PORTLAND, Maine — Summit Natural Gas of Maine has announced it will lay off 21 employees, one quarter of its workforce, in cuts mostly at its Augusta office.
The company announced the layoffs Friday, cutting 13 positions from the natural gas company and eight more from its affiliated Natural Gas Conversion Co., which converts home heating systems to burn natural gas.
Lizzy Reinholt, the spokeswoman for Summit, wrote in an email that all but four of the cuts would be at Summit’s Augusta office, and most of the cuts would be sales positions. The Kennebec Journal first reported news of the layoffs Friday.
The company and its affiliate had 80 employees and will have 59 after the layoffs, Reinholt wrote.
Kurt Adams, the company’s president and CEO, said in a news release that experience in the state and changing market conditions led to the cuts.
The natural gas utility expanded in the Kennebec Valley and three southern Maine towns as the price of crude oil plummeted and dramatically lowered the cost of heating oil, propane and kerosene.
Forecasts expect the price of oil to remain low for the next year, but commodity prices depend on many variables that could affect the relative price of heating fuels and natural gas, now abundant domestically through extraction by hydraulic fracturing.
Adams said the company would continue to expand its network this year, with a construction plan that calls for 90,000 more feet of distribution network pipe.
The company last year scaled back some of its expansion plans in Cumberland, Falmouth and Yarmouth, according to The Forecaster, which town officials said was partly the result of the dramatic drop in oil prices.