Numerous new projects have been heralded by petrochemical firms in recent years to build and expand on a stable supply of natural gas and ethane from their shale-advantaged capacity in the U.S.

While many companies elected to construct facilities from scratch, Houston-based LyondellBasell Industries chose to update and restart a plant it idled nearly a decade ago. The U.S. chemical giant says its methanol unit in Channelview, Texas, restarted in late 2013.

It closed the unit in 2004 because of the then-high cost of gas—the main feedstock for North American methanol producers.

In a recent interview with Hart Energy, LyondellBasell spokesman David A. Harpole said that with the lower gas prices in North America, restarting the mothballed methanol plant could be done at a fraction of the cost of building a new unit.

“Methanol is produced with natural gas as the primary feedstock, and with the low cost of natural gas available to us now through the more abundant supplies from shale formations—particularly those in South Texas [Eagle Ford]—it gives us an incentive to put this plant back into service,” Harpole said.

“We’re the largest producer of MTBE [methyl tertiary butyl ether] globally, and so that has been a component of this business for us,” Harpole said. “Certainly MTBE or direct-blending of methanol offers one of the fuel opportunities for methanol. We also have a fairly sizable acetic-acid business and methanol is one of the components of acetic acid as well. So those are at least two of the internal drivers that we see.”

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