Methanol Casale, the third company of the Casale Group, was established in 1994 to resume Casale activities in the methanol technology field.

In 1928, in view of the close similarity of their synthesis gas production technology, Ammonia Casale started to engineer and construct methanol synthesis plants in addition to ammonia plants.

The methanol process developed in the early days by Ammonia Casale operated at 250-350 bar and remained the dominant technology for over 45 years, once the fundamental problem of corrosion of the reactor steel by carbon monoxide had been solved by the use of copper clad equipment.

Owing to the massive introduction of large second-generation units operating at low-pressure (45-100 bar), which was made possible by new, more active catalysts, Ammonia Casale lost most of its market share in methanol. It had practically no involvement in the methanol field from the late 1960s until activities were resumed by Methanol Casale, making very successful breakthroughs.

At the beginning, Methanol Casale activities concentrated on revamping synthesis reactors, taking advantage of the know-how gained by Ammonia Casale in reactor design, and it soon became a leader in the design of methanol synthesis reactors with its well-known ARC design.

With this very reliable and efficient design, Methanol Casale, in collaboration with ICI, modernized several plants based on ICI technology. The same design has also been licensed for the construction of world-scale grass-root plants.

As it has progressively gained experience, Methanol Casale has also become a leader in revamping complete methanol plants and in designing and constructing new ones.

Key achievements in plant upgrading include capacity increase, reduced specific consumption of synthesis gas, and improvement in the quality of the raw methanol. Methanol Casale has also recently built, and is still building, grass-roots plants including the world’s largest plant with a capacity of 7,000 MTD.

These plants incorporate the most advanced designs developed by Methanol Casale, such as the IMC (Isothermal Methanol Converter). This is the ultimate step in terms of converter efficiency,  enabling very efficient revamping and making it possible to design 7,000 MTD converters in a single vessel.

Among Methanol Casale's latest developments, ammonia plants can be retrofitted for methanol production or co-production of ammonia and methanol. Like its mother company Ammonia Casale, the main strength of Methanol Casale lies in the continuous development of its technologies, which are developed in-house by a team of very specialized and experienced people.