Summary. Europe’s ethylene balance moved decisively in 2026. The EU27 imported 1,093,881 tonnes of ethylene (HS 290121) from outside the bloc in January–August 2026, 28.6% more than in the same eight months of 2025, and 54.0% more in the first half of 2026 than in the first half of 2025. The United States supplied 68.2% of those eight-month imports, up from 44.7% a year earlier; Norway held 22.6%; the United Kingdom fell from 25.1% to 7.5% and recorded no shipments at all from May 2026. The average declared import unit value fell to EUR 912 per tonne from EUR 1,014, a 10.1% decline that survived a May–June spike to EUR 1,134. The bloc exported 7,394 tonnes in the same period — 0.7% of what it imported.
Data updated: 2026-11-03
Latest 12 months: volumes up, unit values down
Table 1 covers September 2025 to August 2026 for HS 290121, EU27 trade with partners outside the bloc, from Eurostat Comext DS-045409, refreshed on 16 October 2026. Unit values are declared customs value divided by net mass — a ratio computed from the same declaration, not a price assessment. The series ends in August 2026 because that is the latest month Eurostat has published for this dataset.
| Month | Imports (t) | Import value (EUR m) | Import unit value (EUR/t) | Exports (t) | Export unit value (EUR/t) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-09 | 134,790 | 125.6 | 932 | 109 | 2,115 |
| 2025-10 | 129,897 | 115.7 | 890 | 3,554 | 745 |
| 2025-11 | 112,520 | 101.2 | 900 | 57 | 3,312 |
| 2025-12 | 140,367 | 133.8 | 953 | 11,104 | 722 |
| 2026-01 | 112,271 | 88.5 | 788 | 93 | 2,229 |
| 2026-02 | 156,845 | 120.1 | 765 | 103 | 2,043 |
| 2026-03 | 127,699 | 92.9 | 727 | 3,458 | 831 |
| 2026-04 | 185,310 | 161.5 | 871 | 141 | 2,411 |
| 2026-05 | 183,355 | 207.9 | 1,134 | 70 | 2,817 |
| 2026-06 | 145,260 | 158.6 | 1,092 | 3,391 | 674 |
| 2026-07 | 103,515 | 100.7 | 973 | 53 | 3,302 |
| 2026-08 | 79,625 | 67.3 | 845 | 86 | 1,761 |
| Total | 1,611,455 | 1,473.7 | 915 | 22,218 | 789 |
The import line is consistent enough to read as a market, unlike most petrochemicals traded in parcel-sized lumps. Volumes ran above 100,000 tonnes in eleven of the twelve months, peaked at 185,310 tonnes in April 2026 and 183,355 tonnes in May, then fell back to 103,515 tonnes in July and 79,625 tonnes in August, the only month below 100,000. The twelve-month total of 1,611,455 tonnes is 38.7% above the whole of 2024, which came in at 1,162,202 tonnes.
The price line is not a straight decline. The declared import unit value averaged EUR 920 per tonne in September–December 2025, dropped to EUR 911 in the first half of 2026 on volumes 54.0% higher than the first half of 2025, then jumped to EUR 1,134 in May and EUR 1,092 in June before easing to EUR 973 in July and EUR 845 in August. May is the outlier: every major origin was valued higher that month than in April — the United States at EUR 1,120 against EUR 924 and Norway at EUR 1,197 against EUR 610 — so the spike reflects a market-wide repricing rather than a shift in the origin mix. That is a description of the data, not an explanation of it: the dataset records what was declared at customs, and nothing in it identifies the trigger.
Exports are too small to carry a trend. The EU shipped 22,218 tonnes in the twelve months against 1.61 million tonnes of imports, and the monthly export series alternates between a few dozen tonnes and a 3,000–11,000 tonne cargo: December 2025 alone accounted for 11,104 of the 30,085 tonnes exported in the 2025 calendar year. Export unit values in the low-volume months routinely exceed EUR 2,000 per tonne because they divide a small value by a tiny mass, and should not be read as prices.
The 2026 shift: the United States in, the United Kingdom out
Table 2 breaks the same eight months of 2026 and 2025 down by origin. It is the import side that changed, and it changed by lane rather than by total alone.
| Origin | 2025 (t) | 2025 share | 2026 (t) | 2026 share | 2026 EUR/t |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 380,000 | 44.7% | 746,321 | 68.2% | 947 |
| Norway | 188,169 | 22.1% | 247,437 | 22.6% | 816 |
| United Kingdom | 213,372 | 25.1% | 82,268 | 7.5% | 864 |
| Saudi Arabia | 14,960 | 1.8% | 13,084 | 1.2% | 1,041 |
| Libya | 25,499 | 3.0% | — | — | — |
| Türkiye | 22,918 | 2.7% | 4,750 | 0.4% | 869 |
| Other origins | 5,599 | 0.7% | 1 | 0.0% | — |
| Total | 850,516 | 100% | 1,093,861 | 100% | 912 |
Three lanes tell the story. US-origin volume rose 96.4% to 746,321 tonnes, adding 366,321 tonnes — more than the entire net increase in imports. Norwegian volume rose 31.5% to 247,437 tonnes and its share held at 22.6%, against 22.1% a year earlier. UK-origin volume fell 61.4% to 82,268 tonnes, and the monthly path is sharper than the eight-month average: 44,029 tonnes in January 2026, 24,722 in February, 3,091 in March, 10,427 in April, then zero in every month from May to August.
The UK decline tracks a plant closure rather than a commercial re-routing. ExxonMobil’s Fife ethylene plant at Mossmorran ceased production in February 2026; in a statement to the House of Commons on 18 November 2025, the industry minister recorded that “none of the ethylene produced at Mossmorran was used in the UK anyway; 100% of it was exported to the EU”, and described the plant as 40 years old, loss-making for five years, and facing “a sharp decline in ethane supply in the North Sea”. The trade series matches that timing to the month: the lane that had been running at 20,000–30,000 tonnes a month stops in the spring.
The US lane took the space. On the customs numbers it is a long-haul lane: US-origin ethylene cleared at a declared EUR 947 per tonne against EUR 816 for Norwegian-origin volume, and it added 366,321 tonnes in eight months — more than the whole net increase in extra-EU imports. The dataset does not say why those cargoes moved; it records that they did.
The export side: the United States is the swing supplier
Table 3 turns to UN Comtrade, the only source here that covers exporters outside Europe. The annual records show a US export book that peaked in 2022, fell back through 2024, then grew again in 2025 — and a 2026 monthly series running at roughly twice the 2025 pace.
| Period | Volume (kt) | Value (USD m) | Unit value (USD/t) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 650.8 | 388.0 | 596 |
| 2021 | n/r | 597.5 | n/r |
| 2022 | 1,195.4 | 1,088.6 | 911 |
| 2023 | n/r | 760.3 | n/r |
| 2024 | n/r | 567.5 | n/r |
| 2025 | 790.9 | 539.8 | 683 |
| 2026-01 | 97.0 | 60.4 | 623 |
| 2026-02 | 82.9 | 46.6 | 562 |
| 2026-03 | 135.6 | 79.6 | 587 |
| 2026-04 | 168.7 | 126.4 | 750 |
| 2026-05 | 176.5 | 152.9 | 866 |
| 2026-06 | 74.6 | 69.7 | 934 |
| 2026 H1 | 735.3 | 535.6 | 728 |
Two comparisons frame the 2026 numbers. First, US exports in the first half of 2026 — 735.3 kilotonnes — were equal to 93.0% of the whole of 2025, and the six-month value of USD 535.6 million was within USD 5 million of the full 2025 figure. Second, the EU alone took 746,321 tonnes of US-origin ethylene in January–August 2026 — a volume of the same order as the entire US export book in the first half of the year, which is consistent with Europe having become the main destination rather than a residual market.
Korea is the other continuous exporter in the preview data, and the larger one by volume: 2.05 million tonnes and USD 1.60 billion in 2025, against 0.85 million tonnes and USD 605 million in 2020. Japan filed annual records only to 2022 (0.38 million tonnes, USD 364 million). China is excluded because the preview records used for this article did not contain a usable 2025 annual series, and no estimate has been substituted; the Gulf producers recorded small HS 290121 export volumes in the same records — Saudi Arabia 46.8 kilotonnes in 2025, while Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE returned no HS 290121 export records in the years retrieved. No global total is presented. What the available series do show is a market in which Asian and US export volumes move independently of European production, and in which the US has become the marginal supplier to Europe.
Capacity: the European supply base is still shrinking
The trade shift is the visible half of a capacity story that company announcements make explicit.
- Dow confirmed on 7 July 2025 that its board had approved the shutdown of three upstream European assets, including the ethylene cracker at Böhlen, Germany, with shutdown expected in the fourth quarter of 2027 and implementation running from 2026 to 2029. The release frames the move as “right-sizing upstream regional capacity, reducing merchant sale exposure, and removing higher-cost, energy-intensive assets”.
- SABIC agreed in January 2026 to sell its European petrochemical business — including manufacturing sites in the United Kingdom and Germany — to Munich-based AEQUITA at an enterprise value of USD 500 million, as part of a portfolio review during an industry slowdown, Reuters reported on 8 January 2026.
- ExxonMobil’s Fife closure, recorded in Hansard on 18 November 2025, removed a plant that sold 100% of its ethylene into the EU.
Fife is the only one of the three that has removed tonnes in 2026. That timing is the analytically useful part: the import surge is happening before the Böhlen shutdown, so the extra 366,321 tonnes of US material cannot be a response to capacity that is still running. Whatever moved those cargoes, it was not a sudden loss of European ethylene capacity. If the announced 2027 closures proceed, the import requirement rises again from a higher base.
Analysis / outlook: what to watch into 2027
Analysis / outlook — the judgements below are PetroApex’s reading of the data above, not statements by any cited source.
- The import floor is higher than it was. Even with July–August 2026 falling back to 103,515 and 79,625 tonnes, the eight-month volume is 28.6% above the same months of 2025 and 113% above the same months of 2024. The 2026 monthly average of 136,735 tonnes is 41% above the 2024 monthly average of 96,852 tonnes, so a full return to 2024 levels would take a deliberate demand event, not a normal seasonal correction.
- Origin concentration is the risk. With the US at 68.2% of extra-EU imports, a US Gulf Coast outage, a hurricane-season disruption, or a widening US–Europe price gap moves the European balance more than any other single variable. Norway’s 22.6% is pipeline-linked and cannot flex.
- The UK lane is gone, not deferred. Fife stopped producing in February 2026 and sold its entire output into the EU. The monthly series shows no UK-origin volume from May 2026, so the 2025 UK share of 25.1% should be treated as historical rather than cyclical.
- Unit values are the least reliable line in the table. May–June 2026 showed a market-wide jump that no origin mix explains, and the August 2026 fall to EUR 845 came on the lowest monthly volume of the twelve. A buyer should not read the monthly unit value as a contract price.
Data limitations
- “Extra-EU” is not “seaborne”. Eurostat’s EU27_2020 / EXT_EU27_2020 series includes Norway, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, so much of the Norwegian and UK volume moves by pipeline or short sea rather than in ocean cargoes. The US lane is the genuinely long-haul component.
- Unit values are declared customs values divided by net mass. They mix grades, contract types and Incoterms, and a change in origin or grade mix moves the average without any price change.
- The 2026 comparison is January–August against January–August, not a full year against a full year. Eurostat’s DS-045409 series for HS 290121 ends in August 2026; later months were not published when this was written.
- Comtrade 2025 annual figures are first-reported and subject to revision. China is not included in Table 3: the preview records used here did not return a usable 2025 annual series for HS 290121, and no estimate has been substituted. No 2025 global total is presented.
- EU export volumes are small and lumpy; no export trend is inferred from them.
Sources
- Eurostat Comext DS-045409, monthly extra-EU imports of HS 290121, January 2024 to August 2026: API query, flow 1
- Eurostat Comext DS-045409, monthly extra-EU exports of HS 290121: API query, flow 2
- Eurostat Comext DS-045409, monthly extra-EU imports of HS 290121 by partner, January 2025 to August 2026: API query by partner
- Eurostat, international trade in goods database: database entry point
- UN Comtrade, United States annual exports of HS 290121, 2020–2025: preview API, 2025
- UN Comtrade, United States monthly exports of HS 290121, January–June 2026: preview API, June 2026
- UN Comtrade, Republic of Korea annual exports of HS 290121, 2020–2025: preview API, 2025
- UN Comtrade database: comtradeplus.un.org
- Dow, “Dow will shut down three upstream European assets in response to structural challenges in the region”, 7 July 2025: press release
- Reuters, “Saudi’s SABIC sells assets in Europe, Americas worth $950 million”, 8 January 2026: article
- UK Parliament, Hansard, “ExxonMobil: Mossmorran”, House of Commons, 18 November 2025: debate record
- BBC News, “ExxonMobil fined £267,000 over chemical leaks at Mossmorran”, 26 August 2026, which records that production at the site was shut down in February 2026: report
PetroApex maintains the monthly import and export panels behind this article — volumes, declared values, unit values and origin lanes for ethylene and the derivatives that consume it — and can cut them to a specific origin, destination, grade or period. To request a sample report or a custom data extract, contact our research team. For the product view, see the ethylene market analysis, the main downstream outlets in polyethylene and ethylene oxide, and the chlor-alkali route through ethylene dichloride.