The Pacific Rim Chemical Index Fell Without Its Parts
BLS says goods coming in from the Pacific Rim cost 7.0 percent more than a year ago. Chemicals from the same origin group are down 3.57 percent, which is a steeper fall than basic chemicals, resins or other chemical products managed, and two of those three went up.
The Ledger
Every entry →- Oct 247 min read
How the Catalyst Scope Got Sixty Degrees Wider
Commerce initiated the amine compounds cases against China on October 19 and put the signed scope on public inspection Friday morning. The boiling-point window is sixty degrees wider than the one Evonik and Huntsman filed, a tariff line dropped out of the import table, and the alleged ceiling came down a hundred and twenty points. Scope comments close November 9.
Subscribers - Oct 235 min read
Who Buys Priolo's Propylene Now?
LyondellBasell's last polypropylene line at Brindisi stopped on Saturday morning, ten weeks before the deadline it was given in June. The resin side of that is easy to price. The side nobody is pricing is the propylene that used to sail up the coast from Priolo to feed it.
Subscribers - Oct 234 min read
What Haldia Had to Build Before It Could Build Phenol
Adperma started India's first east-coast phenol plant on October 14, at 345,000 tonnes a year of phenol and 215,000 of acetone. Getting there took a cumene unit and the country's first on-purpose propylene plant, and at nameplate the benzene draw is 2.2 times what the site's own benzene unit makes.
Free - Oct 235 min read
Seven Products Are Left on the Spill Schedule
A routine EPA paperwork renewal published Thursday counts the NCP Product Schedule as of September, three months newer than the last schedule EPA posted: seven products from seven manufacturers, against seventy-eight listings last December. Also on the file, Utah asks to become the eighth state that can issue its own carbon sequestration permit, AkzoNobel sells Southeast Asian decorative paints for $1.35 billion at 21 times EBITDA, Hexcel is hiring ahead of its own order book, and H.B. Fuller's $917 million bridge died without a draw.
Subscribers - Oct 226 min read
Who Holds the Switch on Russian Urea?
A law signed in September ordered a 500 percent duty on everything the United States buys from Russia. The executive order implementing it, published Wednesday, raised the rate in section 2 and waived it in section 4. Fertilizer is 44 percent of that trade, 1.9 million tonnes of urea alone, and the waiver now sits with the Secretary of State.
Subscribers - Oct 224 min read
The Price List Ends Before the Rhine Does
Contargo's low-water surcharge runs from 40 euros a box to 1,075. On two of the four gauges it is keyed to, October's river went past the bottom of the published list, and on none of the four was there a single morning the carrier owed you carriage.
Free - Oct 224 min read
The Cracker Came Back Without the Liquids
Dow's third quarter release says "Middle East conflict" four times and never names Jubail. Asked directly on Thursday's call, the CEO said Sadara is partially restarted with a cracker and the polyethylene trains online and the liquids still down. On Dow's own capacity table that leaves 1,470 thousand tonnes a year of isocyanates, polyols, amines and glycol ethers off the board.
Subscribers - Oct 215 min read
Your Seat at the Accelerator Hearing Closes December 24
The ITC scheduled the final phase of the CBS case on Friday, and the notice names industrial users of the subject merchandise as people who may participate. The deadline to become one is twenty-one days before the January 14 hearing, which puts it on Christmas Eve, eighteen days before Commerce prints the final rate you would want to read first.
Subscribers - Oct 217 min read
The Jubail Outage Has One Public Meter Left
Sadara's 26 plants went down on March 31 and have not restarted. Dow suspended recognition of its share of the venture's losses in the first quarter, so its filings carry the name and nothing about the site. On Monday, Solvay put close to 15 million euros on the peroxide plant inside the same fence and cut its year.
Subscribers - Oct 214 min read
How Jhagadia Found Somewhere to Put Its Chlorine
DCM Shriram told the exchanges on September 30 that it had commissioned a 100 TPD aluminium chloride plant and the first 133 TPD line of a calcium chloride plant, both inside the fence at India's largest caustic soda complex. The filing is unusually blunt about why. Jhagadia makes roughly 1,972 tonnes of chlorine a day whether anyone has ordered it or not.
Free - Oct 204 min read
Which Preparation Moved Your September Escalator?
Three of the four published product lines inside NAICS 325998 did nothing in September. The code still rose 3.15 percent to an all-time high, because the line BLS labels "all other chemical preparations" posted the largest one-month increase in its 41-year history. Every feedstock index you would argue from fell in the same month.
Subscribers - Oct 205 min read
The Week Nothing Came Off a Nameplate
No US chemical plant announced a closure in the last four days, and the California WARN file has been empty of chemicals since September 9. What moved instead was permission and ownership: H.B. Fuller put product lines on the block eleven days after pricing $850m at 7.625%, PHMSA refused to let Trinity re-letter tank cars for inhalation-hazard service, and Cliffs idled the galvanizing lines at Stelco.
Subscribers - Oct 204 min read
Six of Seven Citric Acid Reviews Never Moved
Commerce preliminarily put Sucroal at 3.25 percent for the 2024-2025 review of the Colombian citric acid order. In six of the seven completed reviews before it, the final came in at exactly the preliminary figure, which tells you how to budget the next twelve months of entries.
Free - Oct 194 min read
The Bromine Was Already in the Salt Pans
GHCL started commercial production of liquid bromine at Rajula on October 12, nine days after the monsoon cleared Gujarat. The nameplate is 2,800 tonnes, which is 40% of everything USGS credits India with producing and a quarter of what the country imported last year. The unit sits on salt works the company already owned.
Free - Oct 196 min read
One More Day of Your Plasticizer Owes Nothing
Commerce published the DOTP orders on Malaysia, Poland, Taiwan and Turkiye in May 2025 with the gap period starting May 5. Tomorrow morning, 516 days later, it publishes a two-page correction moving that date to May 4. The window that liquidates free of antidumping duties runs eleven days instead of ten, and the deposits sitting on it go as high as 80.71 percent.
Subscribers - Oct 184 min read
Who Is Selling Brazil the Resin You Used To?
Brazil's renewed import tariff on two dozen chemical headings took effect yesterday and runs to October 16, 2027. On the biggest line it is the smaller of two charges: the antidumping duty Braskem won in April works out to 20.7%, and it has already taken the American share of Brazil's import book from three quarters to a quarter. Brazil's monthly tonnage never moved.
Free - Oct 184 min read
Twelve Percent of Your PET Film Line Is Under Order
Commerce published preliminary results in both Indian PET film reviews this week: 3.98% on the subsidy side Wednesday, 0.61% on the dumping side Monday, both on SRF, the only company the petitioners left in. The orders were renewed in March for another five years. They reach an eighth of the tonnage that actually clears the customs heading.
Subscribers - Oct 186 min read
The Powder Coatings Plant That Got the Money
In March 2024 AkzoNobel named four North American powder sites and spent $30m on them. Thirty-one months later three of those four are absorbing the fourth. Here is what Nashville was making, what the federal record says about it, and the dates that still move.
Subscribers - Oct 174 min read
Wood Sugar Was the Easy Part
UPM inaugurated its Leuna biorefinery on October 15: 1,370 million euros, 220,000 tonnes a year, beechwood from inside a 200 kilometre radius. The clause worth reading is the one about lignin, because the lignin line is the half that was still a forecast the last time we wrote about this site.
Free - Oct 175 min read
How Antwerp Quit Commodity Polycarbonate Four Years Early
Covestro said on Thursday it intends to run Antwerp on one polycarbonate line instead of four and stop making bisphenol A there. The customs record had already called it: Belgian-origin polycarbonate landing in the United States went from $3.40 a kilo in 2021 to $5.43 in 2025, while the average across every origin finished the four years exactly where it started. And your 2026 book is bigger than your 2025 one.
Subscribers - Oct 175 min read
Four Fifths of Your Dissolving Pulp Just Got a Rate
Commerce closed out the high purity dissolving pulp cases on Friday: 6.51% on Norway, 6.40% plus 9.37% on Brazil. Those two origins are 79.5% of the customs line by value, and one of the three rates has been collecting nothing since July 23. Also on the file: the Chinese electrode exporter that bought itself two more months of its own 95.61% deposit, and Chemours pushing back the day India starts paying.
Subscribers - Oct 163 min read
Your Chemical Distributor's Margin Is a Public Number
BLS publishes a monthly index of the gross margin chemical wholesalers take between acquisition and sale. It set an all-time high in June, has fallen three straight months since, and still sits 20.0% above where it was a year ago, against 8.8% for basic chemicals at the plant.
Free - Oct 164 min read
Why Didn't Your Anode Graphite Go Back to China?
Commerce was collecting 93.5 percent on Chinese active anode material last summer. The Commission ruled against the petition on March 31, no order ever issued, and every deposit was refunded. Through June the customs line still runs China at 288 tonnes a month, and Indonesia now carries 55 percent of the value in a heading it did not appear in two years ago.
Subscribers - Oct 166 min read
The Pigment Floor Is Set at Today's Price
Britain's Trade Remedies Authority published its Statement of Essential Facts on Chinese rutile titanium dioxide on October 6, recommending 48.29% on the LB Group and 63.66% on everyone else. The percentages are the part that gets quoted. The part that moves your landed cost is the fixed minimum underneath them, £0.66 and £0.87 a kilo, which the TRA's own impacts analysis says is already equal to the percentage at current prices. Submissions close 09:00 UK time on October 26.
Subscribers - Oct 155 min read
Which December Deadline Did EPA Actually Move?
Three dated obligations on a chemical site's calendar changed in two days of the Federal Register. The greenhouse gas report due October 30 is now due March 10, 2027, and that one is law. The TCE processing prohibition that lands December 18 moved only on paper, with comments closing 35 days before it arrives. Also on the file: nineteen premanufacture substances pick up significant new use rules, and the Rhine at Kaub has gone 626 hours under its own record low.
Subscribers - Oct 156 min read
How Your Furfuryl Line Got Down to One Origin
Monument Chemical said on October 6 that it is picking up THFA and 2-MeTHF as Minasolve stops making them in the United States. The release names no plant, so we found it: 3324 Chelsea Avenue, Memphis, the Penn A Kem site whose predecessor petitioned for the 1995 furfuryl alcohol duty order. Meanwhile 3,738.3 of the 3,739.4 tonnes that landed on that customs line this year came from Belgium.
Subscribers - Oct 154 min read
Bodio Swapped Part of Its Coke for Forest Residue
Imerys has been graphitizing carbon in the same Ticino valley since 1917. On October 8 it said the SU-NERGY line there now runs partly on biomass residue and entirely on low-carbon power, with a cradle-to-gate target under 0.1 kg of CO2e a kilogram. The number is modeled and the product is at sampling, and the customs record already shows what that lane is worth.
Free - Oct 134 min read
Your Three Percent Xanthan Deposit Was Off by Forty-Nine Points
Commerce filed its preliminary results in the 2024-2025 xanthan gum review this morning: 51.82 percent for Fufeng, 70.21 for Deosen. Importers posted 2.90 percent at the border on most of the entries those rates will be used to assess. The last cycle of this same case went from a zero preliminary to a 38.62 final in six months.
Subscribers - Oct 133 min read
The Chemical Increase Nobody Gave Back
Three of the seven chemical producer price indexes BLS publishes are below their May peak, and the other four printed series highs in the same August release. The three that fell make the inputs. The four at records formulate them. September's print lands Thursday, and Brent has already gone back to $114.
Free - Oct 136 min read
How a March Fire Reaches Your November Polyol Bill
LyondellBasell restarted Bayport PO/TBA in June. On October 6, RPM told analysts it was raising its raw material inflation guidance by three points for the quarter that ends in November. The gap between a plant restarting and a price settling is the number most buyers get wrong.
Subscribers - Oct 125 min read
Your Class VI Permit Now Has a Denver Address
EPA has handed Colorado primary enforcement authority over carbon sequestration wells, making it the seventh state that can issue a Class VI permit without going through the federal queue, and five of those seven arrived in the last three years. Also on a file nobody can read until tomorrow: the Army is licensing three filament patents to a Houston compounder, NOAA has accepted a seabed exploration application as complete, PPG put seventy million dollars into Huntsville without naming a capacity, and OFAC added two more sectors of the Iranian economy.
Subscribers - Oct 125 min read
Who Takes Your Spent Carbon on the Gulf Coast?
Calgon Carbon says last Wednesday's expansion nearly doubled reactivated carbon output at Crosby, Texas, and the release carries no tonnage, no furnace count and no dollar figure past multi-million. The industrial plant it bought from a waste company in 2024 is finished 451 days before the drinking-water plant that does have a published plate, and imported virgin carbon now lands at $3.42 a kilo.
Subscribers - Oct 125 min read
Chennai Spent Seventeen Years Getting to a Tire Silane
Momentive's Chennai plant opened in 2009 to make silicone softeners, an agricultural adjuvant, a foam additive and a headlamp hardcoat. On October 7 it started making NXT P97, the bio-based mercapto silane that goes into silica tread compounds at 79 percent renewable carbon. The release carries no tonnage and no investment figure, and the thing a compounder actually needs is in the datasheet instead.
Free - Oct 114 min read
Two Thirds of Your Silica Lands at a Dollar Thirty Eight
Evonik told its silica customers in January 2025 that it would keep imported product available domestically. Its Maryland WARN filing dates the Havre de Grace wind-down to a window that is open right now, and the import book says the tonnes did arrive: 92,979 of them in seven months, up 4.6 percent, with the dollars flat. Two thirds of that weight is Chinese material at $1.38 a kilogram, and the grades a specialty buyer wants come from three countries carrying 13 percent of the weight and a third of the dollars.
Free - Oct 116 min read
Shell Restarted Pearl Without Saying Base Oil
Shell brought part of the world's largest gas-to-liquids plant back on Thursday, 204 days after a missile hit Ras Laffan. The statement promises inventory in storage, with shipping still conditional on the Strait, and it names no product. Train 2 is a first-quarter-2027 date, the emergency licensing that has been covering your reformulations runs out on December 30, and Qatar's arrivals in the line that carries its base oil came in at 20,640 tonnes last quarter.
Subscribers - Oct 114 min read
How Nine Days of Paprika Escaped Both Duties
The Commission voted on October 5 and Commerce issued both orders on October 8, by which point the antidumping clock had already run out and the countervailing clock had been dead since June. Entries of Indian oleoresin paprika made from September 29 through October 7 liquidate free of both duties, 124 days of entries liquidate free of the big one, and Synthite's importers are owed a refund this desk told you to expect the other way.
Subscribers - Oct 105 min read
Who Makes Decene Out of a Rapeseed Field?
Verbio started industrial production at Bitterfeld on Tuesday, in what it calls the world's first large-scale ethenolysis plant running on rapeseed methyl ester. Nameplate is 17,000 tonnes a year of 1-decene and 32,000 of 9-DAME, and the reaction makes them one molecule for one molecule. Your access to the lubricant feed moves with somebody else's detergent qualification.
Free - Oct 105 min read
The Spill Plan You Owe EPA Just Moved to 2030
The Clean Water Act has required a worst case discharge plan for hazardous substances since 1990, EPA only wrote the rule in 2024, and on Friday it pushed the filing date from June 2027 to June 2030. Also on the file: eighty food standards opened to potassium chloride, a hundred and sixty butalbital codes lose their DEA exemption on November 9, every company walked out of a stainless pressure pipe review, and the phosphate five-year reviews got a 2027 hearing date.
Subscribers - Oct 107 min read
Forty-Nine Molecules Europe Says It Cannot Lose
The EU's Critical Chemicals Alliance put its working-group reports up for endorsement on Thursday, and one of them carries a table: forty-nine molecules with a CN8 code against each, the starting list for priority trade defence in Q1 2027 and a dedicated state aid framework asked for by the end of this year. Forty of the forty-nine are bulk. The report says in writing that its own method cannot see specialty chemicals, and that the fix waits on CN2028.
Subscribers - Oct 94 min read
Who Shipped the PTFE Germany Stopped Sending?
US imports of PTFE ran 22.6 percent below last year through July while the declared price per kilo rose 9 percent. Germany and Belgium are almost off the book, the Netherlands doubled, and the British plant that has made Fluon since 1952 stops producing on December 31.
Subscribers - Oct 94 min read
Canada Took Trinidad's Ammonia Months Ago
Nutrien said on Monday it will indefinitely shut its Point Lisas nitrogen operations, and told the market the decision changes nothing about its 2026 volumes. The import data agrees, for an uncomfortable reason: Trinidad shipped the United States 9,801 tonnes of anhydrous ammonia in July, the thinnest month on record, while Canada ran 104,761. The substitution finished before the announcement started.
Subscribers - Oct 94 min read
A Sourcing Manager's Guide to Four Cents of Diesel Relief
Executive Order 14435, published in this morning's Federal Register, defers a federal diesel excise tax from October 5 through December 31. The pump price your freight surcharge is keyed to carries a different one, and the Department of Energy table stepped to 40.0 percent and 79 cents a mile on Wednesday regardless. What the order defers is worth about four cents a mile.
Free - Oct 86 min read
The Acidspar Plant Has No Number On It
Utah's fluorspar site gets its ribbon cut at eleven tomorrow morning, with a congressman, the Defense Logistics Agency and a gallium startup on the guest list. The plant being opened makes the steel-mill grade. The acid-grade plant your HF supplier would care about sits behind C$49.9 million of construction in progress, no grid power until 2028, and a cost to complete the company says in writing it cannot yet estimate.
Subscribers - Oct 85 min read
Nobody Answered, So Your Accelerator Doubles on Entry
Two Chinese CBS producers stopped responding to Commerce, and this morning's preliminary countervailing rate came back at 107.57 percent on everyone, reaching back to entries made on July 10. Also on the file: a Shell catalyst plant in Martinez this desk should have caught in September, an order that issued with a zero in it, a thirty-day window to tell USTR what Europe's carbon border is costing you, and the PM2.5 letters that went out to governors last Friday.
Subscribers - Oct 84 min read
How Bethlehem Got a Second Way to Make Sevoflurane
A 25,113 square foot building in Pennsylvania has been making inhaled anesthetic since 1992 and ships it to more than 100 countries. On August 31 this year, sixteen years to the day after the first foreign-trade zone application for the site, its operator asked the Board to add one more molecule, and that molecule sits a step further down the sevoflurane route than the one it named in 2010.
Free - Oct 74 min read
Who Wrote the Rate on Your Chromic Acid?
Commerce finalizes the chromium trioxide duties in tomorrow's Federal Register, and two of the three rates are the exact numbers the petition alleged, because neither foreign producer answered a questionnaire. What your May entries actually owe, which window shut on September 11, and the origin that starts shipping this quarter.
Subscribers - Oct 74 min read
Ten Percent Came Off Your Organic Chemicals in July
Proclamation 11012's import surcharge expired on its own terms at 12:01 in the morning on July 24, and pharmaceuticals were carved out of it where chemicals never were. August organic chemical imports came in at $2.36 billion, the biggest month since January 2024, and the monthly trade surplus in the line gave up 61 percent in four weeks.
Free - Oct 75 min read
Bayer's Tariff Relief Runs Out Before the Reactor Starts
Bayer committed $2.2 billion to a campus in New Albany, Ohio on Friday. The drug substance module runs in 2031. Every rate concession written into the pharmaceutical proclamation, the zero and the twenty and the fifteen, has either expired or stepped up to 100 percent before that date.
Subscribers - Oct 65 min read
Your Acetonitrile Now Has a Nameplate
Balaji Amines told the Indian exchanges on September 24 that its Solapur acetonitrile plant is now rated 1,440 tonnes a month. That is 17,280 tonnes a year of a solvent that has never had a published capacity anywhere, because nobody has ever made it on purpose at scale. Seven months earlier Ascend cut a ribbon on a dedicated acetonitrile unit in Texas, 47 days after leaving Chapter 11.
Subscribers - Oct 66 min read
Which Connect Chemicals Sold You the Inhibitor?
Commerce published the 2024 countervailing final results on Chinese corrosion inhibitors on Monday. Anhui Trust Chem's rate fell from 44.65 percent to 18.64, Nantong Botao's rose to 48.45, and four companies carrying the Connect name now sit at four different numbers. One of them was rescinded for having no entries at all, which is why it keeps the old rate.
Subscribers - Oct 65 min read
Nobody Drilled a Well for This Iodine
Iofina took 393.3 tonnes of crystalline iodine out of other operators' produced water in the first half of 2026, up 29 percent, from eight plants that own no wells. USGS has America's iodine import reliance back under half, and the same company's Kentucky site is the only one Title 40 names by name.
Free - Oct 54 min read
Who Got the Allowances Your Supplier Lost?
EPA set the 2027 HFC allowances on October 1 and files the notice tomorrow morning. The national cap did not move, and four million allowances changed hands anyway. Here is who took them, which of the two caps actually rations your tonnes, and what the exchange-value math does to an R-410A quote.
Subscribers - Oct 54 min read
The Propane Discount Started Closing From the Wrong End
Gulf Coast propane and propylene stocks set a record in the same month Mont Belvieu propane went up 22.8 percent. The barrels never left, and the premium arrived anyway. Here is what moved, and which line of a propylene derivative contract it reaches.
Free - Oct 55 min read
How Fifty Three Million Entries Become One Refund
A Paperwork Reduction Act notice published this morning carries the first primary-source figure for what Customs owes importers now that the IEEPA tariffs are void: $166 billion across 53 million entry summaries. It also names the one piece of housekeeping that decides whether your share of it lands. Also on the file: a dumping case filed on a tariff line with twenty five cars in it, two staff conferences you have standing to attend, and seven chemical orders that went operative at midnight.
Subscribers - Oct 46 min read
Who Makes Austria's Melamine?
Commerce closed its side of the China melamine sunset on Friday, which keeps every origin Cornerstone ever petitioned under duty. The import book has already moved to Austria, a country nobody filed against, and the plant there answers to the same owner as the German one paying 218.73 percent.
Subscribers - Oct 46 min read
One Percent of Your Catalyst Blend Is Enough
Evonik and Huntsman petitioned against Chinese polyurethane amine catalysts on September 29. Six molecules named by CAS number, alleged margins of 261 to 476 percent, and a scope that reaches any blend carrying one percent of them. Here are the molecules, the entry lines, and the dates.
Subscribers - Oct 43 min read
Morris Has Been Splitting Fat Since 1973
Nouryon announced its first American solar array on Thursday, at Morris, Illinois, and the release quietly sizes the plant at about 34,000 megawatt-hours a year. The five unit operations behind that number have not changed since the Energy Department walked the site in 2003.
Free - Oct 33 min read
Nobody Builds a Reactor at Seven and a Half Percent
Fourteen US-listed chemical makers spent $1.11 billion on plant between January and June, less than the same fourteen spent in the lockdown half of 2020 and 56 percent below the 2023 peak. On Thursday Minerals Technologies priced the reason: 7.500 percent paper to retire 5.000 percent paper.
Free - Oct 33 min read
India Took the Last Three Months of Your Toluidine
US imports under the toluidine heading are down 46.8 percent through July, and Germany shipped 56.8 percent less. India is the only origin that grew, and it has been the largest single source three months running. No American plant told EPA it makes o-toluidine for sale.
Subscribers - Oct 35 min read
Go Back Another Sixty Days on Your Electrodes
Last Wednesday's antidumping preliminaries pushed suspension of liquidation back to July 2. The countervailing duty side of the same two cases reaches back to May 1, it was decided first, and on Chinese electrodes it is the larger half of the bill. Also on the file: your 2024 benzotriazole just got its final subsidy number, seven chemical orders renewed with nobody from the other side filing a word, 5E closed on Searles Valley at 14.5 percent, and Corteva noticed the same two Pittsburg jobs twice.
Subscribers - Oct 25 min read
What Happens If Grangemouth Stops Making Azoxystrobin?
Syngenta opened a consultation on October 1 to close the Scottish plant that has made the world's best-selling fungicide since 1996, putting 377 jobs at risk. A trade profile of the molecule asked in 2010 how much of the market Indian and Chinese producers would take. The US customs book has already answered: a third of America's imported fungicide now ships from India, and the British lane is down to six tenths of one percent.
Subscribers - Oct 26 min read
Two Plants Will Sell You American Hydroquinone
Goodyear kept Bayport and Niagara Falls out of last year's chemical sale, along with the rights to everything they make. On September 29 it decided to close both. Here is what goes with them, who is left holding the molecule, and why your import book moved first.
Subscribers - Oct 24 min read
Rancho Cordova Already Had the Columns
SK pharmteco put more than $200 million behind its American plants on Wednesday, and the one element carrying a date is GMP kilo-scale peptide purification. It lands at the California site whose chromatography group has been training FDA inspectors for years.
Free - Oct 18 min read
Which of September's Tonnes Are Coming Back?
The September edition of the ledger, sixteen entries, and the first month both columns published a capacity figure. Just over two million tonnes a year came off the book against seven and a half thousand arriving, and nine tenths of the leaving side is still standing.
Subscribers - Oct 14 min read
The Silicon Nobody Will File Against
Commerce opened another silicon metal review on Thursday, and the US order list now covers ten origins. Imported tonnes rose 3.3 percent anyway. Angola and Laos went to zero, Norway lost 39 percent, and Canada picked up 8,438 tonnes while its only silicon plant sits majority-owned by the lead petitioner.
Subscribers - Oct 13 min read
How India's Electrodes Beat the Ninety-Day Clock
Commerce found critical circumstances in both large diameter graphite electrode cases on Wednesday, which pushes suspension of liquidation back to July 2. India moved 8,658 tonnes onto the customs line in April, May and June, a third of its entire 2025 book, and every kilo of it entered before that date.
Free - Sep 305 min read
Your July Electrodes Just Became Dutiable
Commerce found critical circumstances in both large diameter graphite electrode cases, so suspension of liquidation runs back to July 2 and the cash deposit is either 95.61 percent or 1.15 percent depending on who answered the questionnaire. Also on the file: Westlake takes 165,000 tonnes of PVC out of Cologne, Chemours backs a twenty-year refrigerant runway, EPA fixes two wrong words that sat in your Title V emergency defense for 120 days, and California's register moves for the first time since the 23rd.
Subscribers - Sep 307 min read
The Importer Asked to Have Its Own Rubber Taxed
An IRS notice going into tomorrow's Federal Register carries a petition from Zeon Chemicals to add SIS rubber, the backbone of hot melt pressure sensitive adhesives, to the Superfund list of taxable substances. The proposed rate is $2.56 a ton and 72 percent of it is benzene. The statutory deadline for deciding it expired on August 7, and the number that can actually cost you money is not the $2.56.
Subscribers - Sep 304 min read
Eleven Months to a New Fluorination Line
Navin Fluorine's board put ₹75 crore behind a debottleneck of a plant it already owned at Dahej last October, against a crop protection molecule a customer had already ordered. Commercial dispatch started Tuesday, a quarter ahead of the published target. The same site's last new acid plant took thirty five months.
Free - Sep 296 min read
You Now Bid Against Rotterdam for the Same Drum
INEOS mothballed what it calls Europe's last world-scale acetyls units on September 22, and two of the three lines it stopped have no same-owner replacement on this side of the Atlantic. Two thirds of America's acetic anhydride exports already clear through the Netherlands, that lane grew 27 percent before Hull went quiet, and every tonne of it moves on a clock that starts fifteen days before the boat.
Subscribers - Sep 294 min read
Two Countries Ship Nine Tenths of Your Ethyl Acetate
INEOS mothballed Europe's largest ethyl acetate line on September 22, and the American drum barely felt it, because Britain had already fallen to 1.1 percent of the US import book. Mexico and South Africa carry 90.5 percent of what's left, the tightest that book has been in seven years, and the largest domestic plant spent this spring in Chapter 11.
Free - Sep 294 min read
How Your Methionine Deposit Became a Loan
The ITC took the methionine orders on France, Japan and Spain into full five-year reviews, which moves the decision from late October to next May. The revocation date, if it ever comes, is already behind you: July 13 for France, September 14 for Japan and Spain. Every subject entry since is money posted against an order that may not exist.
Subscribers - Sep 286 min read
Who Finishes Evonik's Closure List?
BASF confirmed on Friday that it is in exploratory talks over a takeover of Evonik, three days after Evonik published a restructuring plan it has not finished writing. Six German site profiles, two business divestments and 3,200 job cuts are now decisions somebody else may get to make. Here is what that does to the contract you hold.
Subscribers - Sep 285 min read
How Your Chlorine Container Got a Second Rulebook
PHMSA finished a rulemaking this morning that it started in 1995, and it changes which code your cargo tanks, cryogenic portable tanks and one-ton containers can be built and recertified to. Also on the file: EPA reopens the cargo tank vapor tightness rule it wrote in 2024, Tessenderlo closes on 20 percent of FMC for $403 million, Ashland pushes its European receivables facility out to 2029, and five straight days with nothing new in the California register.
Subscribers - Sep 285 min read
Hovione Started the Hastelloy One First
Hovione opened 89 Twin Rivers at its East Windsor campus on September 15 with two commercial-scale PSD-3 spray dryers, and the one it started first is built in Hastelloy because a customer needed acid service. Its VP for the Americas puts a single unit of that class at 30 metric tons a year, and spray drying is how 54 percent of the FDA's approved amorphous products get made.
Free - Sep 274 min read
Your Sulfur Supplier Found a Better Customer
The last complete month of US customs data has American sulfur leaving the Gulf at $1,041 a tonne, with Morocco taking half of it. Mosaic settled the third quarter with those same refiners at $705 a long ton. The fourth-quarter number has not settled yet, and the netback gap is what the refiner is looking at while you negotiate.
Subscribers - Sep 275 min read
Who Made the Tris Molecule in Your Buffer?
Commerce set preliminary countervailing duty rates on Tris from China on Thursday: 20.63 percent for everyone except one exporter, which drew 117.39 on adverse facts available and a finding that reaches back to entries made on June 26. The scope decides origin by where the molecule was manufactured, so recrystallizing, retesting or repacking it in a third country leaves it inside the net.
Subscribers - Sep 274 min read
Near Shore Is Eight Percent of America's Penicillin
OMB is asking chemical and petrochemical manufacturers to report idle domestic or near shore capacity behind the ASPR 86 list, and it added amoxicillin to the ask by hand. Seven years of the penicillin import book say the near shore share has already fallen by two thirds.
Free - Sep 265 min read
Nobody Bought More Adhesive. Everybody Paid More.
H.B. Fuller closed its third quarter with 7.4 points of price and three points less volume, and called the margin a record. The plant-closure program behind it is three quarters unspent and names no site. Also on the file: the drug docket that named a butanediol plant 35 days before its press release, a 99.99 percent consent decree at a Puerto Rico sterilizer, and $700 million of notes that get bought back at 101 if a crop protection spin-off does not complete.
Subscribers - Sep 264 min read
How a Worn Forklift Wheel Gets Back to Its Isocyanate
Covestro opened a chemical recycling pilot plant at Leverkusen on September 16 that breaks end-of-life Vulkollan into purified building blocks and recovers more than 90 percent of the material by mass. The elastomer dates to February 1950, can only be cast by a licensed processor, and in the United States that means a short list of addresses.
Free - Sep 266 min read
Half of American Lithium Carbonate Will Be One Building in Georgia
R3 Lithium restarted the Covington line this month and projects it will be more than half of US lithium carbonate production in 2027. The line is 2,500 tonnes a year. Run that claim backwards and it tells you the size of the domestic industry, and the instrument the feedstock rides on is a 2022 variance written to a company that filed for bankruptcy in April.
Subscribers - Sep 254 min read
Your Korean Superabsorbent Now Enters at Zero
Commerce closed the second administrative review of the antidumping order on Korean SAP this morning at 0.00 percent. The published all-others rate is still 26.05, LG Chem has not posted a deposit in thirteen months, and the tonnage on the line has already answered.
Free - Sep 254 min read
Who Ships Your Salt Cake After October?
5E's purchase of the Searles Valley plants is expected to close in early October, and its own 10-K says the Trona Railway transfers only when the Surface Transportation Board says so. The notice that starts that second clock published this morning. If the track runs late, the fallback on sodium sulfate is an import book that is 78.5 percent Canadian.
Subscribers - Sep 256 min read
Thirty-One Days to List Your Idle Reactor
OMB's Made in America Office published a request for information on Friday asking who holds idle US capacity for essential-medicine ingredients, molecule by molecule, site by site, with the price per unit it would take to run it. The ask names the chemical and petrochemical sectors explicitly, and responses close October 26.
Subscribers - Sep 244 min read
Why Your USP Glycerin Has a Stockyards Address
Vantage's 34-acre Chicago site calls itself the nation's largest domestic merchant producer of oleochemical fatty acids. It is also where the first US-made ICH Q7 glycerin comes from, and the hydrolysis that makes one makes the other.
Free - Sep 245 min read
Twelve Kilograms a Week, If You're New
Commerce published the polysilicon anti-stockpiling rule this morning, two days after it took effect. New importers of record are capped at twelve kilograms a week until December 4, everyone else gets measured against a historic average only Commerce can see, and the first month of public data that could show a surge does not publish until October 6. Also on the file: a 117 percent subsidy rate on Chinese tromethamine, a rubber accelerator deadline that moved only fourteen days, and graphite electrode deposits that now reach back to May 1.
Subscribers - Sep 246 min read
Methylene Chloride Is Legal Again. Now Find Some.
The Fifth Circuit vacated EPA's 2024 methylene chloride rule on September 15, and with it all forty of the prohibitions the rule wrote. Every one of its five prohibition dates had already passed, the newest by 140 days. The molecule itself never went anywhere: US imports hit 14,345 tonnes in 2025, the highest of the seven years we pulled, in the same calendar year the import ban took effect.
Subscribers - Sep 236 min read
The Force Majeure Nobody Has Lifted
Chevron Phillips Chemical told customers on June 9 that critical equipment had failed at the normal alpha olefins units at Cedar Bayou and the units were down. One hundred and six days later there is no lifting notice, no restart date and no tonnage. The only public figure that touches the event at all sits in a filing by the company that owns half of CPChem, and it never mentions the outage.
Subscribers - Sep 234 min read
The Deposit Stopped One Subheading Short
Heading 3823 of the tariff schedule covers the fatty acids and the industrial fatty alcohols together. Commerce's scope named four of its subheadings on Tuesday and left 3823.70 alone, so the same Indonesian plants that now post a 35.97 percent cash deposit on stearic acid ship the alcohol at nothing. And the alcohol line is the only one in the chain with a real third origin.
Subscribers - Sep 233 min read
Five Codes Left the Zero List This Morning
Commerce filed seven pages of pharmaceutical tariff housekeeping at 4:15 on Monday afternoon. One paragraph of it takes five HTSUS codes out of the annex that was holding them at zero, six days before the rate lands, and four of those five carried $92.8 billion of imports last year.
Free - Sep 225 min read
Who Still Ships You Stearic Acid Without a Cash Deposit?
Commerce set preliminary dumping margins on fatty acids from Indonesia and Malaysia this morning, and those two origins shipped 89 percent of every tonne the United States imported under the scope's three main lines last year. An unexamined Indonesian supplier now posts 35.97 percent against a Malaysian one's 9.54, and Indonesian entries back to June 24 are already inside the net. Also on the file: the ITC voted early on PFA, a PET deposit date moved back 107 days, and Corteva's record date is Thursday.
Subscribers - Sep 225 min read
Fifteen Days' Notice to Change Your Anhydride Origin
INEOS idled its three Hull acetyls plants on Tuesday, and two of them had already stopped. The acetic acid has a transatlantic route that already runs. The acetic anhydride has 45,357 tonnes of American export book and a DEA filing attached to every drum.
Subscribers - Sep 224 min read
Cleveland Still Makes the Phosphor
The chemical division of GE Lighting became Current Chemicals in February, 250,000 square feet running from gram-scale to full-scale production. It sits against a luminophore import line that has fallen 87 percent since 2016, and a rare-earth compound line where 78 percent of the weight arrives from China.
Free - Sep 215 min read
Your Replacement Polystyrene Ships From Altamira
INEOS Styrolution's Illinois WARN filing puts 64 people out in September and 30 in December, which is a plant that stops making polystyrene now and gets taken apart later. The 400,000 tonnes coming out is about nine times everything the US imported on that customs line last year, and Mexico already ships half of what does arrive.
Subscribers - Sep 214 min read
Only One Chemical Industry Is Actually Full
August put US synthetic rubber at 57.4 percent of capacity, the emptiest manufacturing industry the Federal Reserve publishes. The artificial and synthetic fibers line next door ran at 92.7, the fullest. Both are inside the 71.7 percent everyone quotes for chemicals, and the difference between them decides which of your fourth-quarter contracts has any leverage in it.
Subscribers - Sep 213 min read
How One Weekly Number Reprices Every Drum You Buy
US on-highway diesel printed $6.285 on September 14, the highest in the thirty-two years EIA has published the series. The surcharge tables keyed to it stepped two days later: 41.0 percent on the Department of Energy's own matrix, 54.80 percent at one LTL carrier.
Free - Sep 206 min read
Who Has Butadiene Left for October?
TPC's Houston plant, about 35% of North American butadiene by the company's own count, lost power on September 14 and routed the site to its flare. The report says sixty-five minutes and ten pounds, it is still open six days later, and two more US units are already out or going out for the fourth quarter.
Subscribers - Sep 205 min read
The Cracked Gas Went Backwards
The Chemical Safety Board closed its Shell Polymers Monaca file on Wednesday: two motor-operated valves opened at once, cracked gas ran the wrong way into a lit firebox, and Furnace Five was out for seven months on $95 million of damage. Also on the file: six solar determinations Commerce finished without a single comment, EPA repealing most of the 2024 power rule, and an 8-K feed that produced nothing at all.
Subscribers - Sep 204 min read
Forty-Eight Million Pounds Out of South Pittsburg
Colonial Chemical publishes its own running pounds-shipped counter, and it just put two new reactors behind amphoterics and imidazolines rather than behind the sugar chemistry that won it an EPA award. The customs line its imported competition arrives on prices the same six digits at fifty-one cents a kilo and at nine dollars twenty-four.
Free - Sep 193 min read
Why Chemical Plants Ran Emptier in August Than in 2020
The Fed's August G.17 landed Friday morning with chemical capacity utilization at 71.7 percent, below every month of the 2020 shutdown. Output is only down 2.6 percent in a year. The denominator did the rest of the work, and it has gone up in all seventy-two months since August 2020.
Free - Sep 194 min read
Which Ten-Digit Line Pays on September 29?
The zero rung every non-Annex-III importer has entered patented pharmaceutical articles under since July 31 expires in ten days. We counted the proclamation's own annexes this run: 131 ten-digit codes take a rate, 526 are set to zero, and inside heading 2933 the split is 21 against 79.
Subscribers - Sep 196 min read
Europe Protected the Yarn and Lost the Lactam
Brussels put 60 to 67.6 percent antidumping duties on Chinese polyamide yarn on July 27, naming an industry in five member states. Six weeks later Leuna Polyamid said it has no investor and stops producing at the end of September, taking 176,000 tonnes a year of caprolactam out of the Western balance. Two of the countries the Commission protected are already the largest European buyers of American lactam.
Subscribers - Sep 185 min read
Your Second Borate Source Went for $3.4 Million in Cash
5E Advanced Materials won the Searles Valley operating assets out of chapter 11 on Monday for $3.4 million in cash, 8.3 million shares and a $6.2 million note, then filed an annual report three days later carrying a going-concern warning on its first page of risk factors. Also on the file: the WARN notice that finally puts a date on Mosaic's idled Faustina, a permanent closure at Shell's Martinez catalyst plant, and a full year in which Chinese R-32 produced no entries at all.
Subscribers - Sep 186 min read
What Else Came Out of Shell's Martinez Catalyst Plant
Shell filed a WARN notice on September 9 closing its Martinez, California catalyst plant on November 30, 64 jobs, permanent, with no press release and no statement. The county air permit says the site runs two trains of silver-based ethylene oxide catalyst and a second batch process whose product goes to Shell's own long-chain alcohol plants.
Subscribers - Sep 184 min read
Killeen Thins the Resist, Plainview Cleans the Wafer
A Federal Register notice on September 10 prints the eight materials that go into semiconductor-grade photoresist thinner at Dongjin Semichem's plant in Killeen, Texas. The same Korean company runs 24,000 tonnes a year of electronic-grade sulfuric acid out in the Panhandle, and the two plants are the clearest public record anyone has of the US electronic-chemicals layer being built.
Free - Sep 174 min read
Who Buys West Virginia's New Maleic Anhydride?
TCL Specialties made its first commercial sale of maleic anhydride out of New Martinsville this year, from a unit rated 40,500 tonnes. The United States imported 8,893 tonnes of the stuff in all of 2025, and exported 47,309. A plant that size does not land in an import gap, and the export column tells you what it has to price against.
Subscribers - Sep 176 min read
North Carolina Stopped Being Your Fayetteville Risk
Chemours, DuPont and Corteva signed a $455 million settlement with the State of North Carolina and eleven local entities on September 9, resolving the litigation over Fayetteville Works. The number that governs the shared liability ledger is $210 million, the number that touches the plant is zero, and the federal obligations the settlement leaves untouched are the ones your supply actually runs through.
Subscribers - Sep 165 min read
Why American Tungsten Doesn't Reach You Until 2028
The Department of War committed $450 million to The Elmet Group on Monday and the Defense Logistics Agency signed a $2 billion ceiling for ore, concentrate and sodium tungstate. The mine restarts in the fourth quarter of 2027 and the APT plant in the second half of 2028. Also on the file: 109 days in which lysine from China owed no countervailing duty, two Chinese isocyanurate producers at 73 and 91 percent while the Spanish pair sit at zero, and Deepak Nitrite's margin going to nothing.
Subscribers - Sep 164 min read
Who Raised Price Faster, the Plant or the Port?
BLS prices fourteen chemical NAICS industries twice, once at the American plant gate and once at the foreign port. This morning's import release lets you line the two up for August, and in nine of the fourteen the American price outran the import.
Free - Sep 166 min read
The Other Half of Every Penta Tonne
Perstorp's Toledo plant stopped making chemicals on September 2 and will still be laying people off on July 1, 2027. The WARN filing that surfaced this week gives the wind-down calendar. The customs record gives something better: Sweden cut its formate shipments to the US by 4,308 tonnes in the same half it tripled its penta, and nobody replaced them.
Subscribers - Sep 155 min read
Your HF Plant Still Can't Buy American Fluorspar
The Utah mine that is supposed to end 100 percent US import reliance on fluorspar commissioned a plant in July and named August 15 as its production date. The plant that started makes metallurgical grade for steel mills, a 20,000 tonne import line. The acid-grade plant behind the Defense Logistics Agency contract is still a construction site, and the prospectus filed on September 4 withdrew the delivery date.
Subscribers - Sep 154 min read
Twenty-Five Thousand Square Feet That Make Nothing
RTI International cut the ribbon last Thursday on a $14 million expansion of the only privately owned industrial pilot laboratory in North Carolina, and the Department of Energy put $5.5 million into two projects there the day before. The building has no nameplate and will never sell you a tonne. Five companies have ever used it, and a few dozen say they would like to.
Free - Sep 154 min read
The Government Publishes Your Single-Source List
The National Defense Stockpile has signed fourteen delivery orders this fiscal year, worth $313.1 million. Nine of them went out with the contracting officer recording that only one source could supply the material. That list is free, it updates itself, and five of the entries sit directly upstream of products you buy.
Subscribers - Sep 143 min read
Two Thirds of Your Furfural Rides on a Cane Harvest
Half of every tonne of furfural the US imported since 2015 came from South Africa and another sixth from the Dominican Republic, both of them byproducts of sugar milling. The 2026 book is running 29 percent behind last year.
Free - Sep 145 min read
The 374,000 Tonnes Nobody Replaced
A 340,000 tonne chlor-alkali plant was supposed to start up inside Chemours' DeLisle fence in 2028. The supply agreement died in March, the two sides are in arbitration, and the investor deck Chemours filed on September 9 names Olin as the replacement. The chlorine gets sorted out. The 374,000 tonnes of caustic soda that came attached to it does not.
Subscribers - Sep 145 min read
Evonik Keeps One Chlorosilane Site
Evonik said Friday it will shut Bitterfeld at the end of April 2027 and supply chlorosilane customers from Rheinfelden instead, blaming Asian supply of high-purity silicon tetrachloride. Also on the file this week: the polyvinyl alcohol orders survive a fourth review while three quarters of the tonnes arrive from origins no order touches, Chemours puts a number on North Carolina, and EPA quietly moves ethylene oxide sterilizers into the fumigant paperwork.
Subscribers - Sep 135 min read
Which Half of Augusta Comes Back?
Sasol's 20-F reached the SEC on 1 September carrying a plain six-line list of what International Chemicals switched off and on last year. Two of the lines name the same Sicilian site and point opposite ways: the paraffin separation unit restarts by December, the alkylation plant it feeds stays mothballed. The tonnes coming back are feedstock, and they land in somebody else's LAB plant.
Subscribers - Sep 134 min read
The Molecule DOE Picked in 2004 Finally Has a Plant
In August 2004 a DOE screening report named 2,5-furandicarboxylic acid one of twelve building blocks worth making from sugar, and said the barriers were selective sugar dehydration and an industrially viable oxidation step. Avantium finished commissioning the last unit at Delfzijl on September 7, so both of those barriers are now running equipment. The interesting number is where the contracted volume sits.
Free - Sep 134 min read
How Mongolia Ended Up in Your HF Contract
US acid-grade fluorspar imports are up 46 percent this year and Mexico supplied 17 percent of the increase. Two origins that shipped nothing in the same months of 2025 now carry a fifth of the book, and they are not charging a premium to do it.
Subscribers - Sep 123 min read
Your Peroxide Has Two Prices and One Tariff Line
Solvay said on September 3 it will more than double its Taiwan electronic grade hydrogen peroxide plant by the end of the year. US import data puts 94.8 percent of the tonnes on that same tariff line at 45 cents a kilogram, and the Japanese tonnes at $3.40. Taiwan's shipments to the US are down 38 percent this year.
Free - Sep 125 min read
The Shutdown Set Your Glycine Deadline
Four Commerce determinations on four different fine chemicals were all due Tuesday, because last November's tolling pushed them onto the same day. The rates run from 0.00 percent to 104.92. Also on the file: a citric acid case where Canada beat the dumping charge and lost the subsidy one, a 23-year-old polyvinyl alcohol order nobody turned up to fight, and a Korean photoresist thinner plant in Killeen filing for zone status.
Subscribers - Sep 125 min read
Nine Names Can Still Sell You Ibuprofen
IOL Chemicals told the Indian exchanges on Wednesday that its 12,000-tonne ibuprofen unit is running at 95 percent, and that the 6,000 tonnes it is adding do not commercialise until December 2027. On FDA's current drug master file list, nine holders have an open file on the plain molecule, one of them a South Carolina line that stopped making it last year.
Subscribers - Sep 114 min read
Six Things Arrive in Chattanooga, Twenty-Nine Leave
Chattem Chemicals filed two DEA applications on July 20 and the Federal Register published both on August 25. One asks to import six basic classes, including concentrate of poppy straw and the fentanyl precursor ANPP. The other asks to bulk manufacture twenty-nine, on the same site that calls itself the largest US source of sarcosinate surfactants.
Free - Sep 114 min read
Is Anyone Still Importing Turkish Poppy Straw?
Federal regulation says at least 80 percent of the narcotic raw material entering the US must originate in Turkey and India. Through July they are 10.2 percent of the permitted-origin book, and Spain by itself has out-shipped Turkey.
Subscribers - Sep 115 min read
BASF Had to License Back the Molecule It Invented
FDA struck two actives from the sunscreen monograph this morning, taking the list to fifteen. The one entry added since 1999 carries eighteen months of statutory exclusivity held by DSM Nutritional Products, and the company whose chemists made the molecule in the first place is selling it in the US under a license from the company that filed the paperwork.
Subscribers - Sep 103 min read
The Biggest Month in Forty-Three Years of Coatings Prices
The BLS index for marine, industrial and construction coatings rose 8.4% in August, the largest one-month move in the 518 BLS has published since 1983. Pigments were flat, both resin families fell, and the architectural line printed the same number it printed in July.
Free - Sep 106 min read
How a Low-Carbon Contract Runs on Conventional Tonnes
Freeport has been taking conventional ammonium nitrate solution against a five-year low carbon contract since January 2025. The attribute shows up when an EPA permit does, and that date quietly moved a quarter in LSB's last 10-Q.
Subscribers - Sep 105 min read
Four More Rubbers, and the Queue Still Hasn't Moved
Treasury docketed four more petitions to the Superfund taxable-substance list on Wednesday, three of them from Zeon on its own NBR, sSBR and lithium-battery binder latex. That makes twelve pending, the youngest 293 days old against a statutory clock of 180. Also on the file: the TSCA collection that reaches 26,829 companies, fifty extra days before the Tris deposits start, Ercros clearing at zero on its way off the exchange, and a 1930 tariff statute the ITC just reopened.
Subscribers - Sep 93 min read
Why Your Turpentine Comes From Canada Now
Brazil shipped 2,120 tonnes of turpentine into the US in the first seven months of 2025 and fifty kilograms in the same months of 2026. The duty that stopped it was struck down in February, and the tonnes still have not come back.
Subscribers - Sep 94 min read
What Aarti Built Instead of a Chlorotoluene Chain
Aarti Industries commissioned the first three units of Zone IV at Jhagadia on September 7. Six weeks earlier the company had told its analysts the site was 97 percent erected, which tells you what a commissioning date is actually made of.
Free - Sep 95 min read
One Hundred Seventy People Now Make Your Dihydromyrcenol
Symrise sold its US terpene business to the turnaround investor Mutares on September 1, closing the same day it signed. Two plants, about 170 people, and a EUR 145 million write-down that landed eight months before anyone knew the buyer's name.
Subscribers - Sep 85 min read
The Last American Penta Came Out of Toledo
Perstorp shut its Toledo plant on September 2, taking with it the only US pentaerythritol and TMP production. The customs record shows the replacement tonnes were already moving in the first half of 2026, and 87 percent of the growth came from an origin nobody lists as a North American supplier.
Subscribers - Sep 85 min read
The Country Nobody Named Ships Half Your Silicon
Four more silicon metal orders were continued last Thursday, closing out eleven months in which eight origins moved under duty. Brazil was in the last case, won it in 2018, and was left out of this one. It now supplies 56 percent of the US import book, and every origin under order combined adds up to less than half of what Brazil ships alone.
Subscribers - Sep 83 min read
How Much Finished Chemical Is Actually Sitting There?
US chemical inventories are flat and shipments just set a record, and both of those numbers hide the same thing. Finished goods have fallen to the smallest share of the chemical shelf in the thirty-four years Census has measured it.
Free - Sep 76 min read
Who Sold You PFA While Washington Works Was Down?
Chemours filed against perfluoroalkoxy alkane from India on August 5 and told Commerce it is the only producer of PFA in the United States. The period of investigation runs July 1, 2025 to June 30, 2026, the same stretch in which its Parkersburg plant lost a critical piece of equipment to a utility outage and then shut down entirely in January. The ITC votes on September 21.
Subscribers - Sep 74 min read
What a Toll Blender Buys First
ReAgent has blended chemicals in Cheshire since 1977 and never operated outside the UK. Last month it opened 25,000 square feet in Winston-Salem, and the equipment it bought first says more about how the formulation layer actually works than any capacity table does.
Free - Sep 74 min read
Sri Lanka Reprices Your Carbon Bed
US activated carbon imports ran 8.6 percent lighter through June and cost 10.9 percent more. The delivered price hit $3.57 a kilo, the coconut-shell origins did nearly all of the moving, and the domestic reactivation capacity that would relieve it starts in 2028.
Subscribers - Sep 64 min read
The Polysilicon Floor Lands on Malaysia
Section 232 put a $21 per kilogram minimum import price on HTSUS 2804.61 starting December 4. In 2025 that line carried 6,791 tonnes, four fifths of it Malaysian at $15.66 a kilo, and the Chinese share was 27 tonnes at $73.
Free - Sep 65 min read
How a Take-or-Pay Tonne Floats Its Own Start Date
Smackover Lithium has now sold roughly 90% of its targeted offtake at South West Arkansas. Both contracts start on a date the filings moved back a year, and only one of them ends up with a company that actually consumes lithium carbonate.
Subscribers - Sep 66 min read
Fifty-Five Percent of a Methanol Plant
Methanex sold substantially all of its New Zealand gas entitlements on Tuesday and will indefinitely idle Motunui in the first quarter of 2027. Every closure list this week will carry the number 860,000 tonnes. The site has produced at 55 percent of that for six straight quarters, so the tonnes actually leaving are closer to 474,000, and the gas risk in Methanex's book moves to Louisiana.
Subscribers - Sep 54 min read
The Ordinance Said Nonhazardous
Saukville's zoning code permitted nonhazardous chemical manufacturing and had no category at all for the plant Ereztech wanted to build there, so the site that now turns out a US-qualified cobalt precursor needed a use determination before it could exist. Its whole published output ladder stops short of a tonne.
Free - Sep 55 min read
The Lysine Left China Before the Duty Did
The ITC voted lysine from China injurious on Wednesday, the last step before July's margins become orders. The book those orders protect already moved: China went from 98.6 percent of first-half US imports to 37.6 percent while the case was still running, and Korea took the difference. Also on the file: three citric acid origins enter review in one notice, Advancion buys fifty more days on Tris, PET film's annual sweep opens, and EPA pushes RFS reporting to October 1.
Subscribers - Sep 53 min read
The Fifty-Six Rates That Just Locked
Ninety-four antidumping and countervailing duty orders had their review window open on July 1 and close on July 31. Thirty-eight drew a request. Eighteen of the ninety-four cover chemicals, exactly half of those were reviewed, and methionine, polyvinyl alcohol, persulfates and potassium phosphate salts were not among them. The September window closes on the 30th.
Subscribers - Sep 46 min read
The Byproduct That Can't Be Turned Off
EPA's draft risk evaluation for 1,2-dichloropropane published this morning and flags 14 of the 15 conditions of use it assessed, disposal included. Two US plants make the chemical without meaning to, three buy it, and the only lever that moves the volume sits upstream in propylene oxide and epichlorohydrin.
Subscribers - Sep 46 min read
Nobody Asked About the Other Ten
Commerce opened the first administrative review of the vanillin order from China today, and exactly one company is in it: the exporter it refused a separate rate to last year. Chinese vanillin fell from $52.5m to $1.7m in one year and the rest of your book got 44 percent more expensive.
Subscribers - Sep 43 min read
How Much of the Chemical Tariff Did the Court Take?
Two Julys apart, US chemical imports cleared customs within twenty million dollars of each other, and the duty assessed on them fell by $249 million. The Supreme Court struck the IEEPA tariffs in February, and just over half the increase since 2024 is still standing.
Free - Sep 35 min read
Who Makes Your Connecting Pins in 2027?
GrafTech is closing Monterrey and moving pin stock to Pamplona, and together the two moves take 51,000 tonnes out of a business already running at a 125,600 tonne rate. Also on the file: DOE cuts Calumet's renewable loan guarantee by more than half, EPA grants relief to 29 of 34 small refineries, four silicon metal orders renew without a defense, and a spreadsheet fix moves an Omani PET rate.
Subscribers - Sep 34 min read
Three Countries Take the Whole Acrylonitrile Book
US acrylonitrile exports have halved since 2019, and every tonne of the decline is Asian. Turkiye, Mexico and Peru now take 96 percent of what leaves the country, one of them on a metronome, which changes what your supplier can say yes to on 2027 volume.
Subscribers - Sep 34 min read
How Aberdeen Learned an Enzyme
Sterling Specialty Chemicals ran three plant-level actions in eight months at the old American Cyanamid polyacrylamide franchise. Its parent Praana Group closed two more chemicals franchises in the same window.
Free - Sep 26 min read
Your Grade Spec Has a Docket Number Now
A customs rulemaking published this morning asks whether importers should hand over the export declaration their foreign supplier filed at home, and whether composition and grade belong on the entry itself. Commerce has opened 17 circumvention inquiries this year, the most since at least 2010, and the document CBP is asking about would settle most of what those inquiries are trying to prove.
Subscribers - Sep 25 min read
The C4 Merchant Stops Selling the Spread
TPC holds the largest North American share in butadiene, raffinate, 1-butene and polybutene out of a single Houston plant, and it lost $34 million last year. ENEOS closes in October, and an owner with its own rubber plants values those molecules differently than a merchant does.
Subscribers - Sep 23 min read
Seventeen Industries Reported. Chemicals Finished Last.
The ISM's August report landed Tuesday morning. Fifteen manufacturing industries grew, two contracted, and chemicals was the second of the two. July was worse: chemicals was the only industry in the country going backwards, in the strongest headline month of the year.
Free - Sep 14 min read
The Pentane Plant With Two Capacities
South Hampton Resources has quietly turned Silsbee, Texas into roughly four times the plant it was in 2004, and its own EPA filings show the climb. The last increment of headroom was never a steel problem.
Free - Sep 15 min read
Is Your B-Side Twenty Percent Esters?
Commerce opened two more circumvention inquiries on the alkyl phosphate ester orders this morning, and three of the four now open reach past the molecule into finished spray-foam systems. Also on the file: a court pulls nitrogen-15 back out of the ammonium sulfate orders, Chemours gets its India case, and chemicals is one of only two industries the ISM has contracting.
Subscribers - Sep 18 min read
Eight Closures, One Tonnage
The August edition of the ledger, seventeen entries, and the units switched sides. One of eight removals published a capacity figure. Six of eight additions did, and the reason has nothing to do with which way the capacity was going.
Subscribers - Aug 316 min read
The Paraxylene Gap Was Never the Problem
Anellotech is liquidating, and DSI is marketing the Silsbee TCat-8 unit at about $18 million. The market it was built for got better the whole time: US paraxylene imports passed exports in 2022 and have led them every year since.
Subscribers - Aug 313 min read
How Many of the New Chemical Sites Are Plants?
BLS added 662 US chemical establishments to the count on Friday, the twelfth straight annual increase, and the sector employed 4,108 fewer people than a year earlier. Texas alone gained 147 addresses and lost 1,237 jobs.
Free - Aug 304 min read
Twenty-Seven Percent, and Not One Molecule Changed
EIA's Wednesday release put Ohio industrial power at 10.21 cents a kilowatthour for the first half of 2026, against 8.00 cents a year earlier. Henry Hub moved 4.1% across the same window, so the fuel did not do this. The auction that did has already cleared two more delivery years, both at the cap.
Subscribers - Aug 304 min read
The Ring and the Tail Come From the Same Shell
COIM USA is building the first US plant dedicated to its cashew nutshell liquid polyol line, at Texarkana, with roughly 100 million pounds a year of planned capacity. The interesting part is that cardanol is an aromatic, which is the one thing bio-based polyols normally cannot offer a rigid foam formulator.
Free - Aug 306 min read
The Cheapest Kilo That Isn't Chinese
Chemours wants duties of up to 56.57 percent on Indian PFA, the resin a fab's ultrapure chemistry runs inside. The Commission's preliminary record closes tomorrow at 5:15. India landed at $18.77 a kilo last year, and every origin in the heading except China costs more.
Subscribers - Aug 296 min read
Which Huntsman Entity Signs Your 2027 Order?
Olin shareholders cleared a two-thirds bar on August 25 and picked the direct merger, so Huntsman Corporation stops existing at close and Huntsman International LLC stops filing. The path they did not pick is the one that would have fired a change of control.
Subscribers - Aug 295 min read
The Antitrust Clearance Was the Easy Part
The FTC granted early termination on the $14.5 billion Solstice acquisition of Element Solutions on August 12. Both boards killed the deal fifteen days later, with no break fee either way and a $500 million buyback in its place. Plus a bromine producer running 16% of its plant into a 34% price rise, two finished TRISO plants waiting on a licence, and an eighth straight sweep with nothing closed.
Subscribers - Aug 294 min read
How Israel Gained Fifty Thousand Tonnes of Bromine on Paper
USGS restated Israel's 2024 bromine production from 140,000 tonnes to 190,000 in the February edition of the same table, and carried the world total up 40,000 with it. Israel was 83% of US bromine imports over 2021 to 2024 and 89% through July 2025, and the concession that produces it runs to 2030.
Free - Aug 283 min read
One Centimetre Short of a Lift Letter
The Rhine rallied 71 centimetres off its trough and not one gauge reached the level its own fairway is designed around. Kaub missed by a single centimetre, which is why Dormagen's force majeure has a case to lift and Ludwigshafen's does not.
Subscribers - Aug 284 min read
How Long Does an Idled Plant Stay Restartable?
Greatham's chloride line sat dark for ten months, six of them with nobody in a position to spend money on it. It came back on August 20 under its old brand and its old grade codes, and what stands between it and 150,000 tonnes a year is a recruitment campaign.
Free - Aug 286 min read
Fifty More Days on Grade 1800
Commerce moved the PTMEG preliminary determinations to November 4 this morning, fifty days later than they were due, and the petitioner is the one who asked for it. The grade spandex runs on has no US producer and no non-subject import source anywhere in the Commission's record.
Subscribers - Aug 274 min read
The Spike Stopped at the Formulator
Petrochemical producer prices are up 23.7% over twelve months and the whole upstream half of chemical manufacturing came with them. Three industries print below last July, and all three of them formulate rather than crack.
Free - Aug 276 min read
The Order Never Covered the Acid
CHS and OCP announced a phosphate plant at Waggaman on Wednesday, and OCP Group will supply the phosphoric acid. Item eleven on the 2021 countervailing duty order's exclusion list is phosphoric acid, the cash deposit rate on the finished granule is 16.60 percent, and Commerce's July preliminary says 20.04.
Subscribers - Aug 274 min read
Is Your Degreaser on the December 2019 List?
EPA put the trans-1,2-dichloroethylene draft risk evaluation out this morning with a preliminary finding of unreasonable risk, and it is the eighteenth of the twenty substances designated high-priority in December 2019. Four of those eighteen landed in the last seventeen days. Plus thirty-five new SNURs dated to the same day in October, a June new-chemicals queue that is mostly a battery queue, and five more names in the DEA registration file.
Subscribers - Aug 264 min read
Ten Dollars and Twenty Cents a Ton on Imported MDI
Huntsman has petitioned the IRS to add MDI to the Superfund list of taxable substances, and the notice of filing published this morning. The rate in the petition is $10.20 a ton. The rate for an importer who cannot document the chemistry is ten percent of appraised value.
Subscribers - Aug 266 min read
India's Citric Acid Case Has a Chinese Origin Problem
One petition, two countries, two preliminary determinations published this morning. The Canadian producer showed up and got a 0.00 percent dumping margin. The Indian respondent quit in June and took 151.73 percent, and the reason it quit is a CBP evasion case that says the merchandise was never Indian.
Subscribers - Aug 264 min read
Charlotte Coats a Film North America Doesn't Make Yet
Asahi Kasei opened a wet-process separator coating line at the 40-year-old Celgard plant in Charlotte on August 20. The base film that line is built to coat will not be made on this continent until Port Colborne starts in 2027, and the company's own capital numbers say that ordering was the point.
Free - Aug 253 min read
Who Gets Out of New Chemicals Review Without an Order?
EPA's statements of findings for May reached the Federal Register on Tuesday with two entries on it. The unrestricted exit from section 5 review ran 267 determinations in fiscal 2019 and 18 so far in fiscal 2026, and of the 106 fiscal-2026 reviews that ended in permission to commercialize, 88 came with an order attached.
Free - Aug 255 min read
Twenty-Nine Basic Classes, One Chattanooga Address
Eleven DEA registration notices landed in a single Federal Register issue on Tuesday, and one Chattanooga plant applied to make twenty-nine basic classes of controlled substance. Another names the federal API stockpile outright, and the first visible transaction under it is an application to import. Plus the 2026 national ceilings, an EPA clearance list running 86 days behind, and a new CFO at a sulfuric acid regenerator.
Subscribers - Aug 256 min read
How the R-32 Duty Stops at Eighty-Five Percent
Commerce renewed the antidumping order on Chinese R-32 through 2031 on August 4. The scope catches the neat molecule at up to 221.06 percent and stops sixteen points above the blend that replaced R-410A in most new residential systems, while EPA counts that same blend at 465.
Subscribers - Aug 244 min read
Your Antimony Alternative Now Has an American Half
Synthomer sold William Blythe for 30 million pounds in May 2025. Fifteen months later the 1845 Accrington inorganics house is the smaller side of a 160 million dollar group whose largest region is North America, and the flame retardant line it carries is the one sold as an antimony trioxide replacement.
Free - Aug 243 min read
What Did Your 2024 Benzotriazole Actually Enter At?
The antidumping order on tolyltriazole and benzotriazole from China was continued on August 4, and no Chinese producer filed a word against it. The rate on the same two exporters has been 6.12 percent, then 128.88, and the preliminary answer for your March 2024 to February 2025 entries is 61.51.
Subscribers - Aug 246 min read
How a Chemical Nobody Here Makes Gets a TSCA Rule
EPA put the ethylene dibromide draft risk evaluation out on August 19 and preliminarily found that 10 of 12 conditions of use significantly contribute to unreasonable risk. Every pound in the file is import volume, reported by two companies, and the demand base underneath it just printed its highest year since 2019.
Subscribers - Aug 234 min read
Twenty-Eight Points Under One Utilization Rate
The Federal Reserve put US chemical capacity utilization at 71.6% for July. The Census survey that supplies most of that number publishes the lines underneath it, and in the same quarter they run from 88.0% down to 59.6%.
Free - Aug 236 min read
The Nitrapyrin Plant Is Closing in Installments
California's layoff file got one more line on Tuesday: two employees at 901 Loveridge Road in Pittsburg, effective October 30. It is the twentieth notice filed at that address since July 2023, the twenty of them name 155 people, and the state's own safety list says the site closes in December.
Subscribers - Aug 235 min read
Idle Capacity Shows Up in the Footnotes First
A specialty chemicals maker in Illinois pulled ten reporting periods on Friday because it had been capitalizing fixed overhead without regard to normal capacity. The correction took $3.5m out of inventory and the same $3.5m out of equity. Plus a Chinese owner restarts 150,000 tonnes of British pigment inside a dumping case its competitor filed, iodine prints a record $73.40 a kilogram, and carbon black borrows at 4.95% to repay 3.40%.
Subscribers - Aug 226 min read
Which Half of the Paprika Oleoresin Duty Is Live Today?
Commerce finalized both India cases on Friday: 25.42 percent countervailing on Synthite, 5.78 percent dumping. Only the smaller half is being collected right now, and the window shuts when the ITC votes.
Subscribers - Aug 224 min read
The Hormuz Premium Skipped Mont Belvieu
Crude went from $61 to $118 after February 28 and US propane barely moved. A propane barrel has spent 2026 averaging 36.6 percent of a WTI barrel, the cheapest of the thirty-four annual averages EIA's Mont Belvieu series supports, and every propylene derivative escalator written off crude is now indexed to a feedstock your supplier may not be buying.
Subscribers - Aug 224 min read
How a Custom Manufacturer Buys Its Own Demand
MFG Chemical closed its fourth acquisition in four years on August 12. The published capacity underneath all of it is twenty-six reactors and a gallon range, which is exactly why a closure-and-addition file never sees a company like this.
Free - Aug 215 min read
Whose Force Majeure Comes Off First?
The Rhine at Kaub bottomed at 5 centimetres on Monday and reads 46 this morning, a 41-centimetre reversal in four days, and not one of the letters written on that low water has come off yet. Plus the silicon metal orders publish with two duty-free holes in them, a dumping case that collects nothing, and three chemical sites walk off the Superfund list.
Subscribers - Aug 213 min read
The Closure Wave Never Reached the Tank Cars
US railroads moved 1,082,288 carloads of chemicals through the first 32 weeks of 2026, more than through the same week of any year since at least 2018, and they did it while counting one railroad less than they counted in 2022. The Federal Reserve's basic chemical index printed its lowest month since December 2022 in the same window.
Free - Aug 215 min read
Catalyst Refiners Stopped Refining
The federal safety board's August 13 update fixed a capacity date nobody had published: the West Virginia plant that reclaimed silver from spent ethylene oxide catalyst had already ceased operations before the accident that made it news. Silver averaged 34% more last year than the year before, and scrap is now about half of everything US refiners turn out. That combination is why the reclaim clause in your catalyst agreement is worth reading again this week.
Subscribers - Aug 203 min read
One Pipeline From a Refinery to a Drug Master File
gChem's Tuscaloosa complex takes a sulfur stream from the refinery next door and turns it into the only DMSO made in the Americas. An $850m agreement this month is why it is worth introducing.
Free - Aug 205 min read
One Houston Plant, Thirty-Five Percent of the Butadiene
ENEOS signed a merger agreement for TPC Holdings on August 7 and expects to close in October. The release carries three years of TPC's accounts, which nobody had seen: operating income of $118m in 2024, $25m in 2025, and a net loss. The largest merchant crude C4 processor in North America runs one production site, and it just found a strategic owner whose rubber lines are all in Asia.
Subscribers - Aug 203 min read
How Synthetic Rubber Got Thirty Percent More Out of the Same Plants
The Fed's July numbers, out Tuesday, put synthetic rubber capacity utilization at 60.7%, up 13.8 points from a September 2024 trough that only one month in fifty-four years has ever undercut. Capacity moved 1.1% over that stretch. The entire gain is production, and it lands on butadiene demand eight weeks before the plant that makes 35% of North America's supply changes owner.
Subscribers - Aug 194 min read
Which Closure Took Pigments Back to 1982?
The Fed's production index for synthetic dye and pigment manufacturing printed 58.8 for July, the second-lowest month in a series that starts in 1972. No US closure in our file accounts for it, and the Board publishes no capacity number for the code, so nobody can tell you whether the plants are gone or just slow.
Free - Aug 195 min read
Losing Twenty-Six Thousand Tonnes Was the Good Quarter
Trinseo shut its own MMA monomer, folded German polystyrene into one Belgian plant, and then a storm took that plant out for five weeks. Company volume fell from 334 kilotonnes to 308. The segment that gave up the most volume took its adjusted EBITDA from $5m to $43m, which is the number to have in front of you at renewal.
Subscribers - Aug 195 min read
How Your Silicone Feedstock Became a Trade Case
Nine origins now carry a US duty order on silicon metal, and the two newest were signed on August 14. Plus Olin and Huntsman vote Tuesday on projections they disclosed only this week, EPA calls ethylene dibromide an unreasonable risk, a Russian phosphate rate drops five points on a benchmark ruling, and Kaub turned.
Subscribers - Aug 184 min read
Five Hundred Thousand Pounds, No New Plant
Ascent Industries' process engineers pulled more than 500,000 pounds a year of extra capacity out of a reaction asset it already owned. Total capital spending across the company that quarter was $754,000. Nothing about it will ever appear in a capacity database, including ours.
Free - Aug 184 min read
Everything Fell Except What You Import
July producer prices took 2.9% off industrial chemicals and this morning's BLS release took 2.8% off US chemical export prices, the sharpest month in three years. The chemical import index moved five hundredths of a percent, and the China-origin index rose 1.7%. If your contract escalator cites a domestic series, your imported volume is not getting that relief.
Subscribers - Aug 185 min read
Does Your Antimony Contract Run Past November 27?
China banned antimony exports to the United States in December 2024 and the price nearly tripled. Beijing suspended that ban last November, the price round-tripped, and the suspension runs out on November 27. Montana's only primary smelter finished nine new furnaces into the trough, and has a $245m government contract standing in front of your order.
Subscribers - Aug 176 min read
The Deposit Came Before the Capacity
A $12.5 million line called Refundable deposits appeared on FutureFuel's balance sheet this quarter and did not exist at March 31. It is a customer's money, it is paying for a plant expansion at Batesville, and the capacity it buys does not run until early fiscal 2028.
Subscribers - Aug 173 min read
How the Capex Cuts Missed the Job Site
Every producer we have read this earnings season guided capital lower. National spending on chemical plant construction ran $43.8 billion a year in June, six percent off its all-time high, while semiconductor construction fell by more than half.
Free - Aug 175 min read
Four Chinese Producers, One Exclusion Order
A judge found a Section 337 violation on PVDF resin and recommended shutting four Chinese producers out at the border. Plus Chemours petitions against Indian PFA, a twenty-one-year-old pigment order dies because nobody filed a form, choline salts clears its injury test, and Kaub printed a five.
Subscribers - Aug 165 min read
Who Reports the Chlorine Now?
Berkshire's second-quarter filing landed on Monday and gave OxyChem two numbers: $1.4bn of revenue and $149m of pre-tax earnings. Occidental used to publish a chlor-alkali business review, a capex line, and a completion date for the Battleground membrane conversion. That conversion is still due to finish this year.
Subscribers - Aug 163 min read
The Pigment Was Always the Byproduct
A hundred years ago a chemist at Uerdingen turned what aniline manufacture left behind into iron oxide pigment, and that reaction has run on the same site ever since. On August 11 Lanxess said the dryer at the end of it stopped burning natural gas and started burning the hydrogen the chlorine plant next door was going to make anyway.
Free - Aug 154 min read
Which Filing Moved a Tonne This Week?
Kaub printed 6 centimetres on Friday, nineteen under the 2018 record and three under the forecast we carried on Thursday. Everything else the industry filed in three days was a balance sheet: a bankrupt producer's meeting about nothing, a $350m bond, a $1.4bn tender.
Subscribers - Aug 154 min read
The Caustic Soda Index Skipped July
Thursday's PPI took 2.2% off alkalies and chlorine, the sharpest one-month drop in that series since January 2024. The sub-index that would tell you whether caustic caused it is the one BLS did not publish. Nine days earlier, Westlake guided the second half higher.
Subscribers - Aug 153 min read
Everyone Chemical Manufacturing Hired Since 2019 Works in Pharma
US chemical manufacturing employs 42,400 more people than it did at the end of 2019, and pharmaceuticals alone added 47,200 of them. Subtract the drug plants and the industry you actually buy from is smaller than it was before the pandemic.
Free - Aug 146 min read
Somebody Bought the Plant Tronox Closed
In January Tronox said it would permanently close its 46,000 tonne pigment plant in Jiangxi. Its August 6 filing says an unsolicited buyer took the assets, the environmental liabilities and the contract obligations on June 17 for $14 million net, and the closure column has no way to record that.
Subscribers - Aug 144 min read
Several Tons of Peptide a Year
Bachem inaugurated the largest plant it has ever built in April and is making commercial GMP product in it now. The only output figure anyone publishes for the site is three words long, and the guidance attached to it says the second half of 2026 has to run at nearly twice the first.
Free - Aug 135 min read
Which Gauge Shut the Polyol Line?
Covestro declared force majeure on Dormagen polyether polyols on August 7. Kaub, the gauge every wire quotes, went up that day. The gauge that governs the plant sits 198 kilometres downstream, and it had already gone under its all-time low.
Subscribers - Aug 135 min read
Twenty-One Dollars a Kilogram, Minimum
The polysilicon proclamation published Tuesday does something no chemical trade action this desk has read does: it sets a floor price at the border and charges you the difference if your entry comes in under it. Plus R-32 keeps its order for another five years, Kaub at 10 centimetres, and twelve days to the Olin vote.
Subscribers - Aug 134 min read
Aromatics Gave Back. The Intermediates Kept It.
July's producer price data landed this morning: the aromatics index fell 2.6% and the cyclic intermediates made out of it fell 0.7%, which is neither of the two outcomes we wrote down on Tuesday. The June number they both get measured against changed too.
Free - Aug 127 min read
Who Still Synthesizes in Los Angeles?
AMVAC's Los Angeles plant keeps its address, its payroll and its drums, and loses the ability to make a molecule from scratch on December 31. The whole public record of it is a transformation-expense footnote, no WARN notice appears in either California register, and last quarter the reorganization spent $682,000.
Subscribers - Aug 123 min read
The Gulf Coast Has Never Held This Much Propane
Wednesday's EIA report put Gulf Coast propane and propylene stocks at 66.9 million barrels, three weeks after the district printed the highest weekly figure in a series that starts in 2004. The national total is not a record. Almost the whole surplus is sitting in the one district where the dehydrogenation units take suction.
Subscribers - Aug 124 min read
How You Restart a Chloride Line
Tioxide expects single-stream pigment production back at Greatham this month, the first output from the Teesside site since it went idle late last year. Every published restart milestone is a people milestone: 132 employees transferred with the site in April, and 130 more positions have been announced since.
Free - Aug 113 min read
What Took the Intermediates Four Months?
Between February and June the BLS aromatics index gained 71.9%. The cyclic intermediates made out of those aromatics gained 13.3%. June was the first month the derivative layer moved faster than its own feedstock, and the July print lands Thursday.
Free - Aug 116 min read
How Two Plants Become One Establishment Number
STERIS is spending $600m to move its US formulated chemistries into one North Carolina site, and told the market on the way that neither plant it is closing can be expanded. The relief lands in fiscal 2029. The constraint is now, and the label on the drum is how you find out your SKU moved.
Subscribers - Aug 115 min read
Fifteen Million Pounds Wasn't Enough
Arq's activated carbon plant in Louisiana was commissioned a year ago and made on-spec product. Its 10-Q on Monday says it will produce nothing in fiscal 2026 or 2027, because the thermal oxidizer tops out at 15 million pounds and 15 million pounds doesn't pay. Plus Trinseo spending 24 cents on the dollar from inside Chapter 11, a lost month at Batesville, and Kaub at 14 centimetres.
Subscribers - Aug 104 min read
Three of Seventeen Replaced What They Wore Out
Seventeen US chemical filers have now closed their first half. Fourteen spent less capital than they charged in depreciation, the median came in at 74 cents on the dollar, and the only three above the line make fertilizer. Here is what a supplier running at 30 cents is telling you about its next turnaround.
Subscribers - Aug 105 min read
The Grade That Outlived Two Reactor Programs
A graphite grade built for a South African reactor program that lost its funding in 2010 spent this year becoming a commercial product line. On August 3, X-energy agreed to put up to $8 million into doubling the line that makes it, at a carbon plant in the French Alps, and the first reactors it feeds go up at a Dow chemical site in Texas.
Free - Aug 105 min read
How Your Intermediate Became a Pharmaceutical Article
Customs built a tariff heading whose entire job is to let you tell the government your organic chemical is not a drug. Every importer inside roughly 120 chapter 29 and 30 lines has been filing one of ten new headings since July 31, and on September 29 the rate attached to yours stops defaulting to zero.
Subscribers - Aug 96 min read
Who Prills Ammonium Nitrate Now?
CF Industries will rebuild its idled Yazoo City complex without a prilling line. The site returns in the first half of 2027 making solution, ammonia and DEF, and North America loses the solid ammonium nitrate it used to make there.
Subscribers - Aug 95 min read
When Nameplate Becomes an Opinion
Kronos told the SEC it moved its own definition of a normal production rate. Lanxess told analysts it is running below 70% and taking nothing out. Plus STERIS trades two chemistry plants for one, a Rhine force majeure that never existed, and a Kaub recovery that lasted two days.
Subscribers - Aug 93 min read
Six Times the Price, No Extra Sulfur
Tampa's third-quarter molten sulphur contract settled at a record $705 a long ton, six times where the contract started 2025. US sulfur output over the same stretch has not left a 7% band, because no plant in the country was built to make it.
Free - Aug 84 min read
Three Price Increases, One Million Dollars
Chemours has put three global TiO2 price increases into effect since December, and its pigment segment earned one million dollars more this quarter than it did a year ago. Tronox sold 18% more pigment and made 22% less money. The increases are landing, which is exactly why more of them are coming.
Subscribers - Aug 84 min read
The New API Capacity Is Sixteen Years Old
America makes 15% of its own patented active ingredient by volume, and the 100% duty on the rest started biting on July 31. One of the world's largest contract API sites is a Lafayette, Indiana plant Evonik bought from Eli Lilly on New Year's Day 2010, and it just took another $100 million into reactors that are already standing.
Free - Aug 87 min read
The Mine Comes Back Before the Plant Does
Tronox spent eighteen months taking pigment capacity out. On Wednesday it restarted a smelting furnace instead, and told the market that TiO2 prices go up again in the third quarter. The 136,000 tonnes of pigment are not coming back with the furnace, and nothing in the capacity tables will ever show that the furnace left.
Subscribers - Aug 75 min read
The Creosote Comes From Denmark Now
Koppers took $164.6 million of impairment against its Stickney coal tar still on Thursday, and the word conditional came off the closure. Two plants are left in the group and neither of them is in this hemisphere, so the pitch, creosote and naphthalene arrive by ship from the fourth quarter.
Subscribers - Aug 74 min read
How the Fiber Chain Finished Its Closure Wave
US artificial and synthetic fiber capacity is down 29% since 2019 and the plants still standing run at 98%. Synthetic rubber has given up 4% of its capacity and runs at 57%. Both sit inside the 72.1% the Fed printed for chemicals.
Free - Aug 75 min read
Barry Took the Plant Next Door
Cabot shut its Barry fumed silica plant in the same quarter its fumed silica volumes rose, because the feedstock came by pipeline from the Dow unit that closed. Plus Trinseo's storm, Koppers' $215.8m, an $850m DMSO deal, and a Rhine that finally turned.
Subscribers - Aug 64 min read
Who Still Rebuilds a Carbide Furnace?
Alzchem took an electric arc furnace apart this year, wore roughly EUR 10m to do it, and grew its first-half EBITDA 14% anyway. The furnace sits at the top of a chain that now ends in a US government contract and a site in South Carolina.
Free - Aug 66 min read
The Rhine Is Taking Whole Chains Now
Four force majeure letters in three weeks, and two of them sit on the same molecule. BASF declared on surfactants Wednesday; the plasticizer letter went out July 16, and the phthalic anhydride behind those plasticizers went out July 31. None of it is a plant problem.
Subscribers - Aug 64 min read
Nineteen Million, Twice
Orion's rubber carbon black book earned the same $19 million in two straight quarters while its specialty book nearly doubled. Same plants, same feedstock, same oil. The only thing that changed in January was the contract, and Cabot's numbers say the same thing.
Subscribers - Aug 54 min read
What Loads at Seventeen Centimetres?
The Kaub gauge printed 17 centimetres this afternoon, the level the forecasts had for Saturday. Germany's waterways administration publishes a load factor down to 40 centimetres and no further, so here is what the number actually measures and which part of it reaches your invoice.
Free - Aug 55 min read
The Footnote Is Where the Tonnes Went
Mosaic idled Faustina completely and put Bartow at 40% of rate, and said so in the fourth sentence of a cost-of-goods paragraph. Westlake now subtracts its own closed plants from its own volume comparison. Chemours guided next year's capital to two fifths of depreciation. Everything that moved since Monday, and the gauge at Kaub reading 20 centimetres while it did.
Subscribers - Aug 56 min read
How Gladbeck Outlived Its Own Closure Notice
INEOS said a year ago it would permanently close its 1954 phenol site in the Ruhr. On the same date this year it deferred the restart meant to replace it, so Gladbeck keeps running and 680,000 tonnes stay cold at Antwerp.
Subscribers - Aug 44 min read
Why the Adhesive Stays in Maryland
Syensqo just broke ground on 30% more structural adhesive capacity at a Maryland plant it has run since the Cytec days, in the same quarter its composite business posted the best numbers in its history. The siting decision was made years ago by somebody else's qualification file.
Free - Aug 44 min read
The Five Quarters Celanese Just Bought
A First Amendment filed this afternoon pushes the leverage covenant on Celanese's $1.75bn revolver out five quarters and lifts the terminal level from 3.5x to 4.0x. The same filing day carried a finished nylon 6,6 optimization, a closed Korean compounding plant, and a Belgian tow site still on its way out.
Subscribers - Aug 46 min read
How a Contract Round Becomes a Plant Closure
Cabot sold 5% more carbon black in the June quarter and earned 24% less on it. The calendar-2026 customer agreements did that, and the answer the board picked was a plant in Argentina, lines in the Netherlands, and no published tonnage for either.
Subscribers - Aug 35 min read
Who Tells You a Plant Went Down?
Olin's vinyl chloride monomer plant at Freeport stopped in the second quarter, took $40.1 million out of the segment, and is still running at reduced rates. No announcement anywhere. Everything that moved since Thursday, plus the tonnage question Celanese answers tomorrow night.
Subscribers - Aug 37 min read
The Phosgene Plant That Didn't Close
In March, VanDeMark filed a WARN notice for a May 25 shutdown of the largest merchant phosgene plant in the United States. The plant is still there. What that does to the removal column, and to anyone who requalified away in the spring.
Subscribers - Aug 34 min read
Sixty-One Percent at the Cracker
US petrochemical producer prices rose 61% in five months. By the time that shock reached basic inorganics it was worth 4%, and the front end has already turned over while the back end is still climbing.
Free - Aug 26 min read
What the Rhine Takes Before It Takes Ethylene
LyondellBasell declared force majeure on its Wesseling butadiene unit on July 16, when the Kaub gauge averaged 45 centimetres. The river has been lower every day since July 28, the letter is still open, and the August contract settled fifty euros down anyway.
Subscribers - Aug 24 min read
Nobody Closed a Helium Plant
Six new American helium operations started up in 2025 and the federal posted price fell 15%. A third of world production went behind a force majeure anyway, and the cost is reaching your site through a line your contract price never touches.
Subscribers - Aug 24 min read
Everything at Bay City Feeds Something Else
OXEA approved an oxo expansion in Texas on July 9 with no tonnage and no capital figure attached. The number that makes it real is Air Liquide's, and the customer for the biggest output stream is already operating on the same fence line.
Free - Aug 14 min read
The Plant Yara Bought Instead of Building
On June 30 Yara walked away from the ammonia assets inside Air Products' Louisiana complex because the returns did not clear its bar. Two days later it paid $1.3 billion for a Texas City plant that is still in commissioning, and priced per annual tonne that was the cheapest capacity on its list.
Free - Aug 15 min read
The Plant That Took Eight Years to Pick a Country
Covestro announced a world-scale MDI train for Baytown in 2018, paused it twice, and left the location open. On June 30 it chose Shanghai, six weeks after its North American MDI book went to force majeure.
Subscribers - Aug 16 min read
Closures Come With Tonnages. Additions Come With Dollars.
The first monthly edition of the ledger: thirteen capacity entries dated in July 2026, from Barry to Brindisi to the Louisiana complex that got cancelled. Four of six removals came with a capacity figure. One of six additions did.
Subscribers - Jul 314 min read
Why Europe Only Gets Seventy Percent
LyondellBasell guided its European polyolefin assets to 70% for the third quarter and its North American ones to 85%. The fifteen points between those numbers are where the next European closure comes from, and the company has already booked the charge on one of them.
Subscribers - Jul 314 min read
The Twenty Thousand Tonnes Nobody Has to Build
Eastman's Kingsport methanolysis plant is running above 90% yield, its recycled-polyester revenue doubled in the half, and management says incremental projects take it to 130,000 tonnes. New US capacity arriving without a groundbreaking.
Free - Jul 316 min read
The Closure That Never Gets Announced
Huntsman spent $30 million on its plants last quarter and depreciated $77 million of them. MDI prices rose across all three regions in the same quarter, which is the part that should worry anyone buying it.
Subscribers - Jul 303 min read
Thirty-Five Days With One TDI Plant
Wanhua took BorsodChem's 250,000 tonne TDI line down for annual maintenance on July 17. Europe used to keep enough spare plants to absorb that, and then it closed 300,000 tonnes of them.
Free - Jul 305 min read
Dow Restarted a Cracker and Arkema Sold Less Acrylic
Yesterday BASF told us European demand came back. This morning Arkema printed group volumes down 1.8% and acrylic monomer volumes down 9.7%, while Dow spent the quarter firing an idled Dutch cracker back up. Everything that moved this week, plus what lands in the next 36 hours.
Subscribers - Jul 305 min read
Air Products Is Now Selling the Plant It Was Building
The $2.9 billion Louisiana write-off landed in today's numbers, and with it a capital rule: about $1.5 billion a year for traditional industrial gas, against roughly $5 billion a year since 2022. If your site needs an on-site plant before 2030, the queue in front of you just changed shape.
Subscribers - Jul 294 min read
Who Builds a New Chemical Plant in Germany Right Now?
UPM's Leuna biorefinery is selling wood-derived industrial sugars in volume, lignin fillers start this quarter, and the glycols are specified as drop-in. A 1.275 billion euro plant in Saxony-Anhalt, running.
Free - Jul 296 min read
The Quarter European Chemicals Stopped Shrinking
EU chemical production went from minus 3.6% in the first quarter to plus 1.5% in the second, and BASF's half-year report says the demand arrived through the hole Hormuz left. Europe spent three years removing the plants that would have absorbed it.
Subscribers - Jul 294 min read
How an Ammonia Turnaround Reaches Your CO2 Contract
Producer prices for carbon dioxide are up 82% since 2019 against 54% for the industrial gas complex it sits inside, and the two lines moved in opposite directions this half. The gas nobody builds a plant to make is repricing faster than the ones they do.
Subscribers - Jul 283 min read
Your Gas Supplier Is Building for Someone Else
Air Liquide's half-year landed this morning. Electronics took more than a third of a record 2.9 billion euros in investment decisions, the pipeline business that sits inside chemical plants shrank, and one of five announced US plants serves a chemical site.
Free - Jul 285 min read
Three Plants Stopped Being Announcements This Week
Barry went cold inside Dow's quarter, Sakra runs its last days, and the Alabama cut has a number on a state form. Plus three Gulf-driven supply failures and the benzene print that tells you how long they last.
Subscribers - Jul 287 min read
How Low Water Curtails a Plant That Never Stopped
The Rhine gauge at Kaub is within a few centimetres of an all-time low, three months early, and barge freight to Karlsruhe has almost tripled since June. What that does to anything you buy from above the chokepoint.
Subscribers - Jul 276 min read
Why the Ethane Advantage Stops at Benzene
The Hormuz reopening lasted three weeks on the water. US crackers run on ethane and never touched Middle East naphtha, which is exactly why the aromatics half of your book is the exposed half.
Subscribers - Jul 274 min read
If Everyone Is Closing Plants, Why Is Capacity Still Rising?
US chemical capacity utilization fell to 72.1% in June, the weakest print since the December 2022 freeze. The closures are real, and the Fed's capacity line has still gone up every month for almost six years.
Subscribers - Jul 273 min read
A Derivatives Plant Is Only as Good as Its Monomer
Covestro closed on the former Vencorex site at Freeport, Texas on July 1. The plant has made Tolonate since 1988; what changed is who makes the HDI going into it.
Free - Jul 265 min read
Fluoropolymers Were Supposed to Be the Safe Business
AGC proposes to shut its Hillhouse PTFE and ETFE plant by year end, four straight loss years into the chemistry every producer calls defensive. What that leaves for anyone buying Fluon in the West.
Subscribers - Jul 215 min read
The Sixty-Day Head Start
A WARN notice lands in a state database weeks before the press release. The methodology brief on the earliest public closure signal we know of.
Subscribers - Jul 174 min read
A Sourcing Manager's Guide to Who Pays the Tariff
Washington finalized a 25% tariff on most Brazilian goods. Whether you pay it or the exporter does comes down to how much slack is left in US capacity.
Subscribers - Jul 145 min read
How a Dead Cracker Shuts the Plant Behind It
The Versalis cracker at Brindisi went cold in March 2025. Sixteen months later the polypropylene line behind it followed, and the same case is being argued across Europe.
Subscribers - Jul 104 min read
Who Absorbs Barry?
Dow's Barry closure takes roughly a third of Europe's basic-siloxane capacity off the map. We trace where 150,000 tonnes a year has to reappear, and what it does to the plants that take it.
Subscribers - Jul 73 min read
Why We Started Counting Closures
Closures are outrunning expansions in US specialty chemicals. The launch brief on the database we built to keep score, and the feedstock math behind it.
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The nomination letter arrives either way.
Every closure, curtailment, and force majeure in US specialty chemicals, translated into what it does to the products you buy.