Trinidad and To­ba­go's lone cook­ing gas (LPG) pro­duc­er, Phoenix Park Gas Proces­sors (PPG­PL), to­day cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly de­nied a Sun­day Ex­press sto­ry that its fa­cil­i­ty was shut down as a re­sult of a "full-blown nat­ur­al gas cri­sis."

Cook­ing gas com­pris­es propane and bu­tane, which is sep­a­rat­ed from the nat­ur­al gas feed­stock at the PPG­PL fa­cil­i­ty.

PPG­PL pres­i­dent, Do­minic Ram­per­sad told Guardian Me­dia on Sun­day morn­ing that the pro­duc­er of propane, bu­tane and nat­ur­al gaso­lene em­barked on a full shut­down of its plant on the Point Lisas In­dus­tri­al Es­tate be­cause of a planned shut­down as part of its as­set in­tegri­ty and main­te­nance pro­gramme.

"Our shut­down of the fa­cil­i­ty has been in the plan­ning for more than a year," said Ram­per­sad, in a tele­phone in­ter­view. He said the shut­down be­gan on April 17 and is due to be com­plet­ed in 19 days.

"As this is a planned shut­down, we have been build­ing up our in­ven­to­ry of cook­ing gas to en­sure that we can main­tain sup­plies to the lo­cal mar­ket. And we have been work­ing with the dis­trib­u­tors of nat­ur­al gas to en­sure that there are no short­ages in the lo­cal sup­ply chain," said Ram­per­sad.

He said PPG­PL has enough cook­ing gas in­ven­to­ry to sup­ply the lo­cal mar­ket with the com­mod­i­ty for at least 28 days. T&T's peak de­mand for cook­ing gas is 2,200 bar­rels per day.

PPG­PL to­tal pro­duc­tion is 10,000 bar­rels per day, which goes to both its lo­cal and ex­port mar­kets. That means if the shut­down goes on for 19 days as planned, the com­pa­ny's to­tal pro­duc­tion loss will be 190,000 bar­rels per day.

Ram­per­sad said PPG­PL is so con­cerned about main­tain­ing con­ti­nu­ity of cook­ing gas sup­ply to its mar­kets that it im­port­ed a car­go of 90-000 car­go bar­rels.

"Even if the shut­down went on for more than 19 days, we would still be able to sup­ply the lo­cal mar­ket," said Ram­per­sad.

"We cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly de­ny that the im­pli­ca­tion in the Sun­day Ex­press ar­ti­cle that the shut­down of the PPG­PL fa­cil­i­ty has any­thing to do with the nat­ur­al gas sup­ply is­sues re­port­ed in that news­pa­per. Had the re­porter con­tact­ed us, we would have been able to set the record straight," he said.

While PPG­PL is not a pub­lic com­pa­ny, a sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­age of that com­pa­ny's shares are owned by Na­tion­al En­ter­pris­es Ltd, which trades on the T&T Stock Ex­change. PPG­PL is ma­jor­i­ty owned by the Na­ton­al Gas Com­pa­ny of T&T, which is a whol­ly State-owned com­pa­ny.

In the last three years, PPG­PL has made sev­er­al ac­qui­si­tions in the US, pur­chas­ing the mar­ket­ing as­sets of Twin Ea­gle Liq­uids Mar­ket­ing LLC in Feb­ru­ary 2020, the Hull Ter­mi­nal in Texas in Jan­u­ary 2022 and an NGL ter­mi­nal in Rush City, Min­neso­ta in De­cem­ber 2022.