The European chemical industry is currently faced with a structural downturn that transcends typical market cycles. According to 2025 data from the European Chemical Industry Council (Cefic), capacity utilization in the EU has settled at approximately 75% for more than three years, significantly below the threshold required for healthy profitability.
This sustained "industrial anemia" is driven by two primary factors: energy prices that remain structurally higher than in North America and other regions, combined with a surge in imports of basic chemicals and polymers from high-capacity regions like China and the Middle East.
Chemical facilities built across Europe in the past half-century are designed for steady-state, high-volume throughput, and not to operate far below their nameplate capacity for extended periods. This leaves European operators with several options to make the best of a bad situation.
Turndown: the risks of the under-utilized plant
The first option is a deep turndown: keeping the plant online at a reduced but steady throughput. This strategy suits large integrated petrochemical sites, for example, because shutdowns and restarts carry high thermal and mechanical risk.
In a deep turndown, the most immediate concern is mechanical integrity: Operating outside of a plant's original design window introduces risks that are difficult to manage. At low flow rates, "dead legs" in piping can lead to localized corrosion and heat exchangers may experience "fouling" as slower-moving fluids allow deposits to settle, leading to loss of containment or progressive restriction of flow.
The primary solution is a technical re-evaluation of the asset for lower flow rates, using design and engineering analysis software to re-rate equipment for this new context. This involves recalculating the hydraulics and thermal profiles to ensure that the new "low" is still safe. If a column cannot operate safely at 60%, engineering modifications, such as changing tray designs or adding bypasses, can be modeled and implemented before a safety incident occurs.
Operating below capacity also requires greater attention to abnormal situations, via alarm systems or shift handovers. Low throughput creates more alarm activity and more temptation to tune out alarms meant for full capacity. Alarm rationalization can be a necessary step to ensure that alarms are meaningful and effective during abnormal and transitional states.
Intermittent shutdowns: stop and restart
Deep turndown is viable mainly for integrated or technically flexible facilities. For older assets or less forgiving segments, such as commodity petrochemicals, two other adaptation strategies are common.
The first is campaigning, or intermittent operation. It is favored by fine chemicals and commodity intermediates, particularly those exposed to seasonal demand or feedstock volatility. Rather than running 24/7, facilities may aggregate orders and run at full tilt for a few weeks, followed by periods of "hot standby" where the plant is kept warm but idle.
Intermittent operations bring the risk of cycling fatigue. Plants designed for continuous use suffer immensely during the transient phases of startup and shutdown. Each cycle subjects vessels and pipes to thermal and pressure stress, leading to metal fatigue.
Furthermore, the most dangerous moments in a chemical plant's life occur during restarts - which, with campaigning, can happen several times a year instead of once every few years. Success, therefore, depends on disciplined preservation routines, corrosion control and restart readiness.
Mothballing: Combining partial operations and full readiness
Last comes partialization or mothballing. This involves shuttering specific units entirely, such as ammonia or a feedstock cracker, while keeping higher-value units operational. Mothballing differs from partialization in that the asset is placed into long-term preservation, fully taken out of service, de-inventoried and protected against corrosion and degradation.
When a complex facility is partialized, it undergoes significant changes and the remaining active units no longer operate within the original design parameters of the site. Relief systems need to be re-rated, shared systems re-dimensioned and bypasses and isolations implemented.
When conducting these changes, a crucial element is engineering re-validation and the ability to maintain a digital thread that spans the entire idled period: Without it, the mothballed facility can become a black box and restart becomes highly risky. Formal management of change, or MOC, is essential to capture modifications and move them through the required risk assessments and technical reviews.
Effective MOC is not only a workflow for approvals. It also keeps the facility ready for re-commissioning and ensures that procedures and training align with the site’s physical configuration. This structured framework can be integrated with the plant’s digital twin to automatically flag affected parts of the 3D model: If an engineer proposes an isolation for mothballing, the system can automatically identify every connected valve and relief device that requires re-validation.
Mitigating human risks
Across all scenarios, one of the common risk factors is the human element: As capacity declines, workforce experience often erodes, while operational complexity increases.
A key way to address this issue and preserve this knowledge is through better procedure management: ensuring that procedures capture the actual practices through feedback mechanisms that help flag and annotate incorrect or outdated procedures. This is particularly important in a deep turndown phase, where “informal” procedures can stray away from official procedures meant for full capacity.
For intermittent operations, mitigating the loss of veteran expertise can also require mobile tools that provide field technicians with step-by-step, interactive procedures for complex startups, ensuring that safety protocols are followed to the letter regardless of the operator's tenure.
Procedure management should be part of a larger strategy to combat information decay. To do so, European firms are adopting platforms that centralize all asset data, from original 3D CAD models to real-time maintenance logs, to serve as a "single source of truth". This ensures that the engineering team has an accurate map of the current state of the facility, rather than relying on outdated paper records.
Whether they are meant for deep turndowns, intermittent operations or mothballing, effective strategies have something in common: they adapt to the current situations but are also long-term efforts for safer and more resilient plants.
Tighter change management, better startup management, sharper alarm discipline and inspection strategies that keep corrosion risk visible help them meet the moment. But, in doing so, they also make the plant more efficient should it return to its full capacity in the future. In a global market that no longer guarantees the luxury of full volume, this flexibility will be a long-lasting advantage.