The major recurring theme – not overly optimistic – was that the market was very susceptible to price shock from oversupply and that prices were headed in a long term, downward trend. The upside, speakers agreed, was that this oversupply would by necessity create new markets in energy supply where there would be healthy long term business.
Kicking off with Coogee Chemicals’, Peter Hood’s comment “methanol in the morning, ethanol in the evening” wryly reflecting on the audience’s previous night’s merriment, the conference heard the full range of methanol-oriented GTL projects.
The Coogee Chemicals proposal is based on an expanded version of their existing Melbourne plant, located on a 300 metre x 70metre vessel producing 1.5 million tonnes per annum.
Chris Hart from Methanol Australia – the reincarnated Timor Sea Petroleum – outlined his plan for a concrete gravity structure (CGS) in 15 metres of water over the Tassie Shoal in NT/P48.
Bring up the rear was Bruce Aitken, MD of Methanex Asia Pacific, the world’s largest methanol producer. He said their Burrup Peninsula proposal was in fact for two trains, stating the fact that Methanex preferred the economics of incremental brownfield development, pointing to their multiple train locations at their major sites around the world.
Evidence of the shrinking margins in the methanol game was in Aitken’s assertion that Methanex would have no onshore USA methanol production within the space of a few years, after closing a score of its smaller, more expensive, plants.
