“I find dey slack/Trinidad like a big broth­er round the Caribbean/She does lend the oth­er na­tions mon­ey like rain/From Ja­maica right down to Guyana mak­ing use of de oil dol­lar/Trinidad our big broth­er/Is de Caribbean God­fa­ther.” –Sir Ru­pert Phi­lo aka King Swal­low

The Mer­ry Monarch will reign supreme for the next two days. Mon­ey spent on lav­ish par­ties and bright but skimpy cos­tumes would have made a few rich­er and many poor­er. Many would have par­tied; some would have rest­ed, and most would have had an en­joy­able time. How­ev­er, by Ash Wednes­day the coun­try will be back fac­ing the same chal­lenges as it did be­fore Car­ni­val. Many, dis­tract­ed by the cel­e­bra­tions, would have missed the press re­ports and the feed­back from the Prime Min­is­ter’s at­ten­dance at Guyana’s en­er­gy con­fer­ence last week.

The T&T en­er­gy sec­tor is ma­ture and tran­si­tion­ing. The tim­ing and di­rec­tion of that tran­si­tion must be man­aged if the coun­try is to main­tain its stan­dard of liv­ing. Gas pro­duc­tion is in sec­u­lar de­cline and the short-term im­prove­ments pro­ject­ed in the bud­get speech do not ad­dress the feed­stock re­quire­ments to meet liqui­fied nat­ur­al pro­duc­tion (LNG) and the petro­chem­i­cal sec­tor’s ca­pac­i­ty re­quire­ments. As a re­sult, Train 1 re­mains closed, and both sec­tors are op­er­at­ing be­low ca­pac­i­ty.

The bid rounds have not been able to gen­er­ate the ex­plo­ration re­quired to main­tain the pro­duc­tion vol­umes. De­spite the tremen­dous ef­fort to se­cure gas from Venezuela’s Drag­on Gas Field, there re­mains much to do to make this a re­al­i­ty. Even if this project is suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed, it will not make a sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to the in­creased vol­ume of gas re­quired.

In the oil sec­tor pro­duc­tion vol­ume has sta­bilised, al­beit at a low­er lev­el of out­put and the re­fin­ery re­mains closed with no tak­ers in sight. Mean­while, Her­itage, the ex­plo­ration and pro­duc­tion arm of Petrotrin, is un­able to de­vel­op its acreage and has sub­con­tract­ed to Shell to do ex­plo­ration on its be­half.

Speak­ing at the open­ing of the en­er­gy con­fer­ence in Guyana “Har­ness­ing En­er­gy for De­vel­op­ment” Prime Min­is­ter Row­ley said that T&T was open to dis­cus­sion with oth­er Caribbean neigh­bours on mon­etis­ing the hy­dro­car­bon re­sources in T&T. He of­fered as­sis­tance in de­vel­op­ment train­ing for en­er­gy per­son­nel and pro­mot­ed the avail­abil­i­ty of the Pointe-a-Pierre re­fin­ery.

Such of­fers are nor­mal­ly made af­ter pri­vate dis­cus­sions be­tween po­lit­i­cal lead­ers, to main­tain the im­age of Cari­com uni­ty and to avoid any po­ten­tial em­bar­rass­ment. Guyana’s Min­is­ter of Nat­ur­al Re­sources re­spond­ed the fol­low­ing day in­di­cat­ing that Guyana want­ed to be self-suf­fi­cient and had al­ready is­sued a re­quest for pro­pos­als to build its own re­fin­ery which would be sized to meet Guyana’s re­quire­ments. His com­ments made no men­tion of re­gion­al en­er­gy se­cu­ri­ty. He al­so in­di­cat­ed that Guyana’s in­ter­est was in oil, not gas. His re­sponse amount­ed to a re­buke, an out­right pub­lic dis­missal of Prime Min­is­ter Row­ley’s over­ture.

Guyana has long been a sleep­ing gi­ant. Its em­pha­sis on self-suf­fi­cien­cy and lo­cal con­tent rules demon­strate a will­ing­ness to part­ner with oth­er part­ners in the re­gion on its own terms and in a way which de­vel­ops its own re­sources. It al­so sig­nals that the lead­er­ship role in the re­gion has changed. King Swal­low’s ca­lyp­so no longer holds true. Hap­py Car­ni­val.