September 15, 2025 15:12

Speaking at the annual Morgan Stanley Laguna Investor Conference, Dow CEO Jim R. Fitterling announced that the company’s Path2Zero zero-emission cracker project in Canada will face a delay of one — or more likely two — years compared with the timeline originally presented by the U.S. chemical group two years ago.

“First, I just want to say on Alberta, we still think it’s a good project. It’s a low-cost project," Fitterling said. "It’s just a matter of market timing. When you ramp up the construction is when the big spend happens. And when you bring these projects up, the timing to the peak of the market is very critical for the IRR on the project. So what we didn’t want to do was try to be bringing that up — originally the plan was to bring it up in ’27. In this market environment, that doesn’t feel like the right timing".
"But to ramp up the construction when we can bring it up commensurate with the market coming back. And so that — we’ve announced a one-year delay. I think a one- to two-year delay time frame is what we’re looking at. And that, we believe, balances getting the engineering work done, which is what we’re doing right now, and getting the long lead equipment ordered so that we’ve got that on site, but not starting the major construction until we’re ready to get into that and execute quickly and get it online.”

Fitterling confirmed that Canadian government support remains in place and that demand from global customers for low-carbon ethylene and derivatives is strong.
He concluded by stating that a full update on Path2Zero will be provided later this year.

The Path2Zero project involves retrofitting Dow’s ethylene cracker and building new net-zero polyethylene facilities (Scope 1 and 2) at the Fort Saskatchewan complex in Canada.
The cracker will use hydrogen recovered from plant off-gases as furnace fuel in order to eliminate direct CO? emissions (Scope 1).

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