Hugh Howard, president of the American Chamber of Commerce of T&T (AmCham T&T), wants officials of state-owned Petrotrin to say how the company's profit margins will be affected by sourcing crude oil from Russia and Colombia.
He raised the issue following reports that the company's crude oil supplies will no longer be coming from Gabon in West Africa.
"I do not know if purchasing crude oil from Gabon is more favourable than buying from Russia or Colombia. In other words, will T&T be processing crude oil with more costly inputs? If this is so then there is the possibility that Petrotrin's profit margins could be reduced or erased. Whatever the case is, Petrotrin would have to tell us," he told the T&T Guardian yesterday by phone.
Earlier this week, Bloomberg quoted Energy Minister Kevin Ramnarine as saying he had halted oil purchases from Gabon which had been T&T's only African supplier of crude oil for the past 20 months.
This followed the refusal by Petrotrin workers, represented by the Oilfields Workers' Trade Union (OWTU), to offload the MV Overseas Yellowstone which arrived from Gabon last week with half a billion dollars worth of oil.
The vessel eventually docked and was offloaded late Tuesday using outsourced tugs and labour.
This resulted in losses for state-owned Petrotrin, which was forced to reduce throughput to the refinery from 110,000 barrels per day (bpd) to 80,000 bpd because it could not immediately get the 750,000 barrels from on board the tanker. The company had said without the supply of crude it could have been forced to shut down operations at the refinery which can take as much as two weeks to restart.
Gabon is not among the west African countries from where people have been banned from entering T&T due to an outbreak of Ebola.
Howard said importing crude oil from Russia and Colombia is nothing new, but the concern is whether the relevant authorities are now "concentrating on getting crude oil from these countries in light of the Ebola virus." He said T&T is starting to panic and this is not justified.
"There was no evidence that there was anyone with that virus on the vessel. Ebola is not airborne and so cannot be transmitted by air. To get it there must be direct contact with the infected person," he said.
Howard said the focus for T&T should be on building a modern and efficient health care system that can deal not only with Ebola and other dangerous diseases.