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INTRODUCTION

While demand in North America is fairly steady for the last few years, due to the methanol and
synthetic gasoline demand in China, several new production facilities are coming up as shown
in Table 6.

TABLE 6

North America Methanol Expansion Forecast 2012-2016 [132]
New Projects and Re-starts with High Probability (000 Metric Tons)

Name Location Ownership Capacity Timing
Re-starts
OCI-Beaumont Beaumont, TX OCI 750 Q3 2012
Lyondell Channelview, TX Lyondell Base II 740 Q4 2013
Relocations
Former Coastal Plant Pampa, TX G2X Energy 65 Late 2014
Methanex Geismar, LA Methanex 1,000 Q4 2014
New Plants
Celanese Clear Lake, TX Celanese 1,300 Q3 2015
Total 3,855

The world’s largest plant is likely to come up in Texas City which will produce 7.2 MTPA. Most
of the other plants have capacities between 1.5 to 3 MTPA and all these plants are gas based.
The main driver of methanol market for use as fuel is China. To feed Chinese market several
large plants have been announced in 2015 in USA. The first one is going to be the largest
methanol plant in the world as shown in Table 7.

TABLE 7

New Facilities For China [133]
Location Capacity M tons/year
Texas City, Louisiana 7.2
St. Lames Parish, Louisiana 3
Tacoma, Washington 1.6
Oregon 1.6

Already several coal based methanol plants are operating and many more are coming up
in China. About 80% of the methanol produced in China is from coal. However, much of the
current demand is for olefin production. Production is almost doubled from 60 MT between
2015 to 2018 for both methanol and methanol derived olefin production. The demand of DME
was rather low in 2014, hence some of the plants were not operating in full capacity. [134]
Although there is an increase in demand of methanol for fuel application and the production
capacity in China is going to increase but there is some uncertainty due to current surplus
capacity and lower growth of fuel market in North America. The current growth rate of
methanol demand may slow down after 2020 due to alternate carbon neutral energy usage as
transportation fuel.

Methanol and DME Production: Survey and Roadmap | 2017 23