Last month Siluria unveiled its new plant tucked in among dozens of giant petrochemical complexes on the Houston Ship Channel. Situated within a larger polypropylene site operated by Brazilian chemicals giant Braskem , the Siluria plant is a 4-story tall maze of pipes and valves and pressure vessels. It takes in purified methane, mixes it with oxygen in the presence of a revolutionary catalyst and creates ethylene.

The single most commonly produced petrochemcial, ethylene is the basis for myriad plastics like polyester, beverage bottles and PVC. It’s vital for the production of solvents, coatings, antifreeze and pharmaceuticals. By some estimates the worldwide ethylene amounts to $150 billion a year.

Ethylene is so important that up and down the Gulf Coast the world’s biggest chemical companies have unleashed tens of billions of dollars in a building boom to expand ethylene production. But while Siluria’s technology is all about building up ethylene out of smaller methane molecules, the big guys are all going about it the old-fashioned way: by producing ethylene out of larger hydrocarbons such as naphtha (sourced from crude oil) or ethane (found in natural gas).

ChevronPhillips Chemical Company is investing $6 billion to build an ethane cracker. Near Lake Charles, Sasol is spending $8 billion on an ethane cracker and six chemical plants. OxyChem is building its own billion-dollar cracker in Ingleside. ExxonMobil isconstructing one at Baytown.

Why does the world even need a new way to make ethylene when the old way is good enough to attract so much investment? Because Siluria thinks its process, called the oxidative coupling of methane, can do it cheaper. That’s mainly because methane is the cheapest, most plentiful part of the natural gas stream. At about $3 per mmBTU, you can spend just $20 to get the same amount of energy content in methane as there is in a barrel of oil — which even at current low prices costs more than twice as much.

And also because there are massive supplies of “stranded” natural gas far from petrochemical centers like the Gulf Coast — gas that in places like the Bakken shale too often just gets flared off because the costs of building out pipelines and processing plants is prohibitively expensive.