How will Winter Olympic Games affect methanol plants

2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games is going to kick off in Beijing on Feb 2, 2022. According to the assessment from Ministry of Ecology and Environment, there’s heavy air pollution in North China, North region of Huai River and West China. In order to achieve carbon neutrality, there’s news that the central government may decide to shutter all the heavy industry enterprises in those regions from Jan 1, 2022, with the focus on dealing with pollution in Tianjin Municipality; Tangshan, Shijiazhuang, Zhangjiakou and Chengde in Hebei Province; Jinan, Weihai and Weifang in Shandong Province; Taiyuan, Datong, Changzhi in Shanxi Province; Luoyang and Zhengzhou in Henan Province, and etc.

News say that the shutdown will last from Jan 1 to Mar 8, 2022, and the government would require relevant department to implement the tasks.

With the nearing of the Winter Games, whether methanol plants would be impacted by the regulation to combat pollution draws much attention.

This round of environmental protection mainly covers cities and provinces surrounding Beijing, such as Hebei, Shandong, Shanxi, Henan Provinces and Tianjin Municipality. According to the distribution of methanol plants in China, methanol capacity amounts to 21.14 million mt/yr in the above 5 provinces and municipality, accounting for 22% of total. Capacity in the key cities where the government lays focus on combating pollution is 4.51 million mt/yr, 5% of the total. In addition, 400kt/yr out of the 4.51 million mt/yr has been long idled. Therefore, the impact could be limited.

Methanol capacity in key cities

According to the feedback from methanol plants, they have not yet received notice to shut plants. However, they say that the plants operation would be inevitably affected by the Winter Games, and it would be dependent on the policy. Some others say that plants with target in heating will not be affected and will keep running, such as Mingshui Dahua. In addition, apart from the impact on plant operations, to transport methanol during the Winter Games would be affected as methanol is a kind of hazardous chemical.

In a conclusion, methanol capacity that could be affected is not large, and it is still dependent on official policy which has not been announced.