The breakup of ICI saw its former divisions sold off to different owners around the world. Some former ICI companies at the Wilton complex have struggled in recent years, with Petroplus, Artenius, and Invista all facing difficulties or closure. Officials like Paul Booth argue that the government must help coordinate efforts to plan for the chemical industry's future and transition it towards new feedstocks, as the complex used to function more cohesively under ICI ownership. They believe knowledge-based industries and alternative fuels will be increasingly important to ensure the long-term viability of the Wilton site.

1. www.nebusiness.co.uk 76 www.nebusiness.co.ukIssue of the week: Sons of ICI Tuesday, July 28, 2009Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Where now for the sons of ICI? How they’ve
fared since
the break-up
PETROPLUS
SWISS-based Petroplus
announced 200
redundancies at its Wilton
oil refinery in February. The
plant was developed 44
years ago by ICI/Phillips
specifically to handle oil
from the Ekofisk field in the
North Sea.
Petroplus bought the
refinery, which produces a
wide range of feedstocks as
well as being a major
producer of bio-diesel, in
2000. The site is currently in
safe shutdown mode until a
decision on its
future is
reached.
While its
strategic
significance as
a supplier to
the Wilton site
has diminished
over the years,
it was
nevertheless a
significant
customer on
the complex.
ARTENIUS
PLASTICS
company
Artenius -
formerly part
of a link-up
between ICI
and Dupont -
turned over
more than
£300m in
2007/8 and
2008/9, but
despite the
healthy figures,
more than 200 jobs have
been put under threat at the
Wilton plant.
Spanish-owned parent La
Seda de Barcelona posted a
large pre-tax loss last month
and administrators Deloitte
stepped in today.
LUCITE
DUPONT merged with the
acrylics businesses of ICI to
form Lucite in 1993.
The company, which
employs around 280 on
Teesside, has a
manufacturing base in
Billingham and a global
research operation at the
Wilton Centre. It’s Cassel
Works operation at
Billingham is the largest
manufacturing base in the
Lucite group, producing
methyl methacrylate and
methacrylic acid - used to
make acrylic products.
TTE TECHNICAL TRAINING
TTE was created 17 years
ago to carry on the
apprenticeships tradition of
ICI and British Steel.
The Middlesbrough-based
company now employs
around 200 staff, with 60%
of its work involved in
training new recruits for the
process sector.
INVISTA
IN April, global chemical
giant Invista announced the
closure of its former ICI
textile nylon polymer plant
at Wilton, which employed
around 300
people.
AGILITY
LOGISTICS
AGILITY’S
specialty
chemicals
business
provides
supply chain
services to
the chemical
industry
worldwide.
The chemical
industry
specialism
originated
from a
management
buy-out of the
distribution
division of ICI.
The spin-off
business
flourished as a
privately
owned
company and
was bought in 2006 by PWC
(Public Warehousing
Company) Kuwait which
changed its name to Agility
and now forms part of a
much larger, global $6.8bn
supply chain services
company.
AKZONOBEL
AKZONOBEL took over ICI
in January 2008 when an
£8bn takeover offer was
agreed.
The move marked the end
of the ICI global brand.
AkzoNobel launched its
corporate brand strategy
and said ICI would be
discontinued as a corporate
name, following wide
consultation - including
with the Evening Gazette.
But it said it would keep
ICI’s trademark Dulux dog
for its paint brand.
On the day Artenius announced
that it had been put on the
market as its Spanish parent
concentrated on keeping its
mainland European operations
afloat, SUE SCOTT considers if
Wilton is mortally wounded by
recent failures or if the “sons
of ICI” can learn lessons from
the past.
THE Germans have a word for it
and, in the UK, it used to roughly
translate as ICI.
“Verbunt means a very large com-
plex where many synergies are de-
rived from one plant’s product being
another plant’s feedstock. They can
share energy systems and resources
and work collaboratively,” explains
Paul Booth, president of Sabic Pet-
rochemicals UK, one of the pillars of
the Wilton processing site, which has
survived the current brutal cull.
Like many of his former ICI col-
leagues flung to the four corners of
the corporate globe when the chem-
ical giant divested itself, Mr Booth’s
paymasters’ boardrooms are a long
way from Teesside - in his case 3,189
miles away in Riyadh.
And that is at the heart of the
problems now facing Wilton.
In ICI’s heyday, plants were hard
wired together across the site.
“Although there was a river running
through it, they were physically con-
nected, just like a jigsaw, but ICI
exercised commercial flexibility
around the margins,” says Mr Booth.
“If you had crude oil coming in at one
end through what was, in effect, a
verbunt and you had many products
- polymers, PET, vinyl - coming out
the other, there were lots of processes
and sub processes that were more or
less efficient over time. One year
maybe the PET business was doing
very well and perhaps the aromatics
business was not. ICI looked at that
in the round; if it was still making
money, it was not overly bothered.
“When it was broken up in the ’90s,
physically nothing changed and
people stayed where they were. But
commercial agreements were set up
between those units that did not
exist before and they became as
inflexible as the pipes that hard wired
them together.”
The cracks in those pipes are now
beginning to appear. The collapse in
June of Dow, swiftly followed by
Croda - two previously integrated
companies - were the first real signs
that the old order was giving way to
the stresses of recession, although
former ICI textile firm Invista’s clos-
ure had hinted of it two months
previously. The North Tees PetroPlus
refinery, now up for sale by its Swiss
parent, is another, while Artenius - a
previously profitable plastics plant
where local manage-
ment decisions were
subordinate to the
boardroom battles go-
ing on in Barcelona -
also looks precarious.
Artenius’ difficulties
illustrate how Wilton’s
past strength has be-
come its present weak-
ness. A former ICI
company integrated
into the Wilton supply
chain, it was left crit-
ically exposed when its Spanish par-
ent hit the financial rocks.
“This recession is a big wake-up
call,” says Mr Booth. “As a chemical
industry we are at a crossroads and
as a nation we have to decide if it’s
something we want to keep.
“I believe we should since it adds
£20m/day to the UK coffers.”
Doomsayers who
talk of Wilton tum-
bling like a pack of
cards and a gathering
crisis are quickly si-
lenced - and, in truth,
the complex, helped
by the chemical
cluster group NEPIC,
has done well to
attract major invest-
ment including MGT
Power’s £500m
biomass plant, in
the teeth of the downturn.
Behind the scenes, though, they are
sufficiently worried to convene a war
cabinet of industry bosses to thrash
out a letter to Business Secretary
Lord Mandelson calling for cash to
keep companies like Artenius ticking
over while buyers are found.
The current difficulties facing
Wilton are dramatically different
from anything that has gone before
and demand a “paradigm shift” in
thinking, says Paul Booth.
His new incarnation of Wilton will
not be based on commodity feed-
stocks but a knowledge supply chain,
and government must intervene.
“Everybody is trying to do the right
thing but everybody is going in
slightly different directions so the
result is inertia,” says Mr Booth.
“It’s about how we herd all the cats
to head in the right direction. And as
much as I would love to do that, to
think any multi-national will is living
in dreamland.
“The Government has to organise,
to co-ordinate the endeavour to-
wards focused research, picking out
things that it wants the UK to be good
at - getting the technology strategy
board and industry and universities
all homing in the same
direction.”
Mark Lewis, energy
advisor to NEPIC,
agrees that managed
change is needed fast.
“If the credit crunch
had not happened,
things would have
changed more gradu-
ally but, when your
back’s up against the
wall, you have to do
something to manage
the cash,” he says. “We
are working hard to understand what
the future ought to be like and we are
starting to see that, with the wider
investments that are coming such as
MGT and the National Industral Bi-
otechnology Facility (at Wilton’s
Centre for Process Industries), these
things are the future but they are not
going to be here to-
morrow.”
Paul Booth’s future
landscape is even
more visionary. He
believes “the land-
fills of today are go-
ing to be the oilfields
of tomorrow”.
Having created a
problem for the
planet, the petro
chemical industry
could rescue both it-
self and the envir-
onment by breaking asunder what
man had previously joined together.
“For a long time the chemical in-
dustry has survived on North Sea oil
and gas. It’s not going to be switched
off tomorrow, but they are not going to
last forever.
“We may as well get used to the fact
that there’s going to be a
shift from naturally oc-
curring resources to how
we make the polymers of
the future. That’s about
the application of know-
ledge and taking a dif-
ferent route, whether
that’s a bio route or a
synthesis of some other
pre-existing material.”
For a new feedstock to
be based on previously
used materials, the sup-
ply chain going out of the home needs
to be as sophisticated as the one that
filled it with plastic bottles in the first
place. And the process industry can
play a part in shaping that, he says.
“The chemical industry has an op-
portunity to start looking forwards
and thinking about the concept and
what the implications of that would
be. There is no point
waiting until we’re
washed up on a
beach and thinking
what are we going to
do next; we need to
think about it in the
lifeboat,” he says.
Being a pragmatist,
he also believes the
past has much to
teach us.
It may well be time
to rebuild the verbunt
and crucial to that will be the urgent
completion of the upgrader project,
the biggest single investment planned
for Teesside since ICI’s arrival, which
will extract oil from sand.
It would be an opportunity to re-
constitute the jigsaw to create a new
picture of Wilton, he says.
In this brave new world, next gen-
eration polymers will be created
alongside those created from tradi-
tional fossil fuel sources - but with
different separation lines feeding
them.
For all that to happen fast enough to
make a difference, he believes gov-
ernment must enter a partnership
with private enterprise to skew it in
the right direction.
“I don’t think there’s such a thing as a
free market,” he says.
“Sometimes we might decide we
need to do something extraordinary to
one for the benefit of the whole.”
Spoken like a true son of ICI.
THE break up of ICI saw its former operating
divisions sold off to companies throughout the world.
Some have survived and thrived; others have
struggled.
Among the 30,000 staff ICI employed at
its height were three men who have an
enduring influence on Teesside.
PAUL BOOTH, above, now president of
Sabic UK Petrochemicals, started his
career as a mechanical engineering
apprentice for ICI. In 1999 he became
Huntsman’s European vice-president of
manufacturing and technology before
joining SABIC in 2007.
SANDY ANDERSON, right, helped manage
the handover of several of the company’s
divisions. He entered ICI as a chemical
engineering graduate in 1965 and rose to
become Senior Vice President for
Technology. He is now a member of the
board of governors at Teesside University
and chairman of Yarm-based bioethanol
company Ensus.
GEORGE RITCHIE, left, senior
vice-president of human resources and IT
for utility provider Sembcorp is a
passionate advocate for the chemical
industry. He heads up the regional
employers’ board for the National Skills
Academy for the Process Industry.
THE START OF
SOMETHING BIG:
Above, ICI’s
polythene works
under construction
in the 1950s, right,
the ICI nylon works,
below right the
famous logo and
below, Prime
Minister Ramsay
McDonald at the
official opening of
the Oil Works in
1935
ICI looked
at things in
the round; if
it was still
making money, it
was not overly
bothered
- Paul Booth,
president of Sabic
It’s about
how we
herd all the
cats in the
right direction. To
think any multi
national will is
living in dreamland
- Paul Booth
There is no
point
waiting until
we’re
washed up; we
need to think about
it in the lifeboat
- Paul Booth