How a March Fire Reaches Your November Polyol Bill

On October 6, a company with $2.22 billion of quarterly sales told its analysts that it had run out of finished product because its suppliers had run out of polyol.

RPM International makes Rust-Oleum, DAP, Tremco, Carboline and Stonhard. It is a 17,500-person specialty coatings and sealants business that buys polyurethane feedstocks by the tank car on contract.

In the quarter that ended August 31 it could not get enough of them.

Michael Laroche, RPM's controller, put it plainly on the call: "We also experienced finished product shortages caused by the supplier raw material constraints in polyurethanes."

Here is the part that should interest anyone who keeps a capacity file.

The plant that caused it had already restarted.

The Plant That Already Came Back

The capacity event is Bayport PO/TBA, at Pasadena, Texas. A fire on March 12 took part of the Choate site down without warning, and LyondellBasell declared force majeure on propylene oxide inside a week.

The trade press put the unit at roughly 600,000 tonnes a year of PO, which is an estimate and not a nameplate: LyondellBasell's own properties table carries no capacities at all.

What that table does carry is the ownership. Footnote (1) to the Description of Properties in the 2025 Form 10-K reads: "The Bayport PO/TBA plants and the Channelview PO/SM I plant are held by a joint venture between Covestro and Lyondell Chemical Company."

So the propylene oxide that went down in March, and the North American MDI that Covestro declared force majeure on in May, sat behind the same two names. Both legs of a polyurethane system, one partner list.