The En­er­gy Cham­ber of Trinidad & To­ba­go has hailed the gov­ern­ment’s in­ten­tion to ac­cel­er­ate the ap­proval of en­er­gy projects.

In a news re­lease on yes­ter­day, the cham­ber said if ful­ly sup­port­ed the an­nounce­ment by En­er­gy Min­is­ter Dr. Roodal Mooni­lal to sig­nif­i­cant­ly im­prove the time tak­en to ap­prove en­er­gy sec­tor projects through the cre­ation of a hub to fast-track de­ci­sions in the en­er­gy sec­tor.

The re­lease stat­ed, “We ful­ly sup­port the Min­is­ter of En­er­gy’s fo­cus on re­mov­ing red-tape in the en­er­gy sec­tor. Ac­cel­er­at­ing the pace of ap­provals is the first item in the En­er­gy Cham­ber’s six-point plan to in­crease gas sup­ply and max­imise en­er­gy ex­ports.”

Mooni­lal not­ed that a re­port from the cham­ber in­di­cat­ed that im­prov­ing the process for ap­provals would lead to a sig­nif­i­cant in­crease in rev­enue by US$120 mil­lion.

The En­er­gy Cham­ber said, “A study com­mis­sioned by the En­er­gy Cham­ber and de­liv­ered at the T&T En­er­gy Con­fer­ence in 2020 found that there were thir­ty-three (33) ma­jor ap­provals need­ed for each up­stream gas project, across eight (8) dif­fer­ent agen­cies and Min­istries. Six­teen (16) of the ma­jor de­ci­sions need­ed are out­side of the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries di­rect con­trol. “

The cham­ber said the study re­vealed that on av­er­age it took 12 years from the de­ci­sion to hold a bid round to first gas for a typ­i­cal shal­low wa­ter gas field in T&T.

The re­lease stat­ed, “The study cal­cu­lat­ed that if this cy­cle time could be short­ened by just one year, there would be an es­ti­mat­ed US$120 mil­lion in­crease in the Net Present Val­ue (NPV) of a typ­i­cal Trinidad & To­ba­go shal­low wa­ter gas field. This could sig­nif­i­cant­ly im­prove the chances for a fi­nal in­vest­ment de­ci­sion be­ing tak­en for a gas de­vel­op­ment.”

The En­er­gy Cham­ber said the study cre­at­ed for the first time a de­tailed process map of all of the steps need­ed in an ap­proval process and at the 2024 En­er­gy Con­fer­ence, the En­er­gy Cham­ber cre­at­ed a task force of young in­dus­try vol­un­teer lead­ers who took on the task of work­ing close­ly with Min­istry of En­er­gy staff to un­der­stand and find im­prove­ments in work­flows to in­crease the pace of de­ci­sion mak­ing.

The re­lease stat­ed, “At the 2025 En­er­gy Con­fer­ence, the Min­istry of En­er­gy and the Task­force re­port­ed on how they had suc­cess­ful­ly worked to­geth­er to im­prove the process­es to launch the 2025 deep­wa­ter bid round.”

The En­er­gy Cham­ber said it is keen to con­tin­ue to work close­ly with the Min­istry and oth­er key agen­cies to find ways to speed up de­ci­sion mak­ing, while con­tin­u­ing to en­sure the in­de­pen­dence of the reg­u­la­tors and ro­bust de­ci­sions.

The cham­ber stat­ed, “Digi­ti­sa­tion has a cru­cial role to play in the ap­provals process, but there al­so need to be im­prove­ments in work­flows for the full ben­e­fits to be re­alised. This re­quires close stake­hold­er en­gage­ment. The En­er­gy Cham­ber looks for­ward to en­gag­ing with the Min­istry of En­er­gy as we seek to ac­cel­er­ate the ap­provals process­es and bring more oil and gas to mar­ket at a faster pace.”