Recently, OCI announced plans to double the green methanol production capacity of its existing methanol and ammonia production complex in Beaumont, Texas, to 400,000 tons per year.
The company said expansion plans include entering into renewable natural gas (RNG) supply agreements for more than 15,000 million British thermal units per day and acquiring waste development rights from the City of Beaumont. OCI's first upstream RNG production facility is scheduled to begin production in the first quarter of 2025. Green methanol will be produced using a mixture of renewable feedstocks, including RNG, green hydrogen and other feedstocks, the company added.
OCI currently has 200,000 tonnes/year of renewable methanol capacity at Beaumont, which supplies the product to industries including the road and shipping fuel markets, as well as other industrial applications. The company said this will be the first time it has added green hydrogen-based e-methanol to its production mix. OCI predicts that based on the 225 dual-fuel methanol ships currently ordered by the shipping industry, the incremental demand for green methanol will exceed 6 million tons/year by 2028.
In September last year, OCI announced plans to build a 1.1 million tons/year blue ammonia plant in Beaumont, scheduled to start production in the first quarter of 2025. The company said it will increase production facilities and double its blue ammonia production capacity to 2.2 million tons per year by building a second production line of similar scale. The project aims to transition from blue ammonia production to green ammonia production in the future as green hydrogen becomes available on a large scale. In February this year, Linde announced that it had signed a long-term agreement to supply clean hydrogen and other gases to OCI for Beaumont’s blue ammonia project.