En­er­gy Min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine's op­ti­mistic fore­cast for T&T's en­er­gy sec­tor for 2014 is very much at odds with the ma­jor spill that con­tin­ues to in­flict a se­vere eco­nom­ic and en­vi­ron­men­tal toll on the coun­try.While Mr Ram­nar­ine, quot­ing ex­ten­sive­ly from a re­cent Stan­dards and Poors re­port, is pre­dict­ing that this year will be one of the busiest for the sec­tor in more than 30 years, those pro­jec­tions could eas­i­ly be re­versed by the fall­out from last month's mul­ti­ple oil spills.

The thick black crude oil still blan­ket­ing large sec­tions of Trinidad's south­west­ern coast­line rep­re­sent hun­dreds of bar­rels of oil down the drain and rev­enue loss­es for state-owned Petrotrin. It is al­so clear that the fall­out will ex­tend well be­yond the ge­o­graph­ic range of the spill, with ma­jor loss­es like­ly for sev­er­al down­stream and ma­rine-based in­dus­tries.It does not help that a tech­ni­cal re­port on the spill, car­ried ex­clu­sive­ly in the T&T Guardian over the week­end, shows that age­ing and poor­ly main­tained in­fra­struc­ture at Petrotrin may have been a causal fac­tor.One of the many burn­ing ques­tions that needs to be an­swered is what lessons, if any, did stake­hold­ers in this coun­try's en­er­gy sec­tor learn from BP's Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon dis­as­ter of 2010?