Investigating the Global and Turkish Ethylene Oxide Market Chapter 2

Written by: Ahmet Musab (Project Leader)

After successfully laying the groundwork in our first 2 weeks, we entered the second phase of our research: analyzing the global and Turkish ethylene oxide (EO) market. This phase aimed to identify:

✔ The largest EO producers worldwide and their production capacities over the past five years
✔ The market value and trade dynamics of EO, including imports and exports
✔ The situation in Turkey, which proved to be significantly more challenging than expected

Defining Our Research Strategy

To manage this complex research, we divided our responsibilities:

✔ The Global EO Market → Researched by Aiman, Emirhan, Waad, and Mücahit
✔ The Turkish EO Market → Investigated by Ferhat and myself (Ahmet Musab)

Additionally, we assigned fixed roles for specific weekly tasks to ensure an efficient workflow:
✔ Aiman compiled all findings into a single structured report
✔ Mücahit was responsible for preparing the PowerPoint presentation

With a solid structure in place, we began our research—only to realize that finding data on EO production in Turkey would be a major obstacle.

Challenges in Researching the Turkish EO Market

While the global EO market had abundant publicly available reports and trade statistics, Turkey was a different story. Unlike major industrialized nations, Turkey has only one EO producer (Petkim), and official production data remains undisclosed.

We conducted extensive research by examining:
📌 TÜİK (Turkish Statistical Institute)
📌 TOBB (Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey)
📌 Ministry of Industry and Technology
📌 Istanbul Chemicals and Chemical Products Exporters’ Association
📌 Other government and industry sources

Despite our efforts, we could not find detailed, publicly available data on EO production, capacity, or trade in Turkey. Company reports were vague, and government trade statistics lacked specificity.

Going Beyond Public Sources

Faced with these limitations, we decided to take a more direct approach:

✔ We contacted production engineers at major chemical manufacturers
✔ We reached out to sales representatives of companies that deal with EO
✔ We sent emails and made phone calls to industry experts

In some cases, companies refused to disclose data, citing confidentiality policies. In others, we simply received no response. Market intelligence reports from consulting firms contained valuable insights, but they were priced between $5,000 and $20,000, making them inaccessible to students.

We even emailed our professor, explaining our difficulties in acquiring EO production data in Turkey.

This experience highlighted a major gap in transparency within Turkey’s industrial data, posing challenges for researchers, policymakers, and investors alike.

Progress on the Global EO Market

Unlike Turkey, the global EO market offered abundant public data. Our research team successfully:

✔ Identified the world’s largest EO producers
✔ Collected production capacity trends for the last five years
✔ Analyzed EO’s commercial value, import/export trends, and key trade routes

We found that the top EO producers include:

• Dow Chemical (USA)
• BASF (Germany)
• Shell Chemicals (Netherlands)
• SABIC (Saudi Arabia)

These companies dominate the EO industry, with annual production capacities in the millions of metric tons.

Finalizing Our Research: Report & Presentation Submission

After an intense research period, we compiled all our findings into two final deliverables:

📌 Research Report → A comprehensive analysis of EO production, market trends, and trade statistics for both global and Turkish markets
📌 PowerPoint Presentation → A summarized version of our findings, prepared for our class presentation.

To make our research more accessible, we also uploaded a video from our in-class presentation to YouTube, featuring our key insights on the Turkish EO market.

Reflections & Final Thoughts

This research process was more than just gathering technical data—it tested our analytical skills, problem-solving abilities, and persistence. Through this process, we learned that:

✅ Turkey remains heavily dependent on EO imports, creating economic and industrial vulnerabilities
✅ The global EO market continues to grow, especially in the Asia-Pacific region
✅ Access to industrial data in Turkey is highly restricted, making independent research difficult

This project provided invaluable experience in real-world chemical process design, reinforcing the importance of data accessibility, collaboration, and critical thinking.

We now move forward, applying our findings to the design and optimization of an ethylene oxide production process—stay tuned! 🚀

📌 Follow our journey at: musabbesbadem.com

#EthyleneOxide #ChemicalEngineering #ProcessDesign #GTU #MarketResearch