LyondellBasell Brand Guidelines: A 2007 Merger, Chapter 11 & Polyolefin Know-How

Lyondell from Texas, Basell from Europe.

LyondellBasell is a young name for an old trade. It was formed in December 2007, when Basell Polyolefins acquired the American company Lyondell Chemical, English Wikipedia says. German Wikipedia dates the merged name from 1 January 2008 and notes how it is written: as one word, with no hyphen, and with the B of Basell kept as a capital in the middle.

The two halves came from different places. Lyondell was set up in 1985 from facilities that had belonged to the Atlantic Richfield Company, ARCO, and grew through deals: the Equistar partnership of 1997, the purchase of ARCO Chemical in 1998 and Millennium Chemicals in 2004, according to English Wikipedia. Basell was European. German Wikipedia traces it to the Rheinische Olefinwerke, a polyethylene joint venture that BASF and Shell formed in 1953, and to a reshuffle of plastics businesses in the 1990s; on 1 October 2000 the polyethylene business Elenac, the polypropylene business Targor and Shell’s Montell were combined as Basell, a BASF and Shell joint venture with its seat at Hoofddorp in the Netherlands. In August 2005 the two parents completed its sale to a subsidiary of Access Industries, the New York-based investment group, which then owned the merged company.

The company’s own timeline reaches further back, through the research it inherited. It begins in 1953, with Karl Ziegler’s work on linear polyethylene, and 1954, with Giulio Natta’s first crystalline polypropylene, both credited to scientists of predecessor companies; the two shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1963. The same timeline credits predecessors with propylene oxide processes from ARCO in 1969 and the Spheripol polypropylene process, introduced by Montedison in 1982. Production sites carry that inheritance too: the company says polyethylene was first made on an industrial scale at Frankfurt in 1955, and in 2017 it marked 60 years of commercial polypropylene sales from Ferrara, in Italy.

Polyolefins, licences and recycling.

The merged company had a hard start. Its United States operations filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January 2009 and emerged in April 2010, English Wikipedia says; the old parent, LyondellBasell Industries AF S.C.A., was replaced by LyondellBasell Industries N.V., a company incorporated in the Netherlands, which was listed on the New York Stock Exchange on 14 October 2010 under the ticker LYB.

What it makes is mostly the material inside other products. English Wikipedia describes it as a producer of ethylene, propylene, polyolefins and oxyfuels, and as a licensor of polyethylene and polypropylene technologies. On its own website the company describes itself as one of the largest polymer producers anywhere and as “a leader in polyolefin technologies,” and names its purpose as “creating solutions for everyday sustainable living.” Its process names are part of how it presents itself: Spherizone, a polypropylene reactor technology it dates to 2002; Catalloy, from 1990; and Hyperzone, a polyethylene process whose first plant, at La Porte in Texas, the company says it started up in 2020.

Plants are the company’s other face. In July 2017 Chemistry World reported that LyondellBasell would build a propylene oxide and tertiary butyl alcohol plant in Texas, describing it as the largest of its kind and the company’s single largest capital investment; the company says it broke ground in 2018 and that operations began in 2023. In 2018 it completed the purchase of the plastics compounder A. Schulman, which it says more than doubled its compounding business, serving cars, construction, electronics and packaging.

Recycling now sits beside the polymers. The company dates Circulen, a family of recycled and renewable-based polymers, to 2019, and its MoReTec chemical recycling technology to a semi-industrial unit at Ferrara, Italy, in 2020; it says construction of its first commercial-scale MoReTec plant began at Wesseling, Germany, in 2024.

How the polymer trade presents itself.

Petrochemical makers sell materials most people never see on their own: ethylene and propylene, and the pellets of polyethylene, polypropylene and PVC that other companies turn into film, bottles, pipes and car parts. With no product on a shop shelf, the company name has to do most of the work, and many of these firms present it as a bold corporate wordmark, often in capitals or a heavy sans, set on plain white pages.

Colour tends to be cool and sober. Blues and greens recur across the trade’s websites and reports, and pictures lean on the plants themselves: crackers, columns and pipe racks photographed at dusk, lit against a dark sky, or tanker ships and rail terminals at the edge of a port. The plant is the product, so the plant becomes the image.

The websites follow a shared structure. Product pages are usually organised by polymer family — polyethylene, polypropylene, PVC and the rest — with grades, process technologies and trademarked range names, and with applications grouped by market: packaging, cars and construction are the usual first three. Many makers now give equal space to circularity and recycling, with pages for recycled or renewable-based ranges and chemical recycling projects, and publish annual safety, sustainability and community reports as part of the same identity.

The makers in this guide share that vocabulary but come from different histories: mergers of older companies, buyouts of single plants, joint ventures between oil groups and family conglomerates. This guide sets out who founded each one, who owns it and how its name came about, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A shorter name and a smaller map.

In recent years the company has redrawn its map. On its website it now uses the short form LYB alongside the full name. In May 2026, Hydrocarbon Processing reported, it completed the sale of European olefins and polyolefins assets at Berre in France, Münchsmünster in Germany, Carrington in the UK and Tarragona in Spain to the investor AEQUITA, with the business renamed Velogy; LyondellBasell kept its Advanced Polymer Solutions business at Tarragona. In December 2023 it agreed to sell its ethylene oxide and derivatives business to INEOS, English Wikipedia says; INEOS says it completed the purchase in 2024.

Its Houston refinery is a separate story. The company ceased operations there in February 2025, according to its first-quarter 2025 results as cited by Tank Transport, which reported in November 2026 that Valero had agreed, in an announcement on 30 October 2026, to buy the former refinery site; the sale was expected to close by the end of 2026 and had not completed at the time of writing.

For a design guide, LyondellBasell shows how a merged company builds one identity from two names, one capital letter in the middle and a set of trademarked process names. Compare BASF, one of the two parents of Basell, and INEOS, which bought its ethylene oxide business. For this guide we use a deep navy, a steady blue and a muted sage with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep LyondellBasell’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.