Natgasoline

Even in tough times like these, companies need to look ahead, to consider what steps they would take--or investments they would make--if, for example, oil prices were to rise to X dollars per barrel, or the cost of drilling and completing a well were to fall by Y%. For methanol producers, these “what-ifs” might include what if methanol prices (holding steady the past few months at $249/metric ton, or MT) were to rebound to where they stood a year ago ($442/MW in May 2015)? Or what if we could add new capacity at a fraction of the cost of new-build? Today, we consider how building more methanol capacity might make sense in the right circumstances.

There’s good reason to be bullish about a skyrocketing trajectory for US methanol production. Natural gas prices are relatively low and likely to stay so; domestic demand for methanol continues to increase; and overseas demand—especially in China—is rising even faster. More than a dozen methanol mega-projects are in various stages of planning, design and construction, most of them along the Gulf Coast. If they were all built (they probably won’t be), US methanol production capacity would increase more than 10-fold to nearly 30 million metric tons per year, and turn the US from a methanol importer to an exporter within two or three years. Today, we look into why methanol demand is rising, what new capacity is under development in the US, and what it all means for natural gas producers.