Last Fri­day, Nu­trien T&T’s man­ag­ing di­rec­tor, Ed­mond Thomp­son, wrote an in­ter­nal memo to em­ploy­ees at the com­pa­ny’s Point Lisas In­dus­tri­al Es­tate fa­cil­i­ty, ad­vis­ing them that they should re­port to work as usu­al.

He told em­ploy­ees the am­mo­nia and urea pro­duc­er was en­gag­ing in dis­cus­sions “in good faith and with in­tegri­ty” to find long-term so­lu­tions to the two is­sues that re­sult­ed in the “con­trolled shut­down” of the Cana­di­an com­pa­ny’s Trinidad fa­cil­i­ty on Oc­to­ber 23.

“This shut­down is in re­sponse to port ac­cess re­stric­tions im­posed by T&T’s Na­tion­al En­er­gy Cor­po­ra­tion (NEC) and a lack of re­li­able and eco­nom­ic nat­ur­al gas sup­ply that has re­duced the free cash flow con­tri­bu­tion of the Trinidad Ni­tro­gen op­er­a­tions over an ex­tend­ed pe­ri­od of time,” said the com­pa­ny’s Cana­di­an par­ent in a news re­lease.

NEC is the whol­ly owned sub­sidiary of T&T’s nat­ur­al gas ag­gre­ga­tor and dis­trib­u­tor, the 100-per cent state-owned Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC). NEC’s re­spon­si­bil­i­ties in­clude the man­age­ment of the com­pa­ny’s port fa­cil­i­ties at Savonet­ta.

One of the core is­sues dri­ving Nu­trien’s de­ci­sion to shut down its five-plant com­plex is a dis­agree­ment over the pay­ment of US$28 mil­lion in retroac­tive fees to NEC for use of its port fa­cil­i­ties.

In a news re­lease last Fri­day, NGC said, “Pier-user con­tracts were al­lowed to ex­pire since 2018, per­mit­ting down­stream petro­chem­i­cal com­pa­nies to en­joy lega­cy rates up to the present (the end of De­cem­ber, 2025).

“The fail­ure to trig­ger es­ca­la­tion claus­es in these con­tracts led to loss­es ex­ceed­ing $500 mil­lion for the peo­ple of this coun­try. De­spite this, Nu­trien was al­lowed to en­joy lega­cy rates un­til the end of 2025.”

The Nu­trien re­sponse to NGC is that it has paid all of its pier-user in­voic­es as re­quired, but as a pub­licly list­ed com­pa­ny, it would be dif­fi­cult to ap­prove a retroac­tive in­crease in port fees, when the for­mu­la for the hike was not clear­ly ex­plained.

While the po­si­tions of Nu­trien and NGC ap­pear far apart on the pier-user is­sue, the ex­pec­ta­tion is that both par­ties would use the win­dow of op­por­tu­ni­ty cre­at­ed by the de­ci­sion to keep em­ploy­ees at work to nar­row those dif­fer­ences.

The sec­ond is­sue is far more fun­da­men­tal, as it per­tains to the amount of nat­ur­al gas sup­plied by NGC to Nu­trien and the price of it. In its Oc­to­ber 21 news re­lease, Nu­trien com­plained about “a lack of re­li­able and eco­nom­ic nat­ur­al gas sup­ply that has re­duced the free cash flow con­tri­bu­tion of the Trinidad Ni­tro­gen op­er­a­tions over an ex­tend­ed pe­ri­od of time.”

In­creas­ing the re­li­a­bil­i­ty of nat­ur­al gas sup­plies, while en­sur­ing the price of the com­mod­i­ty re­mains com­pet­i­tive with that re­ceived by am­mo­nia plants in oth­er coun­tries, seems like an ex­is­ten­tial is­sue for T&T’s petro­chem­i­cal sec­tor.

The fact is that in 2026, T&T’s nat­ur­al gas sup­ply is down by about 42 per cent from its peak in 2009 and 2010. That means there is less gas for T&T’s am­mo­nia and methanol plants. In most cir­cum­stances in which the sup­ply of a com­mod­i­ty has de­clined, the ex­pect­ed eco­nom­ic im­pulse is for the sup­pli­er to in­crease the price. But the fact is that all of T&T’s am­mo­nia and methanol pro­duc­ers are part of in­ter­na­tion­al com­pa­nies that op­er­ate as part of ver­ti­cal­ly in­te­grat­ed pro­duc­tion chains. This al­lows those com­pa­nies to have in­ti­mate knowl­edge of nat­ur­al gas prices through­out the world.

The oth­er chal­lenge T&T faces is that NGC needs to com­plete ne­go­ti­a­tions with the up­stream pro­duc­ers of nat­ur­al gas, and the down­stream users of the com­mod­i­ty.

This po­si­tion may re­quire up­stream pro­duc­ers, down­stream users and NGC as the mid­dle­man to ex­er­cise un­der­stand­ing and re­straint.