🏭 The Column: October 3, 2025

Good morning. A few interesting bits of news today! Heads up: I tried to explain how magnets are critical in our electrified world in the second story. I’m sure a few experts who read this newsletter will have a critique or two, but hopefully it gets the point across.

Occidental is selling OxyChem

After more than half a century under Occidental Petroleum’s umbrella, OxyChem (the business built around its 1968 acquisition of chlor-alkali pioneer Hooker Chemical) will soon stand on its own—Buffet’s Berkshire is aquiring OxyChem for $9.7 billion in an all-cash transaction. The split is mostly administrative: the production of chlorine and caustic soda (sodium hydroxide) has little overlap with Occidental’s upstream operations—the largest tangible overlap is probably the use of these chemicals to treat produced water from fracking, but the benefits of that cost advantage are far outweighed by the balance sheet benefit that Occidental will reap from paying down a third of its long term debt, even if they need to write down some of those direct air capture (DAC) projects. [LINK]

New magnets in Minnesota

My model for electricity generation is crude: natural gas is burned to make steam, the steam rotates turbine blades on a shaft, the shaft spins magnets around coils of wire, and the changing field pushes electrons back and forth, producing an alternating current. The reverse is also true: a battery can push electrons through coil wire near a magnet, and the interaction between the coil’s field and the magnet’s field creates torque. The point I’m trying to make here is that magnets are important in an electrified world, and I’m making that point because there’s a startup called Niron Magnetics trying to make permanent magnets from iron nitride (instead of relying on rare-earths, which present various supply chain issues), and they just broke ground in Minnesota. [LINK]

Progress for a pilot scale electric cracker

A quick primer: steam crackers break down relatively stable hydrocarbons (like naphtha or ethane) into reactive components (ethylene, propylene, etc.) that are later combined to make most of the world's chemicals and materials. It’s a very-valuable operation, but also a very-energy-intensive one, and right now we provide that energy via heat, and we make that heat by combusting hydrocarbons like natural gas (which produces a lot of CO2). That heat production is responsible for about half of all petrochemical emissions, which makes “electric cracking” something like the holy grail of the petrochemical industry. Scaling such a transformational technology is the sort of thing that happens over the course of decades, and Coolbrook keeps chugging along: they just demonstrated that its pilot-scale electric cracker can handle plastic waste pyrolysis oil. [LINK]

Other Things Happened:

Röhm replaced the sulfuric acid plant that was damaged by a fire in Worms, Germany. Thanks to some new tariffs and anti-dumping duties, Syensqo restarted its synthetic vanillin unit in France. Solvay doubled its electronic-grade hydrogen peroxide production. ExxonMobil bought a US-based synthetic graphite producer. Southern Ionics is expanding its sodium metabisulfite production in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. LyondellBasell is now offering its medical-grade polymers to healthcare and pharmaceutical companies in the US. Advancion plans to make more 3-(n-morpholino)propanesulfonic acid (a zwitterionic biological buffer) at its site in Louisiana. Mitsui acquired Ketjen’s polyolefin co-catalyst business, and Ketjen just expanded its zeolite plant in Bayport, Texas. Formosa just commissioned a horizontal polypropylene reactor at its site in Point Comfort, Texas. CPChem agreed to buy graphene from NanoXplore for a new oil and gas drilling lubricant. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries piloted a membrane dehydration system for ethanol. Ineos decided to mothball its chloromethane plant in France.