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Friday, July 25, 2025

From cane fields to brain fields

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20131222

Ste Madeleine was once the hub of sug­ar­cane man­u­fac­tur­ing.How­ev­er, 108 years af­ter oil was found in T&T, Min­is­ter of Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion Fazal Karim is trans­form­ing the cane­fields of Ste Madeleine in­to the "brain fields" of the oil in­dus­try, with the open­ing of T&T's first drilling school.The Na­tion­al Drilling Acad­e­my for T&T opened its doors last Mon­day at the Ste Madeleine cam­pus of the Na­tion­al En­er­gy Skills Cen­tre (NESC).

De­liv­er­ing the fea­ture ad­dress, Karim ad­vised that the Drilling Acad­e­my would move T&T from the "cane fields to the brain fields." "It will fur­ther pro­vide ex­cit­ing and lu­cra­tive op­por­tu­ni­ties for young na­tion­als. Af­ter 108 years of oil ex­plo­ration and pro­duc­tion lo­cal­ly, the Drilling Acad­e­my is the first of its kind for T&T," karim said.

He added that it is the on­ly open ac­cess drilling tech­ni­cal train­ing fa­cil­i­ty in the re­gion, with on­ly a few drilling acad­e­mies ex­ist­ing around the world such as the in­sti­tutes in Texas USA, Ab­erdeen Scot­land and Aeroglen Aus­tralia.Karim ex­plained that the US oil and gas in­dus­try now em­ploys one mil­lion work­ers of which the ma­jor­i­ty of growth in 2013 was con­cen­trat­ed in oil and gas ex­trac­tion, drilling and sup­port ac­tiv­i­ties.

He fur­ther quot­ed from the Forbes Mag­a­zine en­ti­tled "The Most Lu­cra­tive Coun­tries for Oil and Gas Work­ers," which list­ed T&T at third in the world with the most lu­cra­tive com­pen­sa­tion pack­ages for oil and gas work­ers av­er­ag­ing US$169,000 per an­num."Aus­tralia ranked first with US$171,000 per an­num and Philip­pines ranked sec­ond with US$170,000 per an­num," Karim said.He not­ed that NESC would be the agency with tech­ni­cal over­sight of the Na­tion­al Drilling Acad­e­my.

"The acad­e­my will of­fer a rig tech­ni­cian pro­gramme at one and two-year lev­els, grad­u­ates would ac­quire cog­ni­tive hands on train­ing to per­form mul­ti­func­tion­al roles which in­clude, driller, roustabout, rough­neck/floor­man, der­rick­man, rig me­chan­ic's as­sis­tant, rig elec­tri­cian's as­sis­tant," Karim said.

He added, "The acad­e­my will al­so of­fer con­tin­u­ous pro­fes­sion­al de­vel­op­ment cus­tomized train­ing in a num­ber of sig­nif­i­cant ar­eas some of which will in­clude, In­tro­duc­tion to Rig Floor Op­er­a­tions; Well plan­ning; Well con­trol; Con­trolled Di­rec­tion­al Drilling, Drill Rig Com­po­nents and Func­tion­al­i­ty.

T&T opens first drilling school

"It is ex­pect­ed that oil, gas and wa­ter well drilling com­pa­nies would now have ac­cess to cer­ti­fied, qual­i­fied and com­pe­tent drilling per­son­nel," Karim said. He added that the drilling acad­e­my will ben­e­fit from both lo­cal and for­eign ac­cred­i­ta­tion."Lo­cal­ly it has been ac­cred­it­ed by the Ac­cred­i­ta­tion Coun­cil of T&T (ACTT) and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly it has been ac­cred­it­ed by the Roy­al Char­tered Pro­fes­sion­al En­gi­neer­ing In­sti­tu­tion," Karim ex­plained.

He al­so en­dorsed the idea of es­tab­lish­ing a sec­ond drilling acad­e­my at the Petrotrin For­est Re­serve fa­cil­i­ty.Karim al­so con­grat­u­lat­ed all part­ners in­volved in the project and high­light­ed the pre­vi­ous col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy Af­fairs. Al­so at­tend­ing the func­tion were Mar­lene Coudray, Min­is­ter of Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment, Chair­man of the NESC Feeroz Khan, Chair­man of Petrotrin Lind­say Gillete, Pres­i­dent of the En­er­gy Cham­ber Roger Pack­er and Man­ag­er of the Drilling Acad­e­my Kevin Durham.


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