Caption: Managing Director of Corporate Development at ProMan Timothy Cornelius and representative of Earn DLT at the Energy Conference
By Prior Beharry
ONE of the world’s largest methanol producers has found a way to identify the attributes used to make its product.
Timothy Cornelius, Managing Director of Corporate Development at ProMan, said the company wanted to find a way “to create a digital twin of every molecule we produce.”
Speaking with AZP News at the recent Energy Conference at the Hyatt in Port of Spain, he said, “ProMan was searching for a way to create value out of the attributes of our products – methanol, ammonia, melamine, urea and we needed to try and find a company that understood how to create a digital twin of every molecule we produce.”
Cornelius said after a global serach, ProMan became a customer of Earn DLT which has created the tokens.
He added, “And last year we became a customer of Earn’s and we became the first company in the world to transact methanol tokens. So we tokenised one of our products and we sold it to one of our customers.”
Cornelius then explained what tokenising a product meant.
He said, “When you produce a metric tonne of methanol, for example, that methanol has a lot of attributes – what type of gas was used to make it, where was that gas from, how much energy was used in the production of the methanol.
“All of that is valuable data because companies now have to report for compliance purposes how much carbon, for example, was used in the production.
“We went and mapped one of our facilities in Texas and tokenised the attribute data so for every metric tonne, we created a token and for every token, the customer who was a German chemical customer purchased those attributes because they needed that data for their own reporting and compliance purposes.”
Cornelius said so far ProMan has only tokenised methonal.
He said, “At present, Proman has only tokenised methanol, but we now plan to tokenise all of our product range including ammonia, melamine and UAN (Urea Ammonium Nitrate) to help our customers deal with new administrative burdens such as CBAM in Europe.”
Cornelius, who is the Relationship Manager with Earn DLT, said ProMan started a relationship in January 2024 with them and it took about six months to create the first token.
He said reasons to know the attributes could be for reporting purposes to ensure that the product was not sanctioned.
Cornelius said, “For Trinidad, for example, you have to prove to your customer that your tonnes have legitimately come from Trinidad.
“Other customers may have issues with that they might be sanctioned Russian tonnes, sanctioned Iranian tonnes, it might be Chinese tonnes and if your customer needs absolute proof that the production comes from Trinidad, this is where we step in with the tokens.
