Chemical industry plants and projects, tracked since 2013
chemXplore is a record of what is being built in the chemical industry: who is building what, where, and when. Every project is followed from the first announcement through engineering, the investment decision, construction and start-up, with the companies on it, what it will make, and the plant it belongs to. Every fact carries the source it came from.
We publish news as well, and it is read widely, but the news is not the point of it. An article is evidence: what it says about a project is recorded on that project, and the article stays attached to it. What you can search, follow and rely on is the record the articles feed.
In depth across Europe since 2013, and a growing view of the rest of the world. The industry as we track it, today:
Those numbers are counted from the record as this page loads, not written into it. Alongside the projects sit the plants they belong to, the parks and clusters they sit in, and the substances they will make or use.
chemXplore was built by people who lived the problem. Cees Verhagen and Corné Verbruggen founded Darueber BV in 2013 as a specialist consultancy for the chemical industry. Following the industry closely was the work itself: assessing a site, sizing a market or judging a competitor meant knowing which plants existed, who ran them, and what was being built. So from 2013 they kept records of it — project by project, assignment by assignment.
Those records outgrew the assignments that produced them. The tracking became a system, used by others before it had a name, and in 2024 it was opened to the public as chemXplore: one model instead of a file per question, a source attached to every fact, a review before anything lands, and monitoring that runs whether or not someone is asking. It has been developed actively ever since.
Entries from the early years were compiled from what was published at the time, so they can be coarser than what we record today — a date we only know to the year is kept as a year, never sharpened to look precise. What carried over from that decade is the judgement: what counts as a project, which developments are worth recording, and where the line runs between something a company has committed to and something it has merely said.
A record is only worth keeping if it answers questions. With a subscription, these are the kind you can put to it and get a list back, not an impression:
Each answer is a filtered list you can map, refine and keep. Save a search and an email arrives when something new matches it. And every fact in the answer shows where it came from, so the work can be checked rather than believed.
We monitor hundreds of sources across the industry, continuously, and read what they publish. Where an article says something about a project we track, that becomes a fact on the project: a stage reached and when, a company added in a named role, a capacity, an investment. Where it describes a project we do not hold yet, it becomes a new one. Nothing lands without the source it came from, and a person reviews it before it does.
The stages are the industry's own: announced, engineering, investment decision, construction, commissioning, operational. Dates are kept at the precision they were reported at — a month stays a month, a year stays a year — and a date still in the future is marked as expected, never as something that has happened. When new information about a project appears, the project is updated rather than left as it was written.
The same record feeds everything: the pages on this site, the Weekly newsletter and the subscription.
Builds the pipelines that keep the record filled, and rebuilds them as the tools get better: sources read automatically, with a person checking where accuracy decides the answer. Twenty years of turning scattered information into structured data, and a degree in artificial intelligence — enough to judge a new technique on what it does rather than what it is called, and to put it to work where it earns its place.
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Chemist, 25 years in the bio-tech and process industries. He decides what counts as a project, and whether a source really supports what it is taken to say — the judgement the record rests on. Knowing the processes and the technology behind a plant, he reads the principle a project follows rather than the announcement about it, and that is what shapes the model: which fields are worth holding, and which checks the system can then run on its own.
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chemXplore is a product of Darueber BV, registered with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce under number 82353735.
For partnership and commercial enquiries: [email protected]
