OCI Beaumont, owned and operated by Amsterdam-based chemicals manufacturer OCI N.V., is considering investing almost $5 billion to expand its East Texas complex, according to documents filed with the Texas comptroller’s office.
Chemical plant
The company wants to add nitrogen-based fertilizer production and a renewable fuels plant to its existing 28-acre ammonia and methanol plant south of Beaumont, Texas, on the Neches River, OCI said.
The application is one of two submitted to Beaumont ISD at the same time by related entities, the newly-formed OCI Clean Ammonia LLC and OCI Fuels USA Inc. Both projects will be developed simultaneously and will be adjacent to a third related entity OCI Beaumont LLC. The two projects will share project boundaries.
If the plans are finalized, OCI would spend $2.8 billion on the additional fertilizer production units and $2.075 billion on the proposed lumber waste-to-fuels project, the documents said. Construction is expected to take 24 to 30 months and the facilities are expected to be fully operational in 2027.
The third proposal on OCI's applications for Chapter 313 tax incentives is the proposal for the renewable fuels plant, bringing the total proposed investments to roughly $5 billion. Under that section of the state tax code, companies hoping to build certain industrial projects can make agreements with the local school district to lessen their tax burdens.
The renewable fuels plans call for a unit that turns wood waste into synthesis gas, creating renewable natural gas, OCI said. Another new unit would turn some of the synthesis gas into up to 1 million tons per year of methanol, which in turn would be processed into renewable gasoline in a third new unit. Overall, the facility would have the capacity to make 100,000 tons of gasoline per year, according to the application.
For OCI's fertilizer project, it wants to add two ammonia production units, each of which would have the capacity to make 3,000 metric tons of ammonia per day using imported hydrogen and nitrogen.
Additionally, the company plans to add a plant that uses ammonia and carbon dioxide to make 2,200 metric tons per day of urea. Some of that urea would be converted to diesel exhaust fluid, while the rest would be turned into urea ammonium nitrate, a type of fertilizer, in another new facility with the capacity to make 1,530 metric tons of UAN per day. For the storage of these fertilizer products, various storage tanks will also be built.
Besides the company's East Texas location, OCI is considering its fertilizer manufacturing facility in Wever, Iowa, as another possibility for the proposed new nitrogen production complex.
