Egypt's Suez Canal Economic Zone on Tuesday signed a $2.6 billion contract to build a methanol plant at Egypt's Ain Sokhna port and industrial complex, it said in a statement.

The project will be executed in two phases, with completion of the first by 2025 at an investment cost of about $1.6 billion. The second phase, with an estimated cost of about $1 billion, is to be completed over a further three years.

Targeted production capacity for the first phase is one million tonnes of methanol and 400,000 tonnes of ammonia per year.

(Reporting by Nayera Abdallah Editing by David Goodman ) ((Nayera.Abdallah@thomsonreuters.com;))