Tomorrow’s world

I am a bit of a sucker for futurology. It probably comes of reading too much science fiction in my youth. In a sense all of us in any industry have to be futurologists of a sort; identifying trends, looking for the next growth area or the next business opportunity, and so on. Perhaps it is because we have just completed a year ending in ‘0’ and everyone is looking towards the next one in 2020, but there seems to have been a lot of futurology about of late. My attention was drawn particularly by a rash of reports at the end of last year from several consultancy companies – Deloitte, Frost & Sullivan and KPMG – which all aimed to pick out ‘megatrends’ that they believe will shape the future of the chemical industry over the next decade and beyond. Some companies have looked further still, out to 2050, where the future becomes hazy indeed.

Such reports are well-meaning of course, though hardly containing much that will surprise. Some of the predictions are easy and uncontroversial – demographic shifts are relatively predictable for some way into the future, economic shifts are predictable on a broad scale over the medium term, and resource trends likewise – again to a degree. The impact of increasing urbanisation and the rise of the BRIC countries on chemical demand, and the impact of the resource-rich Middle East on chemical production are already evident and equally evidently likely to continue. The centre of gravity of the chemical industry continues to shift, and the buyout of DSM Agro by Egypt’s Orascom is just one such straw in the wind. Occasionally unnoticed but equally relevant are other trends such as the growth of corporate ‘economies’. Measured against national economies, 46 of the top 100 global economic entities are now corporations rather than nation states. In 2007, WalMart, Exxon and Shell were bigger than Denmark, Iran and South Africa.

Some trends are more industry specific. The retreat of the ‘old’ European and North American chemical industry from commodity chemicals and into specialities is almost complete, except where those commodities are integrated into complexes which add value at various stages of the production chain. Frost & Sullivan single out the BASF ‘verbund’ integrated chemical complex concept as paving the way forward for the European and US industries, and increasingly likely to be exported to the developing world.

Likewise I am sure that the reports are right when they say that the industry will increasingly be driven by sustainability criteria, and not just in the developed world. China has discovered for itself the social and environmental costs of rapid industrialisation, and is working harder than many give it credit for to ameliorate them. I am also sure that they are right that we will see more use of bio-feedstocks and so-called ‘white biochemistry’ in chemical production, although I personally believe that poor economics and competition for scarce land and water resources will inevitably prevent any large-scale move towards biomass feedstocks for the commodity chemicals sector.

The difficulty with futurology is that it depends on continuing that line on the graph into the future. Provided that all trends stay constant, they are easy to predict. The problem is that they never do. There will always be geopolitical shocks like 9/11 or the fall of the Berlin Wall. And unfortunately, futurology is also at its most frustratingly vague when dealing with the impact of technology, which is especially problematic when making predictions about a technology-driven industry like chemicals. The drawbacks of futurology are clearly illustrated by one of the cult online phenomena of last year - a blog dedicated to reproducing a 1972 children’s book called 2010: Living In The Future. The book was originally written by Geoffrey Hoyle (son of the astronomer and SF writer, Fred Hoyle) and is an instructive and even nostalgic look at how we once imagined 2010 might be; a world of jumpsuits, automated kitchens, free public transport, supersonic travel and working for only three days a week as mechanisation provided increased leisure time. To give him his due, electric cars, videophones, videoconferencing and online shopping are all here as he predicted, but so are global warming, peak oil and suicide terrorism. And although the book was more prescient than most about the impact of computers on everyday life, in 1972 the internet was still something no-one could have quite imagined.

Indeed, perhaps its capacity to continually surprise us is the most encouraging thing about the future - it at least proves that it is still ours to create.