MOSCOW (MRC) -- Ingevity says that its chairman Richard Kelson passed away on 13 February at the age of 74, according to Chemweek.
The cause of death has not been disclosed. The company says its “board will select a new chairman over the next several days who will preside over the regularly scheduled board meetings later this week.”
Kelson had been Ingevity’s chairman since its spin-off from WestRock in 2016. He was named interim president and CEO in February 2020 following the resignation of Michael Wilson, and held the role until the appointment of John Fortson, Ingevity’s current president and CEO, on 1 September 2020.
Ingevity’s board, management, and employees have expressed their deepest condolences to Kelson’s family, and the company says it will make a donation in his memory to the Penn Center for Research on Coronavirus.
As MRC reported earlier, in November 2020, Ingevity said it intends to challenge a decision of the US District Court for the District of Delaware regarding a patent-infringement complaint brought by Ingevity against BASF.
And in December 2020, BASF said it would pursue antitrust claims in a US court in Delaware related to Ingevity’s business practices in the evaporative emissions control market. The case concerns BASF’s EvapTrap-branded scrubbers for evaporative emissions control.
We remind that BASF said late last week it was restarting one of its steam crackers at its Ludwigshafen complex in Germany after operations were halted last Wednesday due to a technical issue. The naphtha cracker produces ethylene and propylene, and is one of two crackers on the site. One has a production capacity of 420,000 metric tons/year, with the other’s capacity at 240,000 metric tons/year, according to IHS Markit data.
Ethylene and propylene are feedstocks for producing polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP).
According to MRC's ScanPlast report, Russia's estimated PE consumption totalled 2,220,640 tonnes in 2020, up by 2% year on year. Only shipments of low density polyethylene (LDPE) and high density polyethylene (HDPE) increased. At the same time, polypropylene (PP) shipments to the Russian market reached 1 240,000 tonnes in 2020 (calculated using the formula: production, minus exports, plus imports, excluding producers' inventories as of 1 January, 2020).
MRC