Raphael John-Lall

The short­age of gas at Point Lisas since 2011 has re­sult­ed in a loss of rev­enue, En­er­gy Min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine said yes­ter­day. "There has been a loss of rev­enue. I am not in a po­si­tion to give an ex­act fig­ure, but it has been a loss that has caused con­cern. Any loss of rev­enue at Point Lisas is a source of con­cern. When the plants pro­duce less, the Gov­ern­ment gets less cor­po­rate tax­es," he said. Ram­nar­ine was speak­ing at yes­ter­day's open­ing cer­e­mo­ny of the 2012 En­er­gy Con­fer­ence: Strik­ing the Bal­ance, at the Hy­att Re­gency Trinidad ho­tel, Port-of-Spain.

This con­fer­ence is the pre­mier event on the lo­cal en­er­gy sec­tor cal­en­der as it pro­vides the op­por­tu­ni­ty for ideas and in­for­ma­tion to be ex­changed among in­dus­try pro­fes­sion­als, the Gov­ern­ment and multi­na­tion­al com­pa­nies. Sev­er­al hun­dred del­e­gates were in at­ten­dance at the open­ing yes­ter­day. He said plans are in place to pro­vide re­lief for the short­age. "About the tem­po­rary short­age of nat­ur­al gas at Point Lisas, there is a short­fall on a dai­ly ba­sis that is af­fect­ing the plants and we ex­pect the Tou­can plat­form to be on stream by at least March 2012. That will bring some re­lief to the sit­u­a­tion, but it will not bring to­tal re­lief to the prob­lem," he said. Ram­nar­ine said that he will be meet­ing with stake­hold­ers to ad­dress the is­sue. "I am meet­ing on Thurs­day with all the up­stream com­pa­nies and rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Point Lisas As­so­ci­a­tion to look at com­ing up with a strat­e­gy for the re­main­der of the short­fall. It re­quires align­ing our short­fall plans in the in­dus­try."

He said the most wor­ry­ing part of the en­er­gy sec­tor is the de­cline in oil pro­duc­tion. "Oil pro­duc­tion has been in de­cline since 2006. Oil pro­duc­tion in 2011 was ham­pered by planned shut­downs, un­planned shut­downs and main­te­nance ac­tiv­i­ty. Any gains in Gov­ern­ment rev­enue that could be re­lied on as a re­sult of in­creased oil prices are be­ing negate by falling pro­duc­tion. This is hurt­ing the na­tion­al econ­o­my," he said. Ram­nar­ine said the min­istry con­tin­ues to mar­ket the coun­try in­ter­na­tion­al­ly. "At the end of the month, there will be a T&T en­er­gy sec­tor road show in Hous­ton. At this event, we ex­pect to re­ceive in two days 200 oil and gas com­pa­nies who have in­ter­est in T&T," he said. He used bpTT to show the rev­enues that T&T is get­ting from multi­na­tion­als in the coun­try. "In 2012, bpTT is ex­pect­ed to spend around US$900 mil­lion in T&T. In my meet­ings with BP's chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Bob Dud­ley, he made it clear to me that T&T was BP's largest as­set in terms of vol­umes," he said.