To CP or not to CP – that’s the question. Or is it? Participants in the European toluene market seem to have found alternative answers fairly quickly for pricing.
The flames that lit up the night sky at Plaquemine, Louisiana, on July 14, 2023, have died, the fire associated with an explosion at the site has been extinguished, and the workweek began with more questions than answers.
US polyethylene producers have a domestic demand problem, with year-to-date sales to North American customers off nearly 9%, according to April industry data compiled by the American Chemistry Council (ACC). Post-pandemic destocking and soft consumer demand have put a major dent in the order books of plastic processors.
Despite efforts to reduce plastic waste, the world’s rubbish pile continues to build.
The US PVC market saw an unusually volatile year in 2021, to say the least, and saw another one in 2022.
Chemical recycling, particularly in the U.S., was a dominant theme of the recycled plastics industry in 2022, and it’s creating new commodities from all manner of wastes that until recently had been considered virtually unrecyclable.
For the European benzene market, perhaps only the football World Cup (which most of us have been watching on our home screens, at night, wearing thick ski socks instead of shorts and sipping hot herbal teas instead of cold beverages in a pub) has been a rival in spectacle compared to this month’s tumultuous settlement of the contract price (CP).
Hurricane Nicole’s landfall on the US East Coast caused a sigh of relief among the refining community as the Texas/Louisiana nexus averted another potential weather disaster. Where the storm DID land, however, was important to the plastic pipe markets.
The world party of the styrenics chain of late has seen benzene traveling from Europe to the US and polystyrene traveling from Asia to the US. Not only does this indicate that prices in the US are high enough to attract imports, but what’s missing is also notable. What’s missing? Styrene.
Despite the desire to put the chaos and trauma caused by the Coronavirus pandemic of the past 3+ years behind us, its effect on worldwide chemical and plastics markets must continue to string that period into our memories as we analyze the state of the markets and what created today’s conditions. (more…)