1st Topic of the Week: Recycled content rules can force initial purchases, but brands decide what scales, making flexible virgin and recycled formulations a lower-risk
General Thoughts: Refining margins remain elevated amid shifting crude prices, underscoring that product balances and regional economics can matter more than headline crude direction for
1st Topic of the Week: C-MACC’s Clean Energy Mineral Index added to its 2026 gains in May as copper and aluminum led, showing physical infrastructure
General Thoughts: Supply risk is keeping many chemical chains biased upward, with MDI markets showing how outage timing and system availability can sustain hikes even
1st Topic of the Week: Ethanol is evolving from a crop-surplus outlet to strategic fuel-security infrastructure as refined-product inflation, export demand, carbon monetization, and refinery
1st Topic of the Week: Water availability increasingly defines industrial expansion as awareness rises, shifting value to reuse, treatment, and infrastructure as permitting risk, cost,
General Thoughts: US relative cost advantages persist, but rising global prices are compressing downstream margins as exports rise and cost transmission accelerates across global industrial
1st Topic of the Week: As EPR increasingly shifts packaging economics, which value-chain players will redesign fastest to protect margins, and who risks absorbing compounding
1st Topic of the Week: Water scarcity poses a growing constraint to lithium production, with over half of global reserves in water-stressed regions—escalating risks of
At several points over the last 40 years, ethylene co-products have been so valuable relative to feedstocks that ethylene has been free – US propane
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