Methanex Cor­po­ra­tion, the Cana­di­an methanol com­pa­ny that op­er­ates on the Point Lisas In­dus­tri­al Es­tate, has com­plet­ed the US$1.2bil­lion ac­qui­si­tion of OCI Glob­al’s in­ter­na­tion­al methanol busi­ness.

Ac­cord­ing to a news re­lease, the trans­ac­tion, first an­nounced in Sep­tem­ber 2024, will in­volve ob­tain­ing two world-scale methanol fa­cil­i­ties in Beau­mont, Texas, which have ac­cess to ro­bust North Amer­i­can nat­ur­al gas feed­stock and one of which al­so pro­duces am­mo­nia.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, as part of the deal, Methanex will en­ter in­to a low-car­bon methanol pro­duc­tion and mar­ket­ing busi­ness, as well as have stake in a cur­rent­ly idled methanol fa­cil­i­ty in the Nether­lands.

The re­lease con­firmed the trans­ac­tion con­sid­er­a­tion con­sists of ap­prox­i­mate­ly US$1.2 bil­lion of cash, ex­clud­ing ad­just­ments to work­ing cap­i­tal and cash ac­quired, the is­suance of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 9.9 mil­lion com­mon shares of Methanex and the as­sump­tion of ap­prox­i­mate­ly $450 mil­lion in debt and leas­es.

Pres­i­dent and CEO of Methanex Rich Sum­n­er said, “We are ex­cit­ed to com­plete this im­por­tant strate­gic ac­qui­si­tion and to wel­come a tal­ent­ed team to Methanex.

“I want to thank the in­di­vid­u­als that worked dili­gent­ly to suc­cess­ful­ly close this ac­qui­si­tion. As we move for­ward, our fo­cus is on en­sur­ing a smooth in­te­gra­tion, main­tain­ing safe and sta­ble op­er­a­tions, and de­liv­er­ing the strate­gic ben­e­fits of this ac­qui­si­tion.”

In con­nec­tion with the trans­ac­tion, Methanex has filed a base shelf prospec­tus with the se­cu­ri­ties reg­u­la­to­ry au­thor­i­ty in the Province of British Co­lum­bia in ac­cor­dance with a cus­tom­ary reg­is­tra­tion rights agree­ment en­tered in­to be­tween Methanex and OCI. The Prospec­tus will al­so be filed with the US Se­cu­ri­ties and Ex­change Com­mis­sion as part of a reg­is­tra­tion state­ment on Form F-10 in ac­cor­dance with the Mul­ti-ju­ris­dic­tion­al Dis­clo­sure Sys­tem es­tab­lished be­tween Cana­da and the Unit­ed States.

Methanex has two methanol plants in Trinidad and To­ba­go, At­las, which the com­pa­ny has a 63.1 per cent in­ter­est in and Ti­tan, of which it owns 100 per cent.

As a re­sult of gas cur­tail­ment is­sues, Methanex idled the Ti­tan plant be­tween 2019 and Sep­tem­ber 2024. In that month, the methanol pro­duc­er shut­down the At­las plant af­ter the ex­pi­ra­tion of its lega­cy 20-year gas sup­ply agree­ment.

“With the idling of At­las and the restart of Ti­tan in Sep­tem­ber 2024 over­all pro­duc­tion in Trinidad is low­er by ap­prox­i­mate­ly 1 mil­lion tonnes an­nu­al­ly,” the com­pa­ny said in its 2024 an­nu­al re­port.

Ti­tan start­ed up in 1999 with name­plate out­put of 850,000 met­ric tonnes per an­num. At­las was com­mis­sioned in 2004 with name­plate pro­duc­tion of 1,890,000 met­ric tonnes per an­num, ac­cord­ing to the Min­istry of En­er­gy web­site.