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Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Energy Chamber hopes Budget caters to needs

by

Sharlene Rampersad
2488 days ago
20180930

An amend­ment to the Sup­ple­men­tal Pe­tro­le­um Tax (SPT), a re-in­tro­duc­tion of en­er­gy-ef­fi­cien­cy tax cred­its and gov­ern­ment sup­port for lo­cals try­ing to break in­to the oil mar­ket in Guyana are the top three things on the wish list of the En­er­gy Cham­ber ahead of Mon­day’s bud­get.

Speak­ing to the Sun­day Guardian yes­ter­day, pres­i­dent and chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Dr Thack­wray Dri­ver said the cham­ber is in­ter­est­ed in see­ing some very spe­cif­ic mea­sures in­tro­duced to stim­u­late in­vest­ment.

“What we have asked for this year is a change to the SPT, be­cause the tax as it is cur­rent­ly struc­tured acts as a dis­in­cen­tive for in­vest­ment in oil pro­duc­tion. We think this is par­tic­u­lar­ly im­por­tant giv­en the changes and fo­cus of Petrotrin on the up­stream. In or­der to make that suc­cess­ful, the Gov­ern­ment needs to re­form how the SPT op­er­ates,” Dri­ver said.

He said the cham­ber al­so wants to see a push to­wards greater en­er­gy ef­fi­cien­cy.

“We are look­ing for spe­cif­ic mea­sures to en­cour­age en­er­gy ef­fi­cien­cy, be­cause greater en­er­gy ef­fi­cien­cy will help the coun­try con­sume less gas and elec­tric­i­ty, mak­ing more avail­able for petro­chem­i­cals and liq­ue­fied nat­ur­al gas (LNG). We want to see some mea­sures of in­vest­ing in the pow­er gen­er­a­tion sec­tor to in­crease ef­fi­cien­cy of pow­er gen­er­a­tion.”

He said al­though en­er­gy ef­fi­cien­cy tax cred­its were in­tro­duced in the 2010-2011 bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion, com­pa­nies have been un­able to ac­cess it be­cause of “ad­min­is­tra­tive rea­sons.”

“We want them to in­tro­duce the ad­min­is­tra­tive mea­sures which will al­low us to ac­cess that en­er­gy-ef­fi­cien­cy tax cred­it which we al­so be­lieve will help in small busi­ness de­vel­op­ment, en­er­gy ef­fi­cien­cy and the con­struc­tion sec­tor for retro­fitting build­ings and im­ple­ment­ing small-scale re­new­able en­er­gy projects.”

Dri­ver said there is al­so a need for Gov­ern­ment sup­port by way of trade fa­cil­i­ta­tion for lo­cals who want to work in the oil sec­tor in Guyana.

“Al­so for sup­port for Gov­ern­ment to help the ex­port of ser­vices, we think build­ing on the Mem­o­ran­dum of Un­der­stand­ing (MOU) which we signed with Guyana, we would look to the Gov­ern­ment pro­vid­ing spe­cif­ic sup­port to Trinida­di­an com­pa­nies in terms of trade fa­cil­i­ta­tion, so that means hav­ing peo­ple on the ground in George­town to help Trinida­di­an peo­ple ac­cess op­por­tu­ni­ties in the grow­ing Guyana oil in­dus­try.”

He said these rec­om­men­da­tions have been made to Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert and he is hope­ful they will be an­nounced to­mor­row.

Mean­while, Health Min­is­ter Ter­rance Deyals­ingh is hop­ing that Im­bert is as gen­er­ous to the health sec­tor as he was last year. Speak­ing to the Sun­day Guardian yes­ter­day, Deyals­ingh said he is hope­ful his min­istry can con­tin­ue on the path it has been for the past two years, up­grad­ing and main­tain­ing its fa­cil­i­ties across the coun­try.

In the 2017-2018 bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion, Deyals­ingh’s min­istry re­ceived a $6.02 bil­lion al­lo­ca­tion, the third largest share of the $50.5bil­lion bud­get. Through the Pub­lic Sec­tor In­vest­ment Pro­gramme (PSIP), Deyals­ingh said a lot of in­fra­struc­ture and main­te­nance work has tak­en place over the last year. He out­lined sev­er­al new projects that he hopes to get fund­ing for to­mor­row.

“We are pur­su­ing a new Cen­tral Block at the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal, work has be­gun and will con­tin­ue - I don’t know what the cost is yet. Ude­cott has not award­ed that con­tract yet but we have start­ed clear­ing the site,” he said.

He al­so hopes to mod­ernise and up­grade the Ac­ci­dent and Emer­gency (A&E) room at the PoS­GH and build a cau­ter­i­sa­tion lab at the San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal. At the Er­ic Williams Med­ical Sci­ences Com­plex, he said the Neona­tal In­ten­sive Care Unit (NICU) al­so needs an up­grade, while the St Ann’s Psy­chi­atric Hos­pi­tal needs elec­tri­cal and in­fra­struc­tur­al up­dates.

“I think we have proven to the Fi­nance Min­is­ter that we can de­liv­er our projects on time and with­in bud­get, he (Im­bert) was very kind to us last year and we are hop­ing to see that con­tin­ue.”

Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Robert Le Hunte said he hopes to get fund­ing to do in­fra­struc­ture up­grades at the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) and the T&T Elec­tric­i­ty Com­mis­sion (TTEC.)

“The na­ture of a util­i­ty busi­ness is that if you do not put mon­ey in­to main­te­nance, then over time you will end up hav­ing to put in a lot more mon­ey, so you have to be con­stant­ly main­tain­ing the in­fra­struc­ture of a util­i­ty,” Le Hunte said.

But while Le Hunte said he has made rep­re­sen­ta­tion to try to get the mon­ey need­ed for the up­grades, he un­der­stands Im­bert will need to “ra­tio­nalise” ex­pen­di­ture. He said there is a need to ex­er­cise con­straint with spend­ing and put mon­ey in the ar­eas where the coun­try will get the “best bang for its buck.”

Tourism Min­is­ter Ran­dall Mitchell was more guard­ed in his state­ments, say­ing he will wait un­til the bud­get is read. How­ev­er, he said the min­istry is hit­ting the re­set but­ton as it tries to make tourism a prof­itable sec­tor. He said this is why the Tourism De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny (TDC) was shut down and the Tourism Trinidad Des­ti­na­tion Man­age­ment Com­pa­ny was formed ear­li­er this year.


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