The eternal optimists at Nova Chemicals presented a very bullish view of olefins and polyolefins markets at their recent results meeting.Aaron Yap, trader with Integra, was also equally bullish at the ICIS Asian Polymers Conference in Shanghai last week – see Download file In short, Aaron believed that demand growth would hold up downstream while […]
Asian Chemical Connections
A new era of globalisation?
I was chatting to my good friend and contact Paul Hodges of International eChem yesterday.He believes we’ve entered globalisation part II, where the impact of higher raw material prices will trigger harmful inflation. As Ben Bernanke has pointed out, oil prices are 40% higher than would otherwise have been the case without the recent boom […]
This is not the time to behave like an Ostrich
The United Nations report on climate change, released last Friday, warned of 50 million made homeless as a result of global warming by as early as 2010. Reports such as this will serve to pile even more pressure on the big polluters including, of course, China – the mothership of chemical demand growth. Any investor […]
Is ExxonMobil taking a gamble?
Will China relax the price controls that have led to wallopping great losses for domestic refiners, thereby justifying ExxonMobil’s Fujian investment? As we can see from this Bloomberg article, Exxon is pinning many of its hopes on these controls being relaxed. Does the US giant know something we don’t or are they taking a punt? […]
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 […]
Oh my goodness, when will it end?
We heard about this rumour last year, but it’s emerged again – Reliance is now said to be in advanced discussions for acquiring Nova Chemicals. Nova’s Alberta-based cracker and PE production might be attractive because of pretty competitive, locked-in gas prices, but would Reliance really want its styrenics business – the asset that’s officially on […]
China facing permanent demand destruction?
An interesting debate is emerging over the growth of the recycled polymer market in China. Sinodata, the Beijing-based consultancy, estimates that 5.8m tonnes of all types of recycled polymers were imported into China last year, an 800,000 tonnes increase over 2006. Five years ago, recycled imports totalled less than 500,000 tonnes. With domestic recycling also […]
Prepare for a legislative flood
Global leaders from the Group of Eight rich nations plus Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa have agreed that developing countries will have to face targets for cutting emissions as well as developed countries.If these noble words are followed by action, prepare to be legislated against. I wrote yesterday about Rex Tillerson and his […]
Basell predicts tough times for polyolefins in 2009-10
Paul Cherry of Basell gave an excellent paper at the recent ICIS Olefins Conference – Download file Paul offers some hints on how to survive the next downturn, and provides some sobering predictions on operating rates. I bet that after 2009-10, or whenever the next downturn arrives, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan will further restructure. […]
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