Why Nobody Can Ship You Ethylene Oxide

If you ethoxylate anything, your supply map has a point on it that no ship can cover.

INEOS Oxide sent customers a notice dated October 16 declaring force majeure on ethylene oxide and ethylene oxide derivative products out of its Bayport site in Texas.

The stated cause is unexpected equipment failure and machinery malfunction. Performance was excused effective immediately.

Seventeen days later there is no restart date, no duration and no published allocation on the record.

"When the plant that makes it stops, where does the replacement tonne come from?"

Most of what this desk covers has an answer to that question, and the answer is a customs line. This one has nothing on the other side of it.

What the Whole Country Buys From Abroad

The United States imported $163,476 of ethylene oxide in 2025.

That is not a typo and it is not one shipper. It is the entire national import book for HS 2910.10, every origin, twelve months: Canada at $53,560, Türkiye at $93,606, the Dominican Republic at $13,810, and India at $2,500.

Go back six years and the shape holds (chart below). The high-water mark across the whole window is $230,531 in 2022, a year when China put 20.5 tonnes on the water and nobody has repeated it since.

Weigh the 2025 book instead of pricing it and you get about twelve tonnes across the origins that reported a weight.

Twelve tonnes. For a country of this size, that number is indistinguishable from zero, and it has been for six years running.

Bayport's Hour

INEOS paid $700 million for the Bayport business and said exactly what it was buying. The December 2023 release names "the 420kt Ethylene Oxide plant, the 375kt Ethylene Glycols plant and the 165kt Glycol Ethers plant together with all associated third-party business on the site."

The sale closed on May 1, 2024.

Put the nameplate on an hourly clock. 420,000 tonnes a year across 8,760 hours is 47.9 tonnes an hour.

So the twelve tonnes the entire United States imported in 2025 is roughly fifteen minutes of one plant at nameplate.

That is the whole structural point, and it is worth sitting with before the commercial read. Every other capacity event this desk writes up has a release valve: the tonnes go missing in Texas and show up on a customs line from Belgium or Korea eight weeks later, at a worse price. Ethylene oxide has no such valve. It is made where it is consumed, and the trade data has been saying so for as long as the trade data exists.