Quite possibly, yes, despite my instinctiive pessimism. Perhaps emerging markets such as China and India have reached such a critical mass that no matter how much capacity is brought on stream, it will be easily absorbed. Or maybe some disaster lies just around the corner. Who cares if you’ve made your money in the most […]
Asian Chemical Connections
Life gets more complicated in the Middle East
In the old days all you had to do was propose an ethane cracker with PE and MEG downstream and you were away. But these days if you want to get feedstock, especially in Saudi, you need to offer something a bit different because of the drive to diversify to create jobs. This is a […]
Watch out for the Black Swans and dump the consultants
The former trader turned professor, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his new book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable warns against the danger of forecasting. Forecasting is, obviously, always based on what he know and not what we don’t know. A Black Swan, by the way, is an earth-shattering event we didn’t predict […]
Capacity build-up to force volumes west…even from Asia?
There’s been a lot of talk about the next wave of Middle East capacity being too great for Asia to absorb all the Asian volumes. Indeed, estimates abound over western growth being satisfied by the M-E over the next 3-5 years. But here’s a thought: what if China’s capacity build-up leads producers elsewhere in Asia […]
Bad news for polyvinyl chloride?
And also a whole host of other chemicals if this article on the excellent All Roads Lead to China blog is correct and incentives that have encouraged the real estate boom are removed. This serves of the dangers of overheating. What goes up must come down and, in this case, the real sector has a […]
Are coal-to-chemicals projects in China a load of nonsense?
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 […]
Liveris defends strategy after a very tough few weeks
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 […]
Dow fit with Reliance makes the most sense
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 […]
Don’t read this if all you care about is today’s C2 price
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 […]
Two optimistic views of the future
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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