Air Products Is Now Selling the Plant It Was Building
The $2.9 billion Louisiana write-off landed in today's numbers, and with it a capital rule: about $1.5 billion a year for traditional industrial gas, against roughly $5 billion a year since 2022. If your site needs an on-site plant before 2030, the queue in front of you just changed shape.
In October 2021 the governor of Louisiana stood up with Air Products and announced a $4.5 billion complex near Burnside, in Ascension Parish.
More than 750 million standard cubic feet per day of blue hydrogen. More than five million metric tons a year of carbon dioxide sequestered permanently. Operational in 2026.
It is 2026. The complex does not exist, and this afternoon Air Products booked the bill for that.
The fiscal third quarter carries approximately $2.9 billion of pre-tax charges, $2.2 billion after tax, $9.92 a share, for exiting Louisiana, discontinuing the Casa Grande liquid hydrogen plant in Arizona, and killing a handful of smaller clean-energy distribution projects. GAAP operating income for the quarter is a loss of $2,097.1 million against sales of $3,161.0 million, a negative 66.3% operating margin.
Strip the charge out and the quarter went the other way: adjusted earnings of $3.47 a share, up 12%, adjusted operating margin at 25.6%, and full-year guidance raised to $13.39 to $13.49.
The write-off is history. What matters to anyone who buys nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen or helium is the sentence underneath it.
The rest of this brief is for subscribers.
The capacity math, the trade-flow read, and what it means for the products you buy.
$100 a month, or $800 a year.
Already a subscriber? Sign in