Rich Sumner
Analyst · Alembic Global. Your line is open.
Sure. Thanks, Hassan. So, right now, again, I think I've talked about the makeup of demand for methanol. When we look about 50% is traditional chemical applications, about 30% to 35% is energy applications and the other 15% to 20% is methanol to olefins. So, I mean, we start with the energy applications. Those have been quite good for us. And when we're seeing those, we haven't seen big variability or volatility and that demand has been really stable and growing. MTO tends to be a balance on the industry. So, when there's a lot of supply in the market, they tend to operate high rates and when the supply gets tight, they tend to operate low rates. So there's a bit of a noise in our demand because of the balancing act of MTO operating rates on our industry. The traditional chemical applications vary by -- have varied by region and that depends heavily on GDP in each of the regions. And that's something we monitor really closely and it's -- a lot of it goes into all the leading indicators of economic activity. And so you go around the world and it hasn't been particularly strong, but we haven't seen weakness in it. But it's something that we're watching and we're expecting relatively flattish when we say demand is going to pick up. We're not talking about big increases in -- from a percentage basis, but it was seasonally low in Q1 and we expect it to be seasonally higher in the second quarter. Certainly, auto housing, all those leading indicators are things that we're tracking and we're going to watch closely. But I think one of the things to note about our industry relative to other petrochemical industries is that we have seen, I would call it, lower growth than we've seen historically. What we are -- what we are seeing is limited supply. And I think that's one of the differentiation points. Existing supply in methanol has -- had a hard time keeping pace even with slower growth because of constraints around Iran, constraints around Russia, Venezuela, we've seen it in Trinidad, New Zealand, etcetera. Because of those gas, feedstock or geopolitical sanctions, a variety a number of factors have led existing supply to be constrained and not a lot of new capacity being added in the industry. So I think -- I do think there's a bit of a differentiation that even with slower demand, methanol is not getting out of balance like we do see in some of the other sectors.