The styrene business has been increasingly difficult in recent years: • CD and video sales went online, removing the need for polystyrene (PS) packaging • Prices for the main feedstock, benzene, leapt in the mid-2000’s, due to US gasoline market changes, forcing convertors to look at alternatives such as polypropylene • Recycling became an essential […]
Chemicals and the Economy
Abu Dhabi looks to build its petchem activities
IPIC, Abu Dhabi’s International Petroleum Investment Company, made a very shrewd acquisition of Nova at the bottom of the market, earlier this year. And now they are apparently in talks with a number of major chemicals companies about joint ventures and possibly acquisitions. The key for IPIC is to obtain technology, with which they can […]
Abu Dhabi snaps up Nova Chemicals
Nova’s CEO, Jeffrey Lipton, has always been the great optimist of the petrochemical industry. As recently as December, he was arguing at the GPCA meeting that “demand forecasts will prove to be too low”, and forecasting a shortage of ethylene and polyethylene in 2012. However, optimism isn’t a business strategy, particularly when it leads to […]
Decision time in Europe, N America
Many Asian companies have been cutting back petchem production in recent weeks. Now TOTAL have become the first to follow suit in Europe, with the announcement that they will shutdown the Carling No 2 cracker for a month from mid-November. These decisions are never easy. But as the blog has noted before, when times are […]
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