Is it profitable to do MTO these days?
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This post was last edited by liaifeng on 2018-8-8 at 11:48. It’s over pp8000, and methanol is also at 2800 – how much profit can be made now? Can someone give me a formula?
3.jpg Our company’s 1.8 million-ton DMTO plant uses methanol that is purchased from external suppliers; the downstream facilities include polypropylene and ethylene oxide plants. We are currently constructing the second phase of the polypropylene plant, with commissioning planned for the end of the year!
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Whether profit is made or not cannot be determined based on a single day or a specific period of time. For example, starting from the beginning of the year and over a period of almost half a year, methanol prices remained high, while the prices of ethylene and propylene fluctuated downward; based solely on this, it can be concluded that the MTO project is definitely losing money. However, any company that undertakes MTO projects will inevitably have downstream projects as well, such as PP, EO, EVA, PE, and so on. Measured in terms of the company’s overall economic benefits, it is not necessarily a loss. Recently, methanol prices have fallen, and even when considering the profitability solely from the perspective of MTO projects, there is still a profit margin. In short, to determine whether the MTO project is profitable or not, it is necessary to evaluate it based on the prices of raw materials and products throughout the year, as well as the company’s upstream and downstream products as a whole. Overall, the companies involved in the MTO project are definitely profitable at present.
In our company, coal costs 250 yuan per ton. The cost of producing one ton of methanol is approximately 1000 yuan (this includes equipment depreciation, water, electricity, gas, steam, and employee salaries; sales and financial costs are not included). To produce one ton of olefins from 2.6 tons of methanol, the processing cost is around 1000 yuan as well (including equipment depreciation, water, electricity, gas, steam, and employee salaries; sales and financial costs are not included). The production cost of one ton of olefins is therefore around 3600–4000 yuan. Currently, the price of polyethylene is around 10,000 yuan per ton, while polypropylene costs around 8,000 yuan per ton. The profits are thus quite substantial. .
Are coal prices still this low even with shipping costs? Is it your own mine? Is the unit consumption of 2.6 also external data?