France, Spain, the Netherlands, Czechia, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia are calling for an EU-wide Critical Chemicals Act. Germany, the EU’s largest chemicals manufacturer, is not one of the signatories.
The countries put forward a briefing during a Competitiveness Council meeting on March 12, 2025.
The call builds on France’s original proposal, with seven other countries now calling the European Union to classify 15 key chemical compounds as ‘strategic’.
The idea is to introduce a Critical Chemicals Act, in line with the Critical Raw Materials Act. The signatories argue that the identified chemicals are essential to the competitiveness and sovereignty of the EU economy.
‘Major crisis’
Europe’s chemical industry is facing a ‘major crisis’, with a 12% drop in production between 2019 and 2023, the signatory countries underlined. This is mainly due to energy costs and ‘fierce or even unfair competition’ from non-EU countries, they said.
By 2035, up to 20 steam crackers may shut down, endangering 50,000 jobs, they warned, citing examples of closures announced at plants in France (ExxonMobil, Gravenchon), the Netherlands (Sabic, Geleen), and Italy (Eni-Versalis, Brindisi and Priolo), as well as strategic reviews of European plants by LyondellBasell.
‘Strategic’ chemicals
The eight countries put forward a list detailing the minimum 15 chemicals ‘strategic’ to the EU’s industrial and global leadership.
These ‘form the building-blocks that are essential in the upstream to the defence, health, food, automotive, construction, green tech and other major industries – the absence of which could pose a threat to public and societal interests’, the signatories said.
The list includes:
- Basic petrochemicals: Ethylene, propylene, butadiene, benzene, toluene, xylene, styrene, phenol.
- Key industrial chemicals: Ammonia, methanol, chlorine, sodium hydroxide.
- Specialised materials: Sulfur, silicon, sodium carbonates.
- Critical compounds: Hydrofluoric acid (for batteries, health, electronics), methionine and lysine (for health & food industries).
Some of these, such as ethylene, butadiene, benzene, ammonia, and sodium carbonates, could already be classified as ‘critical’, in addition to ‘strategic’, the countries argued, given that they are ‘produced in a very limited number of sites in Europe and are already subject to sizeable trade balance deficit towards non-EU countries, with potentially concentrated imports’.
Sustainable alternatives
The signatories argued that sustainable alternatives to these 15 chemicals, such as low-carbon or bio-based chemicals, should also be considered strategic.
They included a list of strategic sustainable alternatives, noting it is ‘tentative’ and ‘non-exhaustive’ given the early-stage of development of bio-based molecules.
The list includes:
- Readily available bio-based molecules: Glycerol, ethanol.
- Bio-based molecules with no fossil equivalent: Lactic acid, itaconic acid, glutamic acid, pelargonic acid.
- Key bio-based platform chemicals: Furans (FDCA, HMF), succinic acid, propanediol.
The countries argued it will also be strategic to invest in industrial transformation by developing sustainable production platforms and advanced complementary technologies. These include biofuels, plastic recycling, bioplastics, downstream chemical chains, and developing supply chains like batteries.
They suggested that funding could be facilitated for projects in these areas. Funds could also be allocated to first-of-a-kind plants in EU territory that offer new state-of-the-art alternative ways of producing strategic molecules in Europe in a competitive and environmentally unharmful way.
Clean Industrial Deal
The signatories acknowledged the EU’s recent launch of the Clean Industrial Deal, a business plan to make decarbonisation of European industry profitable.
Although the EU is working on tailoring the Clean Industrial Deal to the chemicals industry, the signatories argued a Critical Chemicals Act is needed in addition to the Chemicals Industry Package set for adoption in late 2025.
Plastics Europe has warned the Clean Industrial Deal risks overlooking the ‘essential contribution’ of the plastics industry.