The C4 Merchant Stops Selling the Spread
TPC holds the largest North American share in butadiene, raffinate, 1-butene and polybutene out of a single Houston plant, and it lost $34 million last year. ENEOS closes in October, and an owner with its own rubber plants values those molecules differently than a merchant does.
The largest North American market share in butadiene sits with one company. So does the largest share in raffinate, in 1-butene, and in polybutene.
All four come out of one plant.
That is TPC Group, and the description is ENEOS's, from the release it published on August 7 announcing it had agreed to buy the company.
TPC's own materials put the footprint plainly: a manufacturing facility in the corridor next to the Houston Ship Channel, and product terminals at Port Neches and Lake Charles. One site makes the molecules. The other two hold them.
Houston nameplate went to 1.1 billion pounds a year of butadiene in December 2024, after a capital program that lifted the maximum sustained daily rate 20 percent.
The transaction is expected to close in October 2026, once regulatory approvals land.
"What changes for a butadiene buyer when the merchant in the middle stops being a merchant?"
The Year the Spread Stopped Paying
ENEOS did something useful for the rest of us. Japanese disclosure rules made it publish three years of TPC Group, Inc. consolidated results in the announcement itself, for a company whose financials are otherwise private.
They are not flattering.
Net sales ran $1,587m, then $1,681m, then $1,511m across 2023, 2024 and 2025. Operating profit over the same three years went $93m, $118m, $25m. Ordinary profit swung from +$54m in 2024 to -$44m in 2025, and the bottom line went from +$9m to -$34m (chart below).
Sales fell about 10 percent. Operating profit fell just under 79 percent. Operating margin went from 7.0 percent to 1.7 percent in a single year.
That gap between the two declines is the whole story.
A merchant C4 processor earns the difference between what crude C4 costs coming off the crackers and what butadiene and its co-products fetch going out the gate. Volume was roughly there in 2025. The spread was not.
Worth holding both documents side by side, because they went out the same morning.
Redwood Capital Management, TPC's largest shareholder at 40.5 percent, described "a phenomenal turnaround" over the past four years in the TPC release. ENEOS's release carried the table above. Both are accurate, and they are describing different windows.
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