Low oil price bears potentials for the coatings industry

The last years have shown a lot of activities to find alternatives to oil-based raw materials in coatings formulations. The use of costly raw materials has been reduced in order to optimize formulations – in general regarding costs. Now we are having unusual situation in market with lower prices. Ludger Küper, chairman of VILF (Association of Coating Engineers), sees a huge potential in the low prices: due to lower costs the performance of a coatings system can become the sole priority number one again and allows to add a little more of a certain raw material. The situation also bears the potential to start R&D projects that had been benched as they were not profitable, but now are showing interesting perspectives. As he and most likely many of us expect the prices for oil will increase sooner or later, the time is now to make use of this unusual situation. I think this is a quite interesting view on the situation and calls for action. What is your opinion?