Basell Polyolefins was a joint venture between

BASF BASF SE (), an initialism of its original name , is a European Multinational corporation, multinational company and the List of largest chemical producers, largest chemical producer in the world. Its headquarters are located in Ludwigshafen, Ge ...

and

Royal Dutch Shell Shell plc is a British multinational oil and gas company, headquartered in London, England. Shell is a public limited company with a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and secondary listings on Euronext Amsterdam and the New ...

. Leonard Blavatnik's Access Industries acquired it from the venturers for $5.7 billion in August 2005.
Plunkett's Chemicals, Coatings & Plastics Industry Almanac: Chemicals, Coatings & Plastics Industry Market Research, Statistics, Trends & Leading Comp
'. N.p., PLUNKETT RES Limited, 2007. In 2007, Basell merged with the privately owned US company Lyondell Chemical Company to form

LyondellBasell LyondellBasell Industries N.V is an American multinational chemical company, incorporated in the Netherlands with U.S. operations headquartered in Houston, Texas and offices in London, UK. The company is the largest licensor of polyethylene an ...

, which went bankrupt in the US in January 2009, and emerged from bankruptcy in April 2010. Basell was the world's largest producer of

polypropylene Polypropylene (PP), also known as polypropene, is a thermoplastic polymer used in a wide variety of applications. It is produced via chain-growth polymerization from the monomer Propene, propylene. Polypropylene belongs to the group of polyolefin ...

and advanced

polyolefins A polyolefin is a type of polymer with the general formula (CH2CHR)n where R is an alkyl group. They are usually derived from a small set of simple olefins ( alkenes). Dominant in a commercial sense are polyethylene and polypropylene. More specia ...

products, the world's largest producer of

polyethylene Polyethylene or polythene (abbreviated PE; IUPAC name polyethene or poly(methylene)) is the most commonly produced plastic. It is a polymer, primarily used for packaging (plastic bags, plastic films, geomembranes and containers including bott ...

, and a global leader in the development and licensing of polypropylene and polyethylene processes, and a leader in catalysts.

Company history

Basell's heritage comes from many companies, including

, Hercules, Himont, Hoechst, ICI, Montecatini,

Montedison Edison S.p.A. is an Italian electric utility company headquartered in Milan. The company was established in 1884 and acquired by Electricité de France in 2012. Edison employs more than 5,000 people in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. ...

and

. However Basell, and then later

, had its origin in a joint venture between

and

. Spurred on by the work of Nobel Prize-winning scientists Karl Ziegler and

Giulio Natta Giulio Natta (; 26 February 1903 – 2 May 1979) was an Italian chemical engineer and Nobel laureate. He won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1963 with Karl Ziegler for work on high density polymers. He also received a Lomonosov Gold Medal in 19 ...

, these Basell predecessor companies were among the leaders of the polyolefin revolution that began in the late 1930s and 1950s. This transformation is still driving the petrochemicals industry today. In 2007, driven on by its then owners Access Industries and against the advice of Basell senior management, Basell acquired the privately owned US company Lyondell Chemical Company to form

, paying far above the market rate for the shares. The main winner was Access, who also held significant shares in Lyondell and was able to realise a massive profit by forcing Basell to overpay. This drove the new company rapidly to file for chapter 11 in the US in January 2009, from which it emerged in May 2010.

References

Chemical companies of the Netherlands Former joint ventures BASF Former Shell plc subsidiaries Chemical companies of Germany {{Chemical-company-stub