Esteban is a petrochemical industry expert with over 30 years of global experience in polymers, petrochemical markets, and value chain economics. He is the Principal and CEO of Chemical and Polymer Market Consultants (ChemPMC), a boutique consulting firm specialising in polyolefins and related petrochemical markets. He holds a Chemical Engineering degree from the Institut Químic de Sarrià (Barcelona, 1993) and an MBA from Rice University (Houston, 2003). His career includes leadership and analytical roles at Repsol, Tetra Pak, Nexant, CMAI (now part of S&P Global and of Chemical Market Analytics), and Wood Mackenzie. He has also authored numerous market studies, presented at major industry conferences across the Americas and Europe, led training programs on supply/demand modeling, polyolefins economics, and petrochemical fundamentals, and has served as an expert witness in both litigation and arbitration proceedings.

Here he speaks to ORIENTATE about the impact of the Iran war on petrochemical markets worldwide and the challenges and opportunities that will shape the industry going forward.

OR: Esteban, can you tell us a bit about your background and how your 30+ years of experience in global petrochemical markets supports you in your current role?

ES: I'm a chemical engineer, trained in Spain but I'm originally from Panama. My career started in Europe with Repsol, where I was in charge of commodity polyolefin sales, as well as speciality polyolefin sales in Spain and other parts of Europe. But during my career, I have also worked in the packaging industry, with Tetra Pak in Panama as a Caribbean sales manager. And then, when I moved to the US, I worked for an equipment manufacturer doing sales of plastic processing equipment in Latin America. Those experiences helped me gain proficiency across raw materials, equipment, and packaging. It was after I went to school to do an MBA that I really started a career in consulting, which I have been doing since the early 2000s. So, my experience in the market and my work with various consulting firms including Nexant/ChemSystems or CMAI - now IHS - and Wood Mackenzie  helped me gain a very in-depth understanding of the market technologies and the things that drive the industry in general; connections to supply and demand, connections to the technology, and how it all works together.

A combination of industry experience, together with the analytical side from my consulting career, is what supports what I do right now, although I must confess to you that I wasn't necessarily planning to start a company back in 2015. Chemical and Polymer Market Consultants is an accidental business, which started through clients wanting training and support with the basics, such as how you prepare supply and demand balances, how do you forecast prices, how do you prepare a cost of production model… So that training ethos was the beginning of the company, which then evolved into consulting services and expert witness support. And I am excited to say we are now in the process of starting a new line of business, reporting market dynamics for polyolefins in the North American market, which we expect to launch by the third quarter of this year.

It's been a snowball process, but having been in the industry for more than 30 years now, I am privileged to have a lot of connections with highly experienced people, and that network of people and companies works with ChemPMC providing training, consulting services and expert witness support at a similar level to the big consulting firms, but at a very competitive cost.

OR: How would you describe the evolution of PP, PE and PET markets during your career, in terms of technology, market structure, and global competition?

ES: Certainly, from a technological standpoint, one of the key things that I've seen - and we're talking about suppliers of commodities – is how dramatically the world scale of production plants has increased over the years, which in some instances, has doubled or tripled what it was when I began my career. Then, as you said, in 30 years I've seen a lot of evolution on the commercial aspects of the industry and the market’s structure. I started my career in Europe in the 1990s, when it was highly regionalised, so you had a Spanish market and a French market and an Italian market. And that gave way to a more globalised industry where production was localised to more cost-effective regions. Commodities moved quite a lot around the world, and that caused a lot of restructuring, not just in where we were making things, but what things we were making in different regions. Some regions had to adapt to a complicated competitive situation, and when they couldn't compete on prices they would then compete on technology or technological innovations. That was the reality up until recently.

Now, we're moving into the third market iteration of my career, which is a regionalisation of sorts again, with a change in the economic environment and in how countries – starting with the United States - are becoming more protective, and with the rules of trade changing. We are not necessarily becoming as regionalised as we were in the 1990s, but there are certainly changes in the way that we behave which affect how the industry operates these days.

The only constant throughout my career is the change. There is never stability. I remember sitting in a conference in Houston in the early 2000s, where we talked about the end of the North American petrochemical industry because, at the time, oil was USD30 per barrel, and gas was USD15 per million BTUs. As a result, we in North America were completely uncompetitive, having to close production facilities. And, just a few years after that, we got the shale revolution that made North America competitive again. So, I guess, the lesson is never to get comfortable because, when you think things are finally stable, they're for sure going to change.

In terms of the evolution of individual products - from a very American-centric point of view - on the polyethylene side, what we have seen is an investment focus on very low-cost production regions, with the Middle East and North America getting the lion's share of investments up until around ten years ago. Then, in recent years, we have the emergence of China as another region with investment in capacity, but for different reasons - not necessarily competition but for assurance of supply and self-sufficiency.

Then, when we consider polypropylene, it's a very different story. The changes driven by the use of light feedstocks for ethylene production in North America meant that the availability of propylene was significantly reduced. That changed the cost position for polypropylene. It went from being a very cheap material to a very expensive one, and this change has impacted its demand growth, and where in the world we're making the material. Because, in this case, we (in North America) don't necessarily enjoy a cost advantage for polypropylene production. It's in those regions where we are using heavier feedstocks for the production of ethylene that we are seeing increases in the production of propylene. And that's where most of the growth is taking place, from a polypropylene capacity standpoint. So, each polymer has had a bit of a different path throughout my career.

OR: The Iran war has continued to wreak havoc on global supply chains, resulting in significant upward price pressure. In your view, how severe is the current market situation compared to disruptions in previous years?

ES: The word that describes this situation is unprecedented. What we are experiencing, nobody - even at my age or older - has seen throughout their career. First of all, the Middle East is a large supplier of many petrochemical and energy products. From a polyolefin standpoint alone, right now we have as much as 20 million tonnes of polyethylene that are not necessarily making their way to the market, and 7 million tonnes of polypropylene that may also not be making its way to the market. Therefore, we have a massive supply shock on the raw material side. And then, the energy products that Saudi Arabia, Iraq or Iran are producing and that would cross the stretch of Hormuz to feed crackers and production units in Asia, are not flowing in the same amounts that they used to. So Asian producers are having trouble with raw materials and, as time progresses and if the conflict lasts for a prolonged period of time, this is going to create further disruptions on supplies in those regions. Regions like Asia are managing to survive using existing inventories, and, in some countries, by retaining domestic production and not exporting materials. So, they are sort of coping, but nevertheless, the longer the conflict continues, the bigger the problems we will face later on.

Therefore, this current situation is completely different from anything we have experienced. We have seen supply interruptions in the past; in the US Gulf Coast we have hurricanes and weather events. And, in Europe, you had to scramble for alternative energy supplies after the loss of energy products from Russia. In the current situation, it's not that there is nothing available, but we lost so much that is hard to quantify. And I think the key uncertainty in my mind is the duration of where we are right now. We are in an impasse, where both Iran and the US are blocking the stretch of Hormuz, so it's a horrible game of chicken where the losers are everybody else. Don't get me wrong, Iran is paying a hefty price, but the rest of the world is also paying a very big price, so the sooner we get to a solution, the better for everybody. I don't know what that solution is, but nevertheless, that lack of certainty in the duration of the conflict is one of the secondary problems we are facing. In summary, we have an unprecedented blockage of supplies and a lot of uncertainty on how long that is going to last.

ORIENTATE subscribers can read the full interview in the May 2026 issue. 

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