On 5–8 October 2026, the 60th annual meeting of the European Petrochemical Association (EPCA) will take place in Vienna. The theme of the event, ‘Rethinking Resilience', addresses perhaps the most pressing question facing Europe’s chemicals industry today. It is also a question to which the logistics industry has some important answers.

The Pressure on the European Chemicals Industry

To understand this properly, the first step is to recognise the pressures chemicals companies in Europe are facing, and therefore what their supply chains need to be resilient against.

As well as the ever-present threat of unexpected disruption, the operating environment has been made more challenging by three main factors:

First, energy costs. The chemicals industry is particularly energy-intensive, and the gap with competing regions remains substantial.

Cefic, the forum for the EU chemical industry, published its Q1 Chemical Trends Report in June. It confirmed that European chemicals producers face a persistent energy cost disadvantage compared to global competitors. In January-April 2026, for example, gas prices in Europe were 3.3 times higher than US levels. Cefic’s Q2 update, which was published in mid-September, revealed that the gas price gap with the US had widened further since then.

At the same time, Europe is operating in a global chemicals market where the balance is shifting. Cefic’s data also shows that Europe’s share of the global chemicals market has fallen to 13%, while China now accounts for 46% of global sales and has become the EU’s leading source of chemicals imports. This landscape is evolving rapidly, and the environment for European producers, particularly in commodity chemicals and petrochemicals, is becoming more competitive all the time.

The third challenge is complexity. Chemicals companies operate within a highly regulated environment, covering everything from the production and handling of chemicals to their transport, storage and use. The European Commission has itself identified the regulatory burden as a significant obstacle to investment and made simplifying the regulatory framework one of the four pillars of its 2025 Chemicals Industry Action Plan.

The good news is that steps are being taken to enact this agenda. In June this year, a provisional political agreement was reached between the European Parliament and the Council of the EU on the Chemicals Omnibus proposal, with the agreed measures designed to cut red tape and compliance costs for Europe’s chemicals industry. That’s a positive development, but managing regulatory requirements will remain an important consideration across chemicals supply chains.

The Value of Supply Chain Engineering

Having a broad range of capabilities is only the starting point. The real value comes from understanding how they can work together most effectively, which is where supply chain engineering comes in.

Our global team of strategists, analysts and engineers uses data, process mapping and scenario modelling to understand how a supply chain works and identify opportunities to optimise it. We look at things holistically, modelling different network configurations, transport options and operating scenarios to find solutions that balance cost, efficiency, risk and sustainability.

It’s a partnership approach with customers, but, crucially, we are both the designer and the operator. Once a solution has been identified, we can draw on our wider ecosystem to put it into practice.

An End-to-End Approach

This is the context in which resilience needs to be viewed, and it changes the role that logistics needs to play. Given that European chemicals companies are operating under sustained cost pressure and competing in an increasingly challenging global market, logistics cannot simply be about moving products from A to B. It needs to help companies optimise their supply chains as a whole, improving efficiency while giving them the flexibility to respond when circumstances change.

The foundation has to be an end-to-end approach. Chemicals supply chains typically span production sites, ports and terminals, transport networks, storage facilities and customers across multiple countries. Managing these elements separately can create unnecessary complexity and make it harder to see where improvements can be made.

We continue to invest in our end-to-end capabilities for chemicals customers across Europe, expanding the infrastructure and services available to support increasingly complex supply chains. Our recently announced investment in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, where we recently started construction on a €50 million expansion of our chemicals logistics hub, is a good example of what this can look like in practice. The investment will add a purpose-built, 30,000 m² warehouse for the storage of lithium-ion batteries and a new rail terminal, significantly expanding the site's capabilities.

However, our chemicals portfolio is much broader than warehousing. It spans Ports & Terminals, Economic Zones, Marine Services, Logistics and Technology, which puts us in a unique position to bring different parts of the supply chain together to deliver integrated, end-to-end solutions.

Rethinking Resilience

This is not simply about reducing costs. It is about designing supply chains that can operate efficiently under normal conditions while retaining the flexibility to respond when those conditions change, something that can be business-critical for chemicals companies under pressure to remain competitive in a changing global market.

Find out more about our Chemicals Logistics Solutions.