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Thursday, July 10, 2025

Methanex to send home 60 workers Can’t reach gas deal with NGC

by

Curtis Williams
1644 days ago
20210108
Titan Methanol Plant.

Titan Methanol Plant.

GUARDIAN

This year has start­ed the same way 2020 be­gun with the sev­er­ing of work­ers in the down­stream petro­chem­i­cal sec­tor as the State-owned Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny fails to reach a gas sup­ply agree­ment with a petro-chem­i­cal com­pa­ny.

This time it is Methanex Cor­po­ra­tion which yes­ter­day an­nounced that it ex­pects its Ti­tan methanol fa­cil­i­ty will re­main idled in­def­i­nite­ly lead­ing to the loss of 60 jobs.

In a me­dia re­lease the Van­cou­ver based com­pa­ny said; “As a re­sult, the com­pa­ny has made the de­ci­sion to re­struc­ture its Trinidad op­er­a­tions to sup­port a one-plant op­er­a­tion and re­duce its Trinidad work­force by ap­prox­i­mate­ly 60 po­si­tions filled by em­ploy­ees and long-term con­trac­tors.”

Methanex had last year shut down the Ti­tan plant short­ly. It has spent al­most $300 mil­lion on an up­grade. It how­ev­er could not reach agree­ment on a gas con­tract.

The press re­lease read: “To date, we have not been suc­cess­ful reach­ing an agree­ment for an eco­nom­ic longer-term nat­ur­al gas agree­ment and giv­en that the eco­nom­ic re­cov­ery path re­mains un­cer­tain we be­lieve it is pru­dent to re­duce costs while con­tin­u­ing our ef­forts to se­cure longer-term gas sup­ply. The At­las methanol fa­cil­i­ty (Methanex in­ter­est 63.1%) is not af­fect­ed by the change and con­tin­ues to op­er­ate as it is un­der­pinned by a sep­a­rate nat­ur­al gas sup­ply agree­ment that ex­pires in 2024.”

En­er­gy Min­is­ter Franklin Khan told Guardian Me­dia that the de­ci­sion has more to do with the col­lapse of methanol prices and less with the price of nat­ur­al gas lo­cal­ly.

Methanex Cor­po­ra­tion’s pres­i­dent and CEO John Flo­ren com­ment­ed, “We re­main com­mit­ted to do­ing busi­ness in Trinidad and To­ba­go and we be­lieve that we will be able to se­cure an eco­nom­ic longer-term nat­ur­al gas agree­ment for Ti­tan in the com­ing years. Our op­er­a­tions in Trinidad are well lo­cat­ed to sup­ply glob­al methanol mar­kets and are an im­por­tant com­po­nent of our glob­al pro­duc­tion net­work. We are tak­ing the nec­es­sary steps to main­tain Ti­tan to en­sure a safe and ef­fi­cient restart of the plant when a longer-term gas agree­ment is reached.”

Methanex is a Van­cou­ver-based, pub­licly trad­ed com­pa­ny and is the world’s largest pro­duc­er and sup­pli­er of methanol to ma­jor in­ter­na­tion­al mar­kets.


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