Santo Domingo.- Recent reports of a malfunction in the liquefaction and discharge systems of the natural gas complex of the supplier Atlantic NLG Co. in Trinidad & Tobago raised concerns of possible shortages and its impact on Dominican Republic’s growing demand for that fuel by vehicles and industry.

The malfunction on March 23 was reported by Platte and Bloomberg as “an unplanned outage and process upset” but called by Billson Hainsley, a company spokesman in Port of Spain, Trinidad “routine maintenance” in March, and noted that only one of the four “trains” that pumps the gas onto tanker ships was affected.

And although two of three DT local industry sources contacted said the outage could lead to a supply crunch locally, Hainsley declined comment, noting that they didn’t deal with specific countries. “We are only a liquefaction facility so we don’t have any supply information of specify countries.”

The spokesman, reached last week on the phone by DT, promised to provide more information on the outage of the facility’s Train 4, and affirmed that “it shouldn’t be long for operations to return to normal.”

According to the reports, the train has a capacity to pump 5.2 million metric tons per year.