The Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny of T&T (NGC) and Methanex Trinidad have signed a new Gas Sales Con­tract (GSC) for the sup­ply of gas to the Ti­tan methanol plant on the Point Lisas In­dus­tri­al Es­tate (PLIE).

The agree­ment with Methanex, which is one of the world’s largest pro­duc­ers and sup­pli­ers of methanol, was signed on Oc­to­ber 12, 2023 at the Hilton Trinidad and Con­fer­ence Cen­tre.

This GSC marks the suc­cess­ful con­clu­sion of many months of ne­go­ti­a­tion be­tween the par­ties.

In a news re­lease, the NGC said the new con­tract would al­low for the re­sump­tion of op­er­a­tions at the world-scale Ti­tan plant, which was idled dur­ing the pan­dem­ic.

“Giv­en Ti­tan’s methanol pro­duc­tion ca­pac­i­ty of 875,000 met­ric tonnes per an­num, the 2024 sched­uled restart of the plant is wel­come news for T&T.

Si­mul­ta­ne­ous to the news of the im­pend­ing restart of the Ti­tan plant, Methanex has an­nounced its in­ten­tion to idle the op­er­a­tions of its At­las methanol plant in Sep­tem­ber 2024 based on eco­nom­ic con­sid­er­a­tions,” the state­ment added.

It al­so not­ed that the time­frame for idling the At­las plant co­in­cides with the ex­pi­ra­tion of its cur­rent nat­ur­al gas con­tract.

NGC pres­i­dent Mark Lo­quan who com­ment­ed on the achieve­ment said, “NGC has been work­ing tire­less­ly with our stake­hold­ers across the val­ue chain to se­cure gas sup­ply and sat­is­fy de­mand, against the back­drop of ma­tur­ing en­er­gy re­serves and an evolv­ing mar­ket. Through­out the process, our goal has al­ways been to max­imise val­ue for all play­ers in this chal­leng­ing en­vi­ron­ment while seek­ing the in­ter­est of T&T.

“With this GSC, we have man­aged to align and achieve those ob­jec­tives. I want to com­mend all our teams for their un­wa­ver­ing com­mit­ment as we worked through this im­por­tant agree­ment. We look for­ward to strength­en­ing our re­la­tion­ship with Methanex to build stronger in the fu­ture.”

Rich Sum­n­er, pres­i­dent and CEO, Methanex Cor­po­ra­tion, al­so added that he was proud of his team’s ef­fort to reach an agree­ment with the NGC that al­lows the com­pa­ny to pre­serve this strate­gic lo­ca­tion in its glob­al port­fo­lio and main­tain a world-class team.

He thanked the NGC for its pro­fes­sion­al­ism dur­ing the ne­go­ti­a­tion process and reaf­firmed its com­mit­ment to work­ing with the NGC and the Gov­ern­ment to se­cure an eco­nom­ic long-term gas sup­ply.