By John Richardson THE soaring confidence of the US petrochemicals industry over abundant ethane feedstock from shale gas could end up being colossally misplaced, as we have discussed before on the blog. America is the most NIMBY (not in my backyard) of all societies and so it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody that […]
Asian Chemical Connections
China Quiet Market Persists
By John Richardson LACK of credit and inflation are becoming even greater problems in China, which is reflected in polyolefin markets that remain very quiet indeed. “It is ice cold out there with very little activity. Importers are waiting and hoping for some kind of improvement,” a Singapore-based polyolefin trader told the blog today. A […]
Gaping Chasm Between Effective, Real Op Rates
By John Richardson A gaping chasm has opened up over the past 18 months between nameplate capacities and effective operating rates, resulting in much greater focus on the latter. It isn’t easy and it is getting ever-more complicated to assess the actual volumes likely to hit markets. There is a considerably well-supported school of thought […]
Overconfidence The Bisk Risk For 2011
By John Richardson OVERCONFIDENCE is perhaps the biggest risk for 2011 as a result of sales volumes that have this year exceeded even the most wildly optimistic forecasts. The danger is that we have yet to see the worst of this current petrochemicals cycle. Companies and chemicals analysts might have got a little ahead […]
OPEC, China Inflation And Petchems
By John Richardson OPEC’s decision to maintain crude quotas at current levels could give the banks further ammunition to manipulate opinion that the black stuff is genuinely in tight supply. There is plenty of evidence that oil is, in fact, still pretty long – and that this bull-run is yet again about speculators talking up […]
Petchems And Tomorow’s OPEC Meeting
By John Richardson THE next OPEC meeting – which takes place in Ecuador this Saturday (11 December) – is crucial for petrochemicals for two reasons. Firstly, the crude market has turned bullish recently as a result of the early onset of winter in Europe and the growing belief that the oil-supply cushion is being reduced. […]
US Petrochemicals A World Beater
Shell’s refinery and petchems complex in Deer Park, Texas Source of picture http://www.msnbc.msn.com/ By John Richardson THE excellent third-quarter financial results of the likes of Dow Chemical and LyondellBasell further confirm the extraordinary turnaround in the cost positions of those with a big proportion of their global polyolefins production based in the US. Some […]
Ethylene Freight Rates Head For Collapse
“If I didn’t care what happens to you….” Source of picture: www.sydbarrett.com By John Richardson AS many as 25 new ethylene vessels could be in operation by 2013 as a result of what one shipping industry source told the blog was “irresponsible shipping brokers and consultants talking up the market”. He predicted that the […]
Diminishing Returns From Middle East Projects
Downtown Riyadh By John Richardson As my fellow blogger Malini Hariharan wrote last week “the projects environment in the Middle East has irrevocably changed” and with it the rather glib and outdated assumption still being frequently made that building capacity in the region represents a licence to print money. First of all, as […]
The Unexpected Bonus For Polyolefins – In Summary
Every dark cloud has a silver lining… By John Richardson GLOBAL polyolefins markets are being kept very tight be a collection of what might seem like only temporary factors. But in the case of the butene-1 shortage, for example, (see below) this has been restricting linear-low density polyethylene (LLDPE) for more than a year. And many […]
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