How a Dead Cracker Shuts the Plant Behind It
The Versalis cracker at Brindisi went cold in March 2025. Sixteen months later the polypropylene line behind it followed, and the same case is being argued across Europe.
In March 2025, Versalis shut its steam cracker at Brindisi, on Italy's Adriatic coast.
A cracker is the front of the chain. It takes naphtha or gas and breaks it into the light olefins, ethylene and propylene, that every unit downstream is built to consume.
When Brindisi's cracker went cold, it stopped supplying roughly 255,000 t/yr of propylene to the plants next door.
One of those plants was a LyondellBasell polypropylene line. Take away its feedstock and you have a plant with no reason to run.
Then, on June 10, 2026, LyondellBasell confirmed it will permanently close that remaining Brindisi PP unit, a 260,000 t/yr Spheripol line, by the end of 2026.
That is the whole story of a rationalization in miniature, and it answers a question every European site behind a marginal cracker is now facing:
When the cracker goes dark, what happens to everything downstream that used to feed on it?
The answer, at Brindisi and increasingly elsewhere, runs in one direction.
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