🏭 The Column: January 24, 2025

Good morning, and Happy Belated New Year! We’re back into full swing and there’s plenty to get you caught up on. Today we’re talking about decentralizing chlor-alkali production, Röhm’s plans to recycle Plexiglas, and how eyeglass lens materials have changed over time.

Things Happened:

Decentralizing chlor-alkali production

When a product is commoditized (because the tech used to produce the product is no longer patented, and the product had so many applications that competition destroyed all pricing power), the only way to beat your competition is by building bigger and pricing lower. That works because the cost of production, on a per product basis, typically drops as you scale. But at some point the cost of transporting that product outweighs the cost savings you get from producing it at a large-scale centralized facility. Those transportation costs, and the supply chain risk from having 80% of US chlor-alkali production on the Gulf Coast, has apparently prompted Chlorum Solutions to build a small scale chlor-alkali plant in Casa Grande, Arizona. (In case you’re unfamiliar, chlor-alkali plants make chlorine, hydrogen, and sodium hydroxide.) Chlorum didn’t announce the plant capacity, but based on the $70m they plan on spending, I’d ballpark the capacity to be around 50 KTA. That’s quite a bit smaller than the big Gulf Coast plants that push out roughly 1,000-3,000 KTA! (Here’s an old list of chlor-alkali plant capacities in case you’re curious.) [LINK]

Molecular recycling of Plexiglas

Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA), known colloquially as Plexiglas, is made by polymerizing—you guessed it—methyl methacrylate (MMA). It’s a pretty straightforward process. The tricky part about PMMA is making the MMA, which can be done in a few ways (historically via acetone, hydrogen cyanide, and methanol, but recently we’ve been trending towards using ethylene, carbon monoxide, and methanol). But now we have a brand new way of making MMA: depolymerizing waste PMMA. Röhm (a leading PMMA producer) is going to supply Nextchem with waste PMMA, Nextchem will toss it into a reactor full of molten metal, the heat will break up PMMA back into that MMA monomer, and then Röhm will buy it back from Nextchem. The plan is to build a 5 KTA plant to do this—which might sound small, especially since global PMMA production is roughly 4000 KTA, but it’s all about perspective. 5 KTA is still enough to produce 10 million car taillights. You choose how you want to look at it. [LINK]

Trends in eyeglass lens materials

As you might imagine, eyeglass lenses were originally made out of glass, and polymers eventually displaced the use of glass. In the 1940s, polyallyl diglycol carbonate (PADC) was introduced, enabling a cheaper and more durable solution. Then, in the 1980s, polycarbonates started to take some market share, especially for weaker prescriptions. Not much has changed since then—PADC still retains about 50% of the market, and polycarbonates have roughly 35%. The remaining 15% is filled with newer specialty polymers that enable thinner lenses for strong prescriptions, such as Trivex (a urethane-based polymer) and Mitsui’s MR series (a thiourethane-based polymer made by reacting isocyanates with thiols). Mitsui is seeing growth here, so they are building a new thiourethane lens plant in Omuta, Japan. [LINK]

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Other Things Happened:

Viridis decided to relocate its ethyl acetate plant from Columbus, Nebraska to Peoria, Illinois. Wacker just started up two new specialty silicones plants in Japan and South Korea. BASF expanded its ammonium chloride plant in Ludwigshafen. Evonik and Fuhua formed a joint venture for hydrogen peroxide production. India just got its first ultra high purity nitrous oxide plant. DuPont is spinning off its electronics business faster than expected, and is no longer spinning off its water business. Covestro is expanding its polycarbonate compounding facility in Hebron, Ohio. Standard Lithium and Equinor scored a $225m grant from the US DoE to build a full scale direct lithium extraction plant in Arkansas.