Dow announced it would shut its 94,000 t/y polyether polyols plant at Tertre, Belgium by the end of March 2026, as part of a wider rationalisation of its European upstream assets. The company cited high energy costs, regulatory burden and rising Asian imports. Two of the site's three lines had already been idled since 2023; Dow says it can serve polyol customers from Terneuzen (Netherlands) and Tarragona (Spain).
The closure is part of a pattern across the European polyurethane raw-material base, where producers are weighing high structural energy and compliance costs against the alternative of importing or consolidating output at more competitive sites. Tertre had been running well below capacity for years (two of its three lines were already idle), so the shutdown formalises a position the market had partly anticipated rather than removing healthy capacity.
Dow has been explicit that customers will continue to be supplied, naming Terneuzen in the Netherlands (530,000 t/y) and Tarragona in Spain (60,000 t/y) as the sites that will absorb the volume. The shift is therefore less about losing total European polyol supply and more about where that supply is produced, with consequences for logistics, lead times and route-to-customer.
For polyurethane formulators the broader signal matters: European upstream rationalisation tends to leave the regional market more dependent on fewer, larger sites and on imports, which can amplify the impact of any single outage or shipping disruption. It reinforces why supplier diversification and inventory planning have moved up the agenda for systems producers.