Houston (Platts)--12Jul2005

The US methanol spot market remained rangebound to 80-82 cts/gal FOB USGC
Tuesday, even as feedstock natural gas broke through the $8/MMBtu level for a
time, sources said. 

Sources said sufficient methanol supply levels in the Americas steadied the
market. Helping supply was Methanex's new 840,000 mt/yr Chile IV methanol
plant, which returned from a brief outage near Jul 1. Unit outages were not
expected in the market until at least mid-July. 

A producer source added that "[natural] gas is pretty much irrelevant to
methanol, as we have almost no domestic production anymore." Buying interest
has also been thin, with spot levels in the low 80s cts/gal range since
falling 2-3 cts early last week.

For more information about the methanol spot market, take a trial to Platts
Petrochemical Report at http://petrochemicalreport.platts.com.