Methanex, the world's largest methanol pro­duc­er, is in­creas­ing­ly will­ing to move its plants from one coun­try to an­oth­er to take ad­van­tage of nat­ur­al gas sup­plies, and could one day choose to move its plant from New Zealand, ac­cord­ing to a re­port Fri­day in the Na­tion­al Busi­ness Re­view.

In re­marks dur­ing a pan­el ses­sion at a pe­tro­le­um con­fer­ence in Welling­ton, New Zealand man­ag­er Har­vey Weake said the dis­man­tling of a Methanex plant in Chile and its trans­fer to a site in Louisiana was part of a plan where Methanex "will be tak­ing a more flex­i­ble ap­proach on equip­ment, to mov­ing it around". That could in­clude New Zealand "if we have to", he said. How­ev­er, there is no im­mi­nent like­li­hood of such a de­ci­sion.

Methanex is a ma­jor pro­duc­er of methanol in Trinidad and To­ba­go, op­er­at­ing a two-plant fa­cil­i­ty at the Point Lisas In­dus­tri­al Es­tate that has a pro­duc­tion ca­pac­i­ty of 2.7 mil­lion tonnes of methanol per year. mak­ing this an im­por­tant pro­duc­tion cen­tre in the or­ga­ni­za­tion's net­work.

The Methanex-owned Ti­tan Plant has an an­nu­al pro­duc­tion ca­pac­i­ty of 900,000 tonnes, while the At­las Plant, which is a joint ven­ture be­tween Methanex Cor­po­ra­tion (63.1 per cent) and BP Trinidad and To­ba­go LLC (36.9 per cent), has an an­nu­al pro­duc­tion ca­pac­i­ty of 1.8 mil­lion tonnes per year.

Methanex has been rein­vest­ing heav­i­ly in its two methanol pro­duc­tion chains at Mo­tonui, as new sup­plies of com­pet­i­tive­ly priced nat­ur­al gas have come to mar­ket in New Zealand, af­ter wind­ing back lo­cal pro­duc­tion in the ear­ly 2000s, when gas sup­plies tight­ened and prices rose. It is al­so con­sid­er­ing re­open­ing its moth­balled plant near­by at Wait­ara as the out­look for gas sup­plies in New Zealand sug­gests sev­er­al years of low-cost gas are be­com­ing avail­able.

The con­fer­ence ses­sion was chaired by Edi­son Re­search In­ter­na­tion­al's New Zealand head John Kidd, who de­scribed how nat­ur­al gas had risen to as high as $9 a Gi­ga­joule in the ear­ly 2000s, but had dropped to around $5 per GJ in re­cent times as elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­a­tors start­ed switch­ing out of gas to pro­duce elec­tric­i­ty and us­ing coal, ge­ot­her­mal and wind en­er­gy. Where­as elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­a­tors were us­ing around 100 peta­joules of gas an­nu­al­ly a decade ago, that had fall­en to 40 PJs in the last year, with Methanex tak­ing up the slack as new gas fields were brought on stream.