

Cefic's Xperimania project was launched in the 27 EU member states in 2007. Its aim was to raise awareness about the importance of chemistry and its ubiquitous application.

In the 2007-2008 school year, around 1,000 pupils participated in the program's various activities - including internet-based seminars and competitions. Some 50,000 students visited the web site.

My role was to participate in one of their online meetings with children from 13 secondary schools across Europe. The theme was based on an article I'd written in May 2008 that considered how tough it would be to live without petrochemicals - specifically, polypropylene - for a week. Inevitably, the task was a resounding failure, but it still stimulated some encouraging debate from the children, with some keen to attempt it themselves.

However, by the end of the session, I'd made two clear observations. Some of the students - aged 10-20 years old - seemed genuinely surprised that chemicals played such a major role in their everyday lives, while others appeared concerned that the products they came into contact with were in some way dangerous.

Clearly, the challenge for industry goes far beyond simply conveying the many benefits and opportunities provided through a career in the sector. Perhaps first, the priority is to work further to overhaul the industry's image and allay the fears of those it is so keen to attract.

Hopefully, imaginative programs such as this will go some way to achieving both.

Click here for the full article in ICB

And click here for the questions (and answers) which Andy couldn't get round to answering at the time - from schools in Poland, Sweden and Hungary.

Great excitement here because IT'S SNOWING IN LONDON. I'm working from home in between bursts of rushing outside to take photos before it all melts. I've had no luck so far in taking the traditional winter picture of Cat in Snow, because the snow in the garden is too deep for the cat to venture out.

Snow in London, 7.00 today

Snow in London, 8.00 today

Madelon's snowman in Clapham, London, 8.00

 7 inches (18 cm) of snow in garden, London 9.15

This is just the kind of top 10 new techie things which the Blog loves, even if half of them are pretty baffling - and that's before you start on the reader comments at the bottom - on technology website GearCrave. That Number 8 - the Designer Netbook would make a very acceptable Valentine's gift.

10 Dual Screens for Laptops

9 3G to 4G - a  better modem for mobile broadband

8 Designer Netbooks

7 USB 3.0 - superspeed USB technology

6 Touchscreens on tablet PCs

5 Cloud Computing - no idea

4 3D Visual Interfaces

3 Smaller, Slimmer All-in-One PCs - very chic

2 Intel Core i7 - new processor, ideal for gamers

1 Solid State Drives for PCs - faster, more reliable, use less power

Are you tired of looking at the same old icons on your PC screen? Watch these normally placid icons come to life and wage war on each other. It's Icon's War. (Needs sound - but don't try this in the office.)

Oil and chemical company executives are amongst those who are taking part in team-building exercises run by British Airways where they experience a simulated plane crash in a hangar at Heathrow. In a smoke-filled Boeing 737 they fight their way to freedom. The courses are so popular that BA has taken more than 350 bookings from about 8,500 oil executives, bankers, civil servants and staff at the Football Association, according to this article in the Sunday Times.