For­mer en­er­gy min­is­ter Stu­art Young is de­fend­ing the PNM’s record on the re­struc­tur­ing of At­lantic LNG, ar­gu­ing that the agree­ment com­plet­ed in De­cem­ber 2023 is re­spon­si­ble for high­er rev­enues now be­ing earned by the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC) and the State.

In a Face­book post yes­ter­day, Young said the re­struc­tur­ing was con­ceived as a PNM pol­i­cy in 2018 and in­volved five years of ne­go­ti­a­tions with en­er­gy com­pa­nies bp and Shell.

He de­scribed the re­struc­tur­ing as “un­prece­dent­ed glob­al­ly”, claim­ing it had nev­er pre­vi­ous­ly been done else­where.

Young said the agree­ment de­liv­ered three key ben­e­fits to Trinidad and To­ba­go: high­er gas prices for NGC and the State, a new 10 per cent share­hold­ing across all of At­lantic LNG, and an in­crease in the num­ber of LNG car­goes NGC could sell.

He ar­gued that these ben­e­fits are now trans­lat­ing in­to in­creased rev­enues.

“To­day, in 2026, ex­act­ly as we in­tend­ed and fought hard to achieve, Trinidad and To­ba­go is ben­e­fit­ting, es­pe­cial­ly via NGC, from in­creased rev­enues,” Young said.

He re­ject­ed claims that the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion’s poli­cies were re­spon­si­ble for in­creased en­er­gy-sec­tor rev­enues, say­ing the high­er re­turns stemmed from pric­ing arrange­ments ne­go­ti­at­ed by the pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tion.

Ac­cord­ing to Young, gas prices ne­go­ti­at­ed from 2019, in­clud­ing those in­cor­po­rat­ed in­to the At­lantic LNG re­struc­tur­ing, were linked to Asian and Eu­ro­pean gas prices and Brent crude prices.

He claimed Asian and Eu­ro­pean gas prices had at times been ten times high­er than the price Trinidad and To­ba­go would oth­er­wise have re­ceived.

Young al­so crit­i­cised the Gov­ern­ment over de­vel­op­ments in the en­er­gy sec­tor, point­ing to the de­par­tures of fer­tilis­er pro­duc­er Nu­trien and methanol pro­duc­er Methanex as ev­i­dence of what he called “in­com­pe­tence”.

He ques­tioned why NGC had stopped sup­port­ing na­tion­al ini­tia­tives, in­clud­ing track and field and steel­band.

Young said the “win­ning” of high­er rev­enues for NGC and Trinidad and To­ba­go was the re­sult of the PNM’s vi­sion and work on the At­lantic LNG re­struc­tur­ing.