Industrial gas major Air Products has said that two underperforming coal gasification facilities in China have acted as a drag on the company’s performance in Asia, delivering bottom-line losses in fiscal 2023 and 2024 that have dented the region’s overall earnings contribution to the group.
“We have our team working on [this challenge], trying to understand how we can optimise these assets,” said the company’s recently installed CEO Eduardo Menezes on the company’s Q2 2025 earnings call last week.
The two projects that are not delivering for Air Products are understood to be the Jiutai New Material Project in Hohhot in Inner Mongolia, which is fully owned by Air Products, and the Debang Group Xuwei National Petrochemical Park in Lianyungang City in China’s Jiangsu province. This is 80%-owned by Air Products and 20% by China’s Jiangsu Debang Chemical Industrial Group Company.
Both facilities came onstream in 2023 and each one uses coal gasifiers to supply purified syngas back to the plant for a fixed monthly fee from the customer based on agreed volumes. The former was slated as originally costing $650m to construct and the latter $250m.
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