A wide propane discount should make the LPG switch look straightforward.
For September 2026, OPIS put the Far East propane-to-Japan naphtha swap at a $93/mt discount as of 10 August. OPIS says flexible crackers are typically motivated to favor LPG when that spread moves wider than roughly $50/mt.
A year earlier, the same OPIS instrument for September cargoes was at a $50.93/mt discount. On OPIS's own $/mt convention, the 2026 spread was $42.07/mt wider. Both years were already on the LPG-favorable side of OPIS's roughly $50/mt motivation threshold, so this is context rather than a clean elasticity test.
Asia's September 2026 LPG-cracking plan was 400,000 mt, 14.9% below the initial September 2025 plan of 469,800 mt. June and July actual cracking had already been about 13.5% and 14.3% below their 2025 comparators, and the September survey was collected with Lotte's planned Daesan shutdown already known.
The useful tension is therefore not that one wider spread "failed." It is that the regional LPG rate stayed lower even though the price screen alone did not explain the gap.
The question for a naphtha desk is narrower: how much of the lower LPG rate can plausibly become incremental naphtha demand, and how much belongs to something else?
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