Dutch fertilizer company OCI N.V. announced Thursday it planned to build the largest methanol plant in the United States, which is believed to have a methanol shortage of about 5 million tonnes.
The projected plant will be built in Beaumont, a city about 48 kilometers from the Gulf of Mexico, at a cost of more than 1 billion U.S. dollars. And it will be able to produce about 1.75 million tonnes of methanol per year upon completion, according to the reports posted Thursday on the website of the Chronicile, an English daily newspaper.
The company also has another methanol plant in Beaumont, with a production capacity of 730,000 tonnes per year, which accounts for 80 percent of the U.S.'s methanol production available for the market. The plant was bought two years ago and is undergoing expansion.
According to Nassef Sawiris, chief executive officer (CEO) of the Dutch company, the new methanol plan, which will be constructed on a separate piece of land in Beaumont, will employ 240 people when it starts production in 2016.
OCI N.V., which employs more than 75,000 people in 35 countries and regions, recently also built a 1.8 billion U.S. dollars nitrogen fertilizer plant in the U.S. state of Iowa.