HSE Philosophy Statement
Natgasoline is committed to ensuring:
- The health, safety and welfare of its employees, visitors and the surrounding communities
- The protection of property and the environment
This commitment will be achieved through a zero accident philosophy and a documented Health, Safety and Environmental System which ensures:
- Leadership accountability for HSE risks
- Authority for anyone to stop unsafe acts is communicated and promoted
- Proactive hazard/risk recognition and mitigation
- Training of employees which enables them to meet their responsibility of working safely and protecting the environment
- Utilization of Safe Working Practices in all aspects of facility operations and maintenance
- Investigation and resolution of all health, safety or environmental incidents and the effective implementation of lessons-learned
- Monitoring and attainment of HSE objectives and targets to drive continuous improvement.
- Sustainability is a key factor in all decision-making processes
- Facility operations have minimum impacts on the environment.
- Awareness and compliance with all applicable Health, Safety and Environmental regulations applicable to facility operations.
What is Methanol?
Also known as methyl alcohol, methanol is a clear, colorless liquid and the starting point for the production of a multitude of everyday products like clothing, automotive parts, paints or building materials. In addition to a wide array of other new applications, the use of methanol as a clean fuel are becoming more common.
At Natgasoline, methanol is made from natural gas and water. These are combined, heated and passed over a catalyst to produce a mixture called synthesis gas. Using additional catalyst, the synthesis gas is reacted to become methanol which is finally distilled to make the pure product.
Safety
Our primary focus as a methanol producer will always be safety and the environment. As is the case with all fuels and chemicals, methanol must be produced, handled, stored and transported safely. Natgasoline follows all applicable engineering, regulatory and industry practices to ensure that our facility is operated in a safe and environmentally sound manner to produce methanol. We utilize and adhere to the OSHA Process Safety Management Standards, EPA’s Risk Management Planning regulations and a multitude of other state and federal environmental programs to ensure that our product is managed safely and with minimum impacts to the environment.
Environmental
Natgasoline believes that the selection of safe and environmentally responsible technologies is inherent for sustainability. The Natgasoline methanol process technology uses cleaner-burning natural gas as both a fuel and a feedstock. Natural gas CO2 emissions can be 50 to 60 percent less CO2 emissions than other coal-derived feedstocks/fuels. During normal plant operations, Natgasoline employs process gas recovery systems that enable us to utilize these recovered streams as supplemental fuel in our fired-equipment and/or re-process the gases into methanol. The process technology employed at Natgasoline also utilizes excess steam and heat from the process using an efficient waste heat recovery system. This allows greater efficiency and reduces the amount of fired-sources needed to produce heat in various phases of the process. A large volume of condensed process steam from the process is also cleaned and conditioned as a supplemental “make-up” water feed for the plant’s process water reducing water use.