Gov­ern­ment ex­pects to raise $18.1 bil­lion in rev­enue from the en­er­gy sec­tor in fis­cal 2011/2012, En­er­gy Min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine said yes­ter­day. He was speak­ing at the start of bud­get con­sul­ta­tions with the En­er­gy Cham­ber at his 26th floor of­fice on the Port-of-Spain Wa­ter­front. Giv­en the size of the en­er­gy in­dus­try, the Min­is­ter met with up­stream oil and gas pro­duc­ers yes­ter­day and will meet with down­stream pro­duc­ers next week.

"I was look­ing at the fig­ures from the bud­get last year, and the en­er­gy sec­tor was ex­pect­ed to gen­er­ate $18.1 bil­lion in rev­enue, and that's from oil and gas com­pa­nies. That's un­der the Pe­tro­le­um Tax­es Act. From what we've seen thus far, we are on tar­get to meet that fore­cast­num­ber, but that is re­al­ly writ­ten in the bet­ter-than-ex­pect­ed prices," Ram­nar­ine said.

In his bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion on Oc­to­ber 10, 2011, for­mer Fi­nance Min­is­ter Win­ston Dook­er­an had said: "To­tal rev­enue is pro­ject­ed at $47 bil­lion, com­pris­ing $18.1 bil­lion from the en­er­gy sec­tor and $28.9 bil­lion from the non en­er­gy sec­tor." Ram­nar­ine said yes­ter­day: "We've had chal­lenges over the last year with oil pro­duc­tion, and as you know, one of our main man­dates here is to in­crease oil pro­duc­tion, and in the last cou­ple months we have seen Train­mar come up now to 23,000 bar­rels con­sis­tent­ly. We've seen land-es­pe­cial­ly with the lease op­er­a­tors-be­gin­ning to re­al­ly turn on some good num­bers.

"There are en­cour­ag­ing signs com­ing from Petrotrin. There are en­cour­ag­ing signs com­ing from Bay­field. Bay­field is now at 2,300 bar­rels per day. BHP is pret­ty con­sis­tent at about 14,000 bar­rels of oil per day and Rep­sol is pret­ty con­sis­tent at about 13,000."

The con­sul­ta­tion was at­tend­ed by rep­re­sen­ta­tives of all of Trinidad and To­ba­go's ma­jor oil and gas pro­duc­ers in­clud­ing BP, BHP Bil­li­ton, Rep­sol, and BG. State-owned com­pa­nies Petrotrin, the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC), and small­er op­er­a­tors like Bay­field were al­so present at the meet­ing.