INEOS ethylene investment in Europe – latest thoughts

In July 2018, INEOS announced a €2.7 billion Euro investment programme to build a world scale ethane cracker and propane dehydrogenation (PDH) facility (that had been announced earlier). Despite INEOS being one of the largest ethylene producers in Europe, it is also the largest net buyer of ethylene (> 1 million tons scale). Wood Mackenzie Chemicals assumes that the new ethane cracker would be at least 1 million tons in scale and based upon imported ethane from the United States. Wood Mackenzie Chemicals categories the ethylene investment in the “firm/likely” category and it is therefore seen as a future capacity addition in our ethylene supply/demand analytics outlook. The location of the new ethane cracker and PDH units have not been formally confirmed by INEOS, it is believed that the review of this is still ongoing. This insight highlights why Antwerp could be a logical choice for this new ethylene investment and the wider market considerations on the European ethylene market.