
About a year after Caribbean Ispat closed its iron and steel facility on the Point Lisas Industrial Estate, Methanol Holdings Trinidad Ltd confirmed yesterday that it is mothballing two of its five methanol plants on the estate and offering voluntary separation packages to dozens of workers.
A spokesman for MHTL said “Negotiations over the last five years with NGC to supply sufficient gas to operate all our plants have to date been unsuccessful.
“Even after exhaustive negotiations and exploring possible supply alternatives, unfortunately, we now have no option but to close two of our plants.
“MHTL deeply regrets the negative impact this will have on its work force.”
The announcement was made at a meeting on Friday afternoon between workers and the operator of the methanol complex, Industrial Plant Services Ltd (IPSL).
One of the workers who attended the meeting told the Sunday Guardian that about 100 employees are going to be separated, but the spokesman said he could not confirm that number.
The company’s five methanol plants situated on the Point Lisas Industrial Estate in Trinidad have a combined annual production capacity of 4.1 million tonnes.
MHTL was once majority owned by CL Financial, the massive local conglomerate that collapsed in January 2009 under the chairmanship of former billionaire, 83-year-old Lawrence Duprey.
CL Financial and its insurance subsidiary, Clico, were forced to sell their 56 per cent stake in the petrochemical complex to MHTL’s minority shareholders for US$1.175 billion in 2014, following the outcome of a bitter international arbitration battle in London.
The arbitration battle has left Proman, a Switzerland-headquartered company, as the majority shareholder of the complex.
MHTL, like many other petrochemical plants at Point Lisas, has been impacted by natural gas shortages (called gas curtailment) over the last five years.
The shortages have been caused by declining gas production at T&T’s offshore gas fields, which are dominated by global multinationals Shell, BP and BHP Billiton.
MHTL brings together production in Trinidad with a global supply chain that includes storage facilities in key global locations and a vessel fleet of 12 chemical tankers.
MHTL diversified its operations in 2010 with the start-up of its AUM operations on the estate, producing annually 647,500 tonnes of Ammonia for use as feedstock for its downstream operations which comprise a UAN plant producing 1,483,500 tonnes of UAN (42 per cent) solution and two ]Melamine plants with a combined capacity of 60,000 tonnes of melamine.