Bruce Aitken, the pres­i­dent of Van­cou­ver-based methanol pro­duc­er Methanex, has raised doubts that the US$5.3 bil­lion SABIC/Sinopec petro­chem­i­cal project will come to fruition in Trinidad and To­ba­go. Speak­ing in a con­fer­ence call to petro­chem­i­cal an­a­lysts late last month, Aitken said al­ready T&T was hav­ing a hard time meet­ing its cur­rent nat­ur­al gas com­mit­ments. Methanex op­er­ates two large methanol pro­duc­ing plants at the Point Lisas in­dus­tri­al es­tate. Ques­tioned about the ap­par­ent "dis­con­nect" of the T&T gov­ern­ment con­sid­er­ing a methanol-to-olefin com­plex in light of the nat­ur­al gas cur­tail­ments that down­stream pro­duc­ers have com­plained about, Aitken said: "My ob­ser­va­tion is that you can buy gas in the US at US$2 and peo­ple are go­ing to be build­ing olefin units in North Amer­i­ca. "So, I think like all glob­al com­pa­nies, the two pro­mot­ers there are prob­a­bly cast­ing around the world look­ing for op­por­tu­ni­ties. And maybe they've had some un­der­tak­ings from Trinidad, but I think from what we've ob­served in Trinidad the coun­try to­day strug­gles to meet all of its var­i­ous com­mit­ments.

The new gas is com­ing from deep­er wa­ter and we're told it's be­com­ing more ex­pen­sive."So, it's hard to imag­ine that project gain­ing trac­tion as both par­ties con­tin­ue to do work. But, oth­er than that, we know noth­ing about the de­tails of the project." Sabic in part­ner­ship with Chi­na Pe­tro­le­um & Chem­i­cal Corp (Sinopec) has agreed to ne­go­ti­ate to build a methanol to olefins and a methanol to petro­chem­i­cal com­plex. The con­sor­tium emerged ahead of sev­er­al oth­er com­pa­nies and both the Am­bas­sadors of the Unit­ed States and Japan wrote to the gov­ern­ment com­plain­ing about the award of the projects to the Sau­di/Chi­nese con­sor­tium. In his an­nu­al re­port to share­hold­ers last month, Mr Aitken said his com­pa­ny failed to op­er­ate at a 97 per cent re­li­a­bil­i­ty rate be­cause of gas short­age in Trinidad and To­ba­go. He said while the sit­u­a­tion had im­proved there were like­ly to be more dis­rup­tions over the next year. He point­ed out that Methanex, like many of its com­peti­tors, was seek­ing to restart plants in the US that had been moth­balled be­cause US gas prices were so at­trac­tive. He told the com­pa­ny's share­hold­ers that Methanex was spend­ing mil­lions of dol­lars trans­port­ing a plant from Chile to the US. The Methanex CEO not­ed that while it was dif­fi­cult to get gas con­tracts in the US, his com­pa­ny was pre­pared to even go with­out one con­fi­dent it can make a prof­it with­in three years. Sev­er­al calls and text mes­sages to En­er­gy Min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine yield­ed no re­ply.