Chemical companies in Houston: the plants, the Ship Channel cluster and the companies behind them

This report is for buyers sourcing chemicals or toll manufacturing in Houston, engineers and operators weighing employers, and contractors and B2B sellers whose customers are chemical plants. It covers the Census count, EPA's named facility list, the public companies and how to approach the plants.

Houston chemicals in Census data

US Census Bureau County Business Patterns (CBP) 2023, NAICS 325 (Chemical Manufacturing), Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX Metro Area (CBSA 26420):

What the plants make

Average pay is our calculation, payroll divided by employees. Basic chemicals and resins together are 237 of the 473 plants (50%) but 29,069 of the jobs (75%). That is the profile of a commodity cluster: a few dozen very large plants making base chemicals and plastics, surrounded by smaller specialty and formulation plants. Within basic chemicals, 74 plants (8,722 employees) make other organic chemicals and 25 make industrial gases.

How big the plants are

In broad bands, 233 plants have fewer than 20 employees, 143 have 20 to 99 and 97 have 100 or more, including 16 with 500 or more.

Where they are

The Census Bureau published Waller County's employee count but flagged it as high-noise (changed by 5% or more by the noise it adds for confidentiality), so we leave it out. Harris County has 69% of the plants. Brazoria (211 employees per plant) and Chambers (164) have far fewer but much larger sites, while Fort Bend and Montgomery plants average 42 to 45 people. CBP counts establishments with paid employees, not companies; a company's head office is usually classed under management of companies rather than chemicals.

The plants by name: EPA's Toxics Release Inventory

Census doesn't name plants. EPA's Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) does: a facility in a covered industry with 10 or more full-time employees that handles listed chemicals above set thresholds must report each year (40 CFR 372.22). In the TRI basic data file for 2024, 195 facilities in the Houston metro's counties report chemical manufacturing as their primary industry, 116 of them basic chemical plants.

By county, 135 are in Harris, 26 in Brazoria, 10 in Galveston and 9 in Chambers. The parent companies with the most of these facilities in the TRI file are LyondellBasell (5), Dow (4), Occidental (4) and Kuraray (4). Occidental's chemical business, OxyChem, has since been sold to Berkshire Hathaway, a deal Occidental's 2025 10-K says closed on 2 January 2026. TRI is the closest thing to a free public list of Houston chemical plants, with names, addresses, parent companies and NAICS codes.

Pasadena, Deer Park, La Porte and Baytown line the Houston Ship Channel. Port Houston says the Houston Ship Channel complex has more than 200 private and eight public terminals along its 52 miles, makes it the nation's largest port for waterborne tonnage, and ranked first in foreign waterborne tonnage in 2024 at 220.1 million short tons.

Chemical makers headquartered in the metro

Headquarters and plants are different maps. Westlake Chemical Partners' ethylene plants are in Lake Charles, Louisiana and Calvert City, Kentucky, and CVR Partners makes fertilizer at a plant in Coffeyville, Kansas, so their Houston presence is a head office. LyondellBasell, by contrast, ships ethylene and propylene from its Channelview and La Porte plants by pipeline, according to its 10-K. EDGAR's chemical codes also include about a dozen Houston-area drug developers; see manufacturing companies in Houston for the wider factory base.

How to vet a Houston chemical supplier

1. Find the plant, not just the brand. Use TRI to see which site would make your product, its parent company and its primary NAICS code.
2. Check its environmental record. EPA's Envirofacts TRI search shows each facility's reported releases and waste management; the TCEQ Central Registry finds the state's regulated entities and their permit numbers.
3. Ask how product moves. Pipeline, barge, rail and truck access differ by site, and a Ship Channel terminal changes your freight cost.
4. Check capacity and redundancy. Ask whether a second plant can supply you during a turnaround or a storm shutdown, and get it in writing.
5. Audit before you sign. Visit the site, review its quality certificates and safety performance, and trial one product before moving volume.

Selling to Houston chemical plants

Large plants plan maintenance turnarounds well ahead and buy from approved contractor lists, so the first sale is usually getting qualified, not winning a job. Smaller formulators decide faster and buy from people who answer the phone.

Illustrative example. The seller, prices and win rate are invented; the counts are from Census data.

Bayport Hydro (bayporthydro.example) cleans heat exchangers and tanks. Its targets are the 94 Houston plants with 100 to 999 employees, big enough to run several exchanger bundles but rarely staffed to clean them in-house. If it wins 8% of them (7 plants) at $180,000 a year of scheduled and turnaround work each, that's $1.26 million a year. It starts with plants in Pasadena, La Porte and Baytown that are posting turnaround or reliability jobs. Bebop can find plants matching that description and draft the first email.

Subject: Exchanger cleaning before your [season] turnaround

Hi [first name],

I saw [company]'s [city] plant is hiring for its turnaround, which usually means a long list of exchanger bundles to pull and clean.

We hydroblast bundles on site or at our yard, with a fixed turnaround price and cleaning records for each bundle.

Could we get on your contractor list before scopes are final?

[Your name]

Houston sources

Next step: for the refiners and producers that supply Houston's chemical plants, read the report on oil and gas companies in Houston.