En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young will re­turn to Venezuela short­ly to com­plete the fi­nal­i­sa­tion of the term sheet for the Drag­on gas field arrange­ment with Venezuela - and the ne­go­ti­a­tion is ex­pect­ed to be closed very soon, Prime Min­is­ter Kei­th Row­ley said yes­ter­day at the White­hall news con­fer­ence

Af­ter the US agreed T&T can do straight up com­mer­cial arrange­ments with Venezuela to get its gas and pay for it ac­cord­ing to the terms on the term sheet, Row­ley said there were mi­nor ad­just­ments like hu­man­i­tar­i­an con­cerns. "But the bot­tom line is the door is open for com­mer­cial arrange­ments."

He said Young is cur­rent­ly on a week's va­ca­tion. "As soon as he gets back here he'll be on his way to Cara­cas to com­plete the dot­ting of the Is and cross­ing the Ts on the term sheet and in the mean­time Shell, our op­er­at­ing part­ner, will be mov­ing full speed ahead on the tech­ni­cal side of things," Row­ley added.

He said that at this stage, not every­thing could be di­vulged, "be­cause these com­mer­cial ar­rang­ments are sub­ject to cer­tain con­fi­den­tial­i­ties."

Row­ley added,"Very soon we ex­pect to close off that ne­go­ti­a­tion and the last thing to hap­pen is for the li­cence to op­er­ate... when all par­ties are sat­is­fied with con­di­tions, the li­cence to op­er­ate will be is­sued,"

He said T&T got a com­mit­ment from Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Nico­las Maduro that the li­cence would be is­sued. Row­ley said he couldn't say when first gas will be ob­tained from the field un­til the li­cence is re­ceived. He said the plat­form for the field al­ready ex­ists.

Row­ley said the ven­ture was for the long term since if TT didn't dis­cov­er ma­jor fields to re­place what is be­ing con­sumed dai­ly and didn't get ac­cess to where the gas ex­ists, T&T would be forced to ac­cept a "sig­nif­i­cant re­duc­tion of for­tunes". TT is now down to 2.6Bil­lion Cu­bic Feet of gas a day.