Last week’s ar­ti­cle con­clud­ed that the nat­ur­al gas econ­o­my is in un­cer­tain ter­ri­to­ry and struc­tural­ly weak. Un­cer­tain ter­ri­to­ry be­cause the nat­ur­al gas sup­ply will not be suf­fi­cient to bring all the Point Lisas plants up to full ca­pac­i­ty util­i­sa­tion. Fur­ther, that in­creased nat­ur­al gas feed­stock prices to the petro­chem­i­cal plants would trans­late in­to op­er­at­ing loss­es. Ar­ti­cles in the Busi­ness Guardian made this point. In these cir­cum­stances, any “sta­bil­i­ty” in the Trinidad and To­ba­go econ­o­my is tem­po­rary as nat­ur­al gas re­mains the dom­i­nant fac­tor in T&T’s eco­nom­ic per­for­mance. The econ­o­my’s per­for­mance de­pends on the suc­cess of cur­rent ex­plo­ration ac­tiv­i­ties and on T&T’s re­la­tion­ship with Venezuela.

A sub­stan­tial share of in­stalled ca­pac­i­ty has been ei­ther idled, in­ter­mit­tent­ly cur­tailed, or op­er­at­ing be­low name­plate ca­pac­i­ty. To put this in con­text, T&T has ap­prox­i­mate­ly 11 am­mo­nia plants in Point Lisas and 10 Methanol plants.

Cur­rent­ly, at least six ma­jor petro­chem­i­cal plants at Point Lisas are shut or idled due to nat­ur­al gas cur­tail­ment. These in­clude three of Pro­man’s five methanol plants, the larg­er of Methanex’s two methanol plants (the oth­er is of­fline for main­te­nance), one Yara am­mo­nia plant, and Nu­trien’s ni­tro­gen com­plex. The Nu­trien com­plex, with four am­mo­nia and one urea plant, be­gan con­trolled shut­downs in late 2025. On­ly CCGL’s methanol plant in La Brea, a joint ven­ture be­tween Mit­subishi, Massy, and NGC, is ful­ly op­er­a­tional. As a re­sult, 54% of all am­mo­nia plants are idled.