The Intratec Methodology Family

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?

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?

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?

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.