Capacity LedgerHow You Restart a Chloride Line
Tioxide expects single-stream pigment production back at Greatham this month, the first output from the Teesside site since it went idle late last year. Every published restart milestone is a people milestone: 132 employees transferred with the site in April, and 130 more positions have been announced since.
A plant that has not made a tonne of pigment since last year is publishing eleven grades on its website, each one with a technical data sheet you can download.
The plant is Greatham, at Hartlepool on Teesside. The company is Tioxide, which LB Group created when it bought the site out of administration in April, and which expects it to make pigment again this month.
"What does it actually take to bring a chloride line back?"
On the published record: people, in two tranches, and a product range that never went off sale.
What Transferred on April 27
Venator Materials UK entered administration on October 22, 2025, a week after signing an asset purchase agreement over the Greatham site.
LB Titanium UK Ltd, a subsidiary of LB Group of Jiaozuo, completed the purchase on April 27, 2026, and 132 employees transferred with the assets. The CMA cleared the deal at Phase 1 four days before completion and closed its case on June 4.
What changed hands is a chloride plant with the TIOXIDE and DELTIO brands attached to it.
Venator's last annual report on file with the SEC, the FY2022 20-F, puts Greatham at 150,000 metric tons a year and lists it as the only wholly owned chloride line in a seven-plant, 602,000 t/yr estate. The one other chloride entry in that table is the half-owned Louisiana Pigment joint venture at Lake Charles.
So a quarter of that estate's tonnage, and effectively all of its own chloride, sat on one site in the northeast of England.
The Restart Is a Hiring Schedule
Tioxide put out its second recruitment release on August 5. Read as a commissioning schedule, it says more than most restart announcements do.
Seventy roles went out after completion.
More than 60 of them were filled in 12 weeks, taking the workforce past 200. Another 60 were announced on August 5, which puts 130 announced positions on top of the 132 that came with the site (chart below).
The split is the part worth reading.
The first tranche covers the black end and the finishing plant, plus the R&D centre at Wynyard and the head office at Stockton-on-Tees. The second tranche exists to bring the second line into operation.
Which gives you the shape of the thing. Single stream first, expected this month subject to commissioning milestones, and the second line behind it on a schedule nobody has dated.
Managing director Karen Askwith, who held the same title at Venator Materials UK when the site was sold, records in the release that experienced people who previously worked at the locations are choosing to come back.
That matters on a chloride line. Chlorinator and oxidation practice lives in the operators, and a line that has stood idle for months either recovers that knowledge or hires it in.
Two of the Eleven Say Where the Range Comes From
Now the part a buyer should notice.
Tioxide publishes eleven grades: five for coatings, four for plastics, two for inks.
Nine are chloride process by the company's own product descriptions. TR52 and TR53, the ink grades that also go into can coatings, are sulfate.
Greatham is a chloride plant. Those two are therefore made somewhere else, and the About page says where in general terms: key TIOXIDE branded products "are also produced within LB Group's global manufacturing network."
LB Group's own key-facts page counts 660,000 t/yr of chloride capacity across two plants and 850,000 t/yr of sulfate across three, with ilmenite mines in Sichuan and mineral sands in Australia behind them. Greatham would be a third chloride plant, the first outside China, and roughly 23% on top of that published chloride base.
If you buy TIOXIDE codes, the question for your next contract round is which plant your specific grade ships from, and whether that answer moves when line one comes up. There is a sales office at Rosemont, Illinois on the same page, so North American buyers get to ask it too.
Final Thoughts
Four days ago this desk counted the other direction on the same chemistry.
Tronox's own disclosed facility list went from 1,078,000 t/yr to 942,000 between two annual reports, 136,000 t/yr removed at Botlek and Fuzhou. Greatham on its own is 150,000.
We would not call a cycle turned on one restart, and Tioxide has published no tonnage of its own for the site. What it has published is a month, a headcount, and a second line with sixty jobs attached, which is more than most entries in the addition column ever arrive with.
This ledger spends most of its time counting subtractions. This month it gets to write in the other column, with a postcode.
Thanks for reading.