Asian industry leaders are playing lip service to the environmental crisis the world confronts . George Monbiot, the excellent author and journalist, argues that what the West needs is a recession to give the planet a breather.Asia also needs a substantial economic slowdown to give policymakers and technology developers more time.
Asian Chemical Connections
Asian biofuels face a big crisis
After all the optimism, all the hype and a lot of investors’ money, the industry has shot itself in the foot by failing to build demand ahead of supply. Plus the negativity caused by food versus fuel and environmental counter-arguments to supporting this current generation of technologies is making some Asian governments hesitate on providing […]
A load of bull or rational exuberance?
I was in India this week as the Times of India carried a front page cartoon of a bull dressed in a Superman outfit with an ‘S’ on his shirt to mark the Sensex surging past 20,000. All the talk was of the index taking 20 years to reach its first 10,000 with the second […]
Another great year for Asian polyolefins but……
……how long will it last is the inevitable question. Demand growth has been so strong so far this year with very little new production coming onstream that while crude oil and the price of monomers have set a floor for pricing, they no longer appear to be the main drivers behind fluctuations and increases; in […]
Lots of froth makes one giant global bubble
Alan Greenspan refused to categorise conditions in the US housing market as a bubble when he was chairman of the Fed. But now he’s retired and while plugging his memoirs, he admitted in a TV interview the other day that lots of froth in different parts of the US made up what was, in reality, […]
The global credit crisis is going to last
The collective sigh of relief was almost audible late last week when the Fed cut its discount rate – the rate banks charge each other for lending. Action from other central banks, including the European Central Bank, could follow this week. Analysts also rate the likelihood of the Fed cutting its formal interest rate at […]
Is this the death of cycles?
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 […]
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 […]
Oops a daisy, here we go again
A boring topic to harp on about again I know, but this article from my colleague Nigel Davis from the Insight section of ICIS news supports what I have been saying for the past two years. The industry has overbuilt, and despite all the optimism engendered by project delays and probably cancellations in Iran of […]
What’s the point in building a plant if you’ve got nobody to run it?
No point obviously. As this report from Deutsche Bank Download file notes, the global skills shortage is not just in the west. In the engineering sector, and perhaps this applies to petrochemicals, Deutsche Bank claims that the huge outpouring of Indian and Chinese graduates is grossly exaggerated; and it adds that the quality of graduates […]
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