Nadaleen Singh

Chair­man of Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny Ger­ry Brooks said the state-owned com­pa­ny is not rul­ing out im­port­ing nat­ur­al gas to meet and sat­is­fy de­mand by mem­bers of the en­er­gy sec­tor.

Jus­ti­fy­ing the op­tion to look at im­port­ing gas, he said giv­en the ex­ist­ing cir­cum­stances in which the coun­try has faced gas cur­tail­ment for the past four years and slip­ping rev­enues, there was need to look at every pos­si­bil­i­ty "rea­son­ably."

Brooks was speak­ing last week, in an in­ter­view af­ter a pan­el dis­cus­sion, ti­tled The Glob­al Gas Econ­o­my, on Day One of the En­er­gy Con­fer­ence which was held at the Hy­att Re­gency Ho­tel on Dock Road in Port-of-Spain.

Asked what coun­tries would NGC look to im­port from, Brooks said: "You are try­ing to ex­tract a re­sponse from me, which I would not give you. There are, though, ob­vi­ous coun­tries that are ex­port­ing gas, the US right now is a net ex­porter.

"When you take a look at en­er­gy prices, the prices are pro­ject­ed to be low cer­tain­ly un­til 2020 so there are sev­er­al ex­port­ing coun­tries that sell car­go on a dai­ly ba­sis. We would look at those (ex­port­ing coun­tries) and see what the op­tions are."

When it comes to oth­er projects, he said it was at a "sen­si­tive stage" and there­fore could not dis­close what the new projects were.

He added though that, "we are look­ing at some ap­proach­es used by oth­er ter­ri­to­ries to solve their prob­lem, which we have to de­ter­mine if it could be ap­plied to our own (prob­lem), in terms of ei­ther the medi­um term be­cause some of them could pro­vide a five-year so­lu­tion which is an in­ter­im pe­ri­od, dur­ing which we solve the gas sup­ply prob­lem."

What is clear, Brooks said is that NGC has a lot of work to do, es­pe­cial­ly as Lo­ran/Man­a­tee and the Drag­on fields are ex­pect­ed to come in­to op­er­a­tion, BHP's drilling cam­paign comes in­to op­er­a­tion, and in the deep­wa­ter drilling 800 mil­lion stan­dard cu­bic feet (scf) of gas per day is need­ed to make the in­fra­struc­ture work.

The means, "we (NGC) are go­ing to be thought­ful around it. We are go­ing to be very pro­fes­sion­al around it, but we are go­ing to be trans­for­ma­tive in our think­ing around it."

Ex­pand­ing fur­ther about a re­gion­al en­er­gy hub, Brooks said that would in­volve us­ing T&T's proven ad­van­taged in the en­er­gy sec­tor over the last 100 years and more than 40 years in gas to es­tab­lish how the coun­try lever­ages its lo­ca­tion and pipeline in­fra­struc­ture.

He added that T&T has 1,000 kilo­me­tres of pipeline with a gas ef­fi­cien­cy of over 99.9 per cent and an ex­cel­lent safe­ty ra­tio.

"How do we lever­age our ex­per­tise in en­gi­neer­ing, in work­ing with the up­stream­ers and go­ing to provinces in Guyana and help­ing them in their own de­vel­op­ment: In terms of their tax in­fra­struc­ture, with their reg­u­la­to­ry arrange­ments, their in­fra­struc­tur­al arrange­ments, the port arrange­ments through Na­tion­al En­er­gy."

Brooks said the Union Es­tate as well as the Point Lisas Es­tate have been de­vel­oped and NGC was look­ing to ex­pand the Point Lisas North Es­tate.

"Al­so, its tak­ing a look at the ca­pac­i­ty of our part­ners and how do you work in part­ner­ship with the ex­ist­ing com­pa­nies, tak­ing that part­ner­ship abroad so that we put idle ca­pac­i­ty to work, we build our own ca­pac­i­ty and that feeds back in­to one-re­mit­tance in­come com­ing back in, it ex­pands our foot­print and im­proves our earn­ings stream."

Guyana and Venezuela

Con­cern­ing NGC pro­vid­ing as­sis­tance to Guyana, Brooks said it was too ear­ly to de­ter­mine to what ex­tent the as­sis­tance would be but, "Guyana has just dis­cov­ered be­tween 800 to 1.4 bil­lion bar­rels of oil equiv­a­lent, a lot of work needs to be done to put a project around that, de­ter­mine the com­mer­cial quan­ti­ties, some work has to be done be­fore one gets to that stage in Guyana."

Elab­o­rat­ing on the NGC team's vis­it to Guyana he said, "they met with the Min­is­ter of En­er­gy in Guyana, the Min­is­ter of Pe­tro­le­um, the Head of the stand­ing com­mit­tee of En­er­gy in Guyana. That team (from T&T, who went to Guyana) would have com­prised peo­ple from Phoenix Park, chief ex­ec­u­tive of Na­tion­al En­er­gy Cor­po­ra­tion and an NGC rep­re­sen­ta­tive who ac­com­pa­nied the team."

Brooks con­firmed that the En­er­gy Cham­ber al­so did a del­e­ga­tion to Guyana and it is "per­haps one of the ar­eas which we can see Cari­com com­ing to life be­cause it is ab­solute­ly im­por­tant for de­vel­op­ing coun­tries who have sim­i­lar as­pi­ra­tions that we work to­geth­er be­cause we un­der­stand the is­sues that we face.

"There is com­mon her­itage, com­mon leg­is­la­tion, com­mon le­gal sys­tems so it makes it eas­i­er to do busi­ness."

On the is­sue of Venezuela he said T&T has demon­strat­ed that it has the re­sources and com­pe­tences to de­vel­op the Drag­on field.

"We have the pipeline, the in­fra­struc­ture, the gas mar­ket­ing, the ac­cess to mar­kets to be able to do that so, that's a clos­er ex­am­ple of the hub work­ing for us."