The Chemical Industry in 2026: An Executive Briefing from the Leaders Redefining Competitive Advantage

Chemical industry trends 2026 point to a familiar set of pressures — slower growth, geopolitical fragmentation, margin compression, and sustainability commitments that still have to justify themselves financially. What has changed is where leaders are looking for advantage. For most of the industry’s history, competitive edge came from what a company could invent: a better molecule, a stronger patent position, a more efficient process. That foundation has not disappeared. But it is no longer where the contest is being decided.

Interviewed separately ahead of CIEX North America 2026 — across different companies, functions, and regions — a group of senior chemical leaders returned repeatedly to the same conclusion: the difficulty is no longer generating innovation. It is scaling it. What follows is a consolidated view of what they told us, organized around the themes the event was built to address.

Chemical Industry Trends 2026: From Pilot to Plant

The constraint most of these leaders described is not a shortage of ideas. It is the difficulty of converting a proven capability into consistent performance across a complex organization. The pattern recurs regardless of function: a promising concept, a successful pilot, and then a stall at the point where the work has to scale.

Lewis Sweet, General Manager Global Refining and Chemicals at Honeywell, states the case plainly. The obstacle, in his view, is rarely the technology itself but the organization’s capacity to embed a working solution consistently across sites and assets. His formulation is deliberately unsparing: the bottleneck is not the tool, it is the enterprise operating around it.

Venki Chandrashekar, President and CEO of AmSty, has observed the same dynamic from within a commoditized business, where there is little tolerance for initiatives that fail to deliver. He describes the recurring failure as the distance between ideation and execution — organizations that generate strong ideas but cannot reproduce them reliably at scale. His remedy is not greater creativity but greater discipline: treating innovation with the same rigor applied to any core business process, complete with defined objectives, measurable outcomes, and clear ownership.

Thanos Yiagopoulos, CTO of Momentive, locates the same problem in the operating environment. Progress comes readily in research settings, where new tools accelerate formulation, scouting, and the screening of technical options. It comes far more slowly on the plant floor, where fragmented data and aging infrastructure resist modernization. The decisive factor, he notes, is often whether the people running those operations trust a new approach enough to change established practice — a question of adoption rather than technical merit.

When advantage is available to everyone

Viewed together, these chemical industry trends 2026 raise a more uncomfortable question. If advantage now depends on operationalizing capability, what remains once competitors operationalize the same capability?

Jayshree Seth, Corporate Scientist and Chief Science Advocate at 3M, confronts the point directly. Optimization, she argues, is not the source of breakthroughs — and when every organization optimizes along the same lines, using the same methods, differentiation erodes. The implication reframes the entire question of adoption. Access to tools confers no lasting edge once that access is universal. What endures is judgment: the discernment to recognize which signal matters, and the discipline to protect the exploratory, non-linear work that cannot be automated.

Michael Lefenfeld, CEO of Hexion, reaches a parallel conclusion from the commercial side of the business. Applying new capability to isolated tasks, he observes, produces incremental gains but no durable position. The more consequential opportunity lies in connecting the enterprise itself — research informed by manufacturing, manufacturing informed by customers — so that the organization compounds its own intelligence over time rather than capturing it in fragments. Advantage, on this account, is a property of the system, not of any single tool within it.

Resilience and discipline, decided in advance

Another defining feature of chemical industry trends 2026 is that execution applies to strategy as much as to operations. Two leaders described resilience and innovation discipline as deliberate commitments, made ahead of need and under real constraint, rather than responses to disruption once it has arrived.

Marc Block, Global VP Performance Chemicals at Wanhua Chemical Group, treats supply chain resilience as a matter of design rather than contingency. A company becomes exposed, he argues, the moment its network is optimized around a single trade-flow assumption or feedstock basis. His account of the trade-off deserves to stand as stated: “the cost of resilience is paid gradually; the cost of fragility arrives all at once when a route closes, a feedstock spikes, or a tariff lands.” Flexibility carries a cost in stable conditions, and accepting that cost is precisely the discipline that separates the prepared from the exposed.

Jamie Cohen, Vice President of R&D, Industrial Intermediates & Infrastructure at Dow, applies the same logic to the innovation pipeline. Under sustained pressure to deliver near-term results, she argues, the conditions for genuine ideation quietly disappear unless an organization protects them by design. Her position is that ideation must be treated as a full business exercise — structured, resourced, and accountable — rather than an activity permitted only when the schedule allows.

Speed as a function of design

A final thread draws the argument together. Even acceleration — the capability most organizations assume can be purchased — proves to be a matter of design rather than expenditure.

These chemical industry trends 2026 point to a broader shift: competitive advantage increasingly depends on how effectively organizations operationalize capability.

Jack Dever, CTO of AVN Corporation, contends that process technology development can move considerably faster than the industry currently accepts as its norm. The gain, however, does not follow from additional resources. It follows from combining sharper work processes with equipment that is well-defined and readily reconfigured, and — he is emphatic on this point — from implementing both together rather than either in isolation. The lesson echoes the others across every function represented here: the binding constraint is not the level of investment, but the deliberateness with which the work itself is designed.

Join the conversation at CIEX North America 2026

These decisions are not being made in isolation — and neither should yours be. In three weeks, the leaders quoted here join CEOs, CTOs, and R&D heads from across the industry for two days of senior, execution-focused exchange on exactly these challenges: scaling AI, building resilience, and turning innovation into measurable performance.

September 9–10, 2026 | Indianapolis

Featuring leaders from 3M, Dow, AVN Corporation, Eastman Chemical, Honeywell, Huntsman, Albemarle, Momentive, Cabot, Hexion, Wanhua Chemical Group, AmSty, and more

Seats are limited as the event approaches.

Taken together, these chemical industry trends 2026 show that execution, resilience, and organizational design are becoming as important as technological innovation itself.

Register for CIEX North America 2026 →

AI Plant Performance in Chemicals: Why the Bottleneck Isn’t Technology

AI plant performance in chemicals starts with one deceptively simple problem: turning plant data into decisions that actually change outcomes — and for most organizations, the bottleneck is not the technology. Lewis Sweet, General Manager Global Refining and Chemicals at Honeywell, brings to CIEX North America 2026 a perspective shaped by working at the intersection of industrial technology and chemical plant operations across some of the world’s most complex refining environments.

In this interview, he shares where AI is already moving hard metrics in plant operations, what is genuinely preventing organizations from scaling proven use cases across sites, and how the shift from volume growth to value creation is reshaping investment priorities in refining and chemicals. The answers are more direct — and more uncomfortable — than most transformation agendas tend to acknowledge.

CIEX: Without giving too much away, what is the core message of your session and what would you like delegates to remember?

Lewis Sweet, General Manager Global Refining and Chemicals, Honeywell

Lewis: The next wave of competitive advantage in chemicals won’t come from more innovation — it will come from better execution. What are the human and machine factors preventing us from closing the loop: using greater degrees of technology in an increasingly dynamic global economy? My message is simple — technology is not the bottleneck. We are.

The next wave of competitive advantage in chemicals won’t come from more innovation — it will come from better execution.

CIEX: What motivates you to join CIEX this year – and where are you most looking to learn from peers at this event?

Lewis: CIEX brings together senior leaders facing the same pressures — margin, sustainability, and complexity — creating a rare environment for practical, peer-level discussion. I’m most interested in how leaders are prioritizing investments and where digital initiatives are truly moving hard business metrics versus where impact is still limited.

CIEX: How has your approach to balancing volume growth and value creation evolved in recent years – and what’s one decision you’ve made here that would’ve been unthinkable three years ago?

Lewis: The focus has shifted from volume growth to value creation — getting more out of existing assets rather than adding new capacity. One clear change is the increase of low- and zero-capex digitization projects. Pay-for-performance and outcome-based models are more market-fluid than SaaS and incentivize all parties toward the right behaviors.

CIEX: Where is AI-enabled innovation already moving a hard business metric, and where is it still not delivering?

Lewis: AI is delivering in areas like process optimization and operator decision support, where it can directly influence performance. The challenge is not capability — it’s scaling. Many organizations have proven use cases, but embedding them consistently across operations using deterministic models scales at 1:1.

CIEX: Have we over-optimized for speed at the expense of resilience — or the other way around?

Lewis: Sustainability and economics are increasingly aligned, especially in areas like energy efficiency, where lower cost and lower emissions go hand in hand. The key is prioritizing initiatives that deliver both, while staying disciplined about where the trade-offs don’t yet justify the investment.

CIEX: Looking ahead, what factors and capabilities will define competitive advantage in the chemical industry over the next few years?

Lewis: Competitive advantage will come down to execution, adaptability, and integration — how well organizations deliver consistent performance, respond to change, and connect data to decision-making. Technology alone won’t differentiate; the ability to scale and operationalize it will.

Technology alone won’t differentiate; the ability to scale and operationalize it will.

Is Your Plant Closing the Loop Between AI and Measurable Performance?

If AI is delivering in pockets but not yet moving the needle at scale, you are not alone — and the gap is rarely where you expect it.

At CIEX North America 2026, Lewis Sweet of Honeywell brings a front-row perspective on what it actually takes to turn plant data into measurable operational performance in the session Closing the Loop: Turning AI Into Measurable Plant Performance.

CIEX is a forum where peers from 3M, Dow, Eastman Chemical, Honeywell, Huntsman, Albemarle, Momentive, Cabot, and Wanhua Chemical Group are working through the same challenge — openly and at a senior level.

September 9–10, 2026 | Indianapolis

Innovation Pipeline Management in Chemical R&D: Why Ideation Needs to Be a Full Business Exercise

Innovation pipeline discipline is becoming one of the most pressing challenges in chemical R&D — not because organizations lack ideas, but because the conditions for generating them are quietly disappearing under the weight of near-term execution pressure. Jamie Cohen, Vice President of R&D, Industrial Intermediates & Infrastructure at Dow, brings to CIEX North America 2026 a practitioner’s perspective from one of the industry’s most complex R&D organizations.

In this interview, she makes the case that filling the innovation pipeline is not a creativity problem — it is a discipline problem. And that solving it requires deliberate organizational design, new collaborative tools, and the conviction to treat ideation as a full business exercise, not a side activity.

CIEX: Without giving too much away, what is the core message of your session and what would you like delegates to remember?

Jamie Cohen, Vice President of R&D, Industrial Intermediates & Infrastructure, Dow

Jamie: With so much focus on near-term value delivery, we must be deliberate and creative in our ability to fill the innovation pipeline. Providing our organizations with a variety of new — inward and outward-facing — tools, different collaborative forums, and ensuring ideation is a full business exercise are all critical for speed and increasing the probability of success. Can every afternoon be a Friday afternoon experiment?

CIEX: What motivates you to join CIEX this year – and where are you most looking to learn from peers at this event?

Jamie: I am interested in learning how others are expanding new innovation tools across larger enterprises and how they have overcome obstacles around culture change and information sharing.

CIEX: How has your approach to balancing volume growth and value creation evolved in recent years, and what’s one decision you’ve made here that would’ve been unthinkable three years ago?

Jamie: We focus on innovation discipline as a whole. A program cannot move forward based solely on volume or value, but on a diverse set of criteria that includes differentiation to the customer and to the market, among other things. The portfolio balance has changed with respect to the timescale of delivery, but the value proposition to the customer remains: it must deliver differentiated performance.

CIEX: Where is AI-enabled innovation already moving a hard business metric, and where is it still not delivering?

Jamie: AI is moving the needle on cycle times for formulation development. We still need to work on how to engage externally for collaborative innovation using AI — sharing data sets continues to spark important conversations.

CIEX: How are you approaching sustainability priorities alongside broader economic and commercial considerations?

Jamie: We continue to look at sustainability alongside economic and commercial delivery. Each product developed should be more sustainable than the incumbent and have differentiated performance at a price that the customer is willing to pay for that differentiation. The application for the product will dictate what is acceptable, and we have experienced interest from customers for sustainable products across a range of economic and commercial terms. The value proposition matters.

CIEX: Looking ahead, what factors and capabilities will define competitive advantage in the chemical industry over the next few years?

Jamie: Speed and product differentiation are still going to be compelling to customers. The ability to form strong partnerships with customers to provide them with bespoke products and aligned services will also be a competitive advantage.

Where Did the Friday Afternoon Experiment Go — and How Do We Get It Back at Scale?

At CIEX North America 2026, Jamie Cohen takes the stage in the session Where Did the ‘Friday Afternoon Experiment’ Go — and How Do We Get It Back at Scale? — a conversation built for R&D leaders who feel the tension between near-term execution pressure and the space needed to fill the innovation pipeline.

That same organizational discipline extends beyond the innovation pipeline: she also joins senior leaders from Momentive and Hexion on the panel Navigating Legacy Infrastructure Transitions in the Chemical Industry.

September 9–10, 2026 | Indianapolis

Accelerating Process Technology Development: A Contract R&D Perspective From AVN Corporation

Accelerating process technology development is one of the most pressing priorities in chemical R&D today — yet for most organizations, the constraint is not budget or headcount. It is how the work is designed. John P (Jack) Dever, CTO of AVN Corporation, brings to CIEX North America 2026 over two decades of experience at the intersection of process technology, advanced software, and applied sustainability — operating where the gap between lab innovation and commercial scale gets closed.

In this interview, he shares how AVN is approaching process development acceleration, where AI is genuinely moving metrics in a contract R&D environment, and what current industry headwinds are quietly reshaping who gets to compete and on what terms.

CIEX: Without giving too much away – what is the core message of your session and what would you like delegates to remember?

John P (Jack): Process technology development can be accelerated beyond what is generally practiced today. The acceleration comes from a combination of advanced work processes with equipment that is well-defined technically and can be readily configured for the process to be studied. However, it is necessary for both to be implemented to achieve accelerated process development.

CIEX: What motivates you to join CIEX this year – and where are you most looking to learn from peers at this event?

John P (Jack): I first attended CIEX last year and found it to be a great event that inspired new

John P (Jack) Dever, CTO, AVN Corporation

perspectives and ideas, as well as creating new connections with others in the industry. This year, I expect to grow those connections further and to share my experiences more with others.

CIEX: How has your approach to balancing volume growth and value creation evolved in recent years – and what’s one decision you’ve made here that would’ve been unthinkable three years ago?

John P (Jack): AVN is a contract research and development company and therefore, our focus is on value creation for our customers. Thinking about now versus three years ago, the biggest difference in perspective is driven by the extended trough in the chemical industry. That has slowed much of our business as large companies look to conserve cash and reduce external spending. This is driving more opportunities for companies like us to reach out to small and mid-size producers and expand our offerings, more so as a small-volume manufacturer where our scale can match market needs.

CIEX: Where is AI-enabled innovation already moving a hard business metric, and where is it still not delivering?

John P (Jack): AVN is engaged with AI technology quite heavily through our Advanced Software Technologies division. Data-rich applications present many opportunities for AI innovation, and we see that in our AST business. On the chemicals side of our business, the confidential nature of the work we perform for a diverse group of customers makes data sharing — and therefore AI opportunities — harder to implement.

CIEX: How are you approaching sustainability priorities alongside broader economic and commercial considerations?

John P (Jack): We are very active in sustainability with our customers and incorporate sustainability principles into the technology development we deliver. We have tools that help us gauge the extent of sustainability practices deployed for customers, which helps us understand trade-offs among sustainability metrics to drive toward an optimized technology that maximizes sustainable goals while delivering the economic outcomes that companies need.

CIEX: Looking ahead, what factors and capabilities will define competitive advantage in the chemical industry over the next few years?

John P (Jack): Raw material advantage has always driven our industry, at least from the commodity side, and I don’t see that changing. However, current events are likely to create a premium for market access that could become a stronger barrier than our industry has faced in a long time. We could see national barriers created to support local production and supply of materials, which would lead to inefficient distribution of resources and create challenges for export opportunities.

Is Your Process Technology Development Keeping Pace With Market Demand?

At CIEX North America 2026, Jack Dever takes the stage to address one of the most pressing operational challenges in specialty chemicals today — in the session “Accelerating Process Technology Development to Re-Shore and Scale Specialty Chemical Manufacturing”.

Leaders from 3M, Dow, Eastman Chemical, Honeywell, Huntsman, Albemarle, Momentive, Cabot, and Wanhua Chemical Group will be in the room. The agenda is built around what’s actually hard: scaling AI beyond the pilot, making sustainability pay, and positioning for a market where access matters as much as feedstock.

September 9–10, 2026 | Indianapolis

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AI-Enabled Chemistry: How Hexion Is Moving Beyond the Commodity Model

AI-enabled chemistry is reshaping how the chemical industry creates value — and the stakes have rarely been higher. Geopolitical uncertainty, changing customer expectations, and the pressure to move beyond commoditized products are forcing companies to rethink not just what they produce, but how they compete. Few leaders are moving faster on that shift than Michael Lefenfeld, President and CEO of Hexion, who since 2023 has been transforming the company from a commodity supplier into a technology-driven leader in advanced materials.

A scientist and serial entrepreneur holding over 100 patents, Lefenfeld brings a rare combination of technical depth and CEO-level strategic perspective to CIEX North America 2026. In this interview, he makes the case that AI’s real opportunity in chemicals is not incremental efficiency — it is a fundamental rethink of how a chemical company creates value, moving beyond commoditized products toward intelligence-driven, high-value customer solutions.

CIEX: What is one idea about the future of the chemical industry that you hope challenges the audience’s thinking?

Michael Lefenfeld, CEO, Hexion

Michael: What if we’re asking the wrong questions about AI?

Most of the conversation in our industry is about making existing work faster. Better productivity, more automation, faster reporting. Those are real gains, but not the story that our industry should care about.

The real story is the fact that AI gives us a chance to rethink how a chemical company actually creates value. Not incrementally. Fundamentally.

For more than a century, we’ve competed by developing better molecules, scaling production, and driving continuous improvement. That foundation is certainly not going away. But now we’re in a period where chemistry has the chance to become part of a much larger value system, one where chemistry, manufacturing, customer operations, and AI continuously learn from and influence one another. Plants that don’t run at steady state. Variability, which used to be a cost center, now becoming a source of competitive intelligence. That’s an entirely different business.

And here’s what really excites me. That shift doesn’t just create value for customers. It creates entirely new value for chemical manufacturers too: deeper customer relationships, new service models, revenue streams that didn’t exist before. Our product business doesn’t disappear. It becomes the foundation that everything else is built on.

If people leave my keynote asking themselves, “What business are we really going to be in ten years?” then we’ve had the right conversation.

CIEX: What motivates you to join CIEX this year, and where are you most looking to learn from peers at this event?

Michael: I always tell my teams, the most innovative ideas in any company don’t come from the boardroom. It happens in the cafeteria.

That’s where an engineer bumps into someone from operations. Where commercial teams push back on R&D. Where someone asks a question nobody else thought to ask in a meeting. Innovation usually starts with a conversation, not a presentation.

CIEX is the chemical industry’s cafeteria. It’s a place where CEOs, scientists, and technology leaders come together, not just from different functions but from across the breadth of our industry — specialty chemicals, materials, petrochemicals — to wrestle with and debate questions none of us have fully answered yet. For me, that kind of cross-pollination is where the really interesting stuff happens.

And the best part? Some of the best conversations that happen at events like this don’t stay as conversations. They turn into partnerships. Many of our biggest breakthroughs at Hexion have come from working with companies that bring completely different capabilities to the table. No single company, no single sector, is going to reinvent this industry on its own.

I’m absolutely looking forward to hearing where people are succeeding. But honestly, I’m just as interested in where they’re struggling. Those conversations are usually more valuable, and sometimes they become the foundation for breakthroughs and partnerships that move the industry forward.

CIEX: How has your approach to balancing volume growth and value creation evolved in recent years, and what is one decision you have made here that would have been unthinkable three years ago?

Michael: For all of my career, volume and value have been tightly linked. The more chemistry you sold, the more value you created for the business. Today, I’m not sure that’s true anymore.

Volume still matters. Manufacturing efficiency still matters. After all, at scale, a one-cent improvement in operating performance can create millions of dollars of financial value. Those fundamentals aren’t changing. What’s changing is where the next layer of growth comes from.

Here’s a decision that would have been hard to imagine a few years ago. Hexion is currently investing in technologies that help customers optimize their own material usage, even when that means they buy less product from us. On the surface, that sounds like the wrong direction.

But here’s what we’ve learned. If we help a customer reduce resin usage or increase throughput, we’ve built a stronger relationship than we ever could by simply selling more resin. You might ask, how is it that we won’t cannibalize our business? Because as we help our customers improve, we’re also building a second business on top of the current one: performance services, intelligent software, new commercial models, new markets.

The companies that lead this industry over the next decades will combine great chemistry with intelligence, services, and outcomes. Great chemistry alone won’t be enough.

CIEX: Where is AI-enabled innovation already moving a hard business metric, and where is it still not delivering?

Michael: Honestly, we’re all still in the early stages. The companies that expect AI to walk in and move the needle right away are mostly finding out it doesn’t work like that. It won’t fix broken processes. It won’t replace operational discipline. It won’t replace experienced people. If strong fundamentals aren’t there, AI just fails faster.

Where we are seeing real promise is in manufacturing. Plants generate enormous amounts of data, and operators have always had to make decisions in the middle of all that noise. Quality, throughput, energy, raw materials, maintenance, cost — all moving at once, limited real-time data, all connected. What AI does well is make sense of that in real time and get the right information to the right person before the moment passes. The decisions are still human. They’re just better ones. That’s where we think the early wins are going to come from.

I believe the bigger opportunity is still largely untapped. Most companies are using AI to optimize individual tasks and processes. What changes the game is connecting the whole business: imagine R&D learning continuously from manufacturing, manufacturing learning continuously from customers, chemistry getting smarter because every part of the system is learning together. When that happens, AI stops being another technology project and starts becoming a genuine competitive advantage.

CIEX: How are you approaching sustainability priorities alongside broader economic and commercial considerations? Where have you had to draw the line on sustainability because the economics did not hold?

Michael: Something customers taught me early: they rarely wake up asking for sustainability. They wake up asking how to reduce waste, improve yield, lower energy costs, and make their operations more competitive.

But if we solve those problems well, sustainability usually follows. That’s changed how I think about the whole topic. I don’t see it as a separate initiative anymore. I see it as the outcome of running a smarter, more efficient business and making green chemistry principles the foundation of all innovation.

That said, not every sustainability idea makes economic sense today, and I think it’s important to be straight about that. Some technologies need more time. Some markets aren’t ready. In those cases, the answer isn’t to force adoption. It’s to keep advancing the science until the economics become compelling. Pretending otherwise doesn’t serve anyone.

What’s interesting is that AI is accelerating sustainability programs. It’s surfacing efficiencies that were always there but impossible to see before. When the economics follow the science, sustainability stops being a cost of doing business and starts becoming a competitive advantage.

CIEX: Looking ahead, what factors and capabilities will define competitive advantage in the chemical industry over the next few years?

Michael: Ask me this same question in ten years and I think we’ll smile at how narrowly we used to define a chemical company.

The winners won’t just make better products. They’ll build better systems. Chemistry will always be the foundation, but the companies that lead will integrate AI, manufacturing intelligence, application expertise, and customer data to create value that competitors can’t easily replicate. They’ll move faster because they’re learning faster. Intelligence scales in ways that headcount and capacity never could.

We’ll also see business models that barely exist today. Performance services. Intelligent software. Adaptive formulations. The product business won’t disappear. It becomes the platform that enables entirely new businesses to grow alongside it.

For twenty years, software transformed the digital world. I believe the next twenty years belong to the physical world: manufacturing, energy, construction, chemicals. That’s where the complexity lives, and complexity is where the real opportunity is.

I don’t think we’re watching the chemical industry adapt to AI. I think we’re watching it redefine itself.

Is Your Business Model Built for the Next Era of Chemical Value Creation?

At CIEX North America 2026, Michael Lefenfeld takes the stage in the session AI-Enabled Chemistry as a Service — a keynote built for leaders ready to move beyond the commodity model and rethink how chemistry creates value in the age of AI.

Leaders from 3M, Dow, Eastman Chemical, Honeywell, Huntsman, Albemarle, Momentive, Cabot, and Wanhua Chemical Group will be in the room.

September 9–10, 2026 | Indianapolis

Supply Chain Resilience in Specialty Chemicals: What Leaders Must Build Before Disruption Arrives

Marc Block, Global VP Performance Chemicals, Wanhua Chemical Group

For specialty chemicals companies operating across multiple regions and trade environments, supply chain resilience is no longer an operational consideration — it is a strategic design choice. Ahead of CIEX North America 2026 — September 9–10 in Indianapolis — we sit down with Marc Block, Global VP Performance Chemicals at Wanhua Chemical Group. He brings over two decades of experience building and scaling specialty chemical platforms across Asia, Europe, and North America.

In this interview, he shares how he is approaching the priorities shaping the industry’s next cycle: from building supply chain resilience and repositioning specialty portfolios to evaluating where AI is actually moving business metrics. The conversation also sets the stage for meaningful peer exchange at the event.

CIEX: Without giving too much away – what is the core message of your session and what would you like delegates to remember?

Marc: Supply chain resilience is a design choice that has to be made before disruption arrives. Companies become exposed when their networks are optimized around a single trade-flow assumption, feedstock basis, or asset footprint. The winners will be those that build optionality into chemistry, production, sourcing, and the commercial model, even when that creates some cost and complexity in normal times. The cost of resilience is paid gradually; the cost of fragility arrives all at once when a route closes, a feedstock spikes, or a tariff lands.

CIEX: What motivates you to join CIEX this year – and where are you most looking to learn from peers at this event?

Marc: I have commercial responsibility for a global specialty platform within a Chinese parent company, with assets and activities across Europe, Korea, and North America. That gives me a useful perspective on how the industry is being reshaped by energy costs, China’s cycle, changing trade flows, and tariff uncertainty. At CIEX, I am especially interested in how peers are repositioning specialty portfolios: where they are defending the core, where they are still investing in R&D, and where AI is actually improving business performance rather than just appearing in strategy presentations.

CIEX: How has your approach to balancing volume growth and value creation evolved in recent years – and what’s one decision you’ve made here that would’ve been unthinkable three years ago?

Marc: Three years ago, the default answer in many parts of chemicals was still scale: integrate vertically, run assets hard, and capture share. Our view has become more selective. In recent European portfolio decisions, we have prioritized customer proximity, conversion flexibility, and optionality over scale for its own sake. That would have been harder to justify a few years ago. Today, in a world of tariffs, volatile feedstocks, and regionalized supply chains, flexibility can create more value than pure volume.

CIEX: Where is AI-enabled innovation already moving a hard business metric, and where is it still not delivering?

Marc: The clearest AI impact is in the operational backbone: demand-supply matching, inventory positioning, production optimization, maintenance decision support, and targeted product development. The impact varies by process maturity, but these are areas where the business case is increasingly tangible. Where AI is still less mature is true commercial excellence. Better targeting and lead scoring are useful, but they are not the same as understanding a customer’s application deeply enough to create a better solution. That still depends heavily on human judgment, technical context, and trust.

CIEX: Have we over-optimized for speed at the expense of resilience — or the other way around?

Marc: For a long time, the industry optimized for simplicity and speed. One primary production location, long production runs, narrow sourcing models, and efficient global trade flows were rational choices in a stable environment. The conditions changed. Flexibility now carries a premium: feedstock optionality, conversion redundancy, regional supply capability, and commercial models that can reroute without breaking customer commitments. The lesson is not that speed was wrong. It is that speed and resilience are portfolio choices, and the balance has to be reviewed much more often than before.

CIEX: Looking ahead, what factors and capabilities will define competitive advantage in the chemical industry over the next few years?

Marc: Competitive advantage will come from integrated value-chain control, efficient innovation, commercial excellence at scale, regulatory and trade fluency, capital discipline, and people who can operate across cultures. The companies that win will not be the ones trying to be everywhere. They will be the ones that know where they have the right to win, allocate capital accordingly, and execute faster than the market changes.

Is Your Supply Chain Built to Withstand the Next Disruption?

If your organization is still optimizing around a single feedstock assumption or trade flow, the window to act is narrowing.

At CIEX North America 2026, Marc Block joins senior leaders from SOCMA, Univar, and UPM Adhesive Materials in the panel discussion “Designing for Disruption: How R&D Is Re-Engineering Processes for Feedstock Flexibility and Supply Chain Resilience” to share how leading specialty chemical companies are redesigning chemistry, processes, and supply models for a fragmented world.

This is the conversation. And it is only happening in Indianapolis, September 9–10.

AI Adoption in R&D: A Corporate Scientist Perspective from 3M

AI adoption in R&D is reshaping how scientific organizations work — but few voices in that conversation come from someone who has spent over 30 years at the bench. Jayshree Seth leads generative AI use cases across 3M’s research organization, holds 80 patents, and brings to CIEX North America 2026 a practitioner’s perspective that is rare in the current AI debate.

Her position is clear: successful AI adoption in R&D does not start with the technology. It starts with something most organizations overlook — and the implications for how R&D teams adopt, scale, and ultimately benefit from generative AI are far more significant than most transformation agendas currently reflect.

CIEX: What is the key message of your session and what should delegates take away for their own R&D organizations?

Jayshree: My key message is simple: don’t start with the technology, start with the pain points – go with the workflow.

Jayshree Seth, Corporate Scientist and Chief Science Advocate, 3M

Map where the pain is and then let AI address it specifically. What happens when you do this is that people naturally begin reorganizing around AI, not because they were told to, but because they experience its benefits firsthand.

We are seeing that AI fluency within familiar workflows can intuitively spark two things simultaneously – one is meaningful discussions about incremental improvements, and the second is organic conversations about potential AI-first workflow redesign.

The other key takeaway is that driving adoption requires more than mere deployment. Change management is key – communicating benefits with real examples, improving modalities through feedback, and influencing through testimonials from lead users – all backed by visible commitment from leadership. The organizations that do all of this together will not only get adoption but can also build AI fluency as an organizational capability. And that can become a real competitive advantage.

CIEX: What brought you to the conference this year, and what are you most interested in learning from other R&D leaders?

Jayshree: I have been in the Corporate R&D ‘trenches’ for over 30 years, and what brings me to any R&D gathering is curiosity about how others are solving problems we all think about every day. As I lead the effort for use cases of generative AI in R&D, I know that mine is one lens in one organization. Forums like CIEX give us access to a community of practitioners across the chemical and specialty materials industry who are navigating similar transformation – and I look forward to learning and sharing.

Specifically, I’m interested in how organizations are handling the human dimension of this transition. That is a people and culture question as much as it is a technology question. I am also curious regarding measurable impact, where it is emerging and where there are still large gaps between the promise and the reality.

With Generative AI, almost everyone, regardless of expertise or seniority, is like an immigrant navigating genuinely unfamiliar territory. Given that, I believe leaders have a specific role in cultivating each element of the mindset needed: modeling iteration, rewarding experimentation, normalizing change, building navigational judgment, and elevating the voices of those who have crossed the territory the hard way.

CIEX: How has your thinking on AI in R&D evolved, and what is the one shift in how R&D work gets done that would have seemed unlikely three years ago?

Jayshree: As the models and their capabilities have evolved, a fundamental shift in the front end of the innovation process has become possible. This is particularly significant for R&D organizations where literature synthesis, patent landscaping, and competitive intelligence can consume enormous amounts of expert time. I prefer to call AI as I see it – “artificial diligence” – the tireless, unsaturable capacity to process volume that no human can match.

A technical expert can read ten papers before their thinking gets saturated. AI reads a thousand without tiring – and keeps going. It is a diligent partner for our intelligence. So, the shift that would have seemed most unlikely three years ago is this: the bottleneck in R&D is no longer access to information – it’s judgment about what to do with it. It’s no longer about who has the best data, the deepest literature review, the broadest patent landscape.

Generative AI has democratized access to all of that. What it cannot democratize is the wisdom to know which signal matters, which assumption is untested, and which confident-sounding answer is wrong. That wisdom still lives in people. And protecting it, cultivating it rather than assuming AI has replaced it, that is important for R&D leaders.

CIEX: Where is AI already delivering measurable impact in R&D, and where is it still not meeting expectations?

Jayshree: Generative AI is brilliant at breadth – pulling together large bodies of literature, patent landscapes, competitive intelligence, and regulatory frameworks – and presenting a coherent picture and usable taxonomy faster than any team could. That acceleration at the front end of the innovation process is real and can be measured – helping R&D teams move from data to insight faster and with broader context. It can free scientists to spend more time on the work that requires human thinking and judgment and less time on the work that requires human diligence or endurance.

But where AI is brilliant at breadth, it is well known that it can be brittle at precision. In R&D, precision is everything. So, I think there is what I call a “Show Me the Money, Show Me the Source” divide. On the business side, leaders are increasingly using AI-generated insights to demand big outcomes. While technical teams are asking – show me the source. That tension is real, it is growing, and it is where I see the most unmet expectations. This is not a fundamental disagreement – it’s just that the two groups are operating from different professional obligations and standards of evidence, and the gaps need to be bridged.

CIEX: Are we at risk of optimizing R&D for speed at the expense of creativity and long-term innovation?

Jayshree: Yes – it can be a real risk. The pressure to demonstrate AI-driven productivity gains is real, and speed is the easiest thing to measure. But in R&D, the things that are easiest to measure are seldom the most important.

In many ways, it is the classic dilemma of exploration versus exploitation, and generative AI can be an extraordinary exploitation engine. It refines, optimizes, synthesizes, and accelerates faster than we ever could. But breakthrough innovation largely lives in exploration – in that uncommon connection, the failed experiment that reveals something new, the hypothesis that seemed wrong and turned out to be right for a different reason.

My concern is that organizations under pressure to show AI ROI may unconsciously tilt more toward exploitation – the fast, the measurable, the defensible. And so may be the case with competitors. And when everyone optimizes the same way, using the same AI, differentiation disappears.

So, I think it is important to protect the conditions under which creativity happens. Protect time for exploration, such as the 15% culture we have at 3M. And be patient with the non-linear, winding paths that build the kind of wisdom AI cannot replicate.

After all, the most important capabilities are still the ones that have always mattered – balancing creative freedom with business rigor, celebrating intelligent failure alongside successes, and encouraging collaboration and empowerment – these will continue to define competitive advantage even in the age of AI.

Hear Jayshree Seth at CIEX North America 2026

Her session — Gen AI for R&D: Go With the (Work)Flow — addresses how to move generative AI from isolated deployment into workflows that R&D teams actually trust and build on.

September 9–10, 2026 | Indianapolis | Senior leaders from 3M, Dow, Eastman Chemical, Honeywell, Huntsman, Albemarle, Momentive, and Cabot.

What you will leave with:

Frameworks for mapping AI to high-impact R&D workflows
Adoption models that build lasting AI fluency across the research organization
Direct exchange with CTOs, CDOs, and VPs of Innovation

Chemical R&D Infrastructure as Competitive Strategy | Momentive | CIEX 2026

Chemical R&D Infrastructure as Competitive Strategy: How Momentive Is Building the Backbone for a Divided World

Thanos Yiagopoulos, CTO, Momentive

Thanos Yiagopoulos leads the global technology organization at Momentive Performance Materials — a network of more than 500 R&D professionals operating across multiple geographies, regulatory environments, and increasingly complex market conditions. With prior leadership roles at LyondellBasell and SABIC, he brings a perspective shaped by the full arc of what it takes to build R&D capability that actually scales.

That experience informs a sharp point of view on one of the industry’s most pressing infrastructure challenges. At CIEX North America 2026, Yiagopoulos will address how chemical companies can integrate lab automation, electronic lab notebooks, pilot systems, IP, and documentation workflows into a single, coherent digital backbone — one that holds together across a divided world, not as an IT initiative, but as a strategic foundation for faster collaboration, sharper decisions, and measurable innovation performance.

CIEX: Without giving too much away – what is the core message of your session and what would you like delegates to remember?

Thanos: The core message of my session is that the chemical industry is reaching an inflection point. We are operating in a world shaped by geopolitical fragmentation, cost pressure, supply chain volatility, and increasingly uneven regional dynamics. In that environment, digital transformation can no longer be treated as a series of disconnected tools or isolated IT projects. It has to be approached as a strategic redesign of how innovation happens across R&D, operations, and the broader enterprise. For me, that means rethinking digital infrastructure in relation to collaboration, governance, knowledge flow, and competitiveness in a more multipolar world.

What I would like delegates to remember is that digital infrastructure is a source of competitive advantage. The rapid emergence of more accessible AI and digital capabilities now gives chemical companies an opportunity to be much more deliberate and differentiated. The key question is no longer whether we digitize, but how we build the right digital backbone to accelerate innovation, strengthen collaboration, and create value in a way that fits our business model and strategic ambition.

CIEX: What motivates you to join CIEX this year – and where are you most looking to learn from peers at this event?

Thanos: CIEX is one of the few forums where chemical industry leaders come together to discuss innovation not only as a scientific or technical topic, but as a business, organizational, and strategic challenge. That is especially important today, because many of the questions we face are no longer about whether change is needed, but about how to make the right trade-offs under real-world constraints. I am expecting an environment where those conversations can happen openly and constructively among peers who understand the complexity of the industry.

What I am most looking to learn from others is how they are translating ambition into execution. I am interested in how peers are prioritizing capital, modernizing aging infrastructure, using AI beyond small pilots, and rethinking operating models in a more fragmented global environment. I am also keen to hear how others are balancing regional resilience with global collaboration, because that is one of the defining tensions of our time. These are very real leadership challenges, and I value forums like CIEX because they allow us to benchmark, challenge assumptions, and sharpen our own thinking.

CIEX: How do you see the boundary conditions of innovation shifting in the specialty chemical industry and what are you doing to ensure you stay relevant?

Thanos: The boundary conditions of innovation in specialty chemicals are becoming much broader and more demanding than they were even a few years ago. In the future, the most attractive opportunities will increasingly sit at the intersection of regulatory compliance, sustainability, differentiated performance, and a much deeper understanding of evolving customer and market needs. Innovation can no longer be driven only by technical possibility; it must also be aligned with speed, cost competitiveness, application relevance, and the ability to scale. At the same time, infrastructure in many mature economies is aging, and that puts additional pressure on companies to modernize while continuing to deliver reliably in the present.

To stay relevant, we are focusing on two dimensions. First, we benefit from a globally distributed operating model, which gives us the ability to place capability, talent, and decision-making closer to where growth, customers, and technical opportunities are emerging. Second, we are investing in digital infrastructure and AI not as stand-alone initiatives, but as enablers of faster collaboration, better foresight, and more effective product and process development across our technology organization. In my view, relevance in this industry will increasingly come from the ability to combine technical depth with organizational agility, regional responsiveness, and a more connected digital foundation.

CIEX: Where is AI enabled innovation already moving a hard business metric, and where is it still not delivering?

Thanos: We are already seeing positive impact from AI in areas such as formulation development, new space exploration, and intellectual property scouting. These are use cases where the link to value creation is becoming increasingly tangible, because they support faster identification of opportunities, more effective screening of solution spaces, and stronger guidance for material development. In addition, AI is beginning to improve individual productivity across the organization as it becomes more democratized, even if that is sometimes harder to measure directly. Over time, I expect the greatest value to come from its integration into development cycles, design of experiments, and increasingly agentic workflows that reduce transactional effort and help technical teams spend more time on higher-value work.

Where AI is still not delivering consistently is in manufacturing and broader operational environments, where data fragmentation, legacy systems, and aging physical infrastructure create significant barriers. In these areas, the problem is rarely the algorithm alone; it is the surrounding operating context. Human adoption and trust are also critical factors, particularly in environments where people need to see reliability, interpretability, and practical value before changing established ways of working. So while AI is already showing promise, the lesson for me is clear: sustainable impact will come only when digital tools are connected to the realities of process, infrastructure, and people.

CIEX: How are you approaching sustainability priorities alongside broader economic and commercial considerations? OR where have you had to draw the line on sustainability because the economics didn’t hold?

Thanos: Our decarbonization agenda remains in place, and our commitment to sustainability has not changed. What has evolved is our level of focus and discipline in how we pursue it. We have become more deliberate about identifying the areas where sustainability can create clear value for both us and our customers, rather than treating it as a broad-based effort with equal intensity everywhere. In practice, that means aligning sustainability priorities more tightly to market segments, product lines, and applications where the value proposition is strong enough to support adoption and where customers recognize and are willing to pay for the benefit being created.

That shift has made our approach more pragmatic and, in my view, more effective. It allows us to concentrate resources where sustainability and commercial value reinforce each other, which increases the likelihood of scale and impact. There are of course areas where the aspiration is strong but the economics are not yet mature enough to justify broad deployment, and in those cases discipline is important. For me, sustainability in specialty chemicals has to be both principled and commercially grounded. It is not about stepping back from ambition, but about ensuring that ambition is translated into durable business outcomes rather than symbolic activity.

CIEX: Looking ahead, what factors and capabilities will define competitive advantage in the chemical industry over the next few years?

Thanos: One of the clearest sources of competitive advantage will be the ability to modernize physical and digital infrastructure in an integrated way. Companies that successfully connect manufacturing, R&D, quality, supply chain, and commercial processes through a digital backbone — while using AI in a targeted and business-relevant manner — will have a significant advantage. That said, this will not be a one-size-fits-all journey. The right model will depend on each company’s scale, portfolio, regional footprint, and strategic priorities. I also believe AI will play an increasingly important role in knowledge retention, particularly as a large amount of tacit industrial expertise begins to retire over the coming years.

Beyond that, I see five defining capabilities. First, differentiated technical depth linked to real customer problems and faster commercialization. Second, globally connected but regionally effective operating models. Third, talent — not only attracting new capabilities, but also renewing and transferring deep industrial know-how. Fourth, capital discipline and the ability to invest selectively in the capabilities that truly matter. And finally, leadership that can redefine the role of chemistry itself as digital fluency becomes part of the profession. The companies that win will not be the ones with the most initiatives, but the ones with the clearest strategic choices, the strongest execution, and the courage to evolve before external pressure forces them to.

Hear Thanos Yiagopoulos at CIEX North America 2026

His session — “Connecting Innovation in a Divided World: Building the Digital Backbone for Global Chemical R&D” — goes directly at the question senior R&D and technology leaders are sitting with: how do you unify fragmented systems, data, and teams into a digital infrastructure that actually accelerates innovation when your operations span multiple geographies and your world is pulling in different directions.

September 9–10, 2026 | Indianapolis

That question sits at the centre of CIEX North America — a two-day executive exchange where senior leaders from 3M, Dow, Eastman Chemical, Honeywell, Huntsman, Albemarle, Momentive, Cabot, and AmSty, work through the strategic and operational realities shaping the industry’s next cycle.

What you will leave with:

A framework for integrating R&D systems — lab automation, ELN, pilot, IP, and documentation — into one connected backbone
Practical models for improving data quality and cross-disciplinary collaboration across geopolitical and regulatory constraints
Direct exchange with CTOs, CDOs, and VPs of Innovation navigating the same pressures

No sales pitch. No theory. Just the conversations that move the needle.

[Secure Your Place →]

Operationalizing Innovation at Industrial Scale | AmSty

Operationalizing Innovation at Industrial Scale: How AmSty Competes and Wins in a Commoditized Market

Venki Chandrashekar, President and CEO, AmSty

In the lead-up to CIEX North America 2026, we are sitting down with practitioners who are driving change from inside the business, not just advising on it.

Venki Chandrashekar is President and CEO of AmSty, one of the largest producers of polystyrene and styrene monomer in North America. Before taking the helm at AmSty, he held senior roles at Chevron Phillips Chemical, LyondellBasell, and Equistar — a career built at the hard edge of commodity chemicals, where margin is fought for in basis points, and differentiation is earned, not assumed.

It is that kind of hands-on operating experience that shapes Chandrashekar’s view on what actually drives competitive advantage. In a commoditized environment, the constraint is rarely imagination. It is execution discipline, cultural alignment, and the organizational rigor to treat innovation as a core business process rather than a strategic initiative that lives above the operational fray. What follows is a conversation about what this actually looks like — inside a mature industry, under margin pressure, with circularity and AI no longer optional on the agenda.

CIEX: Without giving too much away – what is the core message of your talk and what would you like delegates to remember?

Venki: Meaningful growth comes from how well you execute significant goals and projects. When you approach every part of the business with that mindset, even a mature industry offers significant opportunity to create value.

To achieve this goal, we must put a sense of energy and purpose back into how we operate, even in a mature industry. At AmSty, we compete in a space that many would describe as well-established, even commoditized. What keeps us energized is the constant pursuit of differentiation—being intentional about how we buy, make, move, and market our products.

For us, innovation cannot be a one-time event; it is embedded in a culture that promotes continuous improvement. This involves strengthening operational discipline as a foundation; shifting from volume-led growth to performance-driven outcomes; building reliability, agility, and circularity into how we operate; and consistently unlocking value at every step of the value chain.

CIEX: What motivates you to join CIEX this year?

Venki: CIEX brings together leaders who are not just talking about innovation, but actively operationalizing it. What differentiates winners in our industry is the ability to translate ideas into consistent, scalable outcomes. CIEX creates the opportunity to engage with peers across sectors who are tackling similar challenges: how to embed innovation into daily execution, how to move faster without compromising reliability, and how to create value in disciplined ways.

For me, it is also an opportunity to both share and learn through exchanging perspectives on what is working, what is not, and how we collectively raise the bar for industrial performance.

CIEX: Where are the opportunities to benefit from innovation at industrial scale

Venki: Innovation happens faster and more effectively when built on a foundation of strong operational discipline and enabled through the right partnerships with customers, suppliers, or technology providers. It also helps to align decision-makers by providing the key definition of success.

AmSty, in a competitive and somewhat commoditized environment, finds value by redefining success in how well we perform rather than the volume we produce. That includes margin resilience, asset productivity, and customer-centric differentiation. Embedding advanced analytics into decision-making allows us to improve reliability, optimize systems, and respond faster to market shifts. Whether through cost efficiency, product differentiation, or smarter commercial strategies, the goal is sustained value creation.

Sustainability is integrated into how we operate rather than as a separate function. Reliable operations reduce waste, and advancing circular solutions creates new pathways for growth while meeting evolving stakeholder expectations.

CIEX: What are the challenges that keep innovation from scaling up?

Venki: One of the biggest challenges is the gap between ideation and execution. Many organizations generate strong ideas, but struggle to scale them consistently across complex operations.

Barriers can include:

Lack of operational alignment – Innovation initiatives that are not tightly linked to core business priorities tend to lose momentum.
Insufficient discipline in execution – Scaling requires repeatability, accountability, and rigorous follow-through.
Cultural resistance to change – Organizations that are optimized for stability often find it difficult to embrace the agility required for innovation.
Fragmentation of efforts – Without a clear framework, innovation can become siloed rather than enterprise-wide.

Ultimately, scaling innovation requires treating it with the same rigor as any other core business process—clear objectives, measurable outcomes, and strong ownership.

CIEX: What is the value proposition for Innovation at Scale in an otherwise commoditized world?

Venki: In a commoditized environment, it is about shifting the conversation from price to performance. To do that, we need to show improvement in how reliably we deliver, how efficiently we operate, and how effectively we partner with customers to solve their challenges.

Innovation at scale allows us to compete not just on what we produce, but also on how we produce it, how we deliver it, and the value we create across the ecosystem. Innovation at scale is possible only through collaboration

In that sense, even in a mature and commoditized industry, there is significant room to differentiate. That is what keeps us energized.

Hear Venki Chandrashekar at CIEX North America 2026

His session at CIEX North America, “Operationalizing Innovation at Industrial Scale“ — goes directly at the question most chemical executives are sitting with: how do you embed innovation into the operating model when the business cannot afford to slow down to do it.

September 9–10, 2026 | Indianapolis

That question sits at the centre of CIEX North America — a two-day executive exchange where senior leaders from 3M, Dow, Eastman Chemical, Honeywell, Huntsman, Albemarle, Momentive, and Cabot work through the strategic and operational realities shaping the industry’s next cycle.

What you will leave with:

Frameworks for scaling innovation beyond the pilot stage
Peer-tested models for margin resilience and operational performance
Direct exchange with CTOs, CDOs, and VPs of Innovation navigating the same pressures

No sales pitch. No theory. Just the conversations that move the needle.

[Secure Your Place →]

CO2 Circularity as a Growth Opportunity: How Evonik is Transforming the Chemical Industry

Evonik Pioneers CO2 Circularity to Drive Innovation in the Chemical Industry

Jean Vincent, Former Head of Research, Development and Innovation (RD&I), Americas, Evonik

Carbon dioxide is typically framed as a problem the chemical industry must solve. Increasingly, however, it is also being explored as a potential feedstock for future chemical production.

During the session “CO₂ Circularity as an Opportunity for the Chemical Industry” at CIEX, Jean Vincent, Former Head of Research, Development and Innovation (RD&I), Americas, Evonik, discussed how carbon capture, green hydrogen, and biotechnology could enable new circular production pathways.

Using Evonik’s Project Rheticus as an example, she illustrated how CO₂ conversion technologies are progressing from laboratory research toward pilot-scale industrial validation.

You can explore the full executive summary from the presentation below or watch the complete presentation recording via the link below.

📹 Watch the full Evonik presentation: [Link]

Rethinking Carbon: From Waste Stream to Industrial Building Block

Nature has always treated CO₂ differently from the way industry does.

Plants, algae, and marine organisms use carbon dioxide as a fundamental building block for growth through photosynthesis. Translating this concept into industrial chemistry is becoming an increasingly attractive pathway as the industry seeks alternatives to fossil-derived carbon.

The opportunity is significant.

Today, the majority of carbon embedded in chemical products still originates from fossil feedstocks. Increasing the share of circular carbon sources—whether captured CO₂, bio-based inputs, or recycled materials—represents one of the most important structural shifts required for the industry to meet long-term climate targets.

However, transforming CO₂ into viable chemical feedstock requires new technological platforms capable of converting a highly stable molecule into usable intermediates.

One emerging approach combines electrochemistry, biotechnology, and renewable energy.

Industrial Photosynthesis: Converting CO₂ into Specialty Chemicals

One of the most promising directions involves mimicking the logic of photosynthesis in an industrial environment.

Instead of sunlight powering biological conversion, electricity generated from renewable sources can be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen then becomes a key input for transforming captured CO₂ into new chemical molecules.

Evonik’s Project Rheticus represents a notable example of how this concept is being translated into practice.

The platform integrates three technologies:

• Electrolysis to generate hydrogen
• Carbon capture to supply CO₂ feedstock
• Fermentation to convert these inputs into longer-chain molecules

Within the fermentation process, specialized microorganisms convert CO₂ into organic acids through a multi-step biological pathway. These intermediates can then be further processed into specialty chemical building blocks.

The target molecules are not commodity fuels but higher-value chemical intermediates, including compounds used in coatings, cleaning formulations, thermal management fluids, and personal care products.

This strategic positioning reflects an important commercial reality: circular carbon technologies must find markets where customers are willing to pay for the value they create.

Scaling the Technology: Why Pilots Matter

As with many emerging chemical technologies, the challenge lies less in proving scientific feasibility than in demonstrating industrial reliability.

Evonik has therefore spent several years advancing the technology through pilot-scale validation. A fermentation reactor installed in Marl, Germany, has operated continuously for thousands of hours, producing small but meaningful volumes of product.

The objective of this phase is not production scale but process confidence—testing microbial stability, operational resilience, and downstream separation.

The next step would involve demonstration-scale infrastructure capable of increasing output by orders of magnitude. Achieving that milestone would require both public support and industrial partnerships.

This reflects a broader truth about CO₂ utilization technologies: no single company will scale them alone.

The Missing Piece: Green Hydrogen

Any CO₂ conversion strategy ultimately depends on the availability of low-carbon hydrogen.

Hydrogen provides the chemical reducing power needed to transform CO₂ into more complex molecules. Without it, carbon circularity at scale becomes extremely difficult.

However, hydrogen production technologies themselves are still evolving. Current proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolysis systems are effective but rely on expensive precious metal catalysts.

Alternative approaches, such as anion exchange membrane (AEM) electrolysis, aim to reduce these costs by enabling different catalyst systems.

Advances in hydrogen technology therefore play a critical role in determining whether CO₂-based chemical production becomes economically viable.

Securing the Carbon Feedstock

Another challenge lies in sourcing the CO₂ itself.

While global emissions provide no shortage of carbon, capturing and concentrating it in usable form requires dedicated technologies. Chemical companies are exploring several complementary approaches:

• Membrane separation for biogas streams
• Chemical absorption systems for industrial emissions
• Direct air capture technologies
• Solid sorbents and advanced materials

Each pathway has different energy requirements, cost profiles, and scaling constraints. As a result, the future carbon supply landscape will likely involve multiple capture technologies operating simultaneously.

Why Collaboration Is Becoming the Industry’s Operating Model

Perhaps the most important insight emerging from CO₂ innovation efforts is that technology ecosystems matter as much as technology itself.

Carbon circularity requires the integration of multiple disciplines:

• Electrochemistry
• Biotechnology
• Process engineering
• Carbon capture technology
• Renewable energy systems

Few companies possess all these capabilities internally.

As a result, collaboration between chemical companies, startups, academic institutions, and industrial partners is becoming the dominant innovation model.

Industry platforms, startup accelerators, and research consortia are increasingly acting as innovation bridges, allowing large organizations to explore emerging technologies while sharing risk and expertise.

CO2 Circularity Will Require Many Solutions

One lesson emerging clearly across the industry is that there will not be a single pathway to carbon circularity.

Some technologies will rely on biomass.
Others will focus on recycling existing plastics.
Still others will convert captured CO₂ into new molecules.

Each approach addresses a different segment of the chemical value chain.

The long-term objective is not to replace fossil carbon overnight but to gradually diversify the sources of carbon entering chemical production.

In this sense, CO₂ utilization is less about eliminating emissions entirely and more about closing the carbon loop.

Strategic Implications for Chemical Industry Leaders

For R&D leaders and innovation executives, several practical lessons are emerging from early CO₂ circularity projects.

First, technologies must be developed with commercial end markets in mind, particularly in specialty chemicals where value creation can justify early adoption.

Second, pilot and demonstration facilities are essential for bridging the gap between laboratory discovery and industrial reality.

Third, innovation strategies must extend beyond internal R&D to include external technology ecosystems.

Finally, the future competitiveness of chemical companies will increasingly depend on their ability to secure alternative carbon feedstocks.

The Road Ahead

Carbon circularity remains an early-stage field. Many technologies are still progressing through pilot or demonstration phases, and large-scale economics are not yet fully proven.

Yet the direction of travel is becoming clearer.

As regulatory pressure intensifies and fossil feedstocks become less attractive long-term, the chemical industry will need new carbon sources to sustain growth.

CO₂—once considered purely a waste stream—may become one of them.

Where These Strategic Questions Move From Theory to Practice

The structural issues outlined above are not isolated operational matters; they are shaping board-level conversations across the chemical sector.

CIEX North America 2026 is designed as a working forum for senior leaders addressing disciplined portfolio governance, AI integration, capital efficiency, and sustainability-driven product design. It focuses on the operational realities behind these strategic imperatives.

Join us for two focused days with senior leaders in R&D, innovation, and sustainability across the consumer, industrial, and specialty chemical sectors — tackling:

• Scaling new technologies beyond the pilot phase
• Embedding AI and digital tools into real R&D workflows
• De-risking innovation through the right partnerships
• Turning sustainability targets into profitable product pipelines

Expect practical case studies from leading global brands, proven methodologies, and direct access to senior decision-makers across the chemical industry.

📍 CIEX North America | September 9–10, 2026

If you influence innovation strategy, R&D direction, or technology investment — this is where you need to be.

Evonik Pioneers CO2 Circularity to Drive Innovation in the Chemical Industry