Materia has appointed Christopher Murphy as its new president and CEO

MOSCOW (MRC) -- Materia, Inc., a world-leading supplier of high-performance thermoset polymers, has announced that Christopher Murphy has been named president and chief executive officer effective February 1, as per Prnewswire.

Murphy succeeds Nitin Apte who has been named chief executive officer of a renewable energy company based in Singapore.

"As a former business and sales leader at SABIC and E.I. Dupont de Nemours, Chris has a proven track record of profitably growing materials businesses, commercializing technology and winning in new market applications," said Ray Roberge, Materia's Chairman of the Board. "Chris is the right person at the right time to lead the growth of Materia's advanced polymer business and we are very pleased that he will be joining our team."

"The Materia Board thanks Nitin for his many contributions and for positioning Materia for rapid growth through new strategic partnerships and expansion of the company's manufacturing footprint," said Roberge. "We wish Nitin much success in his new endeavor."

Murphy joins Materia from SABIC where he served as Americas Director in the automotive business and Global Business Director for specialty blends and compounds driving impressive business growth. During his service at E.I. Dupont De Nemours, Inc., Murphy served in positions of increasing responsibility including automotive marketing manager, regional sales and marketing director and global initiatives director. In his most recent DuPont assignment, Murphy led the transition for multiple divestitures of large, complex global businesses and the negotiations and implementation that maximized divestiture value.

"I am honored to have the opportunity to lead Materia at such a pivotal time in the company's history, as well as to work with such a committed and innovative team," said Murphy.
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MOSCOW (MRC) - Indonesia's Pertamina appointed a consortium of partners to develop a new USD10 billion refinery at Bontang, said Ardhy N. Mokobombang, director of refinery megaprojects and petrochemicals at the state-owned energy company, as per Hydrocarbonprocessing.

Indonesia, one of Southeast Asia's biggest fuel importers, hopes to reduce its import bill by improving its ageing domestic refining infrastructure, but some projects have been delayed because of financing issues.

Pertamina hopes to soon finalize a framework agreement with Oman's Overseas Oil and Gas LLC (OOG) and Cosmo Oil International, a trading unit of Japan's Cosmo Energy Holdings , to develop the Bontang facility, Mokobombang said on Tuesday.

The Oman government will provide financial support for the project, in which Pertamina expects to take an initial 10 percent stake, Mokobombang said. Pertamina would have the rights to supply 20 percent of the crude for the refinery, and Oman the remainder, he said.

Pertamina plans to reach a final investment decision on the 300,000 bpd Bontang grass roots refinery project in mid-2020, he said. "Hopefully in 2025 this refinery will be operational," Mokobombang told reporters.

A spokeswoman for Cosmo Energy Holdings in Japan said only that the company has not made an investment decision on the project yet. OOG is "active in the development of a number of energy related projects," including a refinery project in Indonesia, it said on its website. OOG could not be reached for comment.
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MOSCOW (MRC) -- The Chemical Activity Barometer (CAB), a leading economic indicator created by the American Chemistry Council (ACC), expanded 0.5 percent in January on a three-month moving average (3MMA) basis and 0.7 percent on an unadjusted basis, as per Hydrocarbonprocessing.

This follows an upwardly revised 3MMA gain of 0.7 percent in December and 0.5 percent in November. The CAB is up 4.0 percent compared to a year earlier, indicating a robust economy well into the third-quarter of 2018.

The Chemical Activity Barometer has four primary components, each consisting of a variety of indicators: 1) production; 2) equity prices; 3) product prices; and 4) inventories and other indicators.

In January, following some weather-related stagnation, production-related indicators showed solid improvement. Strong trends in construction-related resins, pigments, and performance chemistry all suggested further gains in housing activity. Plastic resins used in packaging and in other consumer and institutional applications also improved, suggesting continued consumer confidence. A robust stock market rally continued to push equity prices higher, while product prices and inventories were also positive.

The diffusion index expanded to 71 percent. This index marks the number of positive contributors relative to the total number of indicators monitored.

The Chemical Activity Barometer is a leading economic indicator derived from a composite index of chemical industry activity. The chemical industry has been found to consistently lead the U.S. economy's business cycle given its early position in the supply chain, and this barometer can be used to determine turning points and likely trends in the wider economy. Month-to-month movements can be volatile so a three-month moving average of the barometer is provided. This provides a more consistent and illustrative picture of national economic trends.

Applying the CAB back to 1912, it has been shown to provide a lead of two to fourteen months, with an average lead of eight months at cycle peaks as determined by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The median lead was also eight months. At business cycle troughs, the CAB leads by one to seven months, with an average lead of four months. The median lead was three months. The CAB is rebased to the average lead (in months) of an average 100 in the base year (the year 2012 was used) of a reference time series. The latter is the Federal Reserve's Industrial Production Index.

The CAB comprises indicators relating to the production of chlorine and other alkalies, pigments, plastic resins and other selected basic industrial chemicals; chemical company stock data; hours worked in chemicals; publicly sourced, chemical price information; end-use (or customer) industry sales-to-inventories; and several broader leading economic measures (building permits and new orders). Each month, ACC provides a barometer number, which reflects activity data for the current month, as well as a three-month moving average. The CAB was developed by the economics department at the American Chemistry Council.
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MOSCOW (MRC) - The revolution in U.S. shale oil has battered Canada's energy industry in recent years, ending two decades of rapid expansion and job creation in the nation's vast oil sands, said Hydrocarbonprocessing.

Now Canada is looking to its own shale fields to repair the economic damage. Canadian producers and global oil majors are increasingly exploring the Duvernay and Montney formations, which they say could rival the most prolific U.S. shale fields.

Canada is the first country outside the United States to see large-scale development of shale resources, which already account for 8 percent of total Canadian oil output. China, Russia and Argentina also have ample shale reserves but have yet to overcome the obstacles to full commercial development. Canada, by contrast, offers many of the same advantages that allowed oil firms to launch the shale revolution in the United States: numerous private energy firms with appetite for risk; deep capital markets; infrastructure to transport oil; low population in regions that contain shale reserves; and plentiful water to pump into shale wells.

Together, the Duvernay and Montney formations in Canada hold marketable resources estimated at 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, 20 billion barrels of natural gas liquids and 4.5 billion barrels of oil, according to the National Energy Board, a Canadian regulator. "The Montney is thought to have about half the recoverable resources of the whole oil sands region, so it's formidable," Marty Proctor, chief executive of Calgary-based Seven Generations Energy, told Reuters in an interview.

Canada's shale output stands at about 335,000 bpd, according to energy consultants Wood Mackenzie, which forecasts output should grow to 420,000 bpd in a decade. The pace of output growth could quicken and the estimated size of the resources could rise as activity picks up and knowledge of the fields improves, according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

Seven Generations and Encana Corp, also based in Calgary, are among leading producers developing the two regions. Global majors including Royal Dutch Shell and ConocoPhillips - who pulled back from the oil sands last year - are also developing Canadian shale assets.
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MOSCOW (MRC) -- SunPower Corp. announced that an 8-megawatt SunPower Oasis Power Plant was recently completed and is now operating at Total's La Mede refinery in Chateauneuf-les-Martigues, France, according to Hydrocarbonprocessing.

Total Solar is proud of the start-up of its photovoltaic power plant in La Mede. The project was completed in a very short time and in accordance with the strict safety standards specific to a refinery," said Julien Pouget, senior vice president Renewables at Total. "It demonstrates our willingness to continue to actively help drive the growth of solar power in France through the solarisation of industrial sites."

"SunPower delivers cost-competitive solar energy through innovative, integrated complete solutions such as our Oasis platform," said Tom Werner, SunPower president and CEO. "We commend Total for this forward-thinking, milestone project, and for using high performance SunPower technology to ensure long-term value."

The SunPower Oasis platform is a fully integrated power plant solution designed to streamline construction, reduce operations and maintenance costs, and maximize value for customers. The high efficiency SunPower E-Series solar panels that are mounted on the Oasis solar trackers at the La Mede facility produce 30 percent more energy than conventional solar panels in the first year of operation.

As MRC informed before, in March 2016, The National Petrochemical Company (NPC) of Iran and France-based Total signed an memorandum of understanding (MoU) to build a petrochemical complex in Iran. The complex will include a world-scale steam cracker unit in the coastal area. It will be based on a combination of feedstocks comprised of ethane, naphtha and LPG, as well as other available feed. In addition to steam cracker unit, the complex will include relevant downstream units for supplying its products to domestic and international markets.

SunPower is a majority-owned subsidiary of Total SA.

Total S.A. is a French multinational oil and gas company and one of the six "Supermajor" oil companies in the world with business in Europe, the United States, the Middle East and Asia. The company's petrochemical products cover two main groups: base chemicals and the consumer polymers (polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene) that are derived from them.
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