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.