Uit de conference call van q1. Naar mijn idee schetsen ze, ondanks wat lagere prijzen, niet dat het een slecht kwartaal gaat/is geworden.
Maar zoals we gewend zijn van het management, kan het natuurlijk altijd mooier gemaakt zijn dan het uiteindelijk is geworden.
Thank you, Hassan, and thank you all for joining the call today. Let me start by thanking all our OCI team members for their dedication and resilience and staying safe. I'm impressed that during these challenging times, we have been able to demonstrate levels of global corporation we have not seen before and achieved best-in-class safety records. Despite all the challenges the world is facing, the outlook for the majority of our markets is still looking good and OCI's asset base, commercial capabilities and financial standing are well positioned to manage near-term volatility.
If I start with the nitrogen markets. I'm pleased to confirm that on the fertilizer side, we haven't seen any material impact from COVID-19 during this ongoing application season. If anything, we had a very vigorous start to the season across all our end markets, and our order book for the second quarter is looking very healthy. In the U.S., spring planting is well ahead of last year with the latest USDA data at the beginning of May showing corn planting at 50% complete compared to 21% last year on the same date. It's well publicized that in March, the USDA came out with a bullish estimate of 97 million acres for this application season. Market observers currently believe that this will pan out slightly lower, maybe up to 94 million acres, but we will know more in the coming weeks. This is still a very healthy increase of around 5% from last year. The direct application ammonia season in April has already been the strongest in many years, helped by very favorable weather. And the combination of an increase in acres and lagging urea imports into the U.S. compared to last year is pointing to a very strong season for urea and UAN as well. As a result, the industry should be ending the season with minimal carryover inventory of nitrogen fertilizer.
In Europe, we are seeing very strong demand for May and June deliveries in our core Northern European nitrate markets. So we expect a healthy performance of our European operations in Q2 as well and a lower inventory level starting into the softer summer months.
Our export platform, Fertiglobe, is sold out until mid-June, and we are benefiting from ongoing demand in major importing regions, and we have been selling significant volumes into Southern Europe, East Africa, India and Australia to mention a few, including some new markets for us. So all in all, we feel good about the current season and the current outlook for our fertilizer business, albeit with some weakness on the industrial side of nitrogen projects, be it DEF or melamine.
If I now look at our methanol business, methanol prices have come down as a result of COVID-19 and its effect on the sharply or lowering of oil prices. We have limited visibility on the length and full economic impact of COVID-19 crisis, but looking forward oil prices, we believe the second half of the year should start seeing some recovery in methanol pricing. But I want to reiterate that a large proportion of our methanol production is already committed to end users that need the product or they're down in production and that we are a bit insulated due to our advantageous geographical locations close to our customers. There are also several factors that mitigate a drop in global demand. Most importantly, several producers have already shut down high-cost production facilities which will help support the balance in the market, and we expect more to come if the methanol prices stay lower for longer. We, of course, are on the very low end of the cost curve. At current methanol and natural gas prices, our businesses has a strong competitive cost advantage and still generate healthy margins.
This brings me to our outlook. While selling prices have been lower in both nitrogen and methanol, we remain fully focused on what is within our control. i.e., operational and commercial excellence, controllable costs and volume growth.
With regard to operational excellence, we are fortunate that we finalized our heavy-scope turnarounds for the nitrogen business last year and that we have brought forward and finalized our major methanol turnaround activity to the first quarter this year before the escalation of the COVID-19 pandemic. We have already seen the positive effects coming through in the first quarter performance of our nitrogen business, helped by the strong execution and efficiency on sales and distribution.
In the last few months, we have also addressed certain areas of our methanol operation, and we expect methanol volumes to ramp up through 2020. As a result, we expect higher and more efficient asset utilization rates across the platform in 2020, also achieving better conversion economics.
We believe our cost structure is already one of the best in the industry, but we continue to look for opportunities to optimize further. For example, we have identified an additional $20 million of cash savings at Fertiglobe to be realized over the next 3 years.
Finally, with cost under control and our plans moving toward to their full potential, we see no reason today why we should not see double-digit volume growth this year. With that, we will open the line for questions.