En­er­gy Min­is­ter Dr Roodal Mooni­lal has hit back at his pre­de­ces­sor, Stu­art Young, fol­low­ing the lat­ter’s ques­tions about the Gov­ern­ment’s re­la­tion with act­ing Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Del­cy Ro­driguez.

Fol­low­ing news of the US Trea­sury De­part­ment’s is­suance of OFAC Gen­er­al Li­cense No 50, which has opened the door for BP PLC and Shell PLC to po­ten­tial­ly ex­plore Venezue­lan gas fields, in­clud­ing the cross-bor­der fields Lo­ran and Man­akin-Cocuina, Young is­sued a state­ment ask­ing Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar to clar­i­fy her re­la­tion­ship with the Venezue­lan head of state.

Young al­so raised ques­tions about the Gov­ern­ment’s in­volve­ment in ne­go­ti­a­tions con­cern­ing the cross-bor­der fields.

In a re­lease yes­ter­day, Mooni­lal said, “While the for­mer En­er­gy Min­is­ter was mouthing off inani­ties each day, we were work­ing smart­ly and plan­ning. This is a sig­nif­i­cant de­vel­op­ment for our na­tion­al en­er­gy land­scape. The ac­tiv­i­ties en­abled un­der Gen­er­al Li­cense 50 sup­port progress on cross-bor­der gas ini­tia­tives that will al­low gas from Venezue­lan fields to be trans­port­ed through our up­stream in­fra­struc­ture, in­to Trinidad and To­ba­go’s en­er­gy sys­tem.”

Mooni­lal added, “This cre­ates a path­way for ad­di­tion­al gas sup­ply to reach At­lantic LNG and the petro­chem­i­cal sec­tor,bol­ster­ing long-term en­er­gy se­cu­ri­ty and sup­port­ing eco­nom­ic sta­bil­i­ty. The Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries will con­tin­ue to en­gage proac­tive­ly with all rel­e­vant part­ners to en­sure that Trinidad and To­ba­go re­spon­si­bly max­imis­es the op­por­tu­ni­ties pre­sent­ed by this de­vel­op­ment. We re­main com­mit­ted to safe­guard­ing our na­tion­al in­ter­ests, strength­en­ing re­gion­al en­er­gy co­op­er­a­tion, and en­sur­ing that our coun­try ben­e­fits from se­cure, sus­tain­able, and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly com­pli­ant ac­cess to nat­ur­al gas. I was al­ways con­fi­dent that our strate­gies and en­er­gy diplo­ma­cy would tri­umph to se­cure our eco­nom­ic ad­vance­ment.”

Pri­or to the ex­trac­tion of Venezue­lan Nicholas Maduro in Jan­u­ary by US forces, the act­ing Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Ro­driguez had been very crit­i­cal of stances tak­en by the Prime Min­is­ter, in par­tic­u­lar with re­gard to US ac­tiv­i­ty in the South­ern Caribbean.

Ro­driguez was al­so among those who lob­bied for a sus­pen­sion of all gas projects be­tween T&T and this coun­try in Oc­to­ber 2025, in the midst of that ten­sion.