Business Watch: Dry Rhine crimps another chemical maker; Khartis Therapeutics launches

In a speech to analysts last month, Markus Kamieth made a statement that surprised me: “In May 2026, the number of full-time equivalents at BASF SE in Ludwigshafen was brought below 30,000 for the first time since 1954.”

Of course, the BASF CEO merely meant to point out that the restructuring efforts at the company’s largest site, in Germany, were taking hold. Overall, he was saying, Ludwigshafen is becoming more efficient by closing down expensive and underutilized plants.

But I was struck by the symbolism of that statement. BASF, along with Bayer and Hoechst, separated from IG Farben in 1952. BASF prospered in the postwar boom, selling chemicals, polymers, and fibers to a rebuilding Europe and becoming the largest chemical company in the world.

Now a lack of European industrial competitiveness, exemplified by high prices for energy and feedstocks as well as poor demand, has hit the European chemical sector and BASF hard. Many have called the trend deindustrialization.

But deindustrialization returning the industry all the way back to 1954? At least in terms of jobs, that really demonstrates the depth of the crisis.

Send any questions, comments, or tips to me, senior correspondent Alex Tullo, at [email protected].

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Business in brief

Low-flowing Rhine forces Covestro into force majeure

Covestro has declared force majeure because of low water levels on the Rhine River. The company confirmed in an email that a shortage of the feedstock propylene oxide at its site in Dormagen, Germany, is preventing it from meeting supply obligations for “selected” polyether polyol products. The move follows BASF’s force majeure on various surfactants, announced earlier this month. Water levels on the Rhine have dipped to record lows amid ongoing drought in western Europe, restricting the movement of barges carrying raw materials and goods between the continent’s largest chemical clusters. Covestro told C&EN that over 30% of its finished materials and 75% of its raw materials in Europe move on the waterway. The disruption at Dormagen comes despite the firm’s efforts to shift freight to rail or road, sail partially loaded ships, and build up raw material inventories before the drought.

—Vanessa Zainzinger

Ancora offers to buy H.B. Fuller building adhesives

The activist investment firm Ancora Holdings Group has made an unsolicited offer to buy H.B. Fuller’s building adhesives unit for between $1.1 billion and $1.2 billion. Ancora owns more than 2% of Fuller and has opposed its recently announced deal to buy the wound-care specialist Advanced Medical Solutions for $950 million. Ancora calls that transaction a “poison pill” meant to make Fuller less attractive to firms contemplating acquiring it. The firm says it initially approached Fuller’s management about the building adhesives unit in early July. The business had $860 million in sales in Fuller’s most recent fiscal year—about a quarter of the firm’s total. Ancora says its offer would allow Fuller to reduce debt and exit a segment with low profit margins. It could also end Ancora’s activist investor campaign at Fuller. “Rather than running a multi-year campaign to remove and replace several of you due to chronic underperformance, we hope to begin working together to deliver a truly win-win transaction for H.B. Fuller and its shareholders,” Ancora writes in a letter to Fuller’s board. Fuller says it will evaluate the proposal.

—Alex Tullo

Form Energy raises $750 million for long-duration batteries

Form Energy has raised $750 million to continue commercial deployments of its long-duration iron-air battery. The battery stores energy by using electricity to convert iron hydroxide to iron, and it releases energy when the iron reacts with hydroxide ions to form iron hydroxide. Form says its iron-air batteries can store multiple days of energy, much longer than the 2–4 h typically provided by lithium-ion battery storage. Earlier this year, the company announced commercial agreements to build large-scale batteries for Google and Crusoe data centers, a growing market for long-duration storage. Form has now raised more than $2 billion in total funding; the latest round will be used to scale up manufacturing at a plant in West Virginia.

—Matt Blois

Trinseo redoubles efforts to sell styrenics partnership

The polymer company Trinseo is restarting the sale process for its 50% interest in the Americas Styrenics joint venture with Chevron Phillips Chemical. Americas Styrenics makes styrene and polystyrene; it had nearly $1.6 billion in sales in 2025. Trinseo originally put its stake on the market in 2024. Under pressure by poor European economics to make bulk chemicals and a petrochemical downturn, Trinseo declared bankruptcy earlier this year. The company posted a loss of $120 million on sales of $845 million in the second quarter.

—Alex Tullo

MFG Chemical acquires water treatment chemical firm AP Tech

The specialty chemical maker MFG Chemical has acquired AP Tech, a provider of solid water treatment chemicals sold as an alternative to liquid products. Ohio-based AP supplies discs, tabs, and blocks of chemicals such as scale and corrosion inhibitors for industrial cooling towers, boilers, and steam generators. The firm says the chemicals, dispensed in a proprietary feed system, can replace drums of liquid chemicals and eliminate shipping, handling, and spill hazards. MFG says the products will complement liquid water treatment chemicals already sold by its Radical Polymers and Masters Chemical businesses, both of which it acquired in recent years. MFG itself changed owners in January, when Windjammer Capital bought it from the investment firm Platte River Equity.

—Michael McCoy

Veolia sues chemical makers over PFAS in Delaware

The water treatment provider Veolia is suing a group of companies for contaminating the drinking-water supply near Wilmington, Delaware, with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). The defendants include the chemical and plastic makers Solvay, Syensqo, FMC, Edlon, Niche Polymer, and Westchester Plastics. Veolia is seeking $34.6 million in up-front damages and a continuing payment of $3.5 million per year for contamination that it describes as both historical and connected to ongoing operations at the defendants’ sites. The amounts would cover most of the investment Veolia made in a water treatment plant outside Wilmington that it commissioned in 2025, as well as the operating expenses for the facility, which uses granulated activated carbon to scrub PFAS from the drinking-water supply for roughly 100,000 residents. Veolia says the lawsuit is a way to make polluters pay for the environmental damage they cause instead of foisting the costs onto local water utility ratepayers.

—Craig Bettenhausen

X-energy gets $1 billion in federal money for Dow nuclear project

The nuclear reactor company X-energy will receive an additional $1 billion in federal support for a project in which it will replace an aging gas-fired boiler at Dow’s chemical plant in Seadrift, Texas, with a set of four small modular reactors (SMRs). Each reactor will be capable of providing 200 MW of thermal energy. The money comes from the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program and will bring the total public funding for the project to as much as $2.15 billion, X-energy CEO Clay Sell said last week on a conference call with analysts. The program requires the private companies involved to match public funds. Dow and X-energy say repowering the plant with nuclear energy instead of natural gas will eliminate 440,000 metric tons of CO₂ emissions per year.

—Craig Bettenhausen

Laxness adopts hydrogen-fueled burner at pigment site in Germany

The specialty chemical maker Lanxess has converted a large-scale spray dryer for iron oxide pigments to run on hydrogen instead of natural gas, a change that the firm says cuts its carbon footprint by 6,000 metric tons per year. The switch is part of a long-term partnership between Lanxess and the chemical maker Covestro at their adjacent sites in Krefeld-Uerdingen, Germany. Covestro’s chlorine electrolysis reactors there create a steady hydrogen by-product, which is now being delivered by a short pipeline to Lanxess. The firms say it is the first significant chemical production line in Germany to switch entirely to hydrogen as a fuel. “We are proving that decarbonizing industry works not only in pilot projects, but also in the day-to-day operation of large production facilities,” Michael Ertl, head of Lanxess’s inorganic pigments business, says in a press release.

—Craig Bettenhausen

Shell sells environmental catalyst business to Lummus

Shell has sold its environmental catalysts and systems business to the engineering firm Lummus Technology for an undisclosed sum. Shell says the business includes its DeNOx selective catalytic reduction system for reducing nitrogen oxide emissions. The business also offers catalysts for carbon dioxide purification, dioxin destruction, and other environmental applications. Shell continues to offer catalysts for hydroprocessing, oxidation, and renewable fuels. Shell Catalysts & Technologies president Elise H. Nowee says in a press release that Shell’s long relationship with Lummus in specialized catalysts “gives us confidence that they are well positioned” to take the environmental catalyst business forward.

—Michael McCoy

Quote of the week

Immunology firm Khartis launches with $95 million

Khartis Therapeutics has publicly launched with $50 million in series B funding—for a total of $95 million raised. The small-molecule drug developer will use the money to develop its thyroid eye disease drug candidate, which it says is the first oral, selective IGF-1R inhibitor. The only approved drug for thyroid eye disease is Amgen’s Tepezza, an injectable antibody that binds to IGF-1R. Khartis’s overall goal is to develop oral small-molecule drugs for immunological and chronic diseases. Founded in 2024, the firm reunites some scientific team members from the cancer drug biotech XinThera, which Gilead Sciences acquired in 2023. Two of the cofounders of XinThera founded RayThera, another immunological drug firm, in 2025.

—Sarah Braner

InduPro raises $77 million for ADCs with Big Pharma backing

Biotechnology start-up InduPro has raised $77 million in series B financing, with investment from the venture arms of Merck & Co., Sanofi, and Eli Lilly and Company, among others. The company says it will use the funds to power a Phase 1 clinical trial of an antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) in multiple types of non-small-cell lung cancer and other squamous solid tumors. ADCs are among the hottest areas of investment in biotech right now, thanks to advances in linker chemistry and stability.

—Rowan Walrath

Thermo Fisher, Michael J. Fox Foundation publish Parkinson’s proteomics dataset

Pharmaceutical services giant Thermo Fisher Scientific has made 5,500 Parkinson’s disease research samples available through a partnership with the Michael J. Fox Foundation. The organizations say the proteomics data could help reveal biological changes that mark Parkinson’s disease and enable better subtyping of patients. Researchers can apply for access to the data through the foundation’s Parkinson’s Precision Medicine Initiative.

—Rowan Walrath

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