🏭 The Column: February 21, 2025

Good morning. It was fun seeing familiar faces and meeting new folks at SOCMA in Nashville this week. This was only my second time attending the trade show, but it’s always super interesting because half of the attendees are in some niche chemical business you’ve almost certainly never heard of. The world of custom chemical manufacturing, contract manufacturing, and tolling is very different than the high volume stuff I typically write about! Anyways, today’s edition is a bit shorter because learning about semiconductor chemicals took me longer than I expected (see below). We’ll have plenty to talk about next week (check out the Other Things Happened section at the bottom—it’s rather long).

Things Happened:

Photoresist thinners in Texas

South Korea’s Dongjin Semichem just scored a $2.4m grant from the Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund for a new photoresist thinner plant they are building an hour north of Austin. Photoresists are typically liquid acrylic or styrene-based polymers blended with a molecule that decomposes into a sulfonic acid when exposed to light. That sulfonic acid cleaves reactive side chains on the polymer, making the part exposed to light soluble in something like tetramethylammonium hydroxide (TMAH). This is what enables semiconductor producers to design chips layer by layer—after the photoresist is poured onto a spinning silicon wafer (the spinning spreads the photoresist out into a thin layer), it’s heated to cure/solidify that layer, and then the chip design is projected onto the wafer with light so that TMAH dissolves the right part. But Dongjin isn’t going to be making photoresist north of Austin, they’ll be making photoresist thinners: solvents used to adjust the viscosity of the photoresist, enabling the extra-thin layers needed for advanced technologies like 5G. These thinners are probably propylene glycol monomethyl ether (PGME) or propylene glycol monomethyl ether acetate (PGMEA), which Dow and Eastman Chemical make nearby, but not with specs that semiconductor producers need. So Dongjin is presumably buying from them and then getting impurities down to the parts per trillion level with distillation, filtration, and cleanroom packing lines before shipping them off to someone like Samsung. [LINK]

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Other Things Happened:

Lotte Chemical sold their Pakistan terephthalic acid (PTA) business for $68m. Sumitomo just bought Solvay’s old iquid crystal polymer business. Innospec beat their Q4 2024 earnings forecast. BASF is building a new sodium and potassium methylate plant at its huge site in Ludwigshafen, Germany. Chemours is exiting one of its fluorosurfactant businesses because of regulatory changes for telomer-based chemistries. SK Chemical is piloting a PET to BHET depolymerization process at its site in Ulsan. BASF is selling its Brazilian decorative paints business to Sherwin-Williams. BASF and Dow are claiming that Wanhua is dumping methylene diphenyl diisocyanate (MDI) from its plants in China, in hopes of additional tariffs. Braven is building a new plastics pyrolysis plant in Texas. Neste is deprioritizing sustainable chemicals and polymers in favor of renewable fuels. Nouryon is doubling its chromatography media production in Sweden because of increased demand for GLP-1 agonists. POET and Tallgrass are going to capture CO2 in the US Midwest. Ube just broke ground on its new DMC and EMC plant in Louisiana. A couple of companies are looking into bio-based butadiene.