THE FUSE

On the Mediterranean edge of Port Said, where the Suez Canal hands ships off to Europe, a tangle of steel towers does something quietly improbable. It takes propane, heats it, strips away hydrogen and turns the gas into propylene, then spins that into small white pellets of polypropylene. The plant was the first in the world to run the process at commercial scale. The pellets it makes end up, often enough, woven into the carpets that carry the Khamis name into more than 130 countries. The woman who signed off on the financing that built it does not run the carpet company. She built the machine that feeds it.