Just over a week af­ter ac­knowl­edg­ing mil­lions of US dol­lars could be added to the lo­cal econ­o­my through the fast track­ing of ap­provals in the En­er­gy Sec­tor, En­er­gy Min­is­ter Dr Roodal Mooni­lal has con­firmed Cab­i­net’s de­ci­sion to es­tab­lish an over­sight com­mit­tee called the En­er­gy Ac­cel­er­a­tor Hub.

At Thurs­day’s Cab­i­net news con­fer­ence, Mooni­lal said this com­mit­tee will in­clude him­self as well as Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of En­er­gy Ernesto Ke­sar and the Min­istry’s Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary and head of le­gal. Al­so, on the com­mit­tee are the chair of the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty, Doolar Ram­lal, OS­HA chair­man Curt Cadet, chair of the Work Per­mit Com­mit­tee, the Comp­trol­ler of Cus­toms, the Chief Im­mi­gra­tion Of­fi­cer and a rep­re­sen­ta­tive from the of­fice of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al.

Mooni­lal ex­plained the rea­son­ing for the make up of the com­mit­tee dur­ing the brief­ing.

“The com­mit­tee will in­clude the chair­man of the Oc­cu­pa­tion­al Safe­ty and Health Au­thor­i­ty. There are ap­provals that reg­u­lar­ly go be­fore the OS­HA con­cern­ing work process­es, both on­shore and off­shore, and some­times de­lays in re­solv­ing cer­tain mat­ters of work process­es and pro­duc­tion is­sues can lead to slow down and even shut down of cer­tain pro­duc­tion in­stal­la­tions.

“The com­mit­tee al­so in­cludes the Comp­trol­ler of Cus­toms. Cus­toms is a crit­i­cal in­sti­tu­tion as well, since many of the en­er­gy multi­na­tion­als do im­port equip­ment, spe­cialised tools and so on, that re­quires the at­ten­tion of Cus­toms,” he said,

“The Chief Im­mi­gra­tion Of­fi­cer is al­so in­clud­ed, since this deals di­rect­ly with this use of work­ers and ex­pats in the coun­try.”

The En­er­gy Min­is­ter con­firmed that the hub will be­gin work this month and has been au­tho­rised to co-opt the ser­vices of rep­re­sen­ta­tives of oth­er Gov­ern­ment agen­cies as re­quired.

He said, “This com­mit­tee, as I in­di­cat­ed, will be housed at the Min­istry of En­er­gy and will work in re­al time to deal with out­stand­ing en­er­gy mat­ters as it per­tains to fast track­ing the projects that are be­fore us, it has been well re­ceived by all stake­hold­ers in the en­er­gy sec­tor, and we ex­pect that work will be­gin as of this month on the es­tab­lish­ment of this com­mit­tee.

“It will al­so in­volved as its terms of ref­er­ence, the du­ty to eval­u­ate ap­proval process­es and ac­tiv­i­ties falling un­der our ju­ris­dic­tion, the mon­i­tor­ing of the pro­cess­ing of re­quests for ap­provals in the sec­tor with nec­es­sary in­ter­ven­tions to iden­ti­fy bot­tle­necks in the ap­proval process­es of en­er­gy sec­tor ac­tiv­i­ties un­der our purview, and to pro­vide pe­ri­od­ic re­ports to the Cab­i­net on the work of the ac­cel­er­a­tor hub.”

He added, “I can say in clos­ing that not a day goes by with­out a re­quest from our in­ter­na­tion­al part­ners and lo­cal com­pa­nies for some help as far as it re­lates to fast track­ing.”

Mooni­lal spoke about the im­por­tance of im­prov­ing ap­proval times in the en­er­gy sec­tor on De­cem­ber 29, when the Cer­tifi­cate of En­vi­ron­men­tal Clear­ance (CEC) was cer­e­mo­ni­al­ly de­liv­ered to Exxon­Mo­bil Trinidad and To­ba­go Deep­wa­ter (Exxon­Mo­bil) for the con­duct of a 3D seis­mic sur­vey.

When ad­dress­ing me­dia at that event, he ac­knowl­edged a re­port by the En­er­gy Cham­ber of T&T, which stat­ed that in­creas­ing ef­fi­cien­cy in terms of ap­provals with­in the sec­tor could lead to in­creased earn­ings of US$120 mil­lion.

In re­sponse to those com­ments, the En­er­gy Cham­ber wel­comed the move to ac­cel­er­ate the ap­proval of en­er­gy projects.

The body ex­pressed full sup­port of the Min­is­ter of En­er­gy’s fo­cus on re­mov­ing red-tape in the en­er­gy sec­tor as it had stat­ed 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.