T&T has all but walked away from the Unit­ed States LNG mar­ket with this coun­try ex­port­ing a mere 14 per cent of its LNG to the US . This has been con­firmed by Sel­wyn Lash­ley, di­rec­tor of LNG and gas ex­ports, Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy Af­fairs, who told Busi­ness Guardian that the LNG was be­ing di­vert­ed to Eu­rope and Far East mar­kets where it is fetch­ing much high­er prices than in the US. "Our con­tracts al­low for di­ver­sion of car­goes to ar­eas where we will get a bet­ter price and we have been able to suc­cess­ful­ly do that by send­ing car­goes to Eu­rope where it catch­es a high­er price and to the Far East where the prices are even bet­ter." Lash­ley said this has been a suc­cess­ful strat­e­gy for T&T with a grow­ing glob­al spot mar­ket for the prod­uct.

In an in­ter­view with BG fol­low­ing the pre­sen­ta­tion of the re­sults of the 2010 Ry­der Scott re­port on the coun­try's gas re­serves, Lash­ley said: "At no time have we had a sit­u­a­tion where it has been dif­fi­cult to sell a car­go of LNG from this coun­try. There are mar­kets out there and we have been able to suc­cess­ful­ly tap in­to those mar­kets." This is a ma­jor change from less than five years ago when al­most all the coun­try's LNG went to the US mar­ket and T&T was re­spon­si­ble for close to 70 per cent of the US to­tal LNG im­port. The ad­vent of an abun­dance of shale gas in the US and an over­sup­ply sit­u­a­tion due to the large amounts of ex­port from Qatar has seen a sig­nif­i­cant fall in the price of nat­ur­al gas at the US Hen­ry Hub. How­ev­er, the price has been high in both Eu­rope, where LNG en­joys a re­la­tion­ship to the price of crude oil and al­so in the Far East, dri­ven, in part, by de­mand for en­er­gy from emerg­ing mar­kets and, in the case of Japan, greater de­mand due to the fail­ure of one of its nu­clear plants fol­low­ing the dead­ly earth­quake and tsuna­mi.

En­er­gy Min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine ques­tioned whether T&T would con­tin­ue to ex­pand in­to LNG.

He said: "A broad­er ques­tion that we must ask in the con­text of mar­kets is: Has the LNG sto­ry in T&T come to an end with Train 4? This is a ques­tion that I will put out there in the con­text of the fact that we are mar­ket con­strained and in the con­text of the de­mand-dri­ven mod­el, which was the en­gine of the econ­o­my from 1995-2005." Frank Look Kin, for­mer pres­i­dent of the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny and ad­vis­er to the Min­is­ter of En­er­gy, told BG that the ques­tion raised by the min­is­ter has to be ad­dressed. "The is­sue is whether are present­ly put to­geth­er we can get LNG ex­pan­sion. In oth­er words, do we say that the present part­ners in At­lantic have the op­tion to build a new plant or do we open it up and, in the process, al­low all op­er­a­tors who have gas or may find gas the chance to par­tic­i­pate?"

Ram­nar­ine said as a coun­try we need to be wary of what is hap­pen­ing in the glob­al en­vi­ron­ment. He said events in Japan last April had al­tered the fu­ture glob­al en­er­gy sup­ply mix as con­fi­dence in nu­clear en­er­gy has been shat­tered. "The Ger­man gov­ern­ment has an­nounced that they will to­tal­ly phase out nu­clear pow­er by 2020. Giv­en the un­for­tu­nate events in Japan, there has been a re­newed con­fi­dence that LNG is the fu­el of the fu­ture," said the min­is­ter. T&T ex­ports 2.3 bil­lion cu­bic feet of nat­ur­al gas per day as LNG.