During news time on January 9, as a quiz question a TV station asked: When was natural gas first discovered in Trinidad? The answer given by the station was 1971. This is incorrect. I saw natural gas being used to cook in Guayaguayare in 1950. This was at the homes of the Trinidad Leaseholds Limited oil workers. The gas stoves were made and installed by the oil company.
Apart from this, thousands of people must have seen the Trinidad Leaseholds Limited eternal flame at Pointe-a-Pierre all through the 1940s and probably before. This flame arose because of the burning off of natural gas, a component of petroleum, and it never went out while the refinery was working, which seemed to be ceaselessly.
The natural gas was being burnt off because at that time the company had no use for the gas or did not know that the gas could be used. It was burnt off because of the fear of explosions. Since the refinery kept on refining petroleum constantly through the years the eternal flame really seemed eternal. Maybe natural gas could be said to have been first discovered in Trinidad in the 1890s – even before petroleum was discovered.
The gas can be considered as a vaporisation of petroleum or oil. Hunters at Guayaguayare were known to light fires on tiny holes in the sand to cook their meals, the pressure of oil at that time being quite intense. When Randolph Rust first discovered oil in Guayaguayare in 1902 and an oil industry was born, a way had to be found to be rid of this inflammable gas we are calling natural gas.
When the oil was pumped from the Guayaguayare oilfields to the Pointe-a-Pierre refinery, starting from around 1930, Trinidad Leaseholds Limited thought the safest way to deal with this gas was to burn it off, thus creating the eternal flame.
Michael Anthony