The Ethoxylator That Finally Left Greenville

Ethox Chemicals has told the EPA it handles ethylene oxide every single year the Toxics Release Inventory has been open for business.

38 filings, reporting years 1987 through 2024, no gaps, all of them from 1801 Perimeter Road in Greenville, South Carolina.

That is a long time to run an alkoxylation business 821 miles from the Bayport end of the Houston Ship Channel.

On October 14 the company announced it had finished doing something about it: a greenfield plant at Pasadena, Texas, completed and built from the ground up.

Aimed at exactly what the Greenville site does. Ethoxylation and propoxylation, specialty surfactants, custom synthesis.

Ethox was formed in 1968. This is plant number two.

The Reason Any of This Is Geographic

We put the whole-year US import book for ethylene oxide at $163,476 on November 2. The whole country bought less oxide from abroad last year than a mid-size distributor turns over in a quarter.

Oxide does not arrive. Oxide gets made, and then it gets reacted, usually within sight of where it was made.

So an ethoxylator is really a real-estate business with reactors attached. You are not buying a molecule so much as buying a position next to somebody who makes one, and the qualification file you spent a decade building is attached to the address where you did it.

Greenville made complete sense in 1968. The Piedmont mills wanted surfactants, Ethox was a short truck ride away, and the oxide came to the Carolinas because the demand did.

Fifty-eight years later the demand map looks different and the oxide map does not.

Eleven Filers, One Zip Code

Pull every ethylene oxide Form R for reporting year 2024 out of EPA's Envirofacts service and you get 153 filings nationally. Texas has 35 of them, call it 23 percent of the country, and more than Louisiana and South Carolina put together.

Now cut it finer. Harris County, Texas alone accounts for 15. The city of Pasadena accounts for 11, and every one of those eleven carries the same zip code, 77507.

Eleven filings in one zip code is more than every state in the country except Texas itself and Louisiana (chart below).

Read the eleven and the shape of the thing shows up in the street addresses:

• 5761 Underwood Road is the INEOS Oxide Bayport EO plant. Solvay files from 5761 Underwood Road, Suite B.
• 9502 Bayport Boulevard is four separate corporate parents on one street number: Celanese, Arkema, Clariant and Indorama. Clariant's street line in the federal record reads "9502 Bayport Blvd - ETOX UNIT".
• Indorama files again as Oxiteno USA on Bay Area Boulevard, and Dow, Baker Hughes, Halliburton's Multi-Chem and Carpenter Co fill out the rest of the same few blocks.

Okay, so that is the neighborhood. Now look at where Ethox bought.

5121 Underwood Road

The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation carries the build as project TABS2023005179, registered 2022-11-10, project name "Ethox Campus," owner Ethox Chemicals of 1801 Perimeter Road, Greenville, South Carolina. Address on the filing: 5121 Underwood Road, Buildings A-D, Pasadena, TX 77507, Harris County. Four pre-engineered metal buildings, 29,428 square feet, warehouse and maintenance shed and lab office and an MCC building, construction start 2023-03-20.

The seventeen acres came from Kao, bought around 2021. Kao's own tertiary amine plant sits at 5103 Underwood Road and started up in August 2025.

Underwood Road is also where the oxide is. The INEOS plant at 5761 is the one that sent out a force majeure notice on October 16, the subject of our November 2 piece, and it files from the same road as the new Ethox buildings.

A 38-year qualification history in South Carolina, and the second site lands on the oxide's own street.

Final Thoughts

Ethox published no tonnage, no reactor count, no investment figure and no startup date. The announcement is completed construction, not first production, so what exists on the public record today is buildings. We are not going to invent the parts the company did not publish.

What is worth noticing is who did this.

A privately held specialty house, inside what its own announcement calls a family-owned American company of 88 years, spent fifty-eight years running a single plant. Then it put number two on one of the few roads in America where the molecule it sells already lives.

The Carolinas built that company because the textile demand was there. The Gulf Coast gets the next chapter because the oxide is, and oxide is the one input in this business that will never meet you halfway.

Thanks for reading.