Good afternoon, everyone. We're about to get started. Hello, my name's Kevin Price. I'm the SVP and General Counsel at Methanex, and it's my absolute pleasure to welcome you to the 2025 Investor Day for Methanex Corporation. That welcome is not just for you here in Toronto, but also the many people we have attending via webcast. Now, before I hand over the day to Rich and my other colleagues, I've just got a couple of housekeeping items to go through. First, a safety note, and this is for those who are in attendance today. In case of an emergency, the hotel will activate their emergency response team. If you hear an intermittent alarm, please stand by and prepare to leave the building and listen to the instructions given over the emergency voice communication system. If you hear a continuous alarm, please evacuate using the stairwells.
Now, the stairwells for us, the main ones, are just behind you, but there's also another set over to the right through where the food was. Both stairwells, they lead to the rear alley and onto Bay Street by the loading dock entrance. After exiting, please proceed north to the evacuation site at the Bay and Adelaide Center. Second, I would like to remind the audience, as well as our listeners on the webcast, that any information in the presentation materials or presented orally, either in prepared remarks or in response to questions, may contain forward-looking information. Actual results could differ materially from those contemplated by the forward-looking statements. For more information, please refer to our 2024 annual and third-quarter management discussion and analysis.
Lastly, this presentation uses certain non-GAAP measures that do not have any standardized meaning prescribed by GAAP and are therefore unlikely to be comparable to similar measures presented by other companies. These measures represent the amounts that are attributable to Methanex Corporation and may exclude the impact of specific items. With that, I'd like to turn the presentation over to Methanex President and CEO, Mr. Rich Sumner.
All right, thank you, Kevin. Good afternoon, everyone. I want to welcome you all, welcome all of you, welcome those that are on the webcast, and also official welcome to all of you that are here with us today in Toronto. Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedules, and we're really excited about our Investor Day today. You will see that you have a gift in front of you. That gift is a replica of the Methanex dual-fuel vessels. You'll also be happy to know that we had a different idea that got canceled, which was a stick-build methanol plant that you would have had to build and assemble, and you had to do that correctly to take it home. We know better than anyone how hard it is to build a methanol plant.
You know, I guess what I want to first say is I'm really excited to be here today. One, because it's the first time in three and a half years. Two, because it's the first for me as CEO. Thirdly, it's because we have such a great story to tell for shareholders. I'm also excited that it's not just me and that it's my executive team joining me in the presentation. I'm going to do a quick introduction for the team joining me today. Maybe just a raise of hands. First, it'll be Dean Richardson, our Senior Vice President of Finance and CFO. Next is Kevin Maloney, our Senior Vice President of Corporate Development. I'm realizing my glasses are necessary. Next is Gustavo Parra, our Senior Vice President of Manufacturing.
Next is Karine Delbarre , our Senior Vice President of Global Marketing and Logistics. Last but not least, it's Mark Allard, our Senior Vice President of Low Carbon Solutions. Some facts about the team here. We all started in our roles about three years ago when I took over as CEO. Across this group, we have about 150 years of Methanex experience across this group that'll help me go through our story today. A huge amount of experience, some more than others. The other fact about the entire executive team is that we've lived in and led teams in every major marketing and production site across the Methanex globe. Extensive experience, huge talent, and very excited that they're here with me, and we're very proud to be leading this team at this point in the company's future.
Turning to the next slide, we will have a main presentation, the main presentation provided by the team here. We are also going to do two panel discussions. The first panel discussion will talk about global manufacturing and really about how we manage our assets from a center of excellence perspective. Gustavo Parra will host the panel discussion with Paul Daoust , our VP of Projects and Turnarounds, and Matthew Geary, our VP of Reliability and Asset Integrity. The second panel discussion that we will have will be on low carbon, our Low Carbon Methanol . This is an area that we get asked a lot of questions about. It obviously is an evolving area, has a lot of depth to it. Mark will host a panel discussion with Renato Montero, our VP of Low Carbon Methanol Supply, and Roger Strevens, our Director of Low Carbon Regulations and Advocacy.
On to the first slide here, and that is the theme of today. The theme here is Methanex turning the corner from investment to impact. You know, why the name? First, it's the investments we've done. We've had an intentional build-out of assets in North America, and combined with the OCI acquisition, this is really the cornerstone of Methanex's global asset portfolio. How do we turn the corner? It's taking those assets, it's leveraging our global capabilities in manufacturing and sales and supply chain to then get to impact, which is really focusing on how you do that with a stronger asset base and focusing on free cash flow generation.
Of course, it all has to happen also in the framework of the markets, and we'll talk about the methanol markets and why we think it's a very constructive market for us to be able to execute over the next few years. How will we walk through that story? The first section will be a section called Methanol, a quietly constructive market. I'll go through the markets, methanol supply and demand dynamics, talk about the existing structural tightness we see and how that actually gets tighter as we move forward in the next three to five years. The next section will be presented by Kevin Maloney.
He'll talk about how we have transformed our asset base with that intentional build-out in North America, and that combined with some of the gas basins for both Chile and Egypt are supporting our base production today in prolific gas basins that really support our asset portfolio. The third section will be on leveraging our global capabilities, and that will be presented first by Gustavo, and he'll go through our center of excellence around manufacturing. Karine will then talk about our global leadership position and really how that's unique in our industry. Finally, we'll talk about, again, how we translate all that into stronger free cash flow generation going forward. Dean will present that section.
He'll talk about our approach to deleveraging, getting a stronger balance sheet, and then I'll finish with our discipline capital allocation, both a look back in history and then also thinking forward for the next few years. We do hope that all of those things will weave the story on how we're turning the corner from investment to impact. Before I get into the first section, I do want to stop on the OCI acquisition. You know, for us, this was a transformative opportunity to acquire North American, world-scale North American assets that access abundant North American gas supply. The acquisition price was lower than a brownfield reinvestment economics. We think that this was also an attractive time from where we are in the market cycle with no one building methanol plants and also the existing supply being constrained. Obviously, this is a fit for our business.
This is our business, methanol, and these assets fit very nicely into our business and should be easy to integrate. Now, integration's never easy. What we have seen so far, though, is a really well-planned integration. I think we're seeing really good results from the assets. We're still very early, and Gustavo will talk about this. In fact, this will be weaved throughout everyone's discussion. Kevin will talk about how this fits within the purposeful investing in North America. Gustavo will talk about our approach to integration and how that's really important when we look at our newly acquired assets. Karine will talk about our global supply chain, which starts with our assets and how that bolsters our leadership position in the industry. Dean will talk about actually integration timelines, how we're progressing on synergies. It is a big theme and it's a big focus.
So far, so good, and I really want to thank our teams, both from a due diligence perspective, but also from an integration planning perspective. Still early, lots of work, but things are going really well. Start of the first section, this is Methanex, we're calling methanol a quietly constructive market. Why are we calling it that? I think everyone in this room painfully knows that commodity chemicals have been in a tough, we're going through a tough period. We're not immune to it, but I think there is a difference in terms of the structure here, certainly on the supply side for methanol that makes it a quietly constructive market. We'll go through both the outlook for demand, which we do have a moderated outlook for demand. I think where we are today is a moderated outlook in terms of GDP growth.
We're also being quite conservative in looking at new applications. Even with a moderated demand forecast, you look at no one building new methanol plants and also the constraints on existing supply, we see a constructive market today and one that gets more tight as we move forward. I will start with demand, and we did think that we'd play a little video that contextualizes the diversified end uses of methanol and where it goes. We'll start a video now, and please watch.
This is methanol. No, it's not methane or ethanol. It's methanol. A clear, biodegradable liquid that's an integral part of our day-to-day lives today and plays a key role in a more sustainable tomorrow. You might not know it, but methanol is the building block needed to make so many of the things we use every day. When you drive your car, use your phone, even while you sleep. The paint on our walls, the plywood in our homes, the foam in our mattresses, all made using methanol. It doesn't stop there. From the body panels in your car to the screen of your phone, even the polyester in that fleece jacket. It's not just essential for today, it's also helping shape a more sustainable tomorrow.
Like in shipping, methanol is already being used as a low-emission fuel alternative, giving industrial ships and passenger ferries that cleaner burning option they've needed for so long. It can also be used to power taxis and heavy-duty trucks, heat buildings, even to cook dinners. It can be made from renewable sources. The key element that's essential to your everyday life now and a more sustainable future is methanol.
Okay, so hopefully that puts it into perspective. You can touch and feel a few of the places that methanol goes. I get the pleasure of presenting the first graph of today. There's going to be lots of graphs. This one, what we're trying to show here is achieve a couple of objectives. First is looking at the current makeup of demand in terms of the broad sectors of downstream applications, as well as the regional breakdown. The circles are meant to contextualize size of the markets. The colors are reflecting our views of demand growth over the next five years. I'm going to start regionally. When you look at the starting from left to right, we have the Atlantic markets, this is about 20 million tons of annualized demand. Asia ex-China is about 15 million tons -20 million tons of annualized demand.
China is the biggest market, about 60 million tons of annualized demand. Think a 100 million ton market or thereabouts. When we look at the breakdown, the first application is broad-based chemical demand. Think formaldehyde, acetic acid, methyl methacrylate, silicone. This is going in effectively into endless consumer, residential, commercial applications, really GDP-driven. What you can see is the breakdown of our demand forecast. Green means over 2%. This is not, you know, we're not projecting big strong growth like we would have seen in the past. Remember that when methanol demand shows up, it shows up where industrial manufacturing will happen in support of global GDP demand growth. China, what we look forward in terms of industrial production, both to support their local economy, but also export markets is where we see industrial production and demand consumption for chemicals happening.
You can see then we go over to Asia Pacific, which is slightly lower, and then the Atlantic markets, which is where we kind of moderate down the most. The energy applications, this is where methanol is being used as a transportation fuel. It is in MTBE, which is a gasoline oxygenate, as well as in biodiesel and the production of biodiesel. Those are the big two outside of China. In China, they are using methanol as well to replace coal in boilers and kilns and as a cooking fuel. That is where we see the strongest growth, again, moderated down from what you would have seen in the past. The other thing I would mention here is we have not put any meaningful upside in marine demand into those numbers. We have taken a conservative approach in terms of the outlook.
The last sector is the methanol to olefins market, and that's about anywhere from about 15 million tons -20 million tons of demand, all in China where methanol is being used as a feedstock in the production of ethylene and propylene. What we see here is we've got a yellow with a question mark. I think the reason you see a question mark is because of when I overlay the demand growth, even with conservative assumptions, and you overlay that against the forward look on supply, we do see a tightness there that we'll need to balance. When we look at in that frame, we think about that as a marginal consumer, and the olefins market today is the marginal consumer.
One thing to note is that within the next five years, there's going to be a startup of three more MTO units representing about 4 million tons -5 million tons of demand. We haven't put all of that into our numbers because of the constraint from a supply side, which I'll show in the coming slides. Okay, this next slide, two big points are, we're looking at what's the forecast of new capacity additions in the industry, and also a bit more color and breakdown of why we say current existing supply is constrained. The graph on the left shows the forecast of new capacity additions in methanol. If you look at the dotted line, the dotted line shows average of the past 5-10 years, and then you look at the forward line, that's the average for the next five years.
You can see that average is around 2 million tons a year, whereas in previous we saw above 5. Really, that comes down to what why is that? We've seen first the cost to actually build a new methanol plant has increased significantly. We've also seen the market today not pricing at a level that is really encouraging reinvestment in the industry. Those asset additions are mainly going forward are mainly in China. I'd also say that when we look at the other areas, it's Middle East, which is mainly Iran. When Iran has added capacity, they've had a real hard time actually delivering supply because of the gas feedstock constraints in that country. There's a question mark on whether that will actually result in production. That's the first side. We move over to the right-hand side. This is the breakdown of the existing market.
What you see in a lot of analyst reports that study methanol is there's around 160 million tons of capacity. The industry operates at around 65%-70%, which I always think is a very low number. We're trying to break that down. The first yellow line, or yellow bucket there, is plants that are effectively mothballed. In China, as an example, they've been progressively shutting down small inefficient plants. You know, plants were built out in a big way in the early 2000s. These are plants that have been shut down for more than two years, 100,000 ton- 500,000 ton plants. The economic and political challenges to restarting are significant. Also in this bucket will be existing capacity that is structurally constrained because of feedstock. Think Trinidad, 8 million tons of capacity, operates 4 million tons -5 million tons.
Think Europe, 5 million tons of capacity operating less than 1 million tons a year. Equatorial Guinea, a 1 million ton plant that's been permanently shut down and gas rediverted into LNG. New Zealand, 2.5 million tons of capacity, we're operating one plant less than full capacity. You really look at that as being significantly structurally constrained. On the right, the next bar is talking about where you see seasonal restrictions or sanctions. Iran has 15 million tons of capacity. They operate 9 million tons a year with added pressure as we see from sanctions. Russia is sanctioned, has 5 million tons of capacity, operates 3. In the wintertime, we get significantly restricted in China as natural gas gets shut down and coal gets redirected. Where we think effective capacity in the industry is more at around 110 million tons.
When you think about a 100 million ton market and you have to have planned turnarounds and there are always unplanned things that happen, we are at a really high required operating rate to meet current demand. Now we take both those and we put them together. On the left-hand side, what you see is a 16 million ton demand growth, which we talked about being moderated for GDP, conservative around new energy applications. We have 16 million tons of demand, 9 million tons of new capacity split between China and Middle East. We have put a yellow line, which is at risk. That could be at risk because of the new projects and their ability to actually deliver production or further constraints on existing supply. What you see there is a supply-demand gap of around 10 million tons.
You know, that's where ultimately we all know demand and supply have to equal. And we do think what's that going to mean is pressure on the consumers in the industry. So what does that mean in terms of pricing? In the short run, ultimately it'll be driven by cost curve. The marginal cost of production, we foresee remaining marginal coal and natural gas producers in China. But increasingly as we move forward, we think that the price is set by the marginal consumer, and that's the olefins consumer. The olefins market has been structurally under pressure. You know, when we look forward, the big rebalancing is what's being forecast. It will take time. We're seeing actions being taken in Europe, in Korea, in Japan. China is talking about anti-involution and its work back to chemicals. So it will take time, but we see structural improvement as we move forward.
Timing is dependent on demand and the pace of restructuring. That is something that we're focused on. We think today, reminder that the MTO affordability and the cost curve is really set in China. All markets trade at a premium to China. Karine's going to talk about how that works in our portfolio and how we, where we sell in the world, and how that achieves an average realized price above that. In the long run, pricing ultimately needs to move back to encourage new supply into reinvestment economics. Given the current environment around commodity chemicals, we do think it takes time. We do not project that happening in the next three to five years, but we will be looking at that very closely. What that means for our portfolio is with small structural improvement, we're realizing today $350 methanol price with small structural improvements.
We think that it bodes really well for us as we bring these new assets on and deliver, you know, really strong free cash flows. That is the main conclusion. I think we got a little summary here. You know, industry is constrained both from existing supply with limited new capacity. We think increasingly it is the olefin market that we will be looking forward to get direction on pricing. It will take time to get back to reinvestment economics, but we expect that the structural improvement is going to be puts a really good environment for us to execute on what we need to do over the next few years. With that, I am going to turn it over to Kevin, who will talk about our investing in North America.
Thanks, Rich, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm really excited to have the opportunity to speak with you today about how we've reshaped and strengthened our business and give you an update on our producing regions as well. I'd like to start with this map and the visuals here because I think it really does a good job of illustrating our asset portfolio and how we think about it. What the size of the circles represents is the proportion of earnings that each region contributes to our overall run rate. The colors of each circle represent our view of the gas risks or opportunities in each region. As you can see, North America clearly dominates our earnings generation capability with access to low cost and abundant natural gas. In Chile and Egypt, we have stable to improving gas supply conditions in both regions.
We have a lot more uncertainty in our Trinidad and New Zealand assets, which today, as you can see, do not contribute meaningfully to our overall business performance. Over the next few slides, I'll describe the journey we have been on reshaping our portfolio over the past 15 years or so. Ultimately, it is a story about recognizing shifts in what was happening with the development of shale oil and gas in the U.S.. By taking a disciplined approach, we were first movers who took advantage of these developments. We have been able to build out a very significant capability in North America that is now a considerable competitive advantage. Before I get into what we have done in North America, I would like to provide some context as to how the methanol industry has developed historically, what has changed, and why we are well positioned for the future.
First, when we think about some of our older assets like New Zealand and Chile, these developments occurred where there were stranded gas in basins that were too small for LNG developments, but also too large to develop for local market demand, typically gas basins with resource sizes in the range of 1 tcf-3 tcf. This size of gas resource was the sweet spot for methanol. And this became the business model for project developers: locate smallest stranded gas fields near deep water ports in countries you're comfortable developing a methanol project. This was the original business model, which led to the development of both New Zealand and Chile. The business model for methanol is, however, quite different now.
In particular, as we entered the 2010 period, supported by advancements in shale drilling technology, we began to see upstream investment activity shifting away from smaller basins to larger, low-cost resource basins with shorter investment cycles, like the U.S. Shale Basin. Over the last 15 years, the business model for methanol has been about building or acquiring assets in the U.S. where there's a very significant, large, low-cost resource base. Today, we have a portfolio that includes 6.7 million metric tons of low-cost North American production capacity, which now accounts for 65% of our global capacity and 75% of our run rate earnings generation capability. Over the next couple of slides, I'll talk a little bit more about how we built out this capability and why we're confident about the gas outlook and our future in North America.
Another interesting point about the shifting patterns in upstream investment is that we have two assets that are ideally located to benefit from emerging shifts in upstream investment activity, specifically Chile and Egypt. At a very high level, we're seeing meaningful upstream activity happening in other large, low-cost resource basins, such as shale gas in Argentina and also conventional resources in the Eastern Med. We believe both Chile and Egypt will benefit from these developments. I have a couple of slides where I'll talk more about these two regions in a bit more detail and share our perspectives. Finally, I'll come back to the slide at the end to quickly comment on both New Zealand and Trinidad. Now turning back to North America, the chart on the bottom here shows the buildout of our North American capabilities.
At a high level, without going through each addition of capacity, it shows us growing our North American capability, starting with the restart of our Medicine Hat plant, which we announced in 2010, and the plant came online in 2011. Then the buildout of our three plants in Geismar for 4 million tons of capacity, and finishing with the acquisition of OCI's methanol business, which we closed earlier this summer. In total, over this 15-year period, we've added an impressive 6.7 million metric tons of low-cost production capacity across three production regions in North America. You know, as I'm sure you can appreciate, this is a significant competitive advantage for Methanex. Not only do we have a low-cost structure, but as Karine will share later this afternoon, we're also well situated from a marketing perspective.
Now turning to the chart at the top, this shows the history of gas production and pricing over the same period. I think there are a few kind of key important takeaways from this chart. First, if you're looking at the blue line, from 2010 - 2025, gas production has essentially doubled, growing from around 55 Bcf a day to 105 Bcf per day today. It's a near 100% increase in the gas market. Second, from a historical gas pricing perspective, looking at the yellow squares on the chart, and if we exclude the 2021 and 2022 period, which we consider a once-in-a-generation event when the economy was coming out of COVID, compounded by the start of the Ukraine war, we can see that gas pricing has essentially been flat in nominal terms. What this means is that gas pricing has been declining in real terms.
At the same time, gas supply has doubled and easily kept pace with demand. There are several factors that this can be attributed to, with some of the main drivers being the overall size of the gas resource base in North America, the amount of gas delivery infrastructure that is available. One thing that I think is underappreciated sometimes is the significant productivity improvements that have been achieved with the development of shale resources. Overall, the main message on the slide here is that we have been very deliberate and measured about building out a significant capability in North America, and doing so as we have gained increased confidence in the North American gas market. Now turning to our outlook for North America gas, I have a few charts and points to go through to provide some perspective on our views.
The first chart here is simply a visualization, which highlights the overall magnitude of the gas resource base in the U.S. The circle at the top represents current annual gas production in the U.S., and the circles below show how much gas resource is estimated to still be available based on analysis from the Potential Gas Committee and also the U.S. Energy Information Agency. The key circle to focus on here is the third one, which shows that there are approximately 50 years or more of gas that can still be produced technically and commercially at today's conditions. In simple terms, there is a lot of gas that is available to be produced in North America, which gives us a lot of confidence about our long-term availability of gas supply for our North American assets.
The next chart here does a great job highlighting the productivity improvements that have been achieved across several shale gas basins in the U.S. In summary, over a 10-year period from 2014 - 2024, new well gas production per rig has increased by three to five times. That's 300%-500% improvement. Considering that the cost of drilling is one of the most expensive aspects of producing gas, it's pretty amazing to see how much improvement has been achieved in a relatively short period of time. Now, the improvements come from advancements in shale drilling technology, such as just increasing the number of wells per pad, longer laterals, with some producers now achieving laterals over four miles in length, better placement of wells, and better fracturing technology, just to name a few. Now, it's totally a fair question to ask about whether these productivity improvements will be sustained going forward.
From a learning curve perspective and based on the data in this chart, it does not appear like the pace of improvement is flattening or decelerating yet. Plus, if you look at the investor decks of some of the main upstream players operating in these basins, like EOG and EQT, they are all continuing to set and achieve incremental productivity improvement targets. For me, it seems sensible to assume that there is more opportunity available here. Finally, the last chart is simply the NYMEX forward curve through 2035, taken as of November 7th. What this shows is that the forward curve over the 10-year period is trading essentially between $3.50 and $4 per MMBtu on a nominal basis.
It's important to remember that the forward curve is not necessarily a prediction of future pricing, but more of a risk-clearing market where counterparties are willing to hedge and lock in pricing and returns for the business. What's interesting to note here is that despite an expectation of increased demand for LNG and data centers, the curve is in backwardation, with pricing at the 10-year mark around $350 nominally, so about $3 on a real basis. Also, while we haven't shown it on this chart, industry observers forecast prices over time to reach $5 in nominal terms, so today about $4 on a real basis, based on the assumption that drier gas from basins like the Haynesville are going to be needed to balance the market and that productivity improvements are going to slow down.
Based on the forward curve and forecasted prices, we believe a long-term range of $3-$4 is a sensible planning assumption for our U.S. assets. As a reminder, we also have exposure to ACO for our Medicine Hat plant, and ACO has been trading at around $1.50 discount to Henry Hub. In summary, for all the reasons mentioned, first, we have a very large low-cost resource base in North America, which has yet to be produced. Second, I think the very real possibility of achieving even further productivity improvements in drilling. Third, where the forward curve and forecasted prices, where the forward curve is trading and industry expert forecasts the future pricing, for these reasons and others, we continue to believe there will be abundant low-cost gas for our North American assets, which we believe makes our capability quite valuable. Excuse me.
On this slide here, I wanted to briefly describe how we manage gas price risk across our North American asset base. In really simple terms, based on the chart on the left, we hedge a portion of our North American gas requirements using a laddered hedging strategy, where we hedge a higher percentage of our requirements in the near term, and then this percentage steps down over a 10-year period. In the past, while we were building out our North American portfolio, we aimed to hedge about 70% of our near-term gas requirements. Now, in the context of our current finance strategy, we are making a shift to take a little bit more open exposure and targeting around 50% in the near term. The 50% target is really aimed at striking a balance between protecting against gas price spikes and also benefiting from lower gas prices.
As you can see from the chart on the right here, monthly gas prices over the last 10 years have mostly been below $4, with only a handful of monthly prices above $4. In fact, if we remove the gas prices from the once-in-a-generation event from 2021 - 2022, there has only been one month over the past 10 years where gas prices have been above $4. Also, in terms of managing potential short-term gas price spikes, typically linked to more extreme weather events that occur in the South or in the U.S., we can also adjust our production across our North American portfolio. Given the scale and flexibility of our global supply chain, we could resell gas if it made more economic sense to do so.
Finally, our 50% near-term target is not a hard target, as we have the flexibility to increase our near-term hedge position if we see prices that we really like, but this will be done more so on an opportunistic basis. In summary, we take a balanced approach to our overall gas price risk management strategy and have additional levers to manage short-term gas price volatility. Now coming back to both Chile and Egypt for a moment, as I mentioned earlier, these are two assets that we believe will benefit from the significant upstream activity that is taking place in the respective basins. First, let me talk a little bit about Chile. The base load gas supply for our Chile plants, which is roughly about 40%, comes from the state-owned energy company ENAP, who is planning to maintain and grow its local gas production.
Chile has also been benefiting from upstream activity in Argentina, activity taking place not only in the Austral basin in the South, but also from significant activity in the Vaca Muerta formation in the Neuquén basin. This is a prolific shale gas basin, analogous to the US shale basins, which is estimated to contain over 300 tcf of gas. To help put this into perspective, 1% of this gas, or 3 tcf, would supply our Chilean plants for over 50 years. I was in Argentina about six months ago, and while they're in the early innings of the game there, what I observed from an upstream investment perspective was absolutely outstanding. The pace of development activity happening there is happning very rapidly in Argentina as they leverage U.S. technology and experience, along with building out critical infrastructure like takeaway capacity and development capacity.
The upstream developers in Argentina are working very hard to enable growth in both regional exports and also LNG developments. Ten years ago, we were only producing 200,000 metric tons in Chile, and this year, we're on pace to produce around 1.4 million metric tons. That's a 700% change. We expect this trend to continue as upstream activity accelerates in Argentina, but the pace of our production improvements will likely be constrained somewhat by export policies and how these evolve over the coming years. At the moment, the current Milei government is honoring export regulations put in place by the previous government, which are in place through 2028, and we are not expecting major changes here.
In the near term, we expect to receive full gas to operate both plants for about seven months during the Southern Hemisphere summer period and gas for one plant operation during their winter period, so production of around 1.4 million metric tons per year. Egypt is somewhat of a similar story. The Eastern Med is a large conventional resource basin, and virtually every oil major is exploring and developing oil and gas in the region. The gas resource base in the East Med is estimated to be somewhere between 140 tcf-500 tcf of undiscovered gas. Given its local demand and existing infrastructure, Egypt is well placed to benefit from increased development activity in the region, both domestic and cross-border, and we expect this will improve overall gas supply security to the country.
As an example, earlier this year, the Cypriot and Egyptian governments signed agreements to pave the way for gas exports from Cyprus to Egypt from the Kronos and Aphrodite developments. In Israel, Chevron and its Leviathan partners recently agreed to mend their 2019 agreement with Egypt to export gas from Israel, increasing volumes by 45% in the near term, and then subject to a positive FID on its Leviathan expansion plans targeted for the end of the year, their gas supply commitment would increase by another 85%, up to 1.25 Bcf per day over the 2030 - 2040 period. Now, while some of you may have seen that the Israeli Minister of Energy has said that he isn't approving this agreement at this point, gas supply from Israel to Egypt is, in fact, seen as a real success story for cross-border developments.
In the past, we have seen pragmatism prevail and think that's likely what will play out this time too. Also, another important point that I think is worth noting is that we have a very strong relationship and partnership with the Egyptian government. During times of gas supply constraints, which are typically seasonal in nature, we have been able to operate at high rates, including this past summer when we operated at approximately 70% during this period. The main message here is that there is a tremendous amount of positive upstream activity going on in the Eastern Med, and combined with our strong partnership with the Egyptian government, we expect Egypt to benefit from these developments.
Now, coming back to the slide I started with and to wrap up the discussion on our portfolio, I wanted to make a few comments on both New Zealand and Trinidad. As we can see from the map here, both New Zealand and Trinidad do not contribute meaningfully to our overall business performance. New Zealand is the oldest asset in our fleet, and it is currently celebrating 40 years of operation, but for the past five to seven years, gas supplies have been in significant decline. The reason for this is essentially twofold. One is that the gas basin itself is quite mature, and developing new gas in the basin has become increasingly complex, and to be quite frank, any recent upstream activity has not been that successful.
Second, and probably the more important reason is that the previous New Zealand government implemented a policy in 2018 to ban further oil and gas exploration, with other policies that made it more restrictive and uncertain for upstream development. While the current government has reversed the ban on gas exploration and implemented some other policies to improve upstream investor confidence, it's really difficult to say today whether these actions will ultimately be enough to improve the situation. Today, we're only producing at a rate of around 400,000-500,000 metric tons per year in New Zealand, and as we look forward in New Zealand, we're continuing to engage with government and upstream partners to encourage more upstream investment, but we're also taking prudent steps to manage and optimize our business there. Trinidad is a similar but slightly different story to New Zealand.
What's similar is that the offshore basins supplying Trinidad are all mature at end-of-life. Production has gone from a peak of 4.2 Bcf a day in 2010 to around 2.5 Bcf per day today. That's roughly a 40% decline from peak production. What's different and more important is that the country itself is highly dependent on oil and gas revenues, so unlike New Zealand, there's strong political will and motivation to enable upstream activity in the region. Today, there are a few local offshore developments that are expected to come online in 2027 and have the potential to slightly increase current production and sustain that for another couple of years. However, we currently expect gas supply and demand balances to be relatively tight through 2027.
Ultimately, to sustain and grow production, grow gas supplies in Trinidad hinges on the ability to develop cross-border supplies with Venezuela, where there is a very large gas resource base, but such cross-border developments require the right geopolitical conditions to enable. Today, we're operating our Titan asset in Trinidad and producing around 800,000 metric tons per year. Even though we've developed good capability in Trinidad, continued operation will be largely contingent on the gas look and, more importantly, our ability to secure future gas supply contracts to profitably sustain longer-term operations in the country. To conclude, there are a few final takeaways really to sum everything up.
The main takeaway is that over the past 15 years, we've reshaped our portfolio and built a significant capability of 6.7 million metric tons per year of low-cost production capacity in North America, and this has greatly strengthened the business, enhanced the earnings, and cash flow generation capability of our business. In addition, given the size of the North American gas resource base, the potential for further productivity improvements, along with the forward curve and forecasted prices, we continue to expect a long duration of low-cost gas supply for our plants, making our North American capability quite valuable. Finally, there are very significant and positive upstream developments happening in Argentina and the Eastern Med, and we expect both Chile and Egypt to benefit from these developments.
Now, before we stop to take a 10-minute break, we'd like to share a short video which goes through each of our North American production sites and shares a little bit about each. Thanks.
Across an evolving energy landscape, North America has emerged as a region defined by stability and long-term opportunity. Here, over the last 15 years, Methanex has made a number of strategic investments, leveraging abundant, competitively priced natural gas, strong infrastructure, and skilled people as its foundation for growth in North America. These investments now span a network of world-class facilities across Canada and the U.S. Gulf Coast, able to produce up to 6.7 million tons each year. Connected through deep-water ports, rail networks, and pipelines, these operations connect Methanex to markets across the globe. The strategic move began in Medicine Hat, Alberta, where operations were restarted in 2011 after more than a decade offline.
Once closed during a period of high natural gas prices, the plant was brought back to life as energy markets stabilized and new shale gas opportunities emerged. Today, Medicine Hat stands as Canada's only commercial-scale methanol facility, able to produce up to 600,000 tons each year. Located entirely inland, the site ships product by rail and tanker truck to customers across North America. Next came Geismar, Louisiana, one of the most ambitious projects in Methanex history. Between 2012 and 2015, two entire methanol plants were relocated from our Chile operations to the U.S. Gulf Coast, safely dismantled and shipped across the ocean, and then reassembled in Geismar. The relocation marked an unprecedented engineering and logistical achievement. Geismar 1 and Geismar 2 were both brought online in 2015, together establishing a cornerstone of Methanex's U.S. operations and proving what's possible when precision, scale, and teamwork come together.
The next phase of investment came in 2019 when we announced a final investment decision to build a new 1.8 million ton methanol facility in Geismar, further expanding our U.S. Gulf Coast presence. Geismar 3 came online in 2024. Designed for higher efficiency and lower emissions, it ranks among the lowest CO2 emission-intensity methanol plants in the world. Geismar 3 uses excess hydrogen from our Geismar 1 and 2 plants and incorporates autothermal reforming technology to reduce overall energy requirements. With access to abundant U.S. natural gas, pipeline connectivity, and deep-water shipping via the Mississippi River, Geismar now has a combined production capacity of 4 million tons per year, one of the largest and most efficient methanol complexes in the world. Our North American growth continued in 2025 with the acquisition of OCI Global's International Methanol Business, which included two world-scale facilities in Beaumont, Texas, along the Gulf Coast.
The first is an integrated methanol and ammonia plant that produces up to 900,000 tons of methanol and 340,000 tons of ammonia each year. Its location offers direct pipeline connections to nearby customers and port access through dedicated export docks. The second facility, located just a few miles away, is Natgasoline, where Methanex holds a 50% interest. The plant began operating in 2018 and ranks among the largest methanol facilities in the world, with an annual capacity of 1.7 million tons, half of which is Methanex's share. Together, the Beaumont and Natgasoline operations further strengthen our Gulf Coast presence and our ability to serve global markets. In just 15 years, Methanex has grown its North American production from 0 to 6.7 million tons of annual capacity. Today, these operations form the backbone of our global supply network, delivering reliability, scale, and strength to every market we serve.
By investing with purpose and adapting to change, Methanex has built a foundation in North America for the future, one that continues to drive efficiency, sustainable growth, and safe, reliable operations. Methanex in North America, built for the future.
Okay, we're going to take a 10-minute break, and we'll come back with the rest of the first presentation. Thank you. I think we'll get started in a minute here. I'll just go through the agenda for the rest of the day here because I know I didn't complete that in the first discussion, but we'll go through the second half of the presentation here. We'll start with Gustavo talking about our center of excellence around manufacturing. Karine will talk about our global leadership position, and then Dean is going to talk about our focus on cash flow generation as well as our strengthening of the balance sheet.
I will talk about our capital allocation philosophy, and then we will end the first presentation. That'll be followed by 30 minutes. We'll take a quick break, followed by 30 minutes of Q&A, and then we'll go into our panel discussions. Okay, with that, I'll invite Gustavo up to the stage.
Thank you, Rich. Good afternoon, everyone. Before I start talking about manufacturing, Rich mentioned about this 150 years of experience, and to be honest, I got a little bit scared because I realized that 25% of that is me. It's a great opportunity to talk about manufacturing and explain how we work, what our focus areas are, and how do we deliver value to the business. This slide is basically a representation of our global strategy.
We really focus on those elements that you see there, but let me start talking about the effort that we put in working as one team using our center of excellence approach. We put a lot of effort in transferring our knowledge, working with our lesson lens and using best practices. Part of that is our team that we have in region. We put a lot of emphasis in developing our team by using our competency assurance process and also our professional development program. One example that probably reflects that is turnarounds. When we execute turnarounds in region, we think about turnarounds as a global initiative for manufacturing, and we deploy resources in region that bring expertise into that particular turnaround, and then they go back into the other region, bringing those learnings in a way that we continually learn from each other.
A few elements there basically are showing our approach in manufacturing. I will start talking about safety. Safety is really number one for us. We put a lot of emphasis in working safely in every site that we operate. We really focus on the health and safety of our team and really protect the environment and also the community that we operate. Lots of effort in reliability, reliability by doing our proper asset management and operating that with excellence, using our systems and practices and standards that we have captured for years of operating experience, and also understanding the assets and understanding the risk and manage those accordingly. In a way, the main message here is that we have a global manufacturing strategy that focuses on delivering safe, reliable, and sustainable operations across our asset portfolio, and we translate excellence into value.
A little bit more color on how we work using our global operational capability and our certain effectiveness approach. We start with a global manufacturing team that is driving our manufacturing strategy. They allocate resources to develop and deliver our key initiatives and also measure performance. On the left side, you see what we call our global expert. They focus on asset assurance. They also manage reliability data and put a lot of emphasis on improving our plant performance. On the right side, we have our global functional teams that are basically focusing on delivering the global key initiative that we have in manufacturing and working together with the site management team. I will try to kind of reflect on all of this as an example. Kevin showed the video on North America and the two plants that we relocated from Chile.
I had the honor to lead those projects years ago and kind of describe how this model works. You think about this. We have a team in Chile that we built there to find a way to dismantle the plant and find a way to make models of this plant and then put it in vessels and move it to Louisiana through the Atlantic and over to the Mississippi River. We have another team in Louisiana that was preparing the plant, ensuring that we have the foundations in place to receive those modules and ensure that everything is prepared as soon as we have those modules in place. We have to build a big bridge over the levee in Louisiana to bring those modules across and install this accordingly. Everything fit very nicely. Everything came together very nicely.
We commissioned and set up those plants very well in a year, in a calendar year. I have to say those plants are operating very reliably, very safely, and we added very quickly, or in four years, an extra 2 million ton capacity. In a way, I am trying to reflect how this model works, and we would have been unable to do that without the capacity and the talented team that we have in our company. Moving forward to some of the performance metrics, this slide is showing our safety performance that we are very proud of. We have been well below industry benchmark in both health and safety and also process safety. Notable for me is that we have not had any major event in the last two years.
You see zero there, and that's because of the effort that we put in running those assets safely and protecting our people, as I said before. On the top, you see our reliability performance over the last five years is an average of 96%. We do have a target of 97%. We are putting a lot of emphasis in removing all the defects that we have in our assets and manage the risk accordingly. G3 has been a really nice story. Now the plant is running extremely well. We are very happy with that asset. It's very reliable. We sort out all the initial operational issues that we have with that plant, and it's a really, really good plant, low emitter, high reliability, and high efficiency.
Lastly, our capital performance, we put a lot of emphasis in managing those based on risk and based on priorities and based on return of the business. The number that you see there, the $150 million, is basically including our new assets in Beaumont, and we are going to work very hard to keep those numbers on those levels. OCI, Rich spoke about OCI, and more colleagues are going to talk about that. We are really happy with the asset that we have, really excited what it's going to bring to our company. We have a great team that are running those assets for years. Most of them enjoy, and they say that they are working very nice with us in learning from our background and our vast experience in building and operating plants, and really excited to go through that process. A couple of comments there.
You saw in the video our plant in Medicine Hat in Alberta. Beaumont has a lot of similarities in the front end of that plant with that particular plant, so we are bringing all our years of experience into Beaumont. That gasoline is basically a copy of our Atlas plant in Trinidad that we have a lot of history operating those plants and learning from that particular asset. I will try to show a little bit of data or analysis how we really are focusing in bringing these new assets on. There is a lot of detail there, so I will try to highlight a few things there. At the beginning, we knew that we need to engage the team well, so we went back.
We follow a very thorough onboarding program, and we are now following a process of competency assurance and understand what are the gaps that we need to bridge and how we work together. The main thing that we did and successfully achieved are the reviews on safety and responsible care. We wanted to do that to ensure that we do not have major compliance issues, that we are protecting the environment well, and we have good safety practices to manage those assets accordingly. Happy to say that we did not identify any big red flags, and we are going to work through the findings based on using our normal processes.
We did complete also a deep dive on the assets that we call asset assurance, and we are going to probably talk a little bit more about that on our panel, but also we have a very good understanding on the vulnerabilities that we have in the plant and how we are going to overcome those in the next period to come. Lastly, all our technology is coming across. We have all these systems and processes that we use for years, and we are building that into our new organization. For example, we do have strong applications to monitor performance in the plant, and that requires a little bit of training for the new team to understand how we report back and how do we manage those issues. By closing, I think what I would like to leave with you is kind of three messages.
Safety is our top priority. We have a strong belief that a safe plant is a reliable plant, and a reliable plant is more production. That is the way that we think about this. We are focusing in ensuring and improving our reliability performance and efficiency across the assets, and this will bring more methanol. Lastly, we believe that we have a center of excellence approach, that our team worked together and will bring value to the business. Thank you very much first, and with that, I will pass it on to Karine.
Thank you, Gustavo, and good afternoon, everyone. You heard from Rich how the methanol supply and demand balances are getting tighter, and you also heard from Kevin and from Gustavo how our reliable assets are becoming even more reliable and stronger, supported by natural gas in North America.
What does this mean for our strategy, our marketing strategy? What you will hear from me on the next few slides is that we are the global leader in the methanol industry. We have a global reach supplying customers in all major continents, that we create value with our supply chain, our global supply chain, creating reliability for our customers and a lot of flexibility. Those two elements are really critical in today's world where the methanol markets, as I said, are getting tighter, making reliability even more so valuable, and geopolitical environments are creating added constraints when you want to move product around. I mentioned our global reach, and as I said, we have access to all major consuming regions. We can do business pretty much with any customers around the world. Let me just explain what I mean by this global reach.
We spoke about our global asset base. We have 6.7 million tons in North America, our assets in Chile, in Egypt, in Trinidad, in New Zealand. From those manufacturing sites, we supply the local demand first, and then we export to the consuming regions. To manage those exports, we use our own vessel fleet, which is a very key component. You'll see what I mentioned afterwards. Once the product gets into the region, we have marketing offices around the world that make sure that through our extensive network, we make sure to deliver product to our customers on time. Why is reliability becoming so much more important? As Rich explained, there's a lack of new capacity coming in the market. If you noticed, the new capacity is actually coming from China, from Iran, and from Russia mostly.
A brief point about China, it's mostly inland coal-based Chinese production that we're talking about. It's about 50% of the global production that's coming from inland China, and really, it's the market that's not truly accessible. The rest, as I mentioned, of those new assets are mostly coming from Iran and Russia. Today, our customers cannot buy product from those two countries. They are sanctioned product. We also mentioned about the attrition that we foresee in the future, but just also to give you a sense of what happened to the existing capacity that's running today. In the past five years, the production of the three world-scale plants that were built in North America was actually offset by the shutdown in Equatorial Guinea, in Trinidad, and in Europe. That really tells you how the non-sanctioned product is getting actually quite tighter.
That makes definitely reliability and flexibility truly important features. I would say that we stand out in the methanol industry with our capabilities. As you can see on the graph on the right-hand side, we have put here our estimated market share, excluding, again, the inland domestic China market. Methanex's size is twice, as you can see, the nearest of our competitors. I would add that there are many producers in the world in methanol. There is a long tail list of producers after these few names you see here. Most of our competitors are actually regionally focused. They either run a single—they are a single plant operator, or they run out of a single region, which makes them much less flexible when it comes to, as I mentioned earlier, sanctions or navigation restrictions. Maybe a quick point on sanctions.
About 30% of the global production outside of China is actually today subject to sanctions. It's a significant amount, obviously. I just also mentioned about navigation restrictions, and this is really very much felt in the Suez Canal. I'm sure everybody is aware that there is significant restriction to go through the canal at the moment, and it's truly impacting the ability for Middle Eastern producers to go through the Suez and bring product into the European markets. We stand out very different supply chain that we're running with this very complex and comprehensive global footprint. Let me try to give you a sense as to not only how are we set up, what's the supply chain set up, but also how are we actually running our supply chain.
It took us years to develop this very sophisticated end-to-end process that I'm going to try to give you a sense of. On this map here, we're trying to provide a snapshot. It all starts, as I said before, from our manufacturing sites. Those are the purple dots on the map. We supply local demand. It's mostly in South America, North America, and in Europe that we supply regional local markets, and then we export the balance using our own fleet. Waterfront Shipping is our subsidiary, manages exclusively Methanex methanol and brings product to the market. They're today contracting 30 deep-sea methanol tankers under long-term time charter. What that means is that we actually control and direct where those vessels are going. It's a fully integrated fleet that we manage and can send constantly those vessels in different directions.
It's what those arrows on the map here represent. We have different options, obviously, as to where we send the product. Once the product gets into the market, we lease about 25 terminals around the world. Those are the yellow dots you see on the map. We also discharge into our customers' terminals. For instance, in the Mediterranean Sea, we have our Egyptian plant, and from there, we're going to be supplying customers directly into their storage facilities along the Mediterranean coast. We drop in about 70 terminals around the world directly into our customers' facilities. From there, once the product gets into the market, our regional teams—we have eight marketing offices around the world—take over the product and make sure to safely and on time deliver it to our customers using all kinds of modes of transportation, which I'll explain in a minute.
Most of the demand, I would say, in China, in Asia, and in Latin America is really along the coast. It's very close to those big import hubs. When you think about North America and Europe, there is a lot of inland demand, and we actually use what we call the hub-and-spoke terminal concepts where we bring product into these large hubs, and then from there, we dispatch the product to the end location. You can see that we have about 400 delivery points that we supply. As I said, mostly North America and Europe. I just want to point your attention to the 1,400 railcars that we lease. It's mostly in North America that we lease those cars, again, because there's a lot of inland demand. Gustavo mentioned the attention we pay to or the focus we pay to safety in our manufacturing site.
The same holds true for our transportation safety. I'm very proud to share that we are one of the two chemical companies in North America that have been awarded for the 10th consecutive year the so-called Grand Slam Award from the Class 1 Railroad for non-accidental release on their network. That was a mouthful, but that's a very nice testament of our dedication and focus on transportation safety. That's the setup of our supply chain. How do we actually run the supply chain? We have an extensive team, very talented team that's constantly looking at supply and demand balances. Looking at our production forecast, looking at our customer forecast, and then making sure that we, in a very cost-optimized way, match both of them, making sure that we supply our customers on time.
It's true for global movements, our global supply chain team, as well as, obviously, in-region movements. We always focus on cost. We're running a commodity business, as you well know, and we are paying close attention to our logistics cost. From that perspective, we have a few levers that we use to minimize cost. We keep open position in each of the regions. We are active in the spot market. We are purchasing in the spot market, and that allows us to balance supply and demand subject to volatility and minimizes our transportation cost. We also organize swaps with co-producers, and because we have such a global footprint, we're really able to organize several kinds of swaps with many different counterparties, and those swaps, obviously, reduce your logistics cost. Lastly, Waterfront Shipping also minimizes shipping cost. To do so, they use what we call back haul.
They're bringing third-party cargoes into the ships rather than the ships returning back empty to the lower region. We actually bring over 95% of the vessels coming back from the Asian markets, coming back to New Zealand or the Americas, are actually carrying third-party cargoes, which definitely brings you revenue and reduces your shipping cost. In summary, we have a very extensive supply chain, a very sophisticated end-to-end process that we have developed over many years, significant improvement in, sorry, significant investment in physical assets, as well as in our teams around the world. This brings a lot of reliability of supply, obviously, to our customer, and that will be our next topic. It's what's our customer portfolio looking like? On the left-hand side of this chart, you see the sales mix and the different delivery modes that we use to supply our customers.
We sell about 60% of our volume into the Atlantic basin, defined as the Americas and Europe. This is aligned, obviously, with the production profile we talked about earlier, but it is also aligned with our capabilities and the complexities of those markets. You can see in the number of modes of transportation that we use how much of these inland markets there are in mostly North America and in Europe. We supply our customers by vessel and pipeline. That is the easy ones. We do a lot of trucking, barging, and rail supply. Obviously, we supply 40% of our sales into the Pacific basin, which is the growing market. We are very comfortable that we have a high-quality portfolio. We have a good sales mix of geographically differentiated geographies and industries.
We typically align with customers who are industry leaders, which means that they're growing and that they need suppliers who are able to support their growth. We also have a long-standing relationship with our customers. 75% of our customers, we've done business for over 10 years. 50% of our customers, we've done business for over 20 years. In the past few years, I've been celebrating a few 30-year anniversary, and I can tell you that feels pretty special. It's quite neat. Finally, I point you to the graph at the bottom of the slide here, where you see the bottom green line represents the China price. The blue line represents Methanex's global average realized price. The gray bar represents the differential between those two on a dollar per metric ton basis. What does this chart tell us?
We mentioned the fact that the China prices are under pressure. In the past three years, it's been below $300, and it's really a function of the pressure of the sanctioned product. China is the clearing market in the methanol industry. It imports about 15 million tons. Two-thirds of that is coming from sanctioned countries. It's Iran and Russia. Those two countries have no other home to go to but China. Definitely a lot of pressure from sanctioned product, but also the fact that the MTO segment, which exists only in China, is lacking affordability because of this olefin overhang that Rich mentioned earlier. Lots of pressure on the China price. When you look at our global ARP, our global average price, it is reflective of the sales mix that I just described. It's those different geographies and those different markets that we serve.
The region, the deep in-region market that commands very specific service levels and different requirements, those attract higher net back and premium pricing. This is why our price in the past three years has been above $350 per metric ton. Now, when you look at those gray bars, you see that they have been existing for a number of years now. Over seven years, we have had recurring differential over the China price. This is really becoming a function of the tightness of the non-sanctioned product. We really believe that the international product is becoming tighter and structurally trading at a premium to the China price. These differentials are really exacerbated when you have supply disruption. This is exactly what happened in Q4 and Q1 this year. I'll just give you an example to try to make you feel what I'm talking about.
There was a number of outages that happened, unplanned outages that happened starting Q4 last year, compounded by some gas diversion in Q1. Some plants were selling to the gas grid rather than producing methanol. The European market experienced a very significant tightness, and prices in Europe increased over $120 above China. What we saw is that ultimately, trade flows rebalanced, but this took a very long time to actually happen, and the prices stayed elevated for a number of months. The reason is that one element is that the producers are contracted. Customers want term supply, but producers are contracted. There is only a very limited amount of spot non-contracted volume. It is really difficult to actually have access to excess volume, for one. The second element is that, as I mentioned earlier, navigation is really restricted around the Suez. And guess what?
To get to Europe, you have to mostly use the Suez to pivot from the Middle East. It really creates a lot of lengthened time for flows to adjust or very high prices. It takes high prices to actually see those flows to readjust. Because of our flexible supply chain, when such disruption happens, we're actually able to benefit and capitalize from it. We stop our purchasing activity, for instance. We redirect our vessels to those different higher net back regions. We organize swaps. We have a number of levers to capitalize on these disruptions. In summary, I hope you understood that we are the global leader in the methanol industry. We are in a very unique position with our very sophisticated global supply chain, a very integrated process that we are running that took us years to develop and would be very hard to replicate.
It gives us a lot of reliability proposal for our customers and a lot of flexibility in a world that's becoming increasingly constrained by geopolitical events. Thank you for your attention. I'm going to now turn it over to Dean.
Thank you, Karine, and good afternoon, everyone. I hope you can see from the discussion that our full team is committed to operational excellence across the business. Whether that's about investment, gas supply, supply chain, working capital, we're all focused together on a safe, sustainable business that ultimately drives strong free cash flow. I'm also going to talk about our balance sheet and update our leverage target. Starting with this chart here in the upper left, this builds off of Gustavo's earlier discussion on reliability. What you can see is we're talking here about on-stream time.
On-stream time is the combination not only of the reliability of our plants, but also of our feedstock supply. You can see we have split the chart between North America and the rest of the world. When we do not have feedstock constraints, our plants run at very high rates. The rest of the world has had its challenges, as we have seen there. I will point out that running at high rates not only helps from a plant efficiency perspective, but Karine has talked about our global supply chain. You can think about how a stable supply of methanol and a predictable supply allows us to optimize our supply chain, things like back hauls, etc. The bottom left builds off of Kevin's discussion of our portfolio transformation.
It just shows the evolution over the past 10 years to where we now have a full two-thirds of our production capacity in the U.S., with a further 20% in Chile and Egypt, and 12% in Trinidad and New Zealand, which we are calling here a challenging outlook today. If you translate that to earnings on the right, you can see our run rate at a $350 average realized price. A full 95% is now coming from gas basins where we feel we have a long, strong future, with 5% in Trinidad and New Zealand. I will take my turn talking about the OCI acquisition. I know it has been threaded through the presentation today, and this has been a full effort across our team over the past year or so. The due diligence phase, it was very detailed. It involved all our functions from manufacturing, gas supply, finance, etc.
Of course, we had a long time to plan as we worked through the approval process, culminating in the June 27th closing date. All this culminated in being ready to run what we called our day 1 - 90 integration. We were ready to really get in there and make sure that we address the high-risk, high-value items. An example I can give is with Karine's team, who runs our marketing and customer service. Within 30 days, we had transformed or transferred all of the new customers, new logistics onto our systems, which not only allowed for continued reliable supply to our customers and our new customers, but it also allowed us to start getting after synergies, things like looking at terminal contracts, consolidating delivery barges, etc. That is one example of many that have been done across the business.
We are making progress towards our $30 million synergy target. There are other things, of course, that are going to take a little more time. Of course, IT systems and some of those changes, which involve multiple layers of people and processes. We are working diligently through that, and we are on target to hit our $30 million synergy target within that second year. Of course, as a business, we are looking beyond that. That is a starting point. We have always said those are hard, achievable costs that we know we could get at. The real value here is running the plants at high operating rates. We have talked about how we, on our deal, we sort of modeled them in the 90% range. Our target is 97%. Gustavo and team are working hard at that. We had a great Q3, which we are very pleased about.
Of course, we're not sitting on our laurels. That has to be sustained over multiple quarters and years, and we're working very hard at that. Karine, similarly, on the supply chain side. We think there's upside there, and we're working very hard to get at it over the next couple of years. This shows a bridge of our EBITDA evolution over the past couple of years. You can see in 2024, when we had a $355 realized price, what we realized on EBITDA. After adjusting for Trinidad and New Zealand, you can see what our building blocks to get to our current run rate expectations are, particularly G3 and OCI, including the synergies. I hope you've seen from my colleagues here that we collectively are very focused on delivering operational excellence to get to that level.
We do believe there is further upside through the newly acquired assets, as well as Chile and Egypt gas supply, which in our run rate, we do not have full rates there. We are looking to continue to deliver on that expectation. One thing that is really near and dear to my heart, of course, is translating earnings into cash flow. For us, that is defined as operating cash flow less our interest payments, our lease payments, our CapEx payments. All that is reflected here on this screen. You can see that we do have a good transfer of EBITDA into cash flow, particularly when you think about over the last five years, the capital that we have put into the business. Once you adjust for that and take Rich's comments that we do not have much growth capital on the horizon, we compare very favorably to a peer group.
This shows the last five-year history. Towards the right, you can see what our run rate expectations are and that we are working towards. As a team, we are working very focused on that point there. Turning to the balance sheet, a strong, resilient balance sheet is critical to us in a commodity industry. When we think about this, we think through the cycle. We know we are in a commodity industry where we prepare for low prices. When we think about our balance sheet, we specifically think about a $300-$400 window where we think it is reasonable to have a leverage target. We are setting our leverage target at two to two and a half times at a $350 price. Importantly, down in the bottom left, you can see what that does through the cycle.
We're very focused on making sure that we have reasonable leverage through that range. We do prepare for prices below that as we go through crisis points that we know we've seen in the past and we will see again in the future. That is through protecting with a sustainable low-cost structure and ample liquidity. From a leverage perspective, we think this is the right target for Methanex because of the protection it provides to shareholders through the reduction of risk. It is investment-grade quality, as you can see on the right with our peers. That's really important to us because it provides us flexibility, low covenant structures. Also, Kevin talked about the hedging opportunities that we have. Having a strong balance sheet and access to credit is critically important for our business.
For all these reasons, we think that this is the right target for Methanex, and we're working towards that. Of course, as you know, in the near term, we are directing all free cash flow towards repaying our term loan A as our number one priority. In the next section, Rich will talk about how we're thinking beyond that as we move towards our ultimate capital allocation philosophy. Wrapping up this section, I think that it's really building on the work of my colleagues who have really talked about our collective efforts around portfolio transformation, delivering excellence, canned cash flows, ultimately having a strong balance sheet and preparing us for the future. Thank you. I'll turn it over to Rich now.
All right. Thanks, Dean, and to the whole team for setting me up with a nice to be the cleanup hitter here. I want to start by talking about capital allocation at Methanex. Our primary principles around capital allocation is to have a strong balance sheet, have a sustainable dividend, find long-term value creation, and then return excess cash for shareholders. We think we have a really, really nice track record in terms of a balance and discipline approach here. We think that the significant investments we have made in strengthening the asset base set us up really well for that. I am going to start with a little bit of history on our capital allocation. If you look at the graph on the right, that shows our capital allocation balance for the last close to 10 years. I will point you to pre-2025.
If you look at that allocation, have close to $2 billion in shareholder returns and about $1.3 billion in investment. That was mainly G3. The balance there are about 60% returns to shareholders via dividends and share repurchases. At the same time, building G3, which was done at $750 per installed ton, well, well, well discounted below where reinvestment pricing in the industry would be. We are now, obviously, the acquisition of OCI is the big focus. This, again, was an opportunity for us to acquire world-scale assets, North America feedstock, immediate cash flows, no construction risk, and no timeframe of a new build. Our big focus now, as Dean said, is on deleveraging. I am going to get to that in a few slides, but really a balanced approach. We believe we are set up well for how we move in the future here.
This next slide shows a little graph on our production per 1,000 shares and how that's grown over time. If you look from 2015 to today, we've doubled the production per share on a 1,000-ton per share or 1,000-ton share basis. I'd say you can also see that that has been done two ways, adding capacity, but at the same time, buying back shares. I would also highlight that we think that that's a significant improvement in the asset base itself. The quality of the production that's in that per share production is something that we think is significant, and we certainly recognize when we look forward. Now, the timeframes and capital allocation. Dean spoke to it.
I think when we're looking forward and we're setting our target leverage to two, two and a half times, you can think of these bars as being around a two to three-year timeframe. Our first focus is on the left-hand side, and our commitment to shareholders and certainly the feedback we received when we did the OCI transaction was about balance sheet and balance sheet focus. We've committed to getting ourselves back to three times debt to EBITDA, which is our pre-deal leverage. You can think of that as the term loan A number. There's $425 million on our term loan A at the end of September, but we're also carrying excess cash around $100 million. On a net basis, it's probably $325-$350 million left to go. Once we get there, we're still thinking majority focus towards debt. We have a 2027 bond coming due.
It's a $700 million bond. Our target is approximately half of that to be paid down and then refinance the rest. You can also see that we acknowledge that today's share price is very attractive from an investment opportunity to buy back the company for existing shareholders. We are also looking to start to return cash to shareholders. Where that leaves us is once we've made progress on the deleveraging, we're going to be in a position where we're really, really well positioned from a flexibility perspective to be able to either step into the market in an increased way to buy back shares or also be positioned for longer-term growth. Again, over these two to three, on a two to three-year timeframe, we're not expecting to be making any big decisions on major capital. We're set up really well from a cash flow perspective.
I do want to start by reiterating the point around the debt. We do think that having a lower debt target, that there's a perception of risk on our industry that's really important. We think that getting the debt to the right level broadens our set of shareholders as well and helps us close the valuation gap that we see today. Certainly a big focus for us. Where do we want to be? The left-hand side says, for our business, we want to be focused on our sustaining CapEx. Gustavo talked about that as a big focus is making sure we get safe, reliable assets while at the same time optimizing our capital. We have a commitment to, as we deliver, we'll take down our interest and lease payments over the next few years. We have a commitment on the dividend.
One thing that we have, a minimum commitment there, that it's a commitment to the overall dividend level that we see today. We're close to $60 million a year in dividend payments. We're committed to that cash outlay. As we buy back shares, it should increase yield for existing shareholders. Ultimately, we want to get to our target leverage. On the right-hand side, we think it positions us extremely well for flexibility in terms of how we invest on behalf of you, the shareholders. This is just a snapshot. There's a lot of different pieces of information here. I think I'll start with the chart on the left, the bottom left-hand side, which really talks about our share price performance. You can see that clearly the commodity chemical space has been very challenged over the past three years.
Our share price has performed, obviously, reasonably well, relatively well. We still see a lot of upside. The graph on the right-hand side talks about our free cash flow yield on either a consensus basis or run rate that Dean spoke to. That is a very high yield. We think very inexpensive cash flows, certainly an upside valuation for shareholders. On the top left-hand side, I do want to highlight that we obviously are always talking about risks. We are always talking about where the pushback on the shares is. We will highlight some of the big ones, which is methanol markets and macro risk. I believe we have shown the structural constructive forces around methanol as of today and as we look into the future. The other is around asset performance, G3, and the newly acquired assets.
I hope you believe we've shown how focused we are around our center of excellence on both our newly acquired assets as well as our existing platform. The last part is around leverage and the balance sheet. Hopefully, you also see that we are very focused on that. All around, we see a lot of upside for shareholders, and we're really focused on delivering results. Just to pull it back, we think we've had a long history of very balanced and disciplined approach to capital allocation underpinned by our over 6.5 million tons of North American supply as well as our assets in Chile and Egypt that provide really stable gas and prolific gas basins to support production there. I think we're well positioned for strong free cash flow and also taking a very balanced and consistent approach to capital allocation.
Final takeaways, I think I'll just walk you through. What we believe we showed is a quietly constructive methanol market, how we've taken assets and our investments in North America, including the OCI acquisition, to really make the cornerstone of our production to transform the business. Focus now is on taking that and leveraging our global capabilities. Gustavo and Karine talked about that. Then converting that strong asset position into free cash flow generation and disciplined capital allocation. Ultimately, that's all about turning the corner from investment to impact for you, the shareholders. That ends the presentation. I really want to say thank you. We're going to take a 10-minute break. We're going to come back. That will give you some time to think about questions. We're going to come back with a 30-minute Q&A, and that will be followed by our panel discussions.
Thank you very much.
Okay. Welcome back. We're going to start the 30-minute Q&A. We're going to do a balance of the questions from the audience here, as well as there are some questions coming in from the webcast. We're going to start it off with questions from the floor here. Why don't we—yes, Jack, you can go there. Ben.
Thank you very much. Ben Isaacson from Scotia. I have two questions. First question, if we do not think about New Zealand, is it possible that each plant can be free cash flow neutral or positive at all points in the cycle? Is that an aspiration, or is that possible?
No. I mean, right now, first and foremost, even Trinidad and New Zealand are free cash flow positive. And that's an important element to both New Zealand.
Today or all points?
At certain points, we have flexibility. Okay. Now, the other assets that we see today are assets in Egypt, Chile, and the U.S. We see those very much on the low end of the cost curve. In terms of operating at all points in the methanol cycle, that's an important thing that we do in terms of when we look at an asset and when we run it for long term, we try to get a gas price that does allow us to do that. We think we're very comfortable in North America, Chile, and Egypt. Right now, we're very focused in both Trinidad and New Zealand about ensuring that we're free cash flow positive. Obviously, pricing would impact that.
Thank you. And then just a follow-up question. You showed on one of the slides the operating rate of the industry. My question was, if we go back in time, and this may be 20 years ago, when methanol prices were super high, maybe $1,000 a ton, how much did the industry operate at? When there was an incentive for everyone to make money, what was the most we've ever seen the industry?
Yeah. I mean, going back in time, and I can get some of my colleagues' views on this, but we've almost always seen an operating rate in the industry at 65%-70%. A lot of that is because of the capacity in China. Capacity in China has changed over time because we've got to think that half of the global methanol production is there. What we have seen is that in China, you had inefficient plants that operated at the lower end of the rates. That meant China's operating capacity was limited to around 60%. We have seen as they've modernized plants, they've been able to get higher. We've always seen the industry operating at 60% in China and then 70% outside of China. We've had this average.
Because of the constraints, constraints have been there, but we are seeing significantly increasing in constraints, particularly because of geopolitics, as well as certain gas basins and being mature. We also have to think that there has been a pretty big run on LNG pricing as well, which means diversion of gas into LNG. It can make more sense from a net back perspective. Maybe, Karine, I do not know if you—longer-term operating rates, what is the highest we have ever seen us be able to do, even when methanol pricing was extremely high?
Yeah. I mean, I would have to go back, obviously, to see the data. As you described, today, there's not a lot of latent capacity, for sure. In the past, it was a bit more. We've seen this massive rationalization taking place in China. That really means that in the past, call it four or five years, China has been operating at a very high level. Even though when coal prices were high, coal prices were low, we've seen pretty sustained high operating rates in China. We really think there's not much latent capacity. There was much more in the past. Those years you just mentioned, there was definitely more.
Hi. It's Joel from BMO. I'll ask two questions one by one as well. Maybe Rich and team, can I put together—and Dean, let's concoct your dots. You have shown a lot of slides today. What you are saying is you generate at $350 methanol about $500 million in free cash flow, correct? Once you pay off the remaining $325-$350 million of the term A of the loan, you will get into more balanced cap allocation or buyback in debt. $500 million free cash flow. You want to pay off half of the $700 million of the 2027s over a couple of years, the 2027s. That is about $175 million a year. $500 million free cash flow, $175 million of debt repayments. Starting after you start your buyback, you should be doing a few hundred million dollars a year of buybacks. Is that correct?
If you look at how it will pace, we're going to be mid-next year when we—about this is depending all methanol price dependent. It should be sometime mid-next year or a little later when we get past the initial deleveraging. We have now a little over around, I think, Dean, around 15 months to go until we have to refinance the 2027 bonds. We're going to need to build up that $350 over a shorter time frame than two years. It will probably be what we would expect is it'll be lower on share repurchase, lower than $300 million for the next 15-18 months following our initial deleveraging.
Okay. My next question is, so looking at slide 35, which is showing how your average realized price premium has really expanded for the last five years or so over the China price. And obviously, everyone's talking about the North American posted price premiums over many, many years. So obviously, your mix changes now even more with Beaumont and Natgas in that you have a bigger North American mix. Why will the premium stay where it is over China? Are there concerns you make at normalization and that premium comes back down, ignoring mix effects that you now have more North American production?
Yeah. I think Karine explained it well when she said, "When you look at where a lot of those constraints are happening, the constraints on supply in the industry are happening in volume that is non-sanctioned internationally traded." That market is getting tighter. As we look forward, demand continues to grow, but no supply is being added into that market. When we move forward, on top of that, what we continue to see is greater barriers in terms of tariffs and other dislocations that are disrupting supply. Where we see things is there is a structural premium there. As things get tighter, that is going to come under more pressure. When there is a dislocation like the one we talked about earlier with the Suez Canal, that actually makes that temporarily expand even greater.
Where we are today is we think there's a structural premium that stays, and it likely gets stronger as we move forward. That increased dislocations probably stretch that for periods of time as well. I don't know, Karine, if you have anything else to add to that.
I think you summarized it really well.
Oh, sorry. Josh Spector with UBS.
I want to just follow up on the change in the leverage target and kind of why now. A year ago, you thought less than three was right. You talk about the peers, but I think if you look at that peer list, 60% of them are not covering their dividend or recently cut their dividend to address free cash flow. You guys have significantly outperformed, I think, in what has been the bottom of the cycle from cash generation. Why now do you think you need to go lower? Why not consider terming out that 2027 loan to push that into multiple tranches versus, say, today, you need to pay half of that off?
Yeah. For us, we certainly, when we did the OCI deal, we got a lot of feedback on the balance sheet. Is it the right level for a company like ours? Taking a look at where we want to be through the cycle, we really are looking at a $300-$400 range, meaning a low to high cycle as a normal cycle for methanol. We think that that firmly puts us even at the low end of the range at a 4 times debt to EBITDA. I think that that is value for shareholders because there's a perception of risk and asymmetric risk to the downside in terms of taking risk on Methanex, which broadens the shareholder group. At the same time, it makes us more opportunistic too.
When it comes to share buybacks, when there is a big dislocation, it makes us more opportunistic there as well as being positioned for longer-term growth. I think being a cyclical commodity is tough, and getting the right leverage is really important. It is important for long-term value for shareholders. We think that is the right level for us. We are not going to go—we are not going all the way there completely. We acknowledge that at today's share price, there is value in terms of reinvesting some money back into the business for the remaining shareholders. We are going to be taking a balanced approach with majority to debt till we get there. Dean, I do not know if you want to take any more of that.
Yeah. I'll just comment. The 2027 bond is in October. When we look to just under two years away, we wouldn't want to wait right till the last minute. I think the option of building up $700 million cash on the balance sheet and just waiting to repay it is not what we see as an efficient use. We're setting a long-term target that we think is sustainable for the company that sets us up for the next phase. It's a balanced approach is how we're looking at it. I think that's the same comment.
Thanks. And just quickly, in terms of you talked about the 5% of EBITDA from Trinidad, New Zealand. So it's about $50 million at your target. What is that in free cash flow?
Go ahead, Dean.
Yeah. No, you're right with that. I think one of the key differentiators when we were running—we started up Titan versus Atlas—was that Titan had recently had a turnaround done, whereas Atlas needed a large turnaround. What it means is that it's capital CapEx light. I would say similarly in New Zealand, we're being very prudent with our capital. The other element that would be in there would be the taxes. At these levels, there's not a high level of accounting earning, so there's low taxes. I think you can assume it's pretty close to that 50, maybe slightly lower, but mostly in that same area.
Thanks very much. Jeff Zekauskas from JPMorgan. Why is it in Trinidad that there's more methanol exported than there is ammonia? If some of the ammonia plants don't run, does that mean there's more gas for the methanol plants? Secondly, for Dean, when you look at your comparables, why don't you include CF Industries?
Okay. I'll take the Trinidad question.
Right now, Trinidad has got methanol, ammonia, and LNG pretty much across the board in terms of gas, 4 Bcf a day of gas demand and 2.5 Bcf a day of production. Across all end uses there, LNG, methanol, and ammonia, everyone's taking a haircut on operations there. There is the recent announcement of Nutrien and backing out of Trinidad and what happens to gas. We do believe—not certain—is that what's going on there. It's obviously not our—it is not for us to speak to that situation. We do think on a short-term basis, some gas may have been rediverted into methanol. I think everyone is taking a haircut across the whole downstream sector. Right now, our focus on Trinidad is, again, operating at cash positive.
There are developments that Kevin spoke to that could allow Trinidad, both within Trinidad, to develop gas in the short term, but also then longer term, it's around geopolitics in Venezuela and the opportunity to unlock there. Today, our focus would be on the Titan asset that we have. We've got a gas contract coming up in September 2026. Our base case scenario is that we get another two-year gas contract there on similar terms. We don't have a turnaround on Titan till the end of what would be that term of a contract. Dean, maybe I'll turn it over to you on the next question.
On the comparables, sure. No, obviously, there's not a lot of direct comparables for Methanex given our industry nature. So we look to a broad set of peers. No specific reason why we've excluded CF. We do look at CF from time to time. I don't have a specific answer for you on that one, Jeff.
It's Nelson Ng. Hello?
Hello.
It's Nelson Ng from RBC Capital Markets. Karine, you were giving more color in terms of the realized price globally versus in China. Is it safe to assume that China and probably India absorb all the sanctioned products? I just want to ask you, given that you sell about 15%-20% of your product to China, what's your strategy there? Is that your lowest margin market? How do you approach selling product into that region?
Go ahead, Karine.
Yeah. So you're correct that this is the lowest net back region that we serve. That said, it's a very important market. It's a market that's growing. That's very easy to serve in some regions, in some part of the China market, as well as some other areas of the demand that's located in very unique locations where we actually differentiate as well. It's not necessarily the lowest of all our net backs. There are also some pockets of very specific regional demand that we serve with additional services. Yeah. That's.
My last question is, I guess you guys talked about moving the Chilean facilities to Louisiana. I know you do not want to look at any large capital projects over the next few years, but is there an opportunity to move one of the Trinidad facilities or one or two of the New Zealand facilities to another location?
I think I'll turn that over to you, Kevin. Yeah.
Yeah. No, it's something that we look at. What I would say is it sort of depends on the state of the plant and then also the jurisdiction that you might be going to because a lot of it has to do with how much of the plant can you move to a different location and does it actually give you an advantage to do that. A lot of it has to do with the piping or the pressure envelope that you can move. We do look at it. We've got studies that, what I would say, are sort of on the shelf. If there's opportunities that emerge, we'll look at that. It's not something that we're actively pursuing today.
The main advantage to moving is about speed, less about capital savings. We do not see the market really demanding us to move with speed because the pricing signals are not there today. It is unlikely that we are exploring that. Like Kevin says, we are always studying to say, if that was an option, how and which asset would make sense.
Laurence Alexander with Jefferies. Just a very quick one on the shortfall slide, the 9 million tons -11 million tons of shortfall. Can you play out the regulatory barriers to addressing that shortfall, how you think about customer shutdown economics, and the price elasticity that you think you can observe in the methanol market? If you get a 2% or 3% tight market for a few quarters, where do prices go?
Yeah. It's a great question because that's why we put a question mark on it. I think the first thing is on building new capacity. Building new capacity isn't easy to do. It's certainly not easy to do on tight timeframes. Even if you really supercharge a project, you're talking about three or four years to do a methanol project. In terms of restrictions, and where we have seen the restrictions, there's quite a bit in China now. There was rapid expansion in the early 2000s in China. Since then, there's a huge amount of government scrutiny around new methanol plants. It has to be the latest technology. It has to be world scale. It has to come with downstream derivatives with it. Those are just not being sanctioned nearly as loosely as there was in the past.
In fact, they're more on the page of shutting down inefficient plants on basis of energy uses and energy efficiency in the country. It's a big question on what's going to happen. How does that supply-demand gap get filled? That's why we're pointing to the consumer. It likely has to balance. Where would it balance? We think it balances on your marginal consumer unless something changes. That's the olefins market. How sticky that is and where that ultimately lands. Logic would say that the most inefficient plants would have to either shut or significantly reduce down rates. We have actually started to see that happen. There's one older inefficient MTO unit that we think is actually permanently shut in. We've got new plants starting up. There's going to be a competition there.
Logic would say that as the older inefficient plants shut down, that the ability to pay becomes greater because you have more competitiveness of the remaining industry. We are going to be watching that very closely. On that basis, you do not need the rebalancing to happen within olefins to still get some pricing improvement. Obviously, a big question mark and something we study very closely.
Thanks for arranging this, guys. Rich, I thought this was a very tight analyst day. Kudos to you guys and the team. Let's start with supply-demand. One question on supply, another one on demand. On the supply side first, maybe sort of building on what Lawrence asked earlier. You guys laid out 2 million tons -4 million tons of at-risk production, right? And that's kind of what's baked into your 9 million tons -11 million ton shortfall. From the sounds of it, that's primarily Russia, if I heard correctly, and Iran. What are you baking in in terms of anti-involution? I mean, we're beginning to, in a phased manner, hear some rumblings, right? I mean, the other day, PetroChina came out, talked about shutting some refineries, some sort of olefins capacity. Nothing much has really come out on the methanol side. Let me start with that on the supply side.
I have one or two more.
Yeah. We do not, or at least it has not hit our radar that it is going to affect methanol. They have been restructuring that industry for quite some time, already shutting down the small inefficient plants. Like I said, in our kind of yellow bar that I showed you, there is quite a bit of small plants, 100,000, 200,000, 300,000-ton plants that were built in the early 2000s that are permanently mothballed from our perspective and would face significant political and economic hurdles to ever restarting again. We do think a lot of that has already taken place in methanol. There are not big projects today that we would say are on the books that they would either slow down or cancel because of anti-involution. Again, a lot of that is already on the books. It is coming with downstream integration. We do not see a big impact there.
The one area that we are watching more closely is the olefins market. What does that do in terms of slowing down new projects that might be on the books? What does it do potentially of shutting down older inefficient plants, which would certainly be a benefit to us as we are seeing across other regions like Korea and Japan and Europe and the restructurings that are happening there? China would be a big impact. That is something we are paying close attention to. Karine, if you want to add anything to it.
Just the only point I wanted to add is the fact that you mentioned about massive rationalization that already took place in China. Just to give you a sense, about a third of the Chinese production has actually started in the past five years. There has been a number of rationalization that took place, a very significant improvement in the quality and the reliability of the plants. That is why we have such higher operating rates now in China compared to what we had in the past. At the same time, you definitely have rationalization of older industries in general. It is true for methanol, but teapot refineries and such, you see a lot of rationalization taking place already.
Perfect. On the demand side of it, really quickly, I mean, it seems you guys are being pretty conservative with your demand estimates, right? The question mark around MTO. One of the things that seemed to be missing from the presentation was the marine opportunity. I mean, why are you guys not talking about it? Is the opportunity still sort of as spectacular as it seemed to be earlier?
Yeah. Thanks, Hassan. We are going to hit that off when we talk with the Low Carbon Solutions Group. We will start with a discussion on conventional methanol. There is a big demand potential, as we have been saying. We have always said it is demand potential because ultimately, conventional methanol use in marine application, it needs to be competitive. There is an alternative. There are dual-fuel engines. What we have seen thus far is that in the big, deep liquid ports where the big container ships, where the biggest part of the demand potential has been, is that methanol is traded at a premium to the alternative fuels being low sulfur fuel oil. We have seen some adoption. As of today, and I am hopeful I am not stealing too much of Mark's thunder here, but we say there is probably about 3 million tons of demand potential already in the water.
We're seeing less than 10% demand pickup in terms of conventional methanol. We haven't put any big numbers in. We think it is conservative. Certainly, if methanol is available and you get a dislocation of methanol versus conventional fuels, so a dislocation to energy, there's potentially a floor price there that you break through because you could see a lot of methanol being consumed by ships. We're not putting in a big level of base demand today.
One last one, if I may. I appreciated all the slides on natural gas, obviously a very important variable in the methanol and Methanex story. I mean, I just keep debating this, that there seems to be this binary opportunity out there, right? I mean, as I take a look at AI stocks, the way they're trading, what sort of growth they're implying, and compare that to sort of the natural gas market, and you guys did a very good job in showing us that natural gas has averaged $2-$3 a million BTU over the last 10 years. I sit there and I take a look at AI data centers, right? 60% of the electricity consumption by them is fossil fuel-based, right?
Which, again, depending on the region we're looking at, but the mix seems to be an equal mix globally between coal and natural gas. Now, on the natural gas side of it, I mean, it's been like 12% electricity demand growth for data centers from 2017 onwards. I mean, that's a huge number, right? I mean, when I layer on top of that some of the LNG exports that we're seeing here in North America, you can go crazy with some of the growth in fossil fuel-based demand, right? Natural gas in particular. As you sort of sit there and think about the future, I mean, in the near term, I heard you guys talking about near-term natural gas hedges going down from being 70% hedged down to 50%.
I mean, my fear is that you could come up with a cold winter, incremental LNG exports. I mean, have not things gotten a little more volatile or may get a little more volatile, at the very least? Longer term, how are you even thinking about what if what AI stocks are implying may actually be true? Sorry, a very sort of long-winded way of asking you the future of natural gas prices.
Yeah. Obviously, it's critically important for us and our business. I think the main principles that we go back to is what Kevin showed on his slide, right? It's the prolific base in itself that there's 50 years of gas there that are commercially and technically feasible based on everything that is happening in the market today. It's based also on the productivity gains and the outlooks for how that industry is able to operate and that there's likely a lot more to be gained there. Kevin, I don't know if I can turn it over to you to—I'm sure AI and LNG are two things that we're constantly looking at in terms of the demand and how that effectively evolves.
Yeah. No, I think one of the things I was trying to highlight in my talk was that natural gas supply historically has been quite elastic. It has been quite responsive to demand. We think that's going to continue. We have seen a doubling of the gas market over a 15-year period. I think some of the most optimistic projections, when you think about increased LNG exports and data centers and stuff like that, increases the gas market up to 130, maybe 140 Bcf a day. That is a 30% increase kind of where we're at today. When you look at the 50 years of gas that can be technically and commercially produced today, there are also technically recoverables over 100 years of gas.
When we think about gas from the drier gas basins and what it costs to do that, if you look at the investor present decks from Expand Energy or EQT or EOG, they all kind of tout unlevered break-even prices in the low $2 range for that gas, right? We think there's a lot of low-cost gas that's still available. That assumes no productivity improvements going on. You've seen when I think about what's gone on in the U.S., and I talk to forecasters and experts about this, it's like, why aren't you baking in more productivity improvements? If you look at the pace of what's happening here, we just in Argentina recently, and what they're doing in Argentina is even better than what they've been achieving in the U.S., right? You're seeing shale drilling technology improve and get more cost-effective.
We've got to view that supply is going to continue to be quite elastic with demand for the foreseeable future.
I think we have time for one more.
We'll finish off with a question from the webcast.
Okay. Yeah. We should do a question from the webcast for sure.
We've got one here. Would you consider buying out partners out of any joint ventures like Natgasoline?
I mean, we're pretty early here to be exploring that. Obviously, anything like that is subject to both parties and what the motivations are of two interested parties. Right now, we're focused on really all the things that myself and my colleagues talked about today, which is let's operate these assets. Let's do a fantastic job at integration. Let's deliver performance consistently on a stable basis before we start thinking beyond that. Our focus right now is on delivering the balance sheet and making ourselves a stronger, more resilient company. We're always open to opportunities, but right now, that's certainly not our focus. I think that we will wrap up the Q&A. I really appreciate all the questions. We will have time. I just want to say that we're going to start the panel discussions.
We will be around after the day is done if there are follow-ups that people want to have. We have the executive team. We have board members. We also have our senior leaders present as well. If you have follow-ups, please say them, and we will try to answer those. Of course, as always, our investor relations group. Thank you very much.
All right. We are now going to start our first panel discussion. This will be on our manufacturing and our center of excellence around manufacturing. We talk about the importance of this as we think about delivering results and integrating our new assets. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Gustavo.
Thank you, Rich. I have two colleagues here that will walk us through the manufacturing panel. I will talk a little bit about Paul Daoust. I'll introduce him as our VP Projects and Turnarounds. He's based in Canada, more than 25 years of experience in different roles in Methanex, from corporate development to marketing and logistics and also manufacturing. Second is Matt Geary. He's our VP of Reliability and Asset Integrity. He's from New Zealand. You need to accommodate my Latin accent to a New Zealand accent, so see how it goes. He has more than 17 years of experience in really understanding the asset quite well and driving excellence in those. He runs the global experts. That certainly will have a little bit of a discussion on how that team works.
I think I'll start with you, Paul, if you can talk a little bit about our capital allocations process, the way that we manage that in manufacturing, and what is the value that it brings.
Yeah. Sure, Gustavo. Thank you. When I think about capital management for manufacturing in the organization, I'd really kind of look at it from two perspectives. One is really around capital allocation. That's really about what we're going to spend our money on and the technical solutions that we choose. That really helps us to focus on maintaining and enhancing our safety and our reliability and our efficiency within our assets. The other part that I'll talk about is more around the how, the project management and what we do with our capital projects as well as our turnarounds. I'll start with capital allocation. When we look at that, we really drive that from a standardization approach. We drive it from a center approach.
Every one of our manufacturing facilities, we work with them from the center so that we can take a look at what the opportunities are and the risks and allocate the capital appropriately. That really starts off with a few key things that we've implemented over the past 5 -1 0 years. Number one is a common way of looking and defining risks across our assets or vulnerabilities, which is really critical in our decision-making. The other part is around value projects. What I mean by value projects are projects where we can invest in our assets to increase our efficiency or where we can invest in our assets and make them more reliable, invest in our assets to reduce things like emissions, for example, Greenhouse Gases.
We've also introduced a common way across our assets in terms of how we look at capital and how we evaluate it. During this process, there are two key parts that really pull this together. I would say it's the interaction between our sites and our global experts. We've got over 350 years of manufacturing plant operating experience within the organization. We've got a lot of deep experts, whether they sit in Matt's group on the technical expert side or they're people that are in our environment, health, and safety, our responsible care area, or other areas in our plant. We use them to work with our experts at our sites and our technical knowledge people at the front line to really align on the risks and the opportunities so we can look at this from a global perspective and prioritize.
The second part of that, what I was talking about, Gustavo, was around really that being a center-led process. We just make sure we consistently do that across the organization. That really allows us to target our capital and our resources at the highest priorities for the organization. That is really about the what and what we are going to allocate that capital on. I would say the second part that we really work on and spend a lot of time improving over time is more the how, the project management. When we do capital projects or turnarounds, we have really gone through the organization and applied some very common processes and discipline around how we develop and how we plan and how we execute those capital projects as well as those turnarounds. That has really allowed us to enhance our performance over time.
We have a common approach across all of our assets, and we continuously learn in terms of how we do that within the organization. That has really allowed us to improve our performance in both the what we're going to do and the how we're going to do it. I think actually some of the slides you showed earlier, Gustavo, around our performance in terms of our safety performance as an organization, our reliability performance as an organization, it's really underpinned by how we manage our capital and execute our capital.
Thank you, Paul. No, certainly really, really good job in working with the team there and aligning our process. You talk about turnarounds. Probably it is really an important thing that we do every four to five years. It would be good to understand what those turnarounds mean and what we do and how we improve our practices and we try to become better and better in those turnarounds?
Yeah. Turnarounds are really important for us. As you mentioned, Gustavo, there are events that happen at each one of our plant sites every four to five years. They are very major plant events for us. Just to give some perspective, we will have a turnaround that will be shutting down the plant to do a number of work. We will have the plant shut down for approximately five weeks or it could be longer depending on the scope. It is a fairly large event. To give you a sense of the people on site, we work with our people and contractors, our Methanex employees and contractors. We could be reaching 600-700 people as a peak on our sites. As you can imagine, these are pretty major events. We want to make sure that we plan, develop, and execute them really, really well.
Some of the things that happen, just to give you a perspective of what goes on in a turnaround, we'll do a few major things. One of them is we'll change the catalyst in our plants. We have catalysts in various reactors. Over time, this catalyst degrades, so you have to replace it on a certain frequency. We could be replacing several hundred tons of catalyst in multiple vessels during a turnaround. Pretty significant work. We'll test our safety-critical and environmental-critical equipment. We'll do regulatory and critical inspections, testing, repair of our equipment, any kind of overhauls we have to do. Also, when we're doing some of these capital projects I talked about, that happens within a turnaround window as well when we can only do these when the plant comes down. Pretty big events.
We have had a very disciplined approach to looking at our practices around the organization over the past 5 to 10 years and embedding common ways of doing these common processes and following stage gate processes to make sure we have the discipline in how we define and develop these turnarounds as well as how we plan them and how we execute them. That is really underpinned by a few key things to make that successful. I would say one of the ones is we have dedicated teams on our sites. Number two, because of all of our operating experience across all the sites, we have a center that works within my team to look at how we do these turnarounds and make sure we are really supporting the sites in terms of that whole planning and development process as well as execution.
We have steering committees, a common approach around how we do our steering committees with people from the center and leadership from the sites working together to make sure we are applying really good practices and discipline across the sites. I would say one of the last things is that when we—and you mentioned this earlier, Gustavo—when we actually do a turnaround at one of our sites, we like to space our turnarounds out between the sites. That allows us to leverage global resources. It allows us to leverage resources from other sites to come to a site and help with such a major event so we can execute them successfully.
Thank you, Paul. An add is that every turnaround that we finish, we go through a close-up process, and we get all the learnings that we apply in the next opportunity. You mentioned about a four or five-year cycle. Can you talk a little bit about what are we trying to do in that space to optimize performance in turnarounds?
Yeah. I think you touched on one of them there, Gustavo, and that's that lessons learned processes, embedding it back and sharing it amongst the teams globally so we can get better and better as we go forward. The other thing I'll talk about, I mentioned catalysts, and it degrades over time, and there's a requirement to change it. Over time, there's been developments in catalysts, and the technology has improved. That's really allowing us to look more and more at not having to change catalysts out after four years, but the opportunity really to make it last five years. We've been looking at that across our asset basis. We're going asset by asset to look at the potential to go from a four to five-year turnaround cycle. That requires you to look at other things associated with turnarounds.
It requires you to think about asset integrity. It requires you to think about your inspection protocols, your testing of your equipment that I talked about, and potentially some things around vulnerability at the site. You have to look at it from a catalyst perspective, which is quite positive, but all these other elements too to make sure if you're going to move from four to five years that you're doing that and not compromising something else like the safety performance we have at the plant or the reliability. We have experts in the turnaround side and a lot of team members in Matt's team that are technical experts helping each one of our sites go through and evaluate what's the potential to do that. So far, with a couple of the sites that we've looked at, it's looking positive, Gustavo.
Thank you, Paul. Last question for you. We talk a lot about OCI. The way I think about OCI is not OCI anymore. It's Methanex, but that's me. How are we embedding all these things that you talk about, the governance, the processes, and the kind of center of excellence into these new acquired assets?
Yeah. First of all, I think when we did the due diligence, we had a fairly—we got a fairly good sense of the assets and the teams. That helped us with integration planning. As we went forward with integration planning as an organization, manufacturing looked at how we're going to undertake that as well. I would say we really have kind of hit the ground running on that. Some of the key things that we did are very quick interaction between our teams at the center and the site teams. This is very common, the way that we work with any site within our organization, working close with the site teams and the center teams underneath yourself. We've done things like risk management assessments at the sites or sort of responsible care audits at the sites and assessments.
Matt and his team are doing asset integrity assessments. That'll help us to understand the vulnerabilities or potential vulnerabilities or risks that they're identifying as well as any kind of value opportunities. Very quickly, in parallel to people that are technical experts working with site people, we also, as a leadership team, went in and worked with their leadership team looking at the risks that they're identifying, what kind of capital they needed to focus on, the projects they needed to focus on. We've been having very good dialogue back and forth between the teams to really kind of align on what I talked about before when I talked about capital allocation. What's the relative vulnerability and risk? What's the priority? What's the opportunity? That process has gone quite well.
There's been a lot of interaction, really good interaction between the teams to help us align on those priorities.
Thanks, Paul. Now to you, Matt. In the screen, we are showing our reliability framework. We talk a lot about that. Probably it's a good opportunity for you to explain what that really means and what is the value that we bring using this framework.
Certainly, Gustavo. I'll talk about three areas. One is about the culture around reliability, the framework itself, and then the value that we see it deliver. At Methanex, we don't leave reliability to chance. That's why we have a large focus on it. Just in terms of the culture and the mindset, that's the place that we've started over the last 15-20 years in building that. We've defined reliability within Methanex to be constantly and consistently meeting expectations of our stakeholders. What that practically means within our operating plants is that we do what we say we're going to do. That really translates into asset performance. In terms of the framework, on the screen there, you'll see the five areas. It starts with the leadership and culture, which I just mentioned. Reliability management is really taking a data-driven approach to everything we do.
We do that with specific reliability engineers that are trained in terms of looking at that data and analysis to drive the right decisions around our capital allocation. Asset condition management is really focused on how we can assess the assets. Work execution management is really focused on not introducing any defects when we're doing turnarounds. Reliability is about driving a failure-free operation. When we're doing work on our assets, we do not want to introduce anything that could cause risk. The last area really is around human factors. What that translates to is making it easy to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing. When we're designing new bits of equipment or undertaking work, we're really designing the process or the system easy to do the right thing.
Thank you, Matt. I spoke before about our global expert, Paul Tatchet. This group reports to you. Probably it would be an opportunity here to explain what is the value that this group brings and how they integrate with our global manufacturing.
Certainly. We have a team of technical experts. There are about 12 experts working across six disciplines. Those disciplines are static equipment, which would be pressure vessels, piping, exchangers, rotating equipment, our compressors, turbines. We have electrical instrumentation and control, our infrastructure around that space, water treatment and corrosion, and operations, and then process engineering. Collectively, those 12 people have anywhere between 20 and 45 years of technical experience. It is over 400 years of experience and probably about 60% within Methanex itself. They kind of act as the backbone of our technical expertise. They are really the glue within Methanex. Their role is to cascade knowledge from outside the industry to inside Methanex and then cascade it across the sites as well. They do that through global teams.
Each of them have a discipline team that integrates the sites to collectively work on any issues or problems and get ahead, be proactive in terms of getting ahead of those problems as well.
Thank you, Matt. Certainly, all our knowledge is captured in our Methanex project standard that we use when we build and when we operate, right? Thank you for that. Last question to you, Matt. We talk a lot about tools. A gentleman talked about AI. Can you elaborate a little bit? What are we focusing on? How can we improve performance by using these tools? What are the things that we believe are going to bring value to our manufacturing and operations?
Yeah, certainly. We believe that AI lets us see a little bit further ahead in terms of our manufacturing assets. In saying that, our reliability framework is the foundation. We remain disciplined in terms of doing those foundational activities because that has shown over time how we get to our 96% reliability. We do not take that for granted. A couple of areas that we see value in terms of AI today where it is helping us. One example I would give is advanced process control, which is about running our process a little bit tighter to generate efficiency value. AI is sitting on—and that technology has been around for a long time—but AI is starting to sit on top of that where it can give you some predictive direction on where that process control is occurring and provide operator response to that.
If we can utilize that response, we can kind of keep our operations in control before they get to a point where we're having to recover from a situation. The other area, which is quite interesting—so we have two or three large compressors in each of our facilities. We're operating 20-25 compressors. They're not redundant. If they do have a failure, they do have a big impact. AI is allowing us to kind of build a plant model for each compressor. We would take—and doing that, you generate an operating signature for that compressor. Then you can set that alongside the operation of the compressor. As it deviates, you can get an indication as to whether you potentially have an issue. What that translates to us is that we're able to utilize that to develop a plan.
If we're planned, then we're not in a situation where we have an unplanned outage and we're having to react. The differentiator for Methanex in terms of this area that we've got from feedback from the vendors is the 350 years of operating data that we have. We have a lot of operating data that we've utilized to build those models. We've also had some failures. When we're developing these models, we use some of those failures to blind test the models. That allows us to get confidence that when we're applying these models, they are giving us actually the correct indications.
Thank you, Matt. I know I said the last one, but another one occurred to me. We have been talking about asset integrity and all the things that we are doing in Beaumont and soon in Natgasoline. Can you talk a little bit about that process and how that translates into improvements?
Sure. If you think about the reliability framework as defining the activities that we need to do and we do them in the right way, then our asset assurance program is really assessing the equipment at a corporate level to assure that the integrity of the equipment is actually adequate. We gauge it to be at or above industry level. We use that in terms of our capital allocation around resetting some direction for the next period. Just a couple of—we have been on this journey within Beaumont and Natgasoline at the moment. A couple of examples of where we have seen value in that. I think you mentioned earlier that the front end of the Beaumont plant is similar to our Medicine Hat and actually one of our New Zealand plants. Both of those plants have over 30 years of operating history.
We have been able to take some of those procedures and then provide them and set them alongside the reformer at least and then just rebalance the reformer and how that is operating. That is a tangible example of where we have made a difference early on. In the Natgasoline reviews, we are working through that at the moment with the team there. We have a list of learnings from our Atlas plant and some specific learnings around piping and the flue gas duct and coils where we have had issues. We have made some relatively cost-effective solutions. We are looking to take those direct into the Natgasoline really to drive and improve performance there.
Thank you, Matt. That will conclude our panel. I hope you got a better appreciation of how we work together, how we run our manufacturing strategy, how we care about the assets, how we manage and obtain around our capital allocation process, how we operate as one team, how we leverage on our capabilities that we have globally, and how we really sustain performance. It is a moment for one or two questions if somebody wants to kick it off. No then. Thank you very much for the opportunity. Thank you for the explanations today. Thank you.
Thanks, Gustavo, Paul, and Matt. Thank you very much. We will start the second panel. This will be on discussion on Low Carbon Methanol . Mark is going to start off with that conventional methanol discussion we were having as well. With that, I will turn it over to you. Mark, you have a—yep. You got a microphone.
All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Pleasure to be here today. Now, I'd just like to highlight that I think my colleagues have done an excellent job of highlighting the positive outlook that we have for the conventional business. Now we're going to turn to the opportunity in Low Carbon Methanol . Importantly, there are some synergies between the two opportunities. Let me just highlight two synergies that we think are really important. First of all, we can leverage our global supply chain to be able to cost-effectively move Low Carbon Methanol around the world at times when it's still a relatively small market. That's really important because logistics costs are an important element of the overall cost of getting Low Carbon Methanol to market. For example, you can co-mingle 5,000 tons of Low Carbon Methanol in a 45,000-ton vessel just to put it into perspective.
The other area of synergy is really leveraging our existing asset base. One of the things that we do today is we put renewable feedstocks into our existing asset base, which effectively allows us to produce green methanol from a conventional methanol facility. Those are just two examples of synergies that we think are really important in the low-carbon space. Having said that, let me turn to introducing the panel here. You know me. Rich introduced me. I have oversight responsibility for our low-carbon activities. I have the pleasure of being joined by two of my colleagues here. First of all, to my direct right, Roger Strevens, who comes with a deep history and knowledge in the marine space, having worked for over 15 years in regulatory and decarbonization. He is going to talk about some of the regulatory aspects of the business.
Then Renato Montero, who has a great deal of experience in strategy and business development before he joined Methanex, but has also been with Methanex for a number of years. He is really responsible for driving a portfolio of cost-effective Low Carbon Methanol supply opportunities that are critical to meet the needs of our customer base. To get us started, maybe I could turn to you, Roger. Maybe you could highlight what existing regulations are in place that are designed to drive the adoption of low-carbon fuels in general and Low Carbon Methanol specifically, and then maybe some other developing regulations that might impact things in the future.
Thank you, Mark. Good afternoon, everybody. One of the primary functions of regulation is to address the higher cost of lower-carbon fuels versus the fossil incumbents. It is for that reason that regulation is a primary driver of the market opportunity that we have for our Low Carbon Methanol in two of the three markets that Mark is going to discuss a little bit in just a moment. When we look at the low-carbon regulatory landscape, we can divide it into really two parts. There is the regulation at a national and regional level. That is in the U.K. and the E.U.. That is already in effect. This is a market that exists and where we are competing today. Then there is the global regulation, which is still under development. That has the potential to represent a much larger opportunity again.
There are a few general points that I'd like to make about regulation. First, we're moving nearly entirely towards a life cycle basis for regulation and a Greenhouse Gas basis. What do I mean by that? It's not just the emissions from combustion that are considered by regulation, but also the emissions from production and transport. In addition, we're not just looking at CO2 anymore. We're also looking at two other climate gases. That's methane and nitrous oxide. Why is this important? It means that we're actually addressing the issue for one thing. Second, this is good for the competitiveness of methanol contra other types of fuels. Second point, the specific requirements of different fuels, of different regulations vis-a-vis what's accepted, vary. You'll see that these factors are reflected in the supply strategy that Renato is going to discuss in just a moment.
A third point I'd like to make is that all of the regulation that's on the books today, it escalates over time. It's driving more demand. As time goes by, in different ways, the size of the cake, the size of the opportunity is growing. There I'm talking about regulation that's already settled. It's already on the books. I'd like to turn next to a specific regulation under the E.U.. It's fuel E.U. maritime. This is the primary driver of the energy transition for maritime. It escalates over time as well. Something else that I think is important and interesting is that it's coming up for review. There are two points I'd like to make about that. The first is that it is significantly less ambitious as a regulation today than what IMO, that's the International Maritime Organization, is contemplating.
Second point, it was the European Union member states who pushed the level of ambition for the IMO. I think the question you can ask yourself is, this review of fuel E.U. maritime, are the Europeans going to adopt, make a change to it that's more similar in level of ambition to what they've been pushing for at a global level at IMO? I don't know the answer to that, but I do know there will be advocacy. The next point I'd like to move across to is to IMO. First, just a little bit of context here. IMO is a UN agency, over 170 member states who decide on regulations for security, safety, environmental aspects of shipping. They're a global regulator. They've been doing this for decades. In 2023, they set out their Greenhouse Gas revised strategy. It includes a series of targets.
That defines the what. What are we trying to achieve? Those targets are quite ambitious. Even if I think they're not achieved exactly as intended, they represent a huge opportunity. IMO regulates about eight times as much emissions as the European Union. It is big. Just to put it in terms of energy equivalent, the shipping industry goes through the equivalent of over 500 million tons of methanol per year. Now, of course, that entire amount is not going to be what the shipping industry is using. I'm not saying that. It shows that even a small proportion represents a big opportunity. The strategy was the what. The next part is the how. That was where the net zero framework comes in. This was a package of regulation that IMO has been developing and which are considered for adoption.
That's a critical step before it comes into effect last month at IMO headquarters in London. The outcome of that meeting was adjournment for a year. There was a lot of pressure from the U.S. and other member states. This has been widely documented. I think this is a deferral for sure. The IMO agenda has been slowed down by this. We need to be realistic about that. There is uncertainty on how we go forward. I don't think anybody can say, not even IMO themselves, what the exact agenda is going to look like from here, when something would be adopted, and what version of the net zero framework that might be. I think the key issue was the economic aspect of the net zero framework. There's a technical piece very similar to fuel E.U. maritime.
There is an economic piece which has been viewed by many stakeholders as a tax. That has been, I think, a key sticking part. It is possible, and I do not know, I do not think anybody can say this for certainty, that the focus may pivot towards really narrowing in on a technical measure. That is the kind of thing IMO has been doing for a long time and successfully and recently. The last big example has been the 2020 global sulfur cap change. The work on this is continuing very vigorously at IMO. There is a lot of uncertainty. I think we need to be realistic about that. One thing that is clear and has been encouraging is the shipping industry have been, in general and across all of the major shipping representative organizations, supportive of the work at IMO. Why?
Because they want global regulation for a global industry, which is much better than fragmentation as an approach. For us, for our part, we are trying to work with member states, industry partners, the Methanol Institute to develop solutions and try and help us towards reaching an agreement. With that, I'd like to hand the word to you, Mark.
Thanks very much, Roger. Roger happened to be at the IMO meeting in London. It was quite interesting. I was getting an hour-by-hour blow about everything that was going on. It was quite a fascinating experience to have experienced that at least remotely. Now, I'd like to speak on behalf of one of my colleagues who could not be here today. Her name is Denise Aberdeen. She is responsible for our customer relationships and driving demand for our Low Carbon Methanol . Today, we already have a small but profitable Low Carbon Methanol business. We are selling today about 70,000 tons-80,000 tons of Low Carbon Methanol . That goes into the three segments that are shown on the screen here. Importantly, the reason why that is a profitable business today is because the costs are higher than the cost for conventional methanol.
What drives profitability is that the sales price for that Low Carbon Methanol is roughly three times the sales price of conventional methanol. Now turning to the three different segments here. The first one, and I'll start from the smallest and go to the biggest. The first one is in the chemical space. That is a voluntary application. There is no regulatory driver there. You might ask the question, why are some of the chemical customers voluntarily agreeing to pay close to three times the price of conventional methanol? What really drives that is some of our customers' customers have retail-facing products that they are looking to sell in the marketplace. There are some green marketing credentials, whether it is renewable feedstocks or green credentials, that helps them to pass those costs along to their customers.
We do not expect this is going to be a very material market. It is going to be in the tens of thousands of tons. It is something that is really important for us to make sure that we help support the needs of our existing customers. The road transportation market today is the largest market that we sell into. That is really driven by renewable fuel obligations in both the U.K. and Europe. Where methanol finds its way in there is as a 3% blend in gasoline. That is part of meeting the renewable fuel obligations in the U.K. and Europe. That market is our largest today. We believe that it has the potential to grow into several hundreds of thousands of tons over the next few years.
Importantly, we have got a large amount of capability in that space through the OCI acquisition because OCI was actively promoting that market development for the previous 10 years. We are really well placed to capitalize on some of the growth opportunities that are there. The most important by far potential opportunity for us in terms of volume is in the marine space. Let me first start off by just addressing the question that came earlier on what's the opportunity for conventional methanol in that space. Rich correctly outlined that conventional methanol and the main trade routes with the container ships generally is not competitive with conventional bunker fuels. For that reason, we have not allowed a lot of incremental demand there. It is important to note that we are very early days in the development of this marketplace.
There are some locations where methanol is quite competitive with conventional fuels. I'll give you an example. The further up the Yangtze River you go, the more expensive conventional bunker fuels get and the cheaper methanol gets. There is a point upriver where conventional methanol will be competitive. There are also some other potential markets where it can be competitive. It is not a major focus for us. The major focus and the biggest opportunity is for Low Carbon Methanol in this space. Now, what is going to drive demand for Low Carbon Methanol ? It is really going to be regulations. It is going to be its competitiveness with other low-carbon fuels. What are we doing in that space? We are really focused on making sure that we help shape the regulations so that methanol gets fair treatment, including in blue methanol that Renato will talk about in a minute.
Lastly, we have to make sure that our product has all the environmental attributes that the customers are looking for and has those attributes in a cost-effective way. Typically what we look at is we look at being competitive on a dollars of incremental fuel cost per ton of CO2 reduced basis. That is the benchmark within which we measure our various low-carbon methanol supply opportunities. I'll now turn it over to Renato, who can highlight a bit of the activities that are underway in developing this supply portfolio. Renato?
Thank you, Mark. Good afternoon, everyone. Pleasure to be here sharing with you. Just to start, as my colleagues alluded, low-carbon methanol is the same methanol molecule. Therefore, we can leverage our supply chain commingling physically with the conventional methanol. It has different environmental attributes. That is a critical aspect to define our supply strategy. This implies essentially two elements. The first one is, as Mark said, the carbon intensity, which is emissions per megajoule generated by the methanol molecule. The second one, the certifications that are necessary to be accredited by the regulatory frameworks that Roger has described. In that capacity, we are aiming to develop a sustainably competitive advantage through the supply of all of our customer needs as a one-stop shop for all their needs.
As an example, in the maritime industry, as they develop new vessels, they utilize conventional methanol to test the engines. Thereafter, they would have to use low-carbon methanol to attend the regulatory frameworks. Methanex is uniquely positioned to offer all those ranges of products. How do we want to achieve the competitive sustainable competitive advantage? Through three steps. The first one is, as Mark alluded, being in the left-hand side of the cost curve in a dollar per ton of CO2 reduced. That is the benchmark. That is how the regulatory frameworks allude to the parameters of penalties in the event they do not meet targets. We are developing this with a diversified portfolio of supply, both in terms of geographies as well as production pathways. That aims to minimize geopolitical and regulatory risks.
As we have seen already in the short life, we have many changes along the way on the regulatory side that can curtail our production depending on those measures. The second step is really taking a stepped approach to avoid putting our balance sheet at risk, as Dean and Rich have mentioned before. As the market matures, we believe that starting small, creating the knowledge, the connections in the market will enable us to leverage in the right moments to significantly increase our production and market presence. The third one, we recognize that in some of these production pathways, we are not the experts. In some of those locations, we are not quite familiar. We will need to build alliances with complementary skills to help us build that sustainable operations. How do we translate this into our product strategy?
As I mentioned, in this market, it's more similar to specialty chemicals than really a chemical commodity. We have two strategies, one for green products and another one for blue products. Green products are essentially produced through renewable feedstocks, such as renewable natural gas going through our existing plants, as Mark has alluded. Another example is producing green hydrogen through electrolyzers utilizing renewable power and combining this with captured CO2. A third one is biomass gasification. You can see that methanol, being the simplest alcohol, has multiple options that can leverage the local benefits and the local intrinsic values for different geographies. On the blue methanol side, those are essentially fossil fuel-based or conventional feedstocks utilizing carbon capture, utilization, and storage in one way or the other.
That may include putting carbon capture in our own facilities or buying blue hydrogen to combine with captured CO2, as an example. Regarding our green strategy initially, first, as Roger mentioned about the frameworks, that's the only allowed product into the European Union that is the existing framework. Therefore, it has been our focus in this initial phase of development. We have been producing biomethanol through renewable natural gas in our U.S. Gulf Coast assets, Beaumont and Geismar, since 2018. Therefore, we have a strong connection with the supply markets. We keep a really good track of how much affordability those feedstocks can generate for our end customers. The competitiveness of these pathways is typically in places where you find competitive feedstocks, especially China and in emerging markets.
China has an additional benefit of low capital intensity in their production, which creates a really strong market for biofuels in general. We are starting this approach small and with low risk through offtake agreements in a way that we can establish the context with the different developers and understand the different pathways around the world to, in the right moment, transform these offtake agreements into a stronger presence either through equity positions or through joint ventures. We have just signed two non-binding term sheets. We are now in the process of negotiating definitive agreements that will allow us to continue the supply of the markets that Mark has described. We keep looking for many pathways. We are totally technology agnostic but very thorough in terms of having that project or production in the left-hand of the cost curve. This is an ongoing discussion.
Regarding our blue methanol strategy, this is still not viable or recognized at the moment through the regulatory frameworks in Europe. The IMO, as Roger has indicated, has already signaled that this will be accepted. We are in further advocacy in detailing how those products can be utilized in the maritime space. This is possibly the most competitive pathway. It is a fantastic position that we have in North America, as Kevin has described, giving us access to storage incentives and a network economics of pipelines for CO2, hydrogen, and other elements that makes our position in the Gulf Coast and in Alberta extremely positive and strong. You may have heard that last year, we issued a press release that we were starting pre-feed studies for a carbon capture plant in our Methanex facility in Alberta.
This is in partnership with Entropy, who will build and own that facility with the large majority of all the investments. We will only cover the tie-ins. This will provide us sufficient CO2, carbon dioxide, so that we can reinject in our production and produce about 50,000 tons of low-carbon methanol in Methanex. I think that's only the first step in this. The economics of this project does not rely on blue premiums and just in the capacity expansion. It is certainly a small step and can show you how we are addressing those challenges of starting small and growing as the market becomes differential. Mark, back to you.
Thanks very much, Renato. I hope this has given you a good overview of our business in the low-carbon space. I just like to take you through a few key takeaways. I think, first of all, is we've got a profitable business today. Yes, it's very small. It's just in the first innings of development for this low-carbon space. We're approaching this through a diversified set of customers in different market segments. Regulations are going to be a key to driving adoption of low-carbon methanol because of the higher price. We need to work to reduce the price of low-carbon methanol. Renato is working hard on developing a slate of different low-carbon methanol supply opportunities that we think will meet the needs of our customer base. Overall, the demand potential here is very large. We're really optimistic about what the future will hold.
As I said, it's still very early. We'd be happy to answer any questions that you might have.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much. I was looking at your last Investor Day deck, so about two and a half years ago. There were about 65 vessels that were built at the time. Now, we're over 100, which is what your slide says. If you think back to what your projections were two and a half years ago, are we tracking behind, ahead from that, and why? As part of that question, can you talk about ammonia and the competitiveness of ammonia for dual-fuel ships as well? Thank you.
No, thanks for the question. Certainly, these vessels take a number of years to be built. We're pretty much on track with what we would have projected back at that time. I think the more important part of the question, though, is how are the new methanol dual-fuel vessel orders coming into play? Right now, what we're seeing is a slight decrease in the number of dual-fuel methanol vessels that are being ordered today. We're still seeing new ones come on the water. We still have an optimistic view about the outlook for low-carbon methanol vessels. You're right to point out that there are a number of competing fuels. LNG is probably the biggest one today, so the 400-plus vessels that methanol will have on the water. For LNG, the numbers are over 1,000.
The ammonia comment that you made, that's an interesting one because a lot of people are looking at ammonia vessels. They still have more development to do on the engines. Ammonia does have the attractive feature that it doesn't have a carbon atom on board, which means there's no CO2 emissions on board. That is an attractive feature. One of the key challenges for ammonia is the potential for N2O emissions through the combustion of ammonia, which is a very bad actor from a Greenhouse Gas perspective, a factor of 260 or thereabouts. The other aspect of ammonia is the safety considerations for onboard a vessel. I'm not saying that those issues can't be solved. Ammonia does have some very attractive features. Now that we are an ammonia player, it's also an opportunity for us to potentially get involved in that space.
Thank you. Matthew Blair from TPH. You mentioned that you're co-processing these RNG feedstocks. Could you talk about whether these are landfill RNG feeds or dairy RNG feeds? What is your preference and why? Second, it seems like some of your competitors have been a little bit more aggressive on the green methanol front. Is that because they're building projects on a more speculative basis, or have they just been better about securing contracts? Finally, what is Methanex's thoughts today on building a green methanol plant? Is that on the radar at all or something you're not really considering? Thank you.
Yeah, maybe I'll start off with the green methanol question. Then I'll turn it over to Renato for the RNG question. We think that it's important that the demand signals are strong enough before we're ready to make a big capital investment. You're right to point out that some of our competitors have gone a little bit ahead of time. What I would say is that I'm aware of at least two projects where they have stopped the projects in midstream. They have had to write off hundreds of millions of dollars. We think it's prudent to take the time and assess the various different green methanol production options before making any big investments in that space.
Regarding the renewable natural gas, we are mostly utilizing so far landfill gas, which is a cheaper renewable natural gas. The manure-based or dairy, as you mentioned, has also additional streams of revenue from the California low-carbon fuel standards, which makes the price disproportionately high. This product is still more valuable on a per ton of CO2 reduced. Many of those users are not recognizing yet that feature because they are really in the initial stages of the decarbonization targets. Therefore, we see the manure side being developed much stronger in the future when people will need those CO2 reductions to meet the targets.
If there are no other questions, we'd like to thank you very much for your attention. I'll now call Dean Richardson up to the podium.
OK, thanks, Mark.
Is this on now?
Yep. Thank you. Yeah, just 30 seconds here for the most exciting slide of the day. I just wanted to communicate around our Q4 report. We've historically issued a Q4 report in addition to our annual report. We've done the Q4 report earlier and then our annual about a month later. Like most companies, we're actually going to be consolidating that going forward and just have a single issuance. We will still be issuing the Q4 information to make sure you can split it out. From a timing perspective, we're going to do that once. What you can see here on the left is our timing for 2025, which is coming up in Q1, just a couple of months from now. It means a delay in the issuance of our earnings to coincide with our annual report.
For the next year, we will be resetting our board and audit dates to be a bit earlier and to be about two weeks after that. I just wanted to clearly communicate that to anyone. If anyone has any questions, please feel free to follow up with me directly. Thank you.
All right. So that's a wrap on our 2025 Methanex Investor Day. I want to remind people in the room, we will stay around for another 30 minutes to an hour. There's management and board here available to answer any other questions. I really want to say thank you very much for participating here and allowing us to communicate how we're trying to drive long-term value for shareholders. Very much appreciate it. Thank you very much. We'll talk soon.