Summary - Chemicals Economics: Pricing, Trading, Projects & M&A

About the Course

Move beyond technical feasibility and learn how the chemicals industry evaluates, funds, prices, trades, and grows profitable businesses. In today’s chemicals industry, success depends on identifying the right opportunities, quantifying value, assessing risk, forecasting margins, securing investment approval, and executing projects that deliver sustainable returns.

Chemicals Economics: Pricing, Trading, Projects & M&A is a practical 3-day training course designed to help professionals bridge the gap between technical innovation, market reality, and commercial success. Participants will learn how chemical projects are evaluated, financed, priced, traded, and managed across the project lifecycle, from concept development through forecasting, investment decisions, trading exposure, and M&A execution.

Drawing on real-world industry experience and practical case studies, this course combines project valuation, cash flow modeling, production cost analysis, price forecasting, margin assessment, commercial risk management, and transaction economics into a single integrated framework.

The course is led by industry veteran Jan Kalfus, who brings more than 25 years of leadership experience across chemicals, refining, low-carbon technologies, corporate development, and investment decision-making.

Why This Course Matters

The chemicals industry is being reshaped by major new capacity in China and the Middle East, feedstock price volatility, LNG and NGL market shifts, decarbonization, circularity, changing trade flows, M&A activity, and capital allocation pressures. These forces are compressing margins and increasing the need for sharper price intelligence, cost curve analysis, flexible commercial strategies, and disciplined investment decisions.

Participants will learn to answer key investment questions:

Is the project economically attractive?
What drives profitability, margin resilience, and competitive advantage?
How sensitive are returns to price, feedstock, demand, and trading risk assumptions?
How should acquisition or growth opportunities be evaluated?

Learning Objectives

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

Evaluate chemical projects using key financial metrics such as NPV, IRR, payback, and return on capital.
Analyze feedstock economics, production costs, cost curves, margins, and project competitiveness.
Build stronger investment cases and communicate value clearly to decisionmakers.
Assess price volatility, commercial risk, uncertainty, and sensitivity in project economics.
Understand how growth, M&A, synergies, and due diligence create value.