New Min­is­ter of En­er­gy, Kevin Ram­nar­ine, has giv­en him­self six months to whip the coun­try's top rev­enue gen­er­at­ing min­istry in­to the "lean and mean" ma­chine that he knows it can be­come. Speak­ing in an in­ter­view last week, on on­ly his third week on the job, Ram­nar­ine was busy lay­ing the ground­work for a more fo­cussed Min­istry of En­er­gy. He got an op­por­tu­ni­ty to ob­serve the min­istry up close hav­ing served for 13 months as the Par­lia­men­tary Sec­re­tary un­der the for­mer min­is­ter, Car­olyn Seep­er­sad-Bachan.

With a de­gree in pe­tro­le­um en­gi­neer­ing and a ca­reer spent work­ing at the En­er­gy Cham­ber and at British Gas, Ram­nar­ine brings knowl­edge of the in­dus­try to the job. And as a man un­der 40 in charge of one of the coun­try's most im­por­tant min­istries, he is al­so anx­ious to make his mark and get things done quick­ly.

He says when he was ap­point­ed as the Min­is­ter of En­er­gy a month ago he found that the min­istry had been in a state of re­struc­tur­ing for the last sev­en years, which had cre­at­ed "an en­vi­ron­ment of un­cer­tain­ty."

Ram­nar­ine said he found is­sues of suc­ces­sion plan­ning, a churn­ing of some of the min­istry's young and tal­ent­ed staff and a strate­gic plan that had ex­pired last year. Ram­nar­ine says he is plan­ning a strate­gic plan­ning re­treat for the first week in Au­gust for the min­istry's top tech­nocrats aimed at chart­ing the way for­ward. "Out of that strate­gic plan will come a new or­gan­i­sa­tion­al frame­work for the min­istry and I am al­so look­ing at a train­ing plan for the min­istry. Out of the new or­gan­i­sa­tion­al struc­ture will come a re­cruit­ment dri­ve to bring new peo­ple in­to the min­istry and to fill a num­ber of va­cant posts," says Ram­nar­ine. He said that one of the main chal­lenges of the min­istry is that it finds it dif­fi­cult to hold on to some of its young tal­ent.

Ram­nar­ine al­so plans to ad­dress the is­sue of the en­er­gy as­so­ciate pro­fes­sion­als, who are T&T na­tion­als who are work­ing at the min­istry as a con­di­tion of the schol­ar­ships they re­ceived. Many of these EAPs have stud­ied at some of the finest uni­ver­si­ties in the world "and we have to find a way to em­pow­er them" at the min­istry, he said. "What I have de­scribed for you is a sit­u­a­tion of lim­bo and un­cer­tain­ty and we want to bring that sit­u­a­tion to an end and bring cer­tain­ty and struc­ture to the min­istry. The min­istry is too crit­i­cal to the coun­try. It has to be lean and mean and that is what we are go­ing to do in the next six months."

He is al­so plan­ning a town-hall meet­ing with all the min­istry's staff to­mor­row morn­ing-the first such meet­ing in three years. "At that meet­ing, we want to dis­cuss the plans of the min­istry so that every­one-from the dri­ver go right up to the Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary-is aligned and knows what the plans are."

Ram­nar­ine is al­so plan­ning to bring his en­er­gy to the prob­lems as­so­ci­at­ed with the na­tion's quar­ries. He is plan­ning to es­tab­lish a branch of the min­istry's min­er­als di­vi­sion in East Trinidad, ide­al­ly Va­len­cia, to en­sure that quar­ries re­ceive a high­er lev­el of su­per­vi­sion. The new min­is­ter, who de­scribes him­self as some­one who is very con­cerned about the en­vi­ron­ment, is al­so com­mit­ted to rein­tro­duc­ing the CEC (Cer­tifi­cate of En­vi­ron­men­tal Clear­ance) re­quire­ment for all of the na­tion's quar­ries. As it stands now, quar­ries of less than 150 acres are not re­quired to ob­tain a CEC from the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty. Ram­nar­ine said he is com­mit­ted to chang­ing the law to en­sure that all quar­ries re­quire a CEC. "I can cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly say that we in­tend to do that. There is a pro­pos­al be­fore me from the Min­is­ter of the En­vi­ron­ment as to what that would re­quire." He said he has seen some of the na­tion's quar­ries on the ground and from the air.

"I have seen what the ab­sence of the EMA's over­sight has done. I think the time has come to bring the quar­ry sec­tor back un­der the man­age­ment of the EMA."

While he is con­cerned about the en­vi­ron­ment, he is a big pro­po­nent of find­ing and pump­ing more oil. He says oil is in­her­ent­ly more valu­able than nat­ur­al gas and his num­ber one pri­or­i­ty is to in­crease T&T's oil pro­duc­tion from 96,000 bar­rels of oil per day to 120,000 bar­rels of oil per day by 2014. He points out that every ad­di­tion­al 10,000 bar­rels of oil pro­duced means an ad­di­tion­al $1.5 bil­lion in rev­enues for the Gov­ern­ment.