The Last American Penta Came Out of Toledo
Perstorp shut its Toledo plant on September 2, taking with it the only US pentaerythritol and TMP production. The customs record shows the replacement tonnes were already moving in the first half of 2026, and 87 percent of the growth came from an origin nobody lists as a North American supplier.
Perstorp's own page for its Toledo site carries a timeline of the plant, and two entries on it do all the work.
2011: Acquisition of Ashland business (last Pentaerythritol producer in USA). 2016: Only Trimethylolpropane (TMP) producer in USA.
Fifteen years of being the last one standing, written down by the company as a milestone.
On September 2 Perstorp Polyols, Inc. permanently discontinued production at that site.
"Who supplies a molecule the United States has stopped making, and had they already started?"
The announcement is short and says the ordinary things. A review of the manufacturing footprint, consolidation into fewer and strategically positioned facilities, sales and customer service and distribution carrying on unaffected, North America still a strategic priority.
The one number in it is that approximately 70 percent of Perstorp's US employees are affected.
The site page supplies the scale the release leaves out: 45 acres in northwest Ohio, roughly 130 people, a penta plant bought from Pan American Chemicals in 1976 and started in 1977, a TMP plant on land bought from DuPont that came up in 1990, di-penta from 2004, and the site's own formaldehyde plant from 1996.
What Actually Stopped
Four products came off Toledo: pentaerythritol, di-pentaerythritol, TMP and sodium formate.
Three of them are one reactor.
Penta is made by condensing acetaldehyde with formaldehyde over caustic soda, and the last step is a crossed Cannizzaro that throws off sodium formate in fixed proportion to the penta. Nobody runs the formate stream without running the penta reaction.
Di-penta arrives in the same pot as the heavier fraction, which is why you never see a standalone di-penta plant.
And the formaldehyde unit the site built in 1996 was there to feed that reactor. Formaldehyde moves as a solution that is mostly water, so it does not go looking for a new customer three states away.
So this is one train and everything hanging off it, closed in a single move. TMP is the separate plant next door, and it goes too.
Which leaves the question every buyer of these four materials is now working through, and it is not a question about Perstorp.
The rest of this brief is for subscribers.
The capacity math, the trade-flow read, and what it means for the products you buy.
$50 a month, or $400 a year.
Already a subscriber? Sign in