The war in Iran did not just spike oil prices and strand tankers. It physically stopped a steel structure the size of an 18-story building — one of the two final critical components of Europe’s largest petrochemical construction project in a quarter century — from reaching the Belgian port where it was needed. The module sat in the Persian Gulf for months, trapped, with no alternative route. On July 28, it finally arrived at the Port of Antwerp, having slipped through the Strait of Hormuz during a one-week ceasefire window in mid-June, as INEOS confirmed in its official press release.
INEOS confirmed delivery of the first of the final two modules required to complete its Project ONE ethane cracker in Antwerp’s Lillo industrial zone. The module, carried by the heavy-lift vessel Jin Xu Xiang 88, weighs 6,920 tonnes (approximately 7,628 short tons) and stands 55 metres (180 feet) tall — roughly the weight of the Eiffel Tower’s entire steel frame combined with the height of a mid-sized skyscraper. Its companion module, weighing 7,200 tonnes (approximately 7,937 short tons), is expected to arrive in the first half of August. Together, they complete the structural assembly of a €5 billion (approximately $5.77 billion) investment that is the first of its scale anywhere in Europe since 2000.
The news arrived the day before Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fired ballistic missiles at US forces on July 29, collapsing the latest ceasefire understanding and pushing oil prices up 7.3 percent in a single session, as TechTimes reported. The modules escaped by weeks — possibly days — of what could have been another indefinite lockout.
What the Hormuz Blockade Did to a Non-Oil Industrial Project
The Hormuz crisis — which began February 28, 2026, when the United States and Israel launched airstrikes on Iran, triggering an Iranian closure of the strait — has dominated financial headlines as an oil and gas supply story, as documented across reporting on the 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis. It is that. But the INEOS module stranding is the first publicly documented case of a major non-energy industrial project cargo held hostage by the blockade, revealing a category of economic damage that oil-price reporting alone does not capture.
The two modules were fabricated in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. When the war began and Iran effectively closed the strait to commercial shipping, both heavy-lift vessels carrying the modules were either in transit or in the Gulf — with no viable exit. Unlike tankers, which can reroute via the Cape of Good Hope with a cost and time penalty, a 7,000-tonne (7,716-short-ton) industrial module aboard a purpose-built semi-submersible heavy-lift ship cannot easily be turned around. The vessel class is rare; the cargo cannot be offloaded at an interim port; and the Cape route adds weeks of steaming time that the project calendar could not absorb at that stage, as Breakbulk News reported.
The modules sat in the Gulf from late February through mid-June — approximately three and a half months — as diplomatic efforts produced a series of failed ceasefire windows, partial reopenings, and re-closures. The one-week window that finally opened in mid-June, coinciding with the US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding signed June 17, was the only sustained transit opportunity the vessels could use. Both ships transited the strait and proceeded via the Suez Canal to Antwerp — arriving approximately six weeks after clearing Hormuz, on July 28, as TechTimes covered at the time.
How Steam Crackers Are Actually Built: Why Hormuz Became Project ONE’s Problem
Project ONE is an ethane steam cracker: a facility that converts ethane gas into ethylene, the world’s most produced organic chemical, through a process called pyrolysis. In the cracking furnaces at the heart of the plant, ethane molecules (C₂H₆) are heated to between 800 and 870°C (1,472 and 1,598°F) in the presence of steam. The intense heat breaks the carbon-carbon bond, yielding ethylene (C₂H₄) — along with co-products including hydrogen, propylene, and pyrolysis oil. Ethylene is the monomer for polyethylene, the basis for dozens of plastics, and a feedstock for medical packaging, wind-turbine blades, solar-panel encapsulants, and automotive components, among hundreds of other applications, as INEOS describes on its Project ONE website.
Project ONE will process approximately 1.91 million tonnes (roughly 2.1 million short tons) of ethane feedstock per year, producing 1.45 million tonnes (approximately 1.6 million short tons) of ethylene annually, along with around 230,500 tonnes (approximately 254,000 short tons) of polymer-grade propylene. The ethane arrives from the United States, where it is an abundant byproduct of shale gas extraction, shipped to Antwerp in Very Large Ethane Carriers. The economics are critical: ethane cracking yields roughly 80 percent ethylene from feedstock, versus approximately 30 percent for naphtha cracking — the dominant method in Europe’s aging plant fleet. That yield advantage, combined with US shale ethane’s lower price point, is the financial logic that makes a €5 billion ($5.77 billion) greenfield investment competitive despite Europe’s high labor and regulatory costs.
The construction strategy INEOS chose to solve the Antwerp site’s physical constraints created the vulnerability the Hormuz blockade exposed. Rather than assembling the entire plant in place — which would have required sequential construction phases and far more site congestion — INEOS adopted a modular approach: fabricating complete sections of the cracker at overseas yards, primarily in Abu Dhabi and Thailand, as finished units already containing their internal piping, equipment, and structural steel, as the company explains. While those sections were being assembled abroad, civil engineering, foundation work, and utility installation proceeded simultaneously at the Lillo site. The parallel-workflow strategy compresses the overall schedule by years — but it means the project’s most critical components spend months at sea, dependent on unobstructed shipping lanes that, in February 2026, ceased to exist.
What the Gulf Supply Chain Model Now Costs
The INEOS stranding is not a story about a company making a mistake. It is a story about a risk that did not exist — or was not priced — before February 2026.
Modular construction from Gulf fabrication yards has been standard practice in the LNG and petrochemical industries for two decades. The engineering rationale is sound: specialist fabrication yards in Abu Dhabi and South Korea offer far lower labor costs, specialized crane and welding capacity, and the ability to work around site-footprint constraints that would otherwise require years of sequential on-site assembly. Project finance models for large industrial projects have routinely assumed that transit through the Strait of Hormuz — a recognized international strait governed by United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea transit-passage rights — is a logistical fact of life, not a geopolitical variable. The Renewable Matter analysis of Hormuz non-oil disruptions documents how deeply non-energy industrial supply chains depend on Gulf transit.
The 2026 Iran war changed that assumption permanently. Boston Consulting Group partner Jan Friese described the structural shift in April 2026: “In a scenario with free global trade, many chemical products can be imported easily. But in times of crisis or when geopolitical blocs form that hinder free trade, this becomes problematic, as entire production lines can suddenly come to a halt,” as Bloomberg reported. The INEOS case makes that abstract observation concrete: a single geopolitical event can strand irreplaceable industrial components with no alternative route and no timeline for recovery.
Any future mega-project that plans to fabricate modules in Abu Dhabi, Ras al-Khaimah, or other Gulf yards — and ship them through Hormuz — now faces a documented, named risk scenario. Project finance will have to price it. Engineering schedules will need contingency buffers. Insurance terms will be renegotiated. And some projects will likely shift fabrication to Korean, European, or other non-Gulf yards, absorbing higher unit costs to eliminate the stranding risk. The INEOS Project ONE modules arrived safely. The question their journey raises is whether the industry’s standard playbook — Gulf fabrication, Hormuz transit, just-in-time delivery — can survive another crisis of this kind without a project-ending result.
How Project ONE Makes Its Environmental Claims
INEOS describes Project ONE as the most sustainable ethane cracker of its type, and the technical basis for that claim is worth unpacking. Three design choices drive the emissions performance.
First, the plant uses its own process byproduct — the hydrogen released during ethane cracking — as furnace fuel. This captured hydrogen meets up to 60 percent of the plant’s energy needs without requiring external fossil fuel purchases. The furnaces are also designed for 100 percent hydrogen firing if low-carbon hydrogen supply becomes commercially available, which would reduce operational emissions to near zero, as INEOS states in its press materials.
Second, INEOS has deployed what it describes as the two best-available techniques for nitrogen oxide control at all six furnaces and both steam generators: low-NOx burners, which reduce NOx formation at source, and selective catalytic reduction systems, which remove residual NOx from flue gases. The combination achieves a 71 percent reduction in NOx emissions versus a conventional cracker design.
Third, the choice of ethane over naphtha as feedstock is itself an emissions decision: ethane cracking produces substantially lower carbon dioxide per tonne of ethylene output than naphtha cracking, because ethane is a simpler molecule requiring less process energy to crack.
INEOS states that Project ONE’s carbon emissions are less than one-third of the average European cracker and below half the emissions of the top 10 percent of European performers. Those figures have not been independently audited as of this writing, but the technical architecture — hydrogen recycling, SCR systems, ethane feedstock — is consistent with the claimed performance level.
The plant is also under a regulatory condition, imposed with the re-issuance of its environmental permit in January 2024, to achieve climate neutrality within 10 years of startup. That deadline — approximately 2037 if the cracker starts as planned in late 2027 — gives INEOS a binding obligation, not merely an aspiration.
Project ONE’s Long Fight to Reach This Point
Project ONE’s history before the Hormuz delay is itself a case study in the obstacles facing large-scale industrial investment in Europe.
Construction began in December 2022. In July 2023, the Council for Permit Disputes in Flanders revoked the environmental permit, ruling that the assessment of nitrogen deposition impacts on the Brabantse Wal nature reserve in the Netherlands had been insufficient, as S&P Global Commodity Insights reported. INEOS submitted a modified assessment in October 2023; Environment Minister Zuhal Demir issued a new conditional permit on January 7, 2024, allowing construction to resume. The Province of Antwerp subsequently issued a follow-up strengthened permit in January 2025.
The permit battles added significant time and cost to a project whose original investment estimate was approximately €3 billion (approximately $3.46 billion) — a figure that has since grown to €5 billion ($5.77 billion) as inflation, permitting delays, and the Hormuz stranding have taken their toll.
A coalition of NGOs including ClientEarth continues to challenge the current permit on the grounds that the project’s full emissions — including downstream plastic production — were not adequately assessed. The outcome of the most recent hearing, held in April 2026, has not been publicly disclosed. That challenge remains a live legal risk even as construction nears mechanical completion.
What Happens Next
With both modules now either in port or en route, the Antwerp site shifts fully into what INEOS describes as its peak construction and commissioning phase. Approximately 2,500 workers from around 80 contractors are on site, having logged more than 14 million combined man-hours to date. Active work includes laying 1,250 kilometres (approximately 777 miles) of instrumentation and electrical cabling, conducting leak tests on completed subsystems, and finishing construction of administrative buildings, the control room, and warehouses. The site was permanently connected to Belgium’s 380-kilovolt electricity grid in the first quarter of 2026 — the prerequisite for full commissioning work to begin, as INEOS confirmed.
Before the first module can be lifted into its permanent position at the heart of the plant, engineering crews must remove the protective steel structures welded around it for the sea voyage. That work is underway at the quay.
Mechanical completion of the entire site is targeted for summer 2027. INEOS aims to start up the cracker in the second half of 2027 — a timeline that already reflects the combined cost of the Flemish permitting crisis, cost inflation, and the months the modules spent stranded in the Gulf.
John McNally, CEO of INEOS Project ONE, said in the July 28 press release: “We are extremely relieved that the last two modules have arrived ‘home’ in Antwerp safely. I am already looking forward to seeing them take their final positions within the overall installation so that we can complete hooking all of our modules together and start up our cracker complex. This marks a significant milestone in the realisation of this project, which is unique in Europe.”
When it comes online, Project ONE will create 450 direct jobs at the Lillo site and thousands more indirectly, while adding 1.45 million tonnes (approximately 1.6 million short tons) of annual ethylene capacity to a European market that has seen roughly 9 percent of its petrochemical production capacity shutter since 2022, according to Bloomberg’s reporting on European chemicals and the Iran war.
The Hormuz war is not over. As of July 30, 2026, the ceasefire that allowed the modules to escape has collapsed, IRGC ballistic missiles struck US positions on July 29, and the question of whether the strait can be reliably reopened for commercial traffic remains unresolved. The modules made it through. The industry’s assumptions about Gulf-yard fabrication did not survive intact.
Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat is INEOS Project ONE and why does it matter?
Project ONE is a €5 billion (approximately $5.77 billion) ethane cracker under construction in the Lillo industrial zone of the Port of Antwerp, Belgium. It will convert ethane shipped from US shale-gas operations into ethylene — the world’s most produced organic chemical, used in everything from food packaging and medical supplies to wind turbine blades and solar panels. When it starts up, expected in the second half of 2027, it will be the first large-scale new ethylene production facility built in Europe in approximately 25 years. Europe has been closing aging, naphtha-based crackers faster than it has been replacing them since 2022; Project ONE is the single largest addition to European ethylene capacity in a generation.
How did the Strait of Hormuz blockade delay an ethylene plant in Belgium?
INEOS fabricated large sections of Project ONE — called modules — at specialist heavy-industry yards in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. When Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz on February 28, 2026, following US-Israeli airstrikes, the heavy-lift ships carrying the two final critical modules were either already in the Persian Gulf or had been unable to depart. Unlike oil tankers, which can reroute via the Cape of Good Hope with a cost penalty, purpose-built heavy-lift ships carrying 7,000-tonne (approximately 7,716-short-ton) industrial structures have no viable alternative route. The modules sat stranded for approximately three and a half months until a one-week ceasefire window in mid-June allowed transit. The ships then sailed via the Suez Canal, arriving in Antwerp on July 28, 2026.
How is Project ONE designed to be more sustainable than existing European crackers?
Three technical features account for the claimed sustainability advantage. First, the cracking process releases large quantities of hydrogen as a byproduct; Project ONE captures and burns this hydrogen as furnace fuel, meeting up to 60 percent of the plant’s energy needs without fossil fuel purchases. Second, every furnace and steam generator is equipped with low-NOx burners and selective catalytic reduction systems, delivering a claimed 71 percent reduction in nitrogen oxide emissions versus conventional cracker designs. Third, the use of ethane rather than naphtha as feedstock produces substantially less carbon dioxide per tonne of ethylene — ethane is a simpler hydrocarbon that requires less process energy to crack. Under a condition attached to its environmental permit, INEOS is also legally obligated to achieve climate neutrality within 10 years of the plant’s startup.
Does the Hormuz crisis affect only energy shipments, or does it disrupt industrial manufacturing more broadly?
The Hormuz crisis has primarily been reported as an energy supply story — crude oil and LNG. But the INEOS module stranding demonstrates that any cargo originating from Gulf fabrication yards faces the same risk. Roughly one-third of global seaborne methanol trade passes through Hormuz, as the World Economic Forum documents, and disruptions have rippled through aluminum, helium, and pharmaceutical raw materials supply chains as well, as Renewable Matter reported. The Project ONE case is the first publicly documented instance of a major European industrial construction project having its critical components physically trapped by the blockade — and it raises questions about whether the industry’s standard model of fabricating large plant sections in Gulf yards and shipping them through Hormuz can be considered reliably low-risk going forward.