Chemicals and Advanced Materials

Almost every manufactured good passes through a chemical plant first. The plastic in a car's bumper, the coating on a washing-machine drum, the resin in a circuit board, the fibre in a jet engine's fan case and the glass on a phone are all made by process manufacturers that turn natural gas, oil fractions, salt, sand and minerals into molecules and materials. The industry splits into two businesses with different economics. Commodity chemicals — ethylene and polyethylene, propylene, chlorine and caustic soda, ammonia, methanol — are made in giant continuous plants, sold on specification and priced off the cost of the marginal producer; whoever has the cheapest feedstock and energy wins. Specialty chemicals and advanced materials — coatings, adhesives, electronic materials, catalysts, engineered polymers, specialty glass — are sold on performance, in small volumes, to customers who rarely switch; whoever owns the formulation and the customer relationship wins. Since the US shale revolution, American producers on the Gulf Coast have had one of the world's cheapest feedstocks (ethane), while European producers running naphtha crackers on imported gas have had one of the most expensive; the 2022 gas crisis and the 2026 Gulf disruption widened the gap. The result in 2023–26 was a wave of European closures — a Cefic-commissioned study counted a roughly six-fold rise in closures since 2022 and ~3.7m tonnes a year of lost capacity, ~9% of European capacity (reported) — including Dow's Böhlen cracker, Sabic's Wilton cracker, INEOS units in Germany and parts of BASF's Ludwigshafen site. At the same time the industry's corporate map kept being redrawn by mergers and splits (Dow–DuPont and its three-way separation in 2017–19; DuPont's 2025 spin-off of Qnity; ADNOC's takeover of Covestro, closed in Dec 2025), and its biggest legal exposure — PFAS, the "forever chemicals" made by 3M, DuPont and Chemours — moved from science to settlements and drinking-water rules. This section explains the value chain, the economics of crackers and specialties, the feedstock gap, the merger-and-split cycle, PFAS and the rules around it, Europe's closures, advanced materials such as Corning's glass, and how an experienced operator reads the industry.