By John Richardson
THE Morgan Stanley Supercycle report, which we first blogged on last Friday, has created a big stir among the blog’s contacts.
Click herefor a copy of the report RI_PETROCHEM_BLUEPAPER2010.pdf
As we said in this ICIS news article on both the Morgan Stanley report, and one from Merrill Lynch which is in a similar vein, the paradigm seems to be shifting away from a supply-driven collapse in margins.
Certain senior industry executives have been telling us for a long while – some claim for several years – (maybe we were not listening hard enough?) that any crisis would not be supply-driven.
But now the majority of people we talk to are climbing on board the same argument – along with the belief that emerging-market demand-growth will be more than good enough compensate for a new recession in the West.
But an industry analyst we talked to earlier this week holds a very different view.
“Think about it – the US consumes around 21m tonne/year of ethylene or ethylene equivalent a year, Europe 24m tonne/year and Japan 7m tonne/year and so you are talking about a total of around 52m tonnes from global consumption of approximately 120m tonnes,” he said.
“So I don’t think it is right to suggest – as Morgan Stanley does in its much talked-about report – that Chinese and Indian demand alone, never mind the rest of the emerging markets, can compensate for weakness in the West.
“The bank’s own data shows a decline in Western consumption in 2000-2009.
“If the US and Europe fall back into recession, and with the energy conservation and environmental pressures growing ever-stronger, their ethylene equivalent consumption is going to decline even further.”
This would place even more pressure on China and the other emerging nations to carry the load – but recent evidence suggested that the Chinese economy was slowing down, he added.
Operating-rate problems that have constrained production this year would eventually be resolved leading to oversupply, he said
But he admitted that the associated gas issue was the wild card in the pack. The lack of petrochemicals feedstock via oil wells is likely to constrain production at Saudi crackers for several more years until global oil demand returns to pre-crisis levels.
Research by Kunal Agrawal, Asia Energy Analyst at BNP Paribas in Singapore, supports the oversupply argument.
“In 2009-2011, we see more than 21m tonne/year (30% of 2010E installed capacity) of new ethylene capacity in the Middle East and Asia,” he wrote in a recent report.
This will lead to surplus capacity of 11.1m tonnes in 2009-2011 and 12.1m tonnes in 2010-11, he warned.
Operating rates would, as a result, decline to 83% in 201011 compared with the average 96% over the past five years.
The BNP Paribas research – taking into account all the project delays – estimates that while 5.1m tonne/year of ethylene came on-stream in Asia and the Middle East last year, this will have risen to 8.8m tonne/year in 2010, and will climb to 8.5m tonne/year in 2011.
The good news is that if the optimists are wrong this should become apparent over the next few quarters – thereby postponing any rash of new projects.
The bad news is that 2011 budget expectations may have already been raised, leading to another ferocious round of cost-cutting in the petrochemicals industry as margins and share prices tank.