The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - America's Leg Up on Petrochemicals || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: April 30, 2026

The Iran War has caused a massive disruption in global petrochemical production. Since most of the world relies on oil-derived naptha, the ~12 million barrels/day shortage is taking a toll. Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan Full Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4sQt6Cg

Hey everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from Walla Walla, Washington. Today we're talking about the Iran War and the impact that it's having on petrochemicals. The way most of the world decides to make petrochemicals is they start with crude oil and they refine it into an intermediate product called naphtha. And that naphtha then goes on and is processed into tens of thousands of things that we all use every day. That's not how it operates in the United States. In the United States, because of the Shale Revolution, we have basically a barrenuous. bottomless supply of natural gas. Based on whose math you're using roughly one-third of the natural

gas that is produced in the United States, it's produced as a waste product, or at least as an associated production of oil, which means that in the United States, natural gas is significantly cheaper compared to the cost of oil. So in the rest of the world, pre-war, the ratio between oil and natural gas on a caloric point of view was about 5 to 1, and the United States, it's closer to 2 to 1. So we use natural gas to produce products that everyone else would use naphtha for. Well, what has happened two things. Number one, all that natural gas means that the United States can produce most petrochemicals at a significant cost advantage versus everyone else.

Second, with the Iran war going on now, there's a global shortage of oil to the tune about 10 to 12 million barrels a day. So everyone else's hardware is designed to turn oil. into naphtha into petrochemical products. But all of a sudden, the price of oil and the availability of oil means that basically everyone in the East Asian Rim, and very soon everyone in Europe, simply can't access the product they need at all.

And they don't have access to enough natural gas in the first place to switch over. And even if they did, they'd have to change their hardware to be able to do it. So the United States is becoming, from an economic point of view, the only real functional, large-scale supplier of the butidine and methanol groups, which is where we already had huge advantage,

and that's things like particle board and silicones and octane for gasoline and nitrogen fertilizers and melamine plastics, a lot of things like that. Whereas everybody else is now discovering that they don't have the price structure that's necessary to maintain competitive production of really any of this. Third problem, because the United States

is able to have an advantage now in all of the product sets, we're seeing a significant shift in production quantities as well as qualities. So let me show you this chart here. If you start at the bottom left, that gray bars oil, you turn it into naphtha, which goes on to make all the daughter products. Go to the right side at the bottom, you start with natural gas, you crack it to get ethylene, and then you turn that into products. But this whole set can be made with natural gas.

And so the United States has not just a price, advantage now, but just a huge advantage in the quantity, the type of products that can be made in mass. You play this forward for six months, two years, which is easily going to happen because of the Iran War, and we're looking at a shattering of the petrochemical supply chains on a global basis outside of North America, and that's going to have massive impacts downstream on pretty much every industrial sector.