Chemical companies have fine-tuned their Web sites and are exploring intranets, extranets, and the broader powers of electronic commerce, but for the most part they are just out of the Internet starting gates. In the U.S. alone the petrochemical industry's e-commerce revenues will rocket from $4.7 billion in 1998 to $118.3 billion in 2003, according to Forrester Research. That is in the context of a global Internet economy-including business-to-business and business-to-consumer revenues-that could leap from $55-$80 billion to $1.8-$3.2 trillion over the same period.