Commodity chemicals

Commodity chemicals (or bulk commodities or bulk chemicals) are a group of chemicals that are made on a very large scale to satisfy global markets. The average prices of commodity chemicals are regularly published in the chemical trade magazines and web sites such as Chemical Week and ICIS. There have been several studies of the scale and complexity of this market for example in the USA.

Commodity Chemicals is a sub-sector of the chemical industry (other sub sectors are fine chemicals, speciality chemicals, inorganic chemicals, petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, renewable energy (e.g. biofuels) and materials (e.g. biopolymers)) Commodity Chemicals are differentiated by primarily their bulk of their manufacture.

The chemistry and processes used to create organic commodity chemicals (that is those based on the chemistry of carbon) from basic raw materials such as oil and gas; plus the chemistry and processes that are used to manufacture the many downstream speciality and fine chemicals have been studied in universities and industrial research centres for most of the 20th century. This is called organic synthesis and the industrial process streams that have been created are termed Industrial Organic Chemistry. and these can be found in many organic chemistry text books.

Chemical compounds are often classified into two classes, inorganic and organic. Both are produced on large scale.

Commonly traded commodity chemicals include:

Materials such as these are made in large scale chemical manufacturing locations around the world. Not all of the materials are produced in one single location but groups of related materials often are to induce industrial symbiosis as well as material, energy and utility efficiency and other economies of scale. These locations often have clusters of manufacturing units called chemical plants that share utilities and large scale infrastructure such as power stations, port facilities, road and rail terminals. In the United Kingdom for example there are 4 main locations for commodity chemical manufacture: near the River Mersey in Northwest England, on the Humber on the East coast of Yorkshire, in Grangemouth near the Firth of Forth in Scotland and on Teesside as part of the Northeast of England Process Industry Cluster (NEPIC). Approximately 50% of the UK's petrochemicals, which are also commodity chemicals, are produced by the industry cluster companies on Teesside on three large chemical parks at Wilton, Billingham and Seal Sands.

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