Friday, November 03, 2017
Jack Kaskey | Bloomberg Businessweek | November 3, 2017
A decade ago, chemicals were just another fading U.S. manufacturing business. Companies were reluctant to invest in new factories because of soaring prices for the oil and natural gas that serve as both raw materials and power sources. Dow Chemical and others were closing plants and moving production to the Middle East to save money. “The conventional wisdom was we are not going to produce a lot of petrochemicals here,” says Kevin Swift, chief economist at the American Chemistry Council, an industry group.