As we enter 2024, the chemical industry is going through a period of unprecedented change. Three interrelated Mega Trends are underpinning this change.

For chemical companies today, sustainability is the top challenge. The pressure to migrate away from fossil fuels as a feedstock is combined with a desire to reduce the direct carbon emissions (and broader environmental footprint) of the chemical industry itself—all whilst supporting the development of low-carbon downstream customer industries.

At the same time, technologies such as AI will create enormous opportunities to develop new chemicals and materials. The industry will experience a major upswing in new product development activity in 2024.

Finally, the current geopolitical tensions will have several knock-on effects on the industry. One outcome will be to accelerate the interest in localization. Advances in digital and automation technologies are increasingly making this feasible, so more chemical plants in the future will no longer be world-scale, but smaller, more flexible, closer to the customer, and in many cases even more cost-effective than the world-scale plants they will replace.

Author: Brian Balmer