We're gonna get it started. Thank you all for attending our Investor Day here in Geismar, Louisiana. A special welcome to the investors and analysts joining us virtually. We appreciate that this is a major time commitment, particularly for those that are here with us in person. Thank you. We hope that you'll find the presentations today from myself and the other members of our executive leadership team to be useful in expanding your understanding of our company. I want to remind everyone that our remarks today may contain forward-looking statements and non-GAAP measures. You can refer to the slide at the end of the presentation, which has been posted on our website for more information.
Before we move into the detailed presentations, I would like to start with a brief overview of our strategy, a look back on what we have delivered over the past 10 years, and the investment thesis looking forward. Each share of Methanex represents an investment in the global methanol market leader. We have the leading market share, cost-competitive assets, and a franchise value that is difficult to replicate. Our vision of global methanol leadership has been our unwavering goal since the company's inception in 1992, and we've had a clear and consistent strategy to achieve this. Through the strategic pillars of leadership, operational excellence, and low cost, we create a sustainable competitive advantage of unmatched security of supply to our customers. Our strategy was tested in 2020 when the world was shut down by the COVID-19 pandemic.
We learned some important lessons during that challenging time, including that our strategy works even under pressure. I'm very proud of our global team and how they worked together under difficult circumstances to ensure that the company continued to operate and deliver value to shareholders. I'm happy to say that we've come out of the experience a stronger and more resilient organization. As the industry leader, we are committed to growing with the market. Our highly advantaged G3 or Geismar 3 project will allow us to maintain our market share and significantly increase our cash generation capability. Vanessa James will discuss the competitive advantage that we have gained from our market leadership. About 13% market share is roughly double the size of our largest competitor.
Another key aspect of our market leadership is having a global presence across all markets, and Rich Sumner and Kevin Henderson will talk to. Our global supply chain gives us enormous flexibility and agility to deliver on our commitments to our customers. Although size is important, we believe that it's leadership that is more impactful as this allows us to lead all aspects of the methanol industry, including market development, safety, product stewardship, and sustainability. We are proud to be the leaders in safety and sustainability in our industry and are committed to reducing our assets' carbon intensity by 10% by 2030, among other sustainability initiatives that will be discussed later this afternoon. I wanted to take this opportunity to take a quick look back to see where we've come as a company over the past 10 years.
We have improved our safety performance to be in the top quartile and have enhanced our reliability. Improved safety and reliability performance, coupled with the relocation of G1 and G2 to Geismar, the two low capital and high return growth projects with our G1 and G2 debottlenecks, and the Chile IV restart, has driven strong produced sales growth. For 2022, we expect to continue strong production of approximately 7 million tons. Later this afternoon, Kevin Henderson will discuss the strategic initiatives that the company is currently pursuing in the areas of safety and reliability. Reliability is important as it enables us to provide secure supply to our customers, lower our CO2 intensity, and enhance profitability, as the last ton produced is always the most profitable. I strongly believe that safety and reliability go hand in hand.
Over the past 10 years, our growth in low-cost production assets and robust pricing has driven record EBITDA for the company. Our excellent track record of capital discipline and accretive capital allocation has allowed us to return over $2 billion to shareholders and invest approximately $3 billion to grow the business. Looking forward, I want to lay out the compelling thesis to invest in Methanex, the leading global pure-play methanol producer. First, we are the leader in the industry with a positive long-term outlook. The methanol industry is forecast to experience demand growth and limited supply additions in the next five years, which drive a favorable industry outlook. This supply-demand dynamic should support pricing. We believe G3 will start commercial production when the industry needs supply.
Being the leader in the methanol industry allows us to be the supplier of choice to our top-tier global customers as we can offer them quality product and security of supply because of our global asset portfolio, dedicated shipping company, and local customer services. Our asset portfolio has strong cash flow generation capability over a range of methanol prices. That cash capability will grow significantly with the addition of G3. We also have the potential to further increase that capability with improved gas availability in Trinidad, New Zealand, and Chile. We have a strong track record of disciplined capital allocation. We are committed to returning excess cash we generate to shareholders after maintaining our business and growing where it makes sense.
As the world transitions to a low carbon economy, we are well-positioned in an industry with a product that will continue to be needed as a path to be low or zero carbon. We have an innovative opportunities for our existing asset portfolio, as well as for new projects to lower our greenhouse gas emissions. We have dedicated resources in place to ensure that we are well-positioned to continue the lead in a low carbon economy. We believe Methanex represents excellent value for value investors with attractive growing free cash generation capability with G3 coming online. I hope you enjoyed the presentations today, and I'll be back at the podium to answer questions at the end of the afternoon.
For that, I'll now turn the podium over to Rich Sumner, our Senior VP Marketing and Logistics, to give a market update and talk about our competitive advantage and our security of supply.
Thanks, John, and good afternoon, everyone. Today, I'll be discussing a number of topics. First, I'm gonna start with key industry fundamentals. On the demand side, we'll look at the current makeup of demand, what we're seeing around demand growth in 2021 and 2022. Then I'll discuss some of the new and emerging applications for methanol as a low emission fuel. On the supply side, we'll take a look at firm capacity additions, and then combine that demand and supply into how that translates into tight industry balances going forward. Finally, we'll take a look at what we see as Methanex unique leadership position in the industry, and how we achieve that. First, let's start with demand.
We currently estimate the market's about 85 million-90 million tons, and we split the market into three broad segments. The first is traditional chemical applications, the second is MTO or methanol to olefins, and the third is energy-related applications. Traditional chemical applications makes up 50% of demand, and this includes products like formaldehyde, acetic acid, methyl methacrylate, silicones, and others that goes into a broad and diversified set of consumer and industrial products. MTO makes up about 15%-20% of demand. That's really 11 plants, world-scale plants in China that each consume 1.5 million-2 million tons of methanol in the production of ethylene and propylene, which then is used in the further into production in through the olefins chain.
Energy-related demand makes up the remaining 30%-35% of demand, and about 2/3 of that goes into well-developed fuel applications like MTBE, which is an oxygenate in gasoline, and in the production of biodiesel. About a third of that is in the new and emerging applications that I'll speak to in a slide. In terms of demand growth into 2021 and into 2022, we've seen strong demand in traditional chemical applications. By their nature, they tend to grow at GDP rates, and we've seen strong GDP growth around the world underpinned by strong consumer demand. For energy-related demand, transportation fuels have also been stronger post-pandemic, and that combined with high energy prices as well as supportive emissions regulations is helping fuel demand for those applications.
On the MTO side, we saw high operating rates through 2021 until late into the fourth quarter when operating rates declined for a number of different factors. One of those being energy restrictions imposed by the Chinese government. Since that time, we've seen those restrictions removed, and the MTO industry's operating around 80%-90% rates, which is consistent with historical operating rates. We also expect to see a 1.8 million-ton MTO unit, the Bohai unit in North China, starting up in the second half of 2022. Overall, we're seeing strong demand, and obviously, we're continuing to monitor a lot of the global economic headwinds that are out there to see what impact that could have on forward demand growth.
Anyway, I'll say over a five-year period, taking a 3% growth rate, we would see the industry needs about 14 million tons of new supply to balance the market. Now, I wanted to take a closer look at these cleaner burning applications, so I'm gonna focus on three of those. The first one is thermal applications in China. As part of China's policies to improve air quality, we're seeing methanol being used to displace coal in industrial, commercial, and residential boilers, kilns, and furnaces. We're also seeing it being used in residential and commercial cooking stoves as a cooking fuel. We would estimate that today there's about 4 million-5 million tons of demand into those applications in China.
Then secondly, I wanted to highlight, methanol being used as a vehicle fuel. It's really being used both as a cleaner burning fuel, but also as a substitute for imported diesel and gasoline. This can be achieved through low-level blending, which has been adopted in China, and it's also being looked at in India as well as various countries in Europe and Latin America. This can also be achieved through M100 fuels. Geely, who's one of the largest automobile manufacturer in China, has developed both car and heavy-duty truck technology for M100. Today, this technology is supported by various national ministries in China, especially for inland provinces where it's high cost, gasoline, and diesel.
Today, we would... Geely has launched taxi fleet programs in various cities across China, and we would say there's about 30,000 M100 vehicles operating today. They also just launched their first fleet of heavy-duty trucks, which is 1,000 trucks. There's about half million to 1 million tons of demand into those applications today. Lastly, I want to talk about methanol marine fuel, and I'll get more detail on the next slide on the marine fuel. Over time, the IMO has placed more stringent emissions requirements on the marine industry that started with SOx and NOx emissions. Now, as part of their own greenhouse gas strategy, they've set targets around CO2 reduction. That's 40% by 2030 and 70% by 2050.
When we look at the attributes for methanol as a fuel, methanol reduces SOx and particulate matter up to 95% and NOx up to 80%. Because there's various proven pathways to reduce the carbon footprint of methanol all the way to zero, it's been increasingly looked at by the marine industry. A bit of history on the marine side. As part of meeting these cleaner emissions, Methanex, Waterfront Shipping, MOL and our partners, including MAN Energy Solutions, developed the first methanol dual-fueled chemical tanker technology. We've been operating these vessels since 2016. This has really put us in a leadership position there from a technology perspective.
The vessels are on their third generation, and we're in a lot of discussions with a lot of shipping companies in relation to this application. We expect this to continue to gain interest and momentum. You'll see here we say that there's 65 dual-fuel vessels within the 2025-2026. These are vessels, including our own 19 vessels that are actually on order and will be in the water by those dates. You'll see the big name here obviously is Maersk, and Maersk has 13 container ships on order. We're starting to see a lot of interest across different segments in the marine space. Container ships, dry bulk, ferry, cruise lines, tug and barge, all looking at that.
What we see also is the OEMs beyond MAN, Wärtsilä, Rolls-Royce, Caterpillar, all developing methanol dual-fuel technology to meet their customer needs. Just last week, CMA CGM, who's a top five container shipping company in the world, just ordered 6 new dual-fueled container ships, and those would consume around 200,000-300,000 tons of methanol operating at 100% of the time. A very exciting area. Methanex is doing a lot to support this. From a project perspective, we're involved with the FASTWATER project in Europe, which is in a consortium with the Port of Antwerp and ABC on doing demonstration retrofits of various vessels. We're also sharing a lot of operational and technical experience with various shipping companies that are interested in the application.
On the bunkering side, we're working with the Methanol Institute to promote the availability of methanol at all major ports in the world and also the ease of bunkering. In 2021, we partnered with the Port of Rotterdam and Vopak to do the first methanol demonstration bunkering. Obviously on the supply side, we're in real discussions with shipping companies on supply, whether it be conventional methanol availability as well as lower carbon alternatives. A very exciting area, and we're actively developing this. Now, switching from demand to supply outlook. This graph shows supply additions over the past few years, and then a look forward to capacity additions in the next five years. When you look at the forecast of firm supply, beyond G3, there's really no capacity additions in the Atlantic markets.
We really have good visibility on this given the typical project development cycle. When you look beyond G3, really the additions to the industry is coming from Malaysia, a project in Malaysia, China and Iran. When we think about Iran, there's a lot of uncertainty as to the timing of those projects, as well as the amount of actual supply that we'll see. Since 2018, Iran has brought on a number of world-scale methanol projects, and we've seen those operate at very intermittent basis, look at relatively low operating rates. We believe that's for a number of reasons, natural gas restrictions, plant technical issues, utility issues. The amount of supply that would come on, highly uncertain.
This means firm new capacity additions are likely to be insufficient to meet growing demand, and the industry would need to operate at higher rates to balance the market. There are a number of other projects in the Middle East, Africa and Russia, but we feel a lot of those are at very early stages. This next slide puts together industry demand using a 3% growth rate and supply using only firm capacity additions. The yellow line is what would be required in terms of increasing operating rates in the industry to balance the market. You can see that there's a meaningful increase required. This would have to come from various jurisdictions, be it China, Iran, Trinidad, Europe, among others.
There's obviously a lot of limitations to the capability of doing that, whether it's high cost or constrained feedstock, geopolitical issues, technical issues or other constraints. When we see the industry balance going forward, we look at it as a really tight market and one that highlights the attractiveness of bringing G3 into the market today. One last point on the market I wanted to make is in relation to the olefins market and the impact on MTO and MTO affordability. The olefins market has gone through a period of demand outpacing supply, and that's really on the back of capacity additions that were added or plants that were committed to back in the 2013, 2015 period where we had really high oil pricing and a very tight olefins market.
Those supply additions have come into the market, and even though we've seen a run-up in energy prices, we've still seen quite a squeeze on olefins margins over the past few years. When you look at Wood Mackenzie's view of industry supply balances in the olefins market, you see that the demand supply balance gets much healthier to a balance and then actually moves and reverses into more of a demand outpacing supply. We think that actually provides at a relative oil pricing more support to olefin ethylene and propylene prices going forward and MTO affordability. Finally bringing it back to methanol pricing. This is just a really illustrative snapshot of the industry cost curve. Just make a few observations.
It's a relatively steep cost curve, which is represented on the right-hand side by high cost marginal coal production and natural gas production in China. Our assets are well-positioned at the mid to low end of the cost curve, which allows us to operate at all points in the cycle. At higher energy pricing, we believe that it better supports MTO affordability as well as affordability into other energy applications, these new and emerging technologies. Now I'll bring it back to Methanex and Methanex's industry leadership position. As John said, we're the world's largest methanol producer and marketer with about 13% of total merchant market on global sales. This slide shows demand and our regional global sales reach with major positions in all regions in the world. This is only possible through our global integrated supply chain.
That really starts with our methanol assets, regionally diversified in New Zealand, Chile, Trinidad, U.S., Canada, and Egypt. Together with Waterfront Shipping, which is now 60/40% JV with MOL, we operate 30 dedicated time charters that flexibly deliver from our manufacturing sites into our marketing regions. Within each marketing region, we have our offices that are managing an extensive network of terminals, and also managing our in-region logistics capabilities with our long-standing service providers. All this allows us to really tailor needs to our customers in different countries, locations, and also delivery mode, be it vessel, barge, pipeline, rail, truck. We're a global company.
We today sell in approximately 30 countries to 150 customers and have well over 500 actual delivery points or ship to locations in our network. This globally integrated businesses allows us to have scale to manage an efficient, reliable supply chain. Together with our commitment to Responsible Care all through the value chain, we're able to meet our customers' needs for safety, quality, and reliability anywhere in the world. It's why we believe we're the preferred supplier to major consumers in the methanol markets. You know, we also think this has created a franchise that's very difficult to replicate, and obviously we continue to invest and improve. It's really our one team execution that's at the heart of the success. Lastly, just before we move into the wrap up, I wanted to mention Waterfront Shipping.
It's already noted it's a key part of our integrated supply chain. We're really excited about the involvement of MOL. They now own 40% of Waterfront Shipping. It's a 30-year relationship, and they bring over 200 years of shipping experience, which we think is gonna be great for our shipping business. We'll be operating 19 dual fuel vessels, what we're looking forward to is really advancing with a world leader, methanol as a low emission marine fuel. Just to wrap up with some key points. Really emphasizing you know, demand growth forecasted to outpace capacity, supply and capacity, higher operating rates needed to balance the market.
Higher energy pricing supporting MTO affordability as well as affordability of these new and emerging applications. Really that we continue to invest in our global integrated supply chain, which we think gives us a competitive advantage as leading supplier to the industry. Thank you. Now I'll turn it over to Kevin.
Good afternoon. I'm gonna start with Responsible Care. One thing about Responsible Care is it's not just safety. Responsible Care is an ethic, and it covers all parts of our business. Responsible Care is all about your management. It's the overall, it's a management system. It covers employee training, it covers engineering systems, it covers off safety programs, environmental programs. It's all aspects. We've been verified by Responsible Care since 1997. We're the first company in the world to verify all our companies around the globe. What you've seen here in Geismar around safety and the behaviors and things, you will see at every single one of our plants. It's consistent approach across our organization. Just talking on these few topics that I've got there. Personal safety is core to our business.
We want people to come in every single day and leave at the end of the day exactly the same way that they came, with all their bits and parts and everything in the same place. It's really core to us and our business, and we strive for perfection in this area on a continuous basis. The next area is environment, and we meet all our local requirements and regulations in every jurisdiction, and we don't have varying standards from one region to the other. It's consistent across the whole organization, and we continuously upgrade our existing assets to continue to meet all those expectations. It's not relying on how that plant was built or using that as an excuse. We continue to improve across the organization. Process safety is fundamental.
I mean, process safety is these big events that could really damage our plants or hurt people or things like that. We've had a lot of focus in this area. We've completed safety case analysis of all our assets around the world, and we continue to improve in the area of process safety. A Responsible Care culture is a key element of Methanex. If you talk to people within the company, they'll say Responsible Care is the glue that holds our company together. It's an ethic, and everybody believes in it, and everybody has goals around Responsible Care on their annual goals. We believe it, we live it, and we continue to strive to improve in this area. One of the codes within Responsible Care is stewardship and accountability. We work with all of our suppliers.
We work with all of our terminals. We work with the shipping companies. We share practices around safety with Methanex, with methanol. We go out, and we do training, fire training with our emergency response companies. We look at routing to make sure it's the safest route. All those things are core to what we do. The other areas around community involvement. We have community advisory panels in every jurisdiction that we have, and we meet with them. We talk about how our business is going, what are the risks. When we build a new facility like Geismar 3, we involve our community advisory panel, where they look at the risk. We make sure that we don't impact our neighbors or impact them to as minimal amount as possible.
As I said, safety is our number one priority, and occupational safety is one of those metrics. You can see over the years, we continue to improve in our occupational safety area by measurement of recordable injuries. Recordable injuries is measuring after the fact, and we wanna be more proactive. We have programs in place that are continuing to push us to improve, and those programs are things like leadership presence. We have a goal of all of our leaders to be out into our facilities on a regular basis, continuing to push that bar higher and continuing to have higher and higher expectations on in the area of safety. The other thing we've done is we've introduced a hazard recognition program.
That hazard recognition program is around getting out there, all our employees, all our leaders, looking for those hazards where we could have somebody get injured, and remove those before something happens. The other thing we have is a program called "Switch On" to Responsible Care, and that's all about capturing their hearts and minds and getting people involved in what's important to them. Why do they come to work every day? Why do they want to be safe? What are those things important? Their family, their sports, whatever it might be, what's important to them, and think about that before they make a decision. The other area of big focus has been contractor management. We've really stepped up our game with regard to contractor management, with regard to evaluating them, with regard to who do they bring on site, what are their qualifications.
Recently in Egypt, as an example, the team interviewed every single person that's coming on that site for a turnaround so that they could understand what's their qualifications. Do they understand? Do they work safely? It's really stepping that bar up in this area. Another metric we use is potential or severe injuries, and these are injuries that somebody could have a debilitating injury, so they have a lifelong injury that they're gonna have to live with, where they don't have the same mobility or the same use of their body that they might have had before, or somebody could actually be killed. These are what we call PSIFs, so potential severe injury or fatalities.
We focused on these, and we started looking at, are there events that are happening that these things could happen? We do a detailed dive on these in order to make sure that they're not gonna happen. We put things in place to prevent them from occurring in the future. Our PSIF number continues to come down, and that's because we're focusing on it. Again, that's being more proactive and not being reactive to the things after they occur. Our whole program is trying to get to be more proactive, let's do something about it before it happens versus waiting for it to happen. As I mentioned, process safety is critical to our business.
We've implemented a robust safety, process safety program, and you can see our tier events are down. They're still not down to zero where we want to be, but you can see that we consistently have about one tier one event each year, and our tier two events have come down dramatically over time because of that focus that we're giving. Now we're going down to what we call tier three events, and we're increasing our focus on all of those incidents in order to lower that bar even further and hopefully get to zero across the whole organization. When we do have a tier event, we learn from it. We do a detailed deep dive on these tier events.
You may have remembered in 2019, we had a significant event in Egypt where we had a steam header that ruptured on us and did significant damage to our facility. That incident, we went back and looked at how the design was of that plant, how it was built, and we took those learnings from that, and we've applied it across our organization. Everything we learn has gone into the G3 project to make sure that it doesn't happen there. We've also shared that incident outside Methanex because we don't want this to happen to someone else. It's all about learning and development and improving the organization. Again, another area of focus for us is environmental.
We continue to stay focused in this area, and you can see that our major incidents and serious incidents have dropped off dramatically. We're really talking about the minor incidents now. We're getting into the detail and starting to assess every single little leak that we have, understand how do we prevent them occurring. Because if we can stop them at that point, it's less likely that we're gonna have bigger events in the future. Again, another area of continuous focus for us. A little bit about our plants. I think most of you are aware of our plants that we have and we operate. I will start with Geismar.
We have Geismar 1 and 2, and those plants were built at 1 million tons each, so 2 million tons capacity, and we debottleneck these by importing CO2. Earlier on, we talked about that, Geismar 1 and 2 are hydrogen rich, and we import CO2, and we're able to make more production. We're now 2.2 million tons per year there. These plants originally were in Chile as Chile III and IV, and we moved them up here, and they were commissioned, both of them came on stream in 2015. These plants are some of our best operating plants. Energy efficiency on the Geismar 1 and 2 are around 35.5 gigajoules per ton, and that's kinda mid-cycle numbers.
Our new G3 facility is gonna be about 31.4 gigajoules per ton, which will be one of the best in the world. Geismar is an extremely attractive facility for us. The next plant is Medicine Hat. Medicine Hat's 640,000 tons. Again, this is an area where we was our first CO2 injection. Again, it's a steam methane reforming facility with excess hydrogen. We inject CO2 from a neighboring CO2 plant into our process, and we've been able to bump up our production. That plant was originally built at about 480,000 tons, and we've been able to debottleneck it up to 640,000. Significant improvement across that plant. That plant is backed up with a long-term gas contract into the next decade.
It's well-positioned. New Zealand, we currently have our two larger plants operating there, and they're producing around 1.5 million metric tons per year. We do have the potential to expand that production in a number of ways if we got a little bit higher CO2 gas or if we were able to restart the Waitara Valley plant. We could get potentially that site up to 2.2 million tons of production. It would take significant capital to get the Waitara Valley plant up, so we would need a long-term gas contract. That facility there is backed up with a methanol sharing gas contract up to the end of the decade. Trinidad plants are both oxygen-based.
Just backing up, Medicine Hat is around 38 gigajoules per metric ton, and New Zealand is around 41 gigajoules a metric ton. Trinidad, we have two oxygen-based plants. These were our first oxygen-based plants. The Titan plant, which is down right now, is 36 gigajoules a metric ton, so if we can get it back up, it's one of our more efficient plants within our fleet. The Atlas plant is around 37 gigajoules per metric ton. Now, these are kinda mid-cycle numbers. Beginning of catalyst, they'll operate better and perhaps a little bit less efficient at end of cycle. The Egypt plant, we have excellent gas availability and lots of gas exploration in that country. It's probably one of our best plants in our fleet.
It's 37 gigajoules a metric ton, and a lot of the technology that is being installed into G3 came from the Egypt design. The ATR is same design. The synthesis loop is same design. Fired heater is actually Chile design. But we take all the best from all of our assets, and we combine them, and learn and grow as a company. The Chile plant, we restarted the Chile IV plant back in 2021. We did have some growing pains with operation with that plant, and it was more around, I think the understanding of that plant and our people learning and developing, and now we operate it, I would say, very well.
In fact, it's operated at 100% reliability for the last year or so. The team is doing really well down there. We have confidence we're gonna continue to get more and more gas. We are operating at about 65% rate. We will be for the winter on all Chile gas for Chile One this winter, and we expect gas from Argentina in the beginning of the summer, this year, their summer. Chile One is around 38.5 gigajoules a metric ton, and Chile IV is around 37.5 gigajoules a metric ton. That's it for the plants. Emission intensity, what are we doing to reduce emission intensity? The biggest impact that we're gonna have is startup of Geismar 3.
Geismar 3 is much lower emission intensity. It's around 0.4 tons of CO2 per ton of methanol, and our fleet averages around 0.62. This is gonna bring down our intensity and help us to achieve our goal of 10% reduction by 2030. Now, that's not gonna be enough to get our number down. We do need some other things to happen and it's a combination of things. One is we need to operate our plants reliably. The biggest impact on emissions is unreliable operation. Every time you cycle the plant, you have to go through a warming process. You flare a lot of gas.
You're inefficient in those early stages of operation, and that's our biggest impact to CO2 emissions that we can directly control. We've done a lot of focus on emissions and emission intensity, or I should say reliability improvements. That's one thing that we're doing. We also measure our CO2 emissions on a daily basis now and report it on a daily online basis in every location. Every facility can look and see how they are performing. When they do something in the plant, they will see immediately what that impact is to CO2 emissions. We've kind of brought it home a little bit rather than looking at just efficiency. We also talk about it in CO2 emissions. We are looking at improvements in our existing facilities.
Now we've always continuously improved and always looked at ways to add value to the business. Now what we've done is we've gone back and taken another visit on this in the current environment to see are there some opportunities. We have identified a few. We think that we've possibly got in the range of about 200,000 tons of CO2 that we could reduce on an annual basis through ongoing improvements in our facilities. A couple of those that we've moved forward, we've done a couple gas recovery projects in our Trinidad facility, and we are looking at doing a re-tray in our New Zealand distillation columns, which will allow us to operate on two distillations versus three distillations, which would improve us by about 0.5 gigajoules a ton production.
There's a number of things. There's some power generation things we're looking at and some additional methanol recovery opportunities in some of our purge gases that could add some more tons and reduce our intensity. Again, will that get us to our 10%? We certainly need that. The other thing we're looking at is carbon capture and storage. Right now we're in the feasibility stage. There's a number of different technologies. It's basically all amine solution based. It depends on the type of solution and the efficiency of that solution for the different flue gases that we have, but there's a lot of work to be done there. How do you integrate that into your facility?
How do you get heat recovery and how do you get the best out of that? There's a lot of work to be done there and I know there's been a lot of questions around dollars and dollars per ton and things like that, but it's kinda early days for us on that and we certainly don't wanna give you something that we can't stand behind. There's also a couple things. There's pre-carbon capture and post-carbon capture. You'll have heard of green hydrogen. Green hydrogen is kinda call it a pre-carbon capture. These are basically big hydrogen plants. You make more hydrogen through your reforming process, and then you take some of that back as fuel, so you have no CO2 emissions coming off your stack.
That's basically pre-carbon capture. Post-carbon capture is when you take your flue gas and you run it through an amine system and you remove the CO2 in that area. Both require utilization or storage of that CO2 of some form. We're working through what's the best approach for us. The last thing we're looking at is new technology. As you saw with Geismar 3, there's an improvement in technology and I would say current new technologies of combined reforming facilities get very close to what our Geismar 3 plant is and maybe slightly better than what our Geismar 3 plant is. We are looking at our own design that could potentially get us to even lower numbers.
Instead of like the 0.4 number of CO2 tons of CO2 per ton of methanol, we could get down into that 0.2-0.3 tons of CO2 per ton of methanol. If you had green power, you could effectively get down to close to zero tons of CO2 per ton of methanol. Those are the things we're looking at. That design has about a. If you look at the 0.4 today, if you just go to without the green power, that's a 43% reduction in CO2 emissions. It uses 11% less gas and about 50% less water. That's something that we're looking at, and that's kind of end of the decade before we'd know whether we could do that. That's using.
That's using we'll trial some of that equipment in our facilities so that we can actually utilize it in a new plant design if the location and situation fits. Again, you'll be evaluating that against building a plant right off the shelf if you want kind of current existing with carbon capture instead. It'll be what's the best option for us. As I mentioned, reliability helps to drive emissions intensity, and our goal has always been to get to 97% or better. Last year, we achieved that. It was probably our best performance since, I think, 2009. So a significant improvement in our performance on an ongoing basis. Again, this year, we're above 97%.
We benchmark ourselves against industry, and the last benchmark we did, I think industry. This is kind of your, I'm gonna say, your better performing people in industry. We benchmark against that group, and ongoing reliability for them was around 93%. We're running at that 97%+. How did we get there? We have global teams, so we investigate and look at all our incidents that we might have that impact reliability. It's our capital management program. You know, are we putting our capital in the right places? It's looking at all of our assets and making sure that we're proactive and repairing and improving the plant where we can in order to reach these reliability targets.
We have a group of global experts to support our team, and they're providing knowledge in the areas of process engineering, water treatment, rotating equipment, turnarounds, electrical instrumentation and operations, and static equipment. It's a very solid team, and they're looking at our plants all the time on how do we improve. Everything that we learn in our plants and everything that the standards that we create are then used and incorporated in a new plant such as G3. We've got Methanex project standards that we use in our plants. Whenever we're making a change within the plant, we use them. For a new plant, G3, all of those were transferred over and incorporated into the design. Hopefully that achieves an even better operation of Geismar 3.
Just to recap, safety is our top priority. You know, you will hear it from the top all the time. I mean, John will say it continuously, safety is the most important thing that we do. It impacts everything that we do. If we have a safety event, it impacts our costs. It can have so many impacts to the public. It impacts our reputation. It is by far and away our top priority. As I said, everybody has this as a goal, as their own personal goal. We have an advantaged asset portfolio, and Geismar 3 is gonna add to that. Geismar 3 is a fantastic project, and I know you guys had a chance to look at it, but I mean, from my side, I'm very excited about it.
It's got great technology in it. It's gonna be a super asset. We're pursuing initiatives to reduce emissions. We've always been conscious of efficiency and trying to operate our plants well, and this has just kind of raised the bar for us as to how we can improve even further. Thank you.
I think we were gonna have a break, but I think we've decided in the interest of time. I know some people have travel commitments, we're gonna carry on through. Please, if anyone needs a bio break, just carry on. Good afternoon with that. Over the last 30 years as a company, we have continued to build on our vision of global methanol leadership to the point where we are today, the clear global leader in a growing industry. We continue to build our company around our strategic pillars of low cost, operational excellence, and market leadership. I think you heard from Rich and Kevin today in terms of many of the elements that contribute to our global market leadership, including our reliable operations and our globally integrated supply chain.
We believe our competitive advantage would be difficult, costly, take many years, if not impossible, to replicate the capabilities that we've developed over the 30 years while we've been in business and what makes us pretty unique as a chemical commodity in this space. Our singular focus on methanol has allowed us to develop what we'd call differentiating capabilities to enhance value, lower our operating costs, particularly in the area of logistics, and ultimately be the supplier of choice to our customers. From a corporate development perspective, the construction of the G3 Advantage world-scale 1.8 million ton project as well as embedding ESG into our strategy. They're the key focus areas that we have within corporate development today as we build on our global methanol leadership.
A lot of conversation obviously at the moment around gas. It's worth highlighting our gas strategy, which is a key part of our low cost pillar. It's based on the principle of ensuring that we can continue to operate our plants profitably through all points of the methanol cycle. There are two approaches that we have to gas strategy across our asset portfolio. In our manufacturing locations outside of North America, that's New Zealand, Trinidad, Chile, Egypt, all our gas contracts are linked to methanol prices. With the focus on ensuring that we operate profitably through all points of the methanol price cycle. We share the upside with our gas suppliers when methanol prices are higher and conversely, when methanol prices are at a lower point, we pay a lower gas cost.
These long-term gas contracts obviously provide costless flexibility through the cycle, but they also create alignment with our gas producers around the world in terms of we share in the upside and in a higher price methanol market. For our North American assets being Geismar and Medicine Hat, we talk about North America in its entirety. Given the very liquid gas markets and the fact that commodity price-linked gas contracts are not standard, we have taken a strategy of pursuing an active gas hedging program in place to manage that gas price risk. The strategy here in the simplest terms, it is to ensure that at our minimum operating rates, we can continue to operate our plants at all times.
That's the basis of the 65% hedging policy that we put in place to ensure that at a minimum, we can continue to operate all those plants. It's an active rolling hedging strategy, and we have various levels of hedges layered in through the next 10 years. When people ask, "Well, what's the price that you hedge at?" I would say what we do is, it's based on a delivered cash cost target that allows us to deliver into our markets during the low end of the cycle. But I think it's also worth highlighting, particularly in the current gas environment that we find ourselves in, that we are hedged for 85% of our needs next year across our North American assets.
If you look at the current forward Henry Hub cost curve, it provides us with a really strong cost advantage heading into 2023. For those of you that are here in person today, you will have had the great opportunity to do the tour this morning and see the significant progress we've made on our G3 project. First and foremost, to echo Kevin's points, we're really pleased with the excellent safety record on this project. We've completed over 2.8 million work hours without a lost time injury. As everybody knows, a safe project is ultimately a successful project. With the engineering and procurement predominantly complete and with all the key equipment and materials already on site, we've eliminated most of the supply chain and materials cost risk exposure.
We now focus on the construction phase of this project, and to date, we're about 55% complete on the project overall. We have a very experienced, excellent owners team in place, and we are really benefiting from the decisions and the work that was taken during the deferral period. Our timing on restart has really placed us ahead of any other construction project in the area as we consider competition for labor. It's a cost advantage capital project, given the brownfield advantages that exist from the existing infrastructure from the G1 and G2 site, as well as we've talked about the capital cost advantage given G3 uses excess hydrogen from the G1 and G2 site, so it eliminates the need for a primary reformer.
Continue to make excellent progress, and we're confident in our ability to deliver this project within the capital and schedule parameters we set out at restart. When complete, as well as adding to our market leadership position, G3 will also significantly increase our future cash flow generation capability. As highlighted on the chart, if you look at a $400 methanol price and consider a range of gas prices between $3 and $5/MMBtu. The uplift to our EBITDA earnings is in the potential of $250 million-$325 million. Another point is the economics for G3 were based on delivering all of this product to Asian market.
As we see the opportunity to grow our sales position further in the Atlantic, it will only further add to the value of this project and make it even more attractive. It's a great project. We're really excited to see it advancing well, and we know it's gonna add to our global market leadership position. Consistent with this global market leadership strategy that we've been pursuing, we've invested in growth through capacity additions over recent years. We executed the relocation of two of our assets from Chile to Geismar to now be G1 and G2, and enabled us to capitalize on the availability and the cost advantage of shale gas here in the U.S.
We've successfully debottlenecked both those plants at low capital cost to add a further 200,000 tons of low cost capacity additions. We know our current G3 project will strengthen our asset portfolio. As mentioned, we remain focused on securing economic gas to restart our idled assets, that being our 800,000-ton plant in Trinidad, as well as our half million-ton Waitara Valley plant in New Zealand. I think the ability to restart these plants represents the lowest capital cost investment to add back capacity, and we're actively pursuing these restarts in both locations.
Given the demand growth outlook for methanol and recognizing the multi-year time frame it takes to develop and ultimately build a plant, we continue to e valuate options for future growth, which include options for a brownfield expansion on a site like Medicine Hat or Geismar. As well as we are always monitoring and evaluating greenfield opportunities in other locations around the world. What I would say in that, as we evaluate future growth options, it's clear that low-carbon technology pathways are gonna be a really important part of that future, project evaluation.
So methanol is an important part of the transition to a low-carbon economy. We know it's an essential chemical that goes into multiple everyday products, and it is a low-carbon fuel, but we are aware that this is an emissions intensive industry. We're focused on our opportunities to decrease carbon intensity at our existing sites and as we consider new projects.
While methanol can be made from different feedstocks, different energy sources, we all know the resulting methanol is chemically the same and it can be used in the same end applications. There are different production methods, including from renewable sources to produce green methanol, but these are all at different stages of commercial and economic feasibility. Really, in terms of green methanol today, it's really a nascent industry making up a small amount of global production. If we consider the industry as a roughly a 90-million-ton industry, coal production in China makes up about a third of that global production, and it's mainly based from coal and has a CO2 carbons emissions intensity of about five times greater than that of a conventional methanol natural gas-based plant.
If you consider the concept of an industry carbon curve, we believe our assets are really well-positioned on that theoretical carbon curve. We have shared that G3 on that carbon curve would be one of the lowest carbon emission intensity methanol plants in the world. We're active in all the pathways to produce low carbon methanol. As mentioned, our feasibility project in North America to evaluate carbon capture and storage would enable us to produce blue methanol. Today, we can produce biomethanol, certified biomethanol here at our facilities in Geismar using renewable natural gas. We'll continue to evaluate projects and technology options for e-methanol and biomethanol. I think you know, if you take anything from this slide, I think what we're trying to outline is we have a great platform and options for transition to low carbon methanol production.
It's also useful to have some context when we talk about the pathways to low carbon and green methanol. While all are technically feasible, the options for green methanol are considerably higher cost to produce today and tend to be smaller in scale, often the 50 to 100,000-ton plant. The recent IRENA studies highlight that as compared to the cost of conventional methanol, which they've indicated is in a range of $350-$450 in terms of cost to produce for a conventional methanol. The cost of the different green methanol production technologies can be two to five times higher, or more costly to produce. We look at the existing conventional assets, and we see their ability to lead the transition to low carbon.
That is the ability to convert to blue methanol from carbon capture and storage, and even through to green methanol with renewable natural gas today. While technology improvements and scale benefits, you'd expect them to emerge over the longer term. What's highlighted, though, is that there needs to be a premium, a willingness to pay or a price response that emerges to incentivize green methanol production. As we continue on our sustainability path and as we've released in our sustainability report this year, I think our intent and direction is really clear through our commitments. We are part of the transition to a low carbon economy, and our assets are important in this transition as they show a path to low carbon methanol. As Kevin highlighted, we're undertaking work throughout all our sites and teams to reduce our emissions.
We believe in the value of methanol as a future carbon source, particularly low carbon fuel source, particularly in the marine fuel space. I think it's clear the energy transition will take a long time, and it's gonna require a lot of input from multiple stakeholders. We continue to work with our customers, the governments that we're in, the regions we operate in and around the world, technology providers, as we evaluate opportunities in green methanol. Maybe in summary, we are the industry leader in methanol, the clear industry leader, and we've got a focus on low cost operational excellence and market leadership. For our global teams, team members around the world, they're the ones that execute on our strategy every day.
We have a depth of industry experience and knowledge, which allows us not only to develop, to build projects like G3, but to also operate those plants efficiently, operate an integrated global supply chain, and service our customers around the world, globally and seamlessly. I think it's worth highlighting our team members are really key to our competitive advantage as well. We're excited about G3 and what it'll add to our business. It's clear from the capital advantages that we'll be also one of the lowest CO2 emission intensity plants in the world. We look forward to bringing on G3 on stream sometime next year.
Good afternoon. It's my job to tie some of this together by talking about the finances and how this impacts the financial performance of the company. I'm gonna be talking a little bit about the financial strategy, how we approach our balance sheet, things like that, capital allocation, our cash generation capability, and then our approach to shareholder distribution. That's going to be the focus of my discussion. You know, first of all, I'd say our financial strategy is informed by the industry structure, by our company strategy and things like that. The industry is growing. We're the leader in this industry. We'd like to grow. We wanna add profitable capital projects to our portfolio over time. I think we've done a really good job of that.
Another thing that informs our strategy is cycles. We are a commodity in commodity cycles, and the interesting thing about cycles is that you cannot always predict when they're gonna happen. You always have to be prepared to manage through business stress, recognizing that you cannot always foresee it. The third characteristics that inform our strategy is that we generate a lot of cash. We generate more cash than we can reinvest in the business, so we want to make sure that we have a good vehicle for returning cash to shareholders. Let me just sort of talk a little bit about the practical ways that we think about that in terms of our balance sheet management.
First of all, we think that the methanol price, the natural range for methanol price is $300-$400 a ton. We structure our balance sheet around that price range. We target investment grade metrics, and our primary metric that we target is based on debt to EBITDA, and the low end of the investment grade rating is 3x. We wanna target meeting that 3x in that price range. We have foreshadowed for about a year now that we would like to lower that range. We would like to be able to meet the investment grade targets at $275 a ton, and over time, our intention is to delever.
Our next opportunity to delever is a bond that's coming due in 2024. It's a $300 million bond. Over the next little while, our intention would be to repay that bond in some way through cash. We have a focus on liquidity. Liquidity is a huge defensive mechanism and an offensive mechanism for us. We target a minimum $300 million of cash, and we also have backup bank capacity. Today we have $300 million of bank normal bank operating capacity, and then we also have a $300 million loan that's supported by the G3 project. We have $600 million of backup liquidity.
You can see from the graph that we have ample liquidity. As at today or the end of the first quarter, we had $1.1 billion of cash. We have $600 million, as I say, backup liquidity. If you look that against our major capital project of Geismar 3, which you saw today, there's $675 million to go. We're in really good shape to complete this project with very little risk. We really feel our balance sheet is in really good shape. The third aspect of our strategy is thinking about shareholder distributions. The thing about for us shareholder distributions we have to take into account is that we wanna grow. When we do grow, it takes capital.
CapEx comes in big lumps. We also recognize that cycles come as well. The focus really is flexibility. That is the same for the way we like to distribute cash. First of all, we like to have a base dividend that grows over time, but we want to ensure that we can pay that dividend at all points of the cycle. You'll see that we reset our dividend about a year ago, and we took the opportunity last April to increase it, and we will continue to grow the dividend over time. The second vehicle that we use is a normal course issuer bid. We've had a long history of repurchasing a lot of shares.
We think that the normal course issuer bid is a tremendous vehicle for distributing cash to shareholders for our type of business, where you have cycles and you have big lumps of capital from time to time. We think that the normal course issuer provides a lot of flexibility. We're gonna have a base dividend that we can pay in all points of the cycle, and the rest of the cash will come back in the form of share buybacks, and the preferred vehicle for that is a normal course issuer bid. You know, I would say that we have a lot of discipline around capital, and it starts with our strategy.
You know, when we have excess cash after meeting these parameters, we have a strong commitment to giving that money back to shareholders. This is an illustration of how we've utilized our cash over the last 10 years, and we call it a balanced approach. But what it shows is that we generate, first of all, a lot of cash, and that's even taking into account a couple down cycles. We generate a lot of cash, and we've had a lot of history of returning excess cash. At least we've invested what we think is a balanced way, $3 billion back into the business. That's including maintenance capital to sustain the business.
Primarily in this graph, anyway, the two big projects, G1 and 2, which you saw today, which have been excellent investments and really added to the cash generation capability of the company. We're really pleased to have you here today and showcase our Geismar assets. We really think this is a really foundational part of our asset portfolio. G1 and G2, as I've already mentioned, have been outstanding investments for the company, and we're really excited about G3. I think you heard a lot about risk. Taking the opportunity to really de-risk G3, and the project is going really, really well. We're really looking forward for this project to come on stream.
We already structurally generate a lot of cash, but as you can see, and Vanessa pointed out in her presentation, G3 represents a big step up in cash generation. How do we think about some of our capital allocation priorities? Our first priority has always been to maintain the business, and that's making sure that our plants are reliable and safe, as Kevin and Vanessa have already mentioned. That takes about $120 million of maintenance capital a year on average. We wanna meet our liquidity targets for sure. That's $300 million of cash on our balance sheet in excess of the cash required to complete G3. As I've mentioned already, we very comfortably meet those liquidity targets today.
We have said that we would like to de-lever a little bit, and we think that taking out the $300 million bond that's coming due in 2024 with cash is smart and provide us lots of financial flexibility going forward. Not a lot of new capacity and new capital required ex G3 for the next few years. That means that all excess cash after thinking about completing the funding of G3 and our debt repayment will come over the next couple of years. There's gonna be a lot of cash to distribute to shareholders. I just thought I'd maybe give you just a little bit of a look at that and how that might look over the next little while.
This is a pro forma cash forecast over the period from March 31 to the end of 2024, and that's presented under two price scenarios. It's presented under a $400 price scenario and a $350 price scenario. It takes into account the capital cost to complete G3, maintenance capital, debt service, all those good things. Also you'll notice that it takes into account also our intention to repay the bond that's due 2024. You can see under a wide range of price assumptions, there's still a lot of cash that's available for distribution to shareholders. We feel really, really good in terms of where we are on our balance sheet and our ability to provide really good returns to shareholders over the next few years.
Maybe just to summarize, it's all about flexibility. We wanna be able to manage cycles, we wanna be able to grow, and we wanna be able to provide a good vehicles for returning cash to shareholders. We have our cash generation capability is excellent. Really good cash generation capability and very disciplined around capital. We are committed and have a long history of returning all excess cash to shareholders. I'm gonna stop there, and we're now going to continue on and have a Q&A session. Sorry. Just to wrap up before we get into the Q&A. Obviously, hopefully demonstrated our leadership position and the value of that leadership position.
Positive, you know, medium-term to long-term growth outlook and not a lot of new supply coming on. Growing cash flow capability with a track record of disciplined capital allocation, returning cash to shareholders, and then really well positioned as we transition to a low carbon economy. With that, I'll stop and open to take your questions. Joel.
Hi. Joel Jackson from BMO. I had two questions. First, you gave a bit of color on the 14 million tons of demand growth over the next five years. I'm guessing the numbers you didn't mention was just the kinda growth in GDP and formaldehyde acetic acid. Can you just clearly go through exactly how the 14 million tons of demand growth are coming from the different buckets? The second question is on G3. It did seem like the team is quite excited about what's going on here, i t's. There are all these parts and steel and pipes that are stockpiled everywhere here. Can you give us an idea of what is the best-case scenario?
If there's no hurricanes and people can somehow withstand the ridiculous heat here, what is the best case scenario that we could be, you know, past the pre-commissioning into the commissioning phase? Is that October? Is that September? That would be helpful. Thanks.
Yeah. On the demand growth, if we take half the market, you know, let's say it's 44 million tons around today, like is related to GDP IP, and we've got that growing at around 3%. Those numbers are IHS numbers, not our numbers. Our numbers would be similar, slightly different in the categories. That's at 3%. If you had a view of no growth in that half of the market, it's about 1.2 million tons that wouldn't grow. I think Rich illustrated that we need new supply to come on into the market or higher operating rates. Today the cost curve is in that RMB 360-RMB 390 with a lot of production there based on a high energy environment.
If we did see less demand growth in the b ecause of a recession or a prolonged recession, it's about 1.2 million tons a year. If we look at the MTO space, we have one new plant coming on this year, 1.8 million tons of demand.
We expect the industry operating rates, as Rich mentioned, to be in the 85%-90%, which is historically what they've been. I would add 1.8 million tons into the MTO space, and then the rest of the balance would be in the fuel space, and that's really, you know, the shipping that's coming on, as well as the boilers and kilns in China, and some M100 in China as well. You know, it's a combination of the demand. We're pretty conservative on the energy space. Then when these demand forecasts were done, I think we were in a different energy environment. You know, a high energy environment is certainly good for energy demand as well.
As far as the project itself, we have a detailed project review coming up in mid-July. I'll be able to update the entire investment community on the July call with the capital cost estimate as well as the schedule. Yes, Kenny? For natural gas availability in Trinidad, maybe I'll ask Ian. He was just there and just had the complete review with the government. Maybe just give us the color there, Ian, please.
Sure. Kenny, just for background, the way the ELT works is that we all have functional responsibilities, but we also have, sponsorship responsibilities for our operations around the world. My sponsorship is of the Trinidad operation, and very proud of the organization that the Atlas plant has been running for the last year and has run incredibly good rates, 100%, I guess, the reliability and safety records are excellent. The challenge in Trinidad is gas. I was down in Trinidad, I don't know, 10-12 days ago. There was a big energy conference there in Trinidad, and it was all about the future. Just sort of as background, Trinidad is a country that's heavily reliant on oil and gas and chemicals and LNG.
It's a big part of their economy. As a big picture concept, the government is very incentivized to make sure that all these operations are sustainable over the next number of years. You can really feel that energy that's happening. When I was in Trinidad last week, I met with most senior people in government and NGC and also with some of the CEOs of the upstream. I would say all of them are very committed to the future investment and continue to ensure that the assets and all the assets in Trinidad are sustainable. That's the goal. The challenge is timing. There's a lot of contractual relationships that are converging at about the same time.
The upstream contracts are expiring in the next year or two, and the contracts with the LNG producers are expiring in the next year or two, and the same with most of the chemical operations as well. There's a lot of things that need to happen in order for the gas contractual regime to work quickly. That's the challenge. As I say, the government is very incentivized, and the upstream is very incentivized to ensure that somehow we figure out a way that we share the economic rent that's available, we think is available, between the upstream, NGC, the government and the downstream, the chemical producers. We're cautiously optimistic that we're gonna be successful, and that includes the Titan plant.
It's a bit of a journey, and my suspicion is that we'll keep the operations going. The time frames and the issues around timing are gonna be a challenge.
Yeah. I want to emphasize the economics of the gas will be different than the economics we've traditionally enjoyed with Titan. We'd pay a little bit more for the gas, but we wanna remain. You know, if to sign a contract, take or pay a contract and to invest the $10s of millions we have to get the plant restarted, we'd wanna be cash positive through the cycle. That's our goal. We won't sign a contract that assures losses during the bottom end of the cycle, and that's part of the challenge that we're having with the government. As the government renegotiates with the upstream, they certainly know the downstream's position, not only ours but our competitors, the ammonia guys and LNG. It's just another part of the question.
Vanessa, I'll ask you to just give us an update what's going on in New Zealand with the gas there and what's going on with the high energy complex there as well.
In New Zealand, we idled our Waitara Valley plant back at the end of 2019. That was as a result of some poor performing fields at the time from the gas suppliers. It's not a reserves issue in New Zealand. They always have a reserves to production ratio that, you know, we would consider just keep moving out as they continue to explore. What we've seen over the last few months is more drilling activity in New Zealand. It's a scheduled program. They're starting to see those results. As we come through the second half of the year, we're expecting to see more gas flow into the two plants.
We're continuing to have those conversations with gas suppliers around the restart of the Waitara Valley, which is gonna take time from the capital to be deployed to return the facilities as well as return some staff. We're still confident in the reserves outlook in New Zealand. We've gone through these challenges before on New Zealand. It is a country that has a small number of large fields, and you know, we're confident at some point we'll get back to a three-plant operation in New Zealand.
Well, some context about New Zealand. We're half the gas market. The gas there is very rich in liquids. When you get $120 oil, they're very incentivized to monetize the liquids. At a high methanol price like we're experiencing today, we're paying a really good price for gas. The private market, it's not government, it's private owners, and they're very you know interested in drilling and developing those reserves. Like Vanessa said, it's not a reserves issue, it's developing the reserves. They've tended to develop the reserves as we, in the country, need it, needed it. The economics today are in such a good place that we're you know gonna see gas be developed.
They need us as much as we need them because they wanna you know, get the liquids and monetize the gas. What I would remind everybody though, that that plant was end of life. When we did shut it down, we had planned a fairly significant investment in turnaround, and that would have to be done. We'd have to, again, sign a contract that allowed us to, in a, you know, a five year period, just to take an example, to recoup the capital that we'd be putting in into that plant. You know, I think, we're gonna see a lot more about what the drilling programs produce over the next one to two quarters and certainly continue to engage with gas suppliers about getting a 5+ year contract.
Great. Just back to Trinidad. The Atlas contract, I believe it expires in 2024. Is that gonna be the same negotiation with the government as Titan, or are those really two separate discussions?
No, I think it's a similar discussion because the timing is such that, you know, a lot's gonna happen in the next two years. We'd like to, you know, finalize gas for Atlas post 2024 at the same time or, you know, negotiating gas for Titan.
Then just one more. Back to Rich. You talked about another MTO plant coming online in the second half of the year. What's coming on in 2023 and 2024? If not much, why not?
Yeah. Maybe I'll start and, Rich, you can add. You know, there was a second wave plan then of MTO plants. The first wave is coming to conclusion here with the Bohai plant. Obviously, when we had the oil collapse in 2016, most of the second wave was canceled in favor of naphtha crackers, 'cause naphtha obviously trades at a price ratio to oil. Obviously, that's changed now, and naphtha's back to $800-$900. Depending on what your outlook is for oil and naphtha, you know, even in today's olefins markets, the naphtha crackers are marginal, and some of them have reduced rates. There is an opportunity now to think about more MTO or the second wave. Probably have to see a high oil environment for another couple of quarters before we'd see that.
I'll remind you, there are two plants in China that are idle. You know, Funde and what was the other one, Rich?
Kaiyue.
Kaiyue. Those are idle. Too, you know, in this environment, restarting those plants is certainly a lot more attractive than, let's say, in a $60 oil environment and relative to $500 naphtha. Anything you want to add there, Rich?
No. No.
Jacob?
Yeah, just a question on the capital cost for the restart of the two plants, and then maybe walk through. There's a couple of debottlenecking opportunities you talked about. One was at Geismar. I forget what the other one was. What the cost for that would be as well.
Yeah. The Titan plant to restart, its people and, you know, maybe $10 million, you know, in that order of magnitude. The Waitara Valley, I mean, it's more $50-$100 million because it's come to end of life and, that's the order of magnitude. As far as debottlenecking opportunities, I don't see us having any, Kevin, around the world at this point. Certainly getting the high CO2 gas in New Zealand would allow us to operate at higher rates. Some of the gas that has been recently found in New Zealand or you know, in the drilling programs is high CO2. You know, we're really the only offtaker for that kind of gas.
I think, you know, getting the other area we didn't talk about is Chile. The developments there in the gas side have been really good in the Dorado- Riquelme field, where we have a 50% ownership. Those wells are, you know, two, three times more productive than the Arenal field, where we're getting most of our gas. We're running the one plant during their winter at, you know, 70+ rates, which is all on Chile gas. I think that's really important to understand. Argentina continues to develop the Neuquén field. Again, in high energy environments like today, we would expect that to continue their investing in pipe, et cetera.
There's gonna be more drilling in the Southern Cone on the Argentinian side, which will also, you know, be helpful. I think the guidance we're giving is still the same. You know, two-plant operation during their summertime and a one-plant operation during the wintertime with upside over the coming years based on both Chile and Argentina gas.
The other question I had was just on the European market. Obviously, lots of moving parts, with the war going on over there. You said it was roughly about 20%. For your end market. What are your thoughts there? Are there any opportunities that presents itself there given, you know, the high natural gas environment or is it, you know, kinda status quo?
The Dutch plants are down, and you would have seen natural gas prices, you know, spike up here in the last few days in Europe as well. We don't see them coming back in this environment. Russia is an exporter of about 1.6 million tons of methanol to Western Europe. Today, most Western European companies, consumers have said pretty emphatically they don't wanna deal with Russian methanol anymore. Until they have an alternative, they're gonna try and run their plants. I think it does create a significant opportunity for us. You know, we modeled all of the Geismar 3 molecules going to Asia, and in today's high fuel environment, that's about $100 a ton in freight.
If we were able to move a bunch of that volume to Europe, that's about $50 a ton in freight in today's energy market. It makes the economics, which are already terrific going to Asia, even that much better. Certainly, you know, our preference would be to grow our market share in Europe if the Russians aren't able to supply, 'cause we'd be the natural supplier to Europe. The other complication or opportunity, I mean, you know, Equinor is a producer of methanol in Norway. They have the opportunity to move that gas into the European market if they choose. You know, but they have contracts for methanol.
Directionally, as we come into the contracting season, which will start here in, you know, now till through the end of the year, it'll be interesting to what we learn about the Russian supply as well as intentions of somebody like Equinor going forward. I think this is a very good opportunity for us to increase our market share in Europe and, you know, even further help with the balances on the Atlantic and the Pacific basins.
You mentioned the two idled MTO plants in China. I was just wondering what that represents in terms of metric tons.
Rich?
It would be about 2 million-3 million tons operating per year.
I mean, I don't know if you know the answer. How fast could they bring that back online? I mean, is it something that could affect 2023?
It'd be difficult to say because they've been shut down for, I would say over the last two or three years. It's difficult to say how long that would take and what kinda capital it would be needed to restart, but we wouldn't think it would take too long, so.
A couple of quarters. I mean, they built them in two years. I mean, to restart them, probably at max a couple of quarters. Right? When they decide to do something, it goes pretty fast.
It's Nelson Ng from RBC Capital Markets. I might be getting ahead of myself, but you guys talked about the Medicine Hat brownfield opportunity. Can you just remind us about that opportunity? Like, is there enough domestic demand? What are some of the other considerations you need to think about there?
Yeah. We've been looking at that site for a while, and it was, you know, a choice between that site and Geismar 3 when we made that decision. I think the conditions that why we chose here versus Medicine Hat haven't changed and maybe got a little more difficult, is what I would say. What are the challenges? You're right, it's not enough market, so it would have to be all exported through the West Coast to Asia. You know, obviously, if Europe develops, there might be an opportunity to move some to the other way, but it would have to be all exported. Challenge, you know, in the carbon tax, the Canadian government has been pretty clear on its wants to move the carbon tax up to CAD 150 a ton range.
You know, if we are producing 0.4 carbon per ton of methanol, you can see the economics get quite squeezed. The other issue is the rail transportation. I don't know if you followed the rail markets in Western Canada, but they've been quite horrible as far as service and getting product out of Western Canada to U.S. markets and overseas markets. You know, there's a monopoly situation and, you know, how could you ever assure yourself that you're gonna move 1 million+ tons to Asia on the current rail system? That, that's something that we'd have to solve. Then getting a terminal built on the West Coast of Canada and United States is in that hard to do basket, where nobody seems to want any of these kinds of things in their backyard.
Having said that, there might be an opportunity up in the Prince Rupert area, Kitimat, where there is activity today to do that. Those are some of the issues that we'd be dealing with. On the positive side, it's a great gas market. We expect that gas market to continue to be advantaged over even Henry Hub. As well as we've got the land there. We've got a great operation. We've got a great team. We'd be able to staff it with a really good group of people. We're well known in the marketplace. We have lots of good connections in the community. From an operations point of view, it would be a great place to operate. There's some hair that we have to deal with. Those are some of the things that we think about, Nelson.
We have a question from the webcast. Historically, Methanex has had a 60/40 split of organic investments and capital returns to shareholders. Do you see that mix changing after G3 starts up?
Yeah. It will change 'cause we won't be having any other capital projects in the short term. Even if we decide to do a green project, these are small in nature, like Vanessa said, 50,000-100,000 tons. Capital cost is in the, you know, not anywhere close to $1.3 billion. I think also what we've learned through G3 and it's quite a significant capital outlay every time we wanna build a project of scale. I think our next one we'd certainly be more difficult to do it without a partner. I never say never, but certainly having a partner to help derisk some of the capital risk that you take, you know, over a three or four-year period when you build is a consideration.
Yeah, I think the slides that I showed and Ian showed, once G3 is complete here in less than 18 months, at any range of methanol prices, we're gonna have a lot of cash to you know, share with our shareholder base and give back. We're not gonna hoard the cash. We're not gonna diversify into other industries. If we don't have projects that we can execute along with the market growth, then, you know, who knows, you know, if we're gonna go into recession, for how long and how deep. If the market's not growing, we're not gonna look to grow, and we'll be focused on getting our idle assets restarted. That's gonna be our 100% focus. If we get Chile back to full rates and [Waitara] Valley and tighten up, that's another 2 million tons.
That's for just a fraction of the capital. We're gonna have a lot of cash to distribute, and it'll probably be more in the 60/40 or probably 70/30, 'cause it's just our maintenance capital, which I think Ian mentioned is around $120 million a year.
Sorry, [Ted Broeker] from Barclays. You mentioned that you wanted to keep IG-like credit metrics through, you know, through the cycle. It seems like through at lower methanol prices as well. I just wanted to get your thoughts on, you know, maybe getting back to IG ratings if that's a goal for you or you just wanna run the business with those IG ratings?
Yeah, we wanna target the metrics. That's three to one, as Ian mentioned, at 275 instead of 300. We've seen below 300 pricing 3x since 2008. I think it's prudent to lower our debts and target that 275 instead of 300. That's about $300 million less debt. Whether we ever get back to investment grade, I think it will be difficult because of the volatility that we've seen in our industry and the fact that we're a single-product company. When we talk to the rating agencies, it's difficult for them to see us as an investment grade. Whether we ever get there or not, I guess it's less important than having our own internal targets of making sure we, as Ian likes to say, bulletproof the balance sheet for downcycle.
Ian, anything you want to add there or no?
No. I think, you captured it well. We can't control whether we're gonna get an investment-grade rating or not, but we wanna do what's right for shareholders and their bondholders, and we think it's smart to run this place very conservatively. You know, I outlined the case that we wanna have lots and lots of flexibility, and we're gonna run the business that way. I think that's the most important point, the way I think about it.
John, just thinking about the maritime opportunity longer term, it's finally emerging, which is great to see. From the shipowner standpoint, one of the concerns has been access to long-term supply or consistent supply. It's already well available in the other markets, of course. I mean, what can you do to help facilitate that growth or get more shipowners on board? Can you offer longer term supply agreements? Would you enter into those, or would they even be willing to entertain them? I'm just trying to get a context for how you could help continue to accelerate the market growth.
Yeah. In the current environment, Waterfront Shipping is a really good customer of ours. Now we're running all of our ships that can run on methanol because it, you know, current methanol prices versus marine gas oil, it's a total advantage today to run on methanol. We'd certainly entertain long-term contracts with shipowners to secure supply. That was a barrier for them to enter. That has not been a barrier, Steve. We haven't, to my knowledge, Rich, had any shipping companies say they're not gonna do this until they get a secure supply. I think many of them are thinking the pathway to carbon-free fuel is through methanol as well. Maersk has been very public that there is a willingness to pay for green methanol.
I think Vanessa illustrated the numbers today for green methanol, and, you know, we certainly haven't signed a contract with Maersk yet, at those kinds of numbers, and I'm not aware of anybody else signing a contract either. I think it will become a bigger issue if the supply-demand balance that we present, you know, continues to be quite tight and you get more shipping companies. Like last week, another one, you know, for another 300,000 tons. I always said when we converted the first engine on the Stena Line years ago, and, you know, people thought I was crazy. Maybe I am, but I thought it was a good opportunity to, you know, improve methanol demand. That proved to be quite successful.
When we took the plunge ourselves. You know, in mid-decade to build our own ships with this dual-fuel capability. I thought it would be a slow adoption. The second half of the decade demand driver, and that seems to be what it's looking like. The total potential here is, you know, if every ship was to convert to methanol, which is not gonna happen, but it's a 500 million ton potential market. So we don't need, you know, much penetration. I'll just reemphasize, this is a new build market. This is not retrofitting. Retrofitting is very expensive. I mean, that's what we did with Stena, just to prove out that the Wärtsilä engine, which is the four-stroke on the faster ferries, worked, and then we worked with MAN to prove it out on the two-stroke engines.
Our market development team's got many projects with cruise ships, with fishing vessels, with tugs, and all different types of vessels around the world. Really exciting to see the other engine makers, like Caterpillar, et cetera, getting into the production of the engines 'cause that's a bit of a bottleneck. I think this is gonna be a key driver of demand growth for our product for the next 10 years.
Do you think there's any resistance on behalf of those shipowners to use, I'll just call it gray methanol or blue methanol in the interim? It sounds to me like most of them are sort of making the conversion step because they believe there's a path to green methanol over 10 years or whatever the timeframe might be. I think as you've described, the economics are pretty terrible still at this point. You know, is there any resistance, I guess, to use the traditional methanol?
Well, they have to make decisions today as they're replacing their ships, right? They're making a decision for 15 years minimum. I mean, if you're an oil major, you don't have a ship that's more than 15 years old, but many carry on beyond 15 years and can be 20, 25 years. They're making decisions today that not knowing where the landscape is gonna be. I think what they like about methanol is there is a green pathway to it. They also like this dual-fuel capability, right? They like to be able to, you know, if the regulations allow to run MGO or methanol, depending on the relative economics. As the IMO specifications become tighter and tighter, things particulate matter, you know, MGO goes away as an option.
I think they're not sure exactly where everything's gonna end up on the regulation side. If they can make a choice, methanol with a green pathway and flexibility, that's why we're seeing quite a bit of adoption now. It's been proven out. We proved it out in the engines. The biggest interesting thing is not the engine. The engine itself is exactly the same. It's the injector and the fuel delivery system that's different for the two products. Having solved all those issues, and I won't get into the long list, but certainly more and more interest. There's other competing products as well.
You know, I remember promoting this early on. LNG was gonna be the be-all and end-all, you know, of the fuels for ships, and certainly with not just the economics of LNG, but the handling and the storing and the bunkering proving to be a lot more complicated and difficult than maybe first thought.
Just one last one, if I may. It's just on the G3 gas. I think you described sort of in broad strokes what the gas position is going to be domestically hedged. You know, as we contemplate startup for the first year or two, 2024, really 2025, I mean, how much of that gas has been secured so far, in sort of those initial years and sort of at what rough threshold, the gas position and at what price?
Well, don't reveal the price, but I think we gave you a hint. Our delivered cash cost target to Asia in that $200 range. You can do the math backwards on the gas price. You know, like I said, we have 65% hedged, and that's our goal, is to have 65% of our North American operations hedged. You can do that. You know, there's a liquid market out about five years. You know, beyond that, it gets a little tougher. We've been layering in hedges all along, and they're, you know, call it lucky or whatever. I mean, next year, we're 85% hedged 'cause that's some of the gas we hedged in years ago when we thought G3 was gonna be starting up now before the Caribbean maintenance period.
You know, certainly in this market, we're happy to have that extra gas. But 65 is what you should be thinking, and that allows us to have minimum operating rates at our production facilities. You know, if markets get to a situation where it doesn't make economic sense to run at $10-$11 gas, whatever it might be, but we look at that all the time. We understand our competitors really aren't that hedged either, Steve. I kinda think there's a natural methanol price hedge too, that if it gets really ugly, it doesn't make economic sense to make methanol at high gas prices, then those producers will be reducing production as well, which will further tighten markets.
We have seen some of our competitors lower operating rates in this environment.
We have another question from the webcast. Could you elaborate more on brownfield expansion opportunities in Medicine Hat and Geismar, specifically around timing, capacity, and anticipated cost?
You know, we have the opportunity to look at a Geismar 4. We have the land. I really worry about concentration risk. I don't know if I'm ever gonna get over that hurdle. I think what I'd rather do here, well, I never say never to anything, is be great to attract a couple large customers to the site and have pipeline customers here. Certainly, this is a great place to do business and a great place to build things. Just the, you know, the concentration risk of adding another 1.5 million tons here that, you know, I don't know how we could get comfortable with that.
I already went through the long list of issues that Medicine Hat had, and I think G3, you know, we would not be able to replicate those capital costs with a new plant, whether it be, you know, a brownfield, certainly not greenfield. You know, I think you're talking, and we've been speaking, it's at least probably in the order of magnitude of $1,000 a ton, and that's before the inflationary environment that we're currently experiencing. That means you'd have to have a double-digit return, $3-$4 gas and a $400 methanol price for 25 years. You know, I think that seems to be in the hard to do basket as well right now.
I don't anticipate us having another significant capital project more towards the end of the decade at the earliest, because I think what we'd like to do is really work hard to get our idle assets restarted at a fraction of the capital cost. We have to watch how the market develops and how it grows. If we are headed to recession and zero or less growth, then we have to consider that as well.
Just back to the maritime market. Can you talk about what the clean fuel alternatives are to methanol? I mean, I think ammonia is probably the biggest one. Are there others? Is there flexibility between ammonia and methanol, or is it just, is there room for both of those to be involved?
Yeah, sure. Yeah, so you're right. Ammonia's being looked at. Hydrogen also. Initially, LNG ships had a big uptake. With LNG, you can only get a certain amount of the way there on CO₂ reduction before you have to introduce bio-LNG. There's other issues around LNG with methane slip and other things that the shipping industry is quite concerned about. Maersk has been very public about that issue. On dual capability between ammonia and methanol, those are completely different technologies. Ammonia is being developed, but it's not there yet today, so they're quite a far ways behind on the actual ammonia technology in comparison to methanol. Ammonia has
Both ammonia and hydrogen have their own challenges in relation to. Hydrogen has to be cryogenic. It's difficult to deliver. The volumetric energy intensity for hydrogen is a lot less than methanol. On the ammonia side, you've got obviously toxicity issues and also, there's still NOx issues when it comes to burning ammonia. It is not a perfect solution developed on those applications yet, but those are the ones that are being looked at.
Yeah, I think methanol is readily available around the world, so bunkering is much easier. You know, it looks like water, handles like water, and you know, if you were to spill some, you know, you might kill a few fish within a few hundred feet of the ship, but you're not gonna have a major type spill. You know, ammonia has properties we all know that are different. Hydrogen is hydrogen. Yeah. But those are the competing ones as of today. Go ahead.
Can we just talk a little bit about the current market? We've got natural gas in the U.S. at, I don't know where it is today, $7, $8, $9. The cost to produce methanol in the U.S. if you're using spot gas is, I don't know what, $330, $350, depending on, you know, if you're at $9 gas. Is that the marginal cost of production right now, given that there's no gas-based operations running in Europe?
That would be the case today. I mean, China is at $390, right? I mentioned the cost curve in China is $360-$390 based on 1,200 RMB coal. You know, I don't know if you read this morning, Australia's short of energy cause they can't get enough coal to run their coal plants. It seems to be a global issue. I think it's in that $360 to, you know, to $400, area. You know, you've got to add freight, right? It's not just gas. The marginal molecules from the United States go to Asia. I already mentioned it's a $100 freight, today with the price that you're paying for fuel. So, it's really marginal 'cause the price in China today is $350, 360-ish for imported products.
The economics are quite challenging today if you're going to add any freight, if you're not hedged on your gas.
How does the gas price in the U.S. impact Trinidad and kind of just how they think about their gas price there for industrial consumers?
Yeah. Historically, the goal of the Trinidad government was to link their gas to Henry Hub, and that's when Henry Hub was trading at $10+. We all saw what happened with the shale, and it went to $2.50, it seemed, for a long time. They changed that strategy, no longer wanting to be linked. I think the strategy today is, like Ian said, to have the upstream, the government, and the downstream all arrive and make some returns. They're trying to work out a way how to do that.
I think I said earlier, you know, the gas price we will pay in the future there is not gonna be what it has been historically, but we are optimistic we can get a price that makes sense through the cycle, so that we don't have to, you know, have take-or-pay gas on the bottom end of the cycle is quite challenging. They have gas. I mean, there's a willingness to develop in Trinidad. The big majors are spending money, and it's just how do we get the economics right. There we have, I guess, a natural hedge as well because one of our largest competitors have four plants there. They're gonna face the same challenges that we do as the ammonia players are, as the others are.
As we think about the possibility of a recession coming up, how are you thinking about preparing for, you know, that possible outcome? How do you think about methanol demand, and how do you think about pricing in that environment?
Yeah. Depends on how deep and what, you know, if it's a mild recession, probably not gonna be much impact unless we get an oil collapse again, which would impact the cost curve. If you believe in higher energy prices are here for a period, the cost curve will be in that $360-$390 with a lot of production at that level. I think you'd have to see 7 or 8 million tons of demand go away before we move down on that cost curve. That would be around 10%.
I think when we've seen prices go below 300 in the past, there were one in 100-year events, but we've had three of them in 15 years, where we saw a 10%-15% demand dip kinda overnight, you know, because of the energy collapse, which impacted DME and MTP as the financial crisis froze everything, and most recently COVID, when everything stopped. You know, so I guess you'd have to have an event like that, I think, to move down significantly on the cost curve today or oil go back to $40-$50.
Given this very fragile economic environment we're in right now, what's your biggest concern?
Hurting somebody is always my biggest concern. Or seriously hurting somebody or having a fatality, that's the number one concern I always have. You know, getting this project done safely on time, on budget is 100% focus. I think we have the cash. As you know, we have the cash on the balance sheet to complete it, and we have other cash. You know, really the same concerns in this environment as all environments is safety and hurting somebody significantly. I think what you've seen the project, this is the best project we've ever run. This is the best team, and it's the largest team we've ever had on a project. They're doing an outstanding job from day one. This doesn't happen, you know, because of work in the last year.
It started five, six years ago when we built that team and built the way we gonna build this plant. I was around as a CEO for G1 and G2 , and they were tremendously successful projects, but they pale in comparison to what we've done on this one. I'm really not concerned about completing this on time and on budget at all. I think you saw that today.
Another question from the webcast: How does management look at M&A opportunities and whether there are any viable or attractive opportunities out there?
Yeah. We look at the M&A space on a regular basis. When you look at the 100+ methanol plants in the world, you know, most of them are not for sale or would be saleable because they're state-owned or they're in China or they're, you know, have some other integration situation. There's some plants, you know, I think the Oman or the OCI plants would, you know. I know OCI has been trying to sell their methanol business for quite some time. When you do sit down and have a conversation about M&A or activity related to acquisitions, you know, the price becomes, you know, in the $1,500-$1,700 a ton for installed capacity discussion, and we're trading at $600-$700, whatever it is.
I can't imagine that's being well embraced by shareholders. I think there could be opportunities now as we come in, if it is a severe recession and a lot of some of our competitors are really leveraged and have to renegotiate. There may be opportunities, but I'd put it in the low probability basket for mergers and acquisitions. I think as long as the industry is growing, taking mergers and maybe shutting capacity is not the strategy that we need to do like we did in 2000. We certainly need if we're gonna incentivize shipping and have enough methanol to do some of these other new applications, we need more methanol, not less. Always consider things, but they have to make economic sense.
John, could you explain the confidence in the cost curve? Because I think you said today it costs more to make methanol than the sales price in China. I think you said some European plants are out. Why isn't the price better for methanol today?
Sentiment, I would say. There's a lot of sentiment and it's been there for some time now because of prices rolling over and that the energy complex will retreat. I think the more as it goes along, that's proving to be not accurate. The imported material into China is right around that cost curve. So we, you know, we've seen operating rates not rebound. Like in China, during the wintertime, we see lower operating rates. As they come out of winter, we see higher operating rates. We've seen a slight increase, but not to the extent we would have seen in previous years. We still see inventories being quite skinny through the chain as well.
We've just come out of, you know, a long-term or another long-term COVID shutdown in parts of China. That's now behind us and, you know, that's spurring on some new demand. There's been a few things like that, I think in the short-term that have impacted some of the demand for methanol. Yeah, the product or the market will always be balanced. It's just a matter of at what price. You know, if you said I could have the current price for the next 10 years, I'd be a very happy person. You know, it's really hard to predict where energy is gonna go. Certainly, you know, LNG prices and coal prices don't seem to be gonna go down in the short term.
If you get a severe recession, that can change overnight as well. I think that's why we tend to be quite cautious in this kind of environment. You know, I have to go by the numbers today, and I know that doesn't mean it's gonna not be different in the future, but we're not seeing any impact on our demand from our customers. I know Rich and Vanessa were just down at the ACC meetings, and their demand's still quite good. Although they're nervous too about what, you know, what kind of recession. If there's a recession, how deep, et cetera. I think taking, you know, a cautious approach here today is the right thing to do.
We have another question from the webcast. Could you give us some more details around the carbon capture initiatives and timeline?
Kevin, can I ask you to?
Yeah. Right now we're just analyzing different technologies. We're doing a little bit of work on that, and probably I would expect by end of the year, we'd have a little bit more color around cost and what kind of technology we would use.
About lead time, if we went forward and made an investment in carbon capture, how long do you think to get that up and running?
Relatively large project, and it's gonna be integrated to existing. I think you're looking at probably three years from the time you decide to the time it would be operating.
Other questions? Okay. Well, thanks very much. You know, we really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedules to come down to Geismar. I know it's not a great, an easy place to get to, but it's a great place to see. I think seeing the project hopefully has alleviated some of the fears in the market about us being late or over budget. Certainly, I think Paul told me that. On his bus, he was schooling the analysts about not writing things about supply chain issues impacting this project. Paul's pretty passionate, and I didn't tell him to say that. That's Paul. He says, "I read that. I don't know where that's coming from." Hopefully that fear has been alleviated, and we really appreciate.
I know it's a lot of uncertain times. Markets are in a turmoil right now and for you to take the time to come down and spend last night with us and all, most of the day today. Certainly, I appreciate that commitment and the interest in our company. I look forward to continuing our dialogue as markets develop and as things change in ways that we probably can't anticipate today. Safe travels home and I'm certainly back on the road again. I'm in New York on Wednesday and Toronto on Tuesday, meeting with the shareholders and potential shareholders. Look forward to catching up with everybody, as we go forward here. Thanks very much.