Growth of Metallocene Polyolefins not upto expectations

Metallocene catalysts have been in existence for almost a decade along with commercial polyolefin products. Though commercial polyolefin products have been in the market for over 7-8 years, barely 3% market penetration has been achieved so far. They are yet to obtain a significant market share of the total Polyolefin market of about 88 million tonnes. While actual figures are not available, their share is certainly not more than 2-2.5 million tonnes.

Several reasons have contributed to this low penetration. Firstly, very few producers were involved in the manufacture of these products until the end of the last decade. Various time consuming legal issues have also been a deterent. The few pioneers of metallocene products had planned to achieve higher value additions mainly to recover a significant amount of high research costs incurred in product development. Higher prices of metallocene polyolefins obviously restricted their usage only for speciality and high end products capable of absorbing such higher costs.

Additionally, the major emphasis of these polyolefins was on metallocene LLDPE. LLDPE has a market share of approximately 19% of the total polyolefin market. PP, having about 38% share of the total polyolefin market was not affected because no significant grades of metallocene PP were introduced until about 1-2 years ago. For quite some time only successful PP grades were available at low molecular weight levels. The major advantage of controlled branching in LLDPE offered by Metallocene catalysts, indeed, do not pose any problems in PP homopolymer. PP homopolymer has more than 75% share of the total PP market. Some penetration was seen in fibres/non wovens, though not very significant. Metallocene PP in lower MFR ( higher molecular weight) have been introduced recently. They therefore, can offer the advantage of lower organoleptics in BOPP/Cast PP film and can find some usage in food packaging.

Higher feedstock costs resulting in higher prices of traditional polyolefins since 2000, coupled with staggering economies of North America, Europe and Japan, leading to weak demand, have restricted the penetration of these higher cost Metallocene Polyolefins.

In the mean time, more developments have taken place in the conventional Ziegler-Natta catalysts, eliminating few of the deficiencies of conventional products. In fact, the fifth generation Z-N catalysts, providing superior performance have now been well established. Metallocene polyolefins will grow at higher growth rates because of smaller volume level, but it is difficult to visualize that they would achieve 25% market penetration by 2005 - a level that many experts expected a few years ago.

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