US shale boom shakes Britain’s $33B chemicals industry

Posted on December 16, 2013 by Bloomberg in Natural gas

By Nidaa Bakhsh, Bloomberg News

The U.S. shale gas boom is reverberating across Britain’s chemical industry, the nation’s second-largest export earner.

The 20-billion pound ($33 billion) chemicals business is losing sales to lower-cost competitors such as in the U.S., where new supplies from domestic shale drilling have reduced prices for natural gas, the fuel used in making chemicals such as plastics. By 2020 the chemicals industry in the U.S. will be 21 percent larger than in Europe, from near parity now, according to the American Chemistry Council. Read more...