MASSY Gas Products Jamaica has exported the country’s first locally produced medical-grade oxygen and said it has plans to make the shipments regular enough to have export earnings from the gas accounting for “a double-digit percentage” in terms of the company’s overall revenues.

The company, which is the sole local producer of medical-grade oxygen, sent a shipment of 16 tonnes of the gas to The Bahamas on Saturday. The gas was marketed under the IGL brand which Massy acquired in a US$140-million deal last August.

“We are revolutionising the health sector,” Peter Graham, CEO of Massy Gas Products Jamaica, said.

“This shipment aligns with our mission to embark on an export-led growth model and to actively participate in leading Jamaica into an era of economic diversification,” he added.

Graham said he expects the company to continue growing the export side of the business in 2025.

“We expect that business to expand over time, because we have a goal in the near term to have double digits percentage of our revenues coming from exports,” Graham told the Jamaica Observer. He was, however, quick to point out that the company is not yet committing to an exact percentage. Apart from medical-grade liquid oxygen, Massy Gas Products also exported a small quantity of ethylene, a gas which has uses across industry, agriculture and medicine.

Graham says while that export was a one-off, he is looking to ensure that the export of oxygen will be recurring and not to The Bahamas alone.

“We see the export of medical-grade oxygen [as having potential] for growth. All countries have hospitals and need medical oxygen, but apart from Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica is the only other country in the English-speaking Caribbean that has a manufacturing facility…so we are now prospecting the region. We are looking at other markets outside of The Bahamas…and in the next few months we will have more to share around additional markets that we are going to go to,” Graham outlined to BusinessWeek.

He said the company started making preparations for the export market six years ago when it invested US$10 million in an air separation unit (ASU) to produce medical-grade oxygen at its Ferry, St Catherine plant, first to substitute imports of the product — all oxygen used in Jamaica prior to that were imported — and then to start exporting once it could fulfil the needs of the local market. An ASU, as the name suggests, is a facility that separates air into its primary components: nitrogen, oxygen, and argon. That plant is ISO 9001 certified and can produce 13 metric tonnes of medical-grade liquid oxygen daily, along with food-grade liquid nitrogen.

But he said with demand for oxygen increasing shortly after the ASU plant was set up, especially with greater need during the COVID-19 pandemic, the capacity to produce medical-grade oxygen in Jamaica was increased further with a $100 million investment in state-of-the-art pressure swing adsorption (PSA) plant — a gas separation technology used to purify and separate gases.

Graham pointed out that the combined capacity of the two plants, “once optimised”, will be able to satisfy local demand with the excess available for exports. He estimates local demand for medical-grade oxygen to be 16 metric tonnes per day, and said both plants will have capacity “way in excess of that,” though he never pinpointed the exact capacity.

“We are still working towards getting to a point where we can consistently meet the full demand before we get into longer-term contracts with export customers. We need to ensure that we are at a point where we are certain that we have enough to meet the local demand, with any spikes, and then we do exports more consistently. But this is an opportunity which we saw and we grasped, and it’s a start. Sometimes in business you have to put down a marker and start,” he said of the shipment of oxygen to The Bahamas.

Senator Aubyn Hill, minister of industry, investment and commerce, commented on the development, stating, “I congratulate Massy Gas Products Jamaica, under the IGL brand, on this historic achievement in exporting Jamaica’s first shipment of locally produced medical-grade oxygen. This accomplishment reflects our country’s commitment to meeting the highest standards in quality and safety, especially in vital sectors like healthcare.”

“We see this as consistent with the Government’s thrust. We see this as a non-traditional. So when people speak of exports they speak about agricultural or additional bauxite or some other traditional product, but we are seeing now, IGL adding a new product which has never been exported as far as we know, to the mix, and we expect it to grow and help the country’s thrust towards growth and the company’s thrust towards earning foreign exchange through exports.

Exports aside, Graham said the ASU has allowed the company to grow the sale of food grade nitrogen which has been seeing increased demand from company’s producing non-carbonated drinks.

“If you look at the past four years, as people make choices away from carbonated beverages to water and other still drinks, we are seeing that growth at a reasonable rate,” Graham noted. The company also sells carbon dioxide which is used by the producers of soda and soda water.