By John Richardson THE ABOVE chart shows that from January 2015 up until November of this year, the Asian naphtha cracker industry has been making a great deal of money. The orange bars are the premiums in percentage terms between feedstock costs and the prices of one grade of polyethylene (PE) – high-density PE injection […]
Asian Chemical Connections
Crude Drives Asian Polyethylene Spreads To Three-Year Low As 2018 Risks Build
By John Richardson IN MARCH 2016 we gave three scenarios for crude-oil prices: Collapsing Demand where we saw crude falling to $25/bbl on weak global demand that would make it impossible to repay much of the huge debts that had been built up since 2008. This is the result of economic stimulus polices that we maintain […]
China To Now Raise Ethylene Capacity By 84% As Self-Sufficiency Drive Accelerates
By John Richardson SINCE my last update on 18 September, our ICIS China team have discovered a further 2.4m tonnes/year of ethylene capacity being planned in China via the steam cracker process (see the updated table above, with the changes from September indicated in red). There will also of course be more propylene via steam […]
China Moves Towards Commodity Grade PE Self-Sufficiency By 2025
By John Richardson THE argument I’ve been making for a couple of years now is that the history of petrochemicals in China suggests a constant drive towards much greater self-sufficiency. No value chain is immune, I have kept contending. The recent history of a sharp rise in self-sufficiency in polyvinyl chloride (PVC), purified terephthalic acid […]
US Oil, Gas, Chemicals Drowning In Excess Of Credit
By John Richardson THE US oil, gas and petrochemicals sectors are drowning in an excess of credit that has distorted rational analysis of long-term supply and demand fundamentals. So, just as is the case with China manufacturing in general, these misguided investments are in danger of contributing to a prolonged period of global deflation. Let’s […]
Finding A Home For US Polyethylene Expansions
By John Richardson EVEN if you take a benign view of the future of the US economy (which, separately, we think is the wrong view), the planned increases in US polyethylene (PE) capacity still raise this very important question: Where on earth will all of this stuff go? The chart above illustrates our assessment of […]
European Energy Sovereign Wealth Fund Needed
By John Richardson THE blog met with an old friend on its recent trip to the UK, a scientist, who moaned about her local MP’s ignorance about why energy self-sufficiency was vital for any economy. “He is opposed to shale gas and shale oil because of all the concerns about fracking causing earthquakes and water […]
US To Lose Out To China In Energy Race
By John Richardson ARE you either a “tree hugger” or a “climate science denier”? If you fall into one of these two categories, you will be one of the dwindling minority of people who support a multi-faceted approach to US energy policy, according to a US petrochemicals industry source. “The tree huggers are those who […]
China Reforms: The Global Implications
By John Richardson IT can feel logical to assume that the fundamentals of the petrochemicals business in Asia haven’t really changed. When you think about it, apart from a brief interruption in the region’s success story during the Asian Financial crisis in 1997-1998, everything has been pretty much plain sailing. And in retrospect, the severity […]
US Jobs Revival A Mirage
By John Richardson THE US is well and truly back economically was once again one of the themes at this year’s Asia Petrochemical Industry Conference (APIC) in Pattaya, Thailand. It was argued that shale gas has led to a manufacturing revival. Billions of dollars of investment in oil, gas, chemicals and fertilisers projects was cited […]
Jump to page: