# The Intratec Methodology Family

## What solutions does Intratec offer? {#what-solutions-does-intratec-offer}

Intratec publishes four solutions, each addressing a different question about commodity markets and industrial economics:

- **Primary Commodity Prices:** price assessments for chemical and petrochemical commodities, built from official international trade statistics through a monthly gathering, transformation, and modeling cycle — serving readers who need reliable, independent price benchmarks.
- **Energy Prices & Markets:** price references for energy markets, produced under the same price-based discipline; energy price references also feed other Intratec models, such as industrial utility cost estimates.
- **Commodity Production Costs:** bottom-up production cost analyses — capital costs, operating costs, and product value — built on conceptual process designs, intended for screening and comparing production economics rather than detailed engineering.
- **Industry Economics & Competitiveness:** a monthly industrial competitiveness report for non-agricultural commodity manufacturing across a fixed set of 33 countries, including plant construction cost indexes and industrial utility costs.

Each solution is delivered with its own publicly available methodology documentation.

## What do all Intratec methodologies share? {#what-do-all-intratec-methodologies-share}

> All four solutions rest on the same foundation: data drawn overwhelmingly from public official sources, no commercial ties to market participants, and impartial, auditable methods — expressed through shared conventions and a shared quality philosophy.

Three layers are common across the family:

- **Core principles.** Independent sourcing, no commercial ties to market participants, and impartial, auditable methods — the eight commitments are detailed on the Core Principles page.
- **Shared conventions.** The US dollar anchors all monetary figures, with a single set of reference exchange rates applied consistently. Reported quantities follow the International System of Units (SI). A single world-regions hierarchy — region, sub-region, country — organizes every analysis geographically.
- **Quality philosophy.** Data passes a two-layer validation before publication: automated processing and cross-referencing of official sources, followed by expert human review as the final quality gate. The methodology is reviewed continuously, and any changes are documented in publicly available monthly Release Notes.

## How do the methodologies differ across solutions? {#how-do-the-methodologies-differ-across-solutions}

Each solution has its own methodology and its own pipeline — they are distinct and not interchangeable. The family is best understood as one set of principles and conventions with four separate methodologies built on top of them, not as a single model applied four times.

The differences follow from what each solution measures:

- **Price-based solutions** assess market prices through structured pipelines that collect official trade data, transform it to common bases, and apply dedicated modeling approaches on a monthly cycle.
- **Commodity Production Costs** works bottom-up from process analysis: technical definition of the plant, then capital and operating cost estimation, producing budgetary-class estimates from conceptual designs.
- **Industry Economics & Competitiveness** builds composite indicators and cost models — such as construction cost indexes combining labor, materials, logistics, and business-environment parameters — to compare countries.

Where one solution uses another's outputs, the link is a deliberate design choice, made explicit in the methodology — for example, the report's utility cost models take energy price inputs from Intratec's price references. Such links connect distinct methodologies; they do not merge them.

## Are the methodology documents publicly available? {#are-the-methodology-documents-publicly-available}

Yes. The methodology behind every solution is fully public, requiring no login or subscription, and methodology changes are documented in monthly Release Notes — also publicly available — so the evolution of every method can be traced over time. The exact boundary between what is disclosed and what remains proprietary is described in the Independence & Limitations section.