En­er­gy sec­tor vet­er­an Dr Ram­per­sad Moti­lal has been ap­point­ed chair­man of At­lantic LNG.

The an­nounce­ment was made yes­ter­day as the liq­ue­fied nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­er con­tin­ues im­ple­ment­ing the first phase of its cor­po­rate re­struc­tur­ing.

Moti­lal re­places Vin­cent Pereira, whose tenure as chair­man has come to an end. The last three chair­men of At­lantic LNG were Pereira, Ian Welch and Gor­don Deane, who were not from the three cur­rent share­hold­er com­pa­nies of At­lantic LNG, BP, Shell and NGC.

Moti­lal is al­so a di­rec­tor of NGC and some of its sub­sidiary com­pa­nies, in­clud­ing TTNGL.

He is wide­ly known in the petro­chem­i­cal sec­tor, hav­ing served for 16 years as chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer and man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of Methanol Hold­ings (Trinidad) Lim­it­ed (MHTL) and its pre­de­ces­sor com­pa­nies.

Dur­ing that time, he over­saw one of the coun­try’s largest methanol pro­duc­ers and one of the biggest con­sumers of nat­ur­al gas with­in the Point Lisas In­dus­tri­al Es­tate.

Across a ca­reer span­ning more than four decades, Moti­lal built ex­ten­sive ex­pe­ri­ence in petro­chem­i­cals, large-scale project de­vel­op­ment, en­gi­neer­ing man­age­ment, and fi­nan­cial strat­e­gy. He has al­so held po­si­tions on a num­ber of lo­cal and in­ter­na­tion­al boards across the en­er­gy, busi­ness, and ed­u­ca­tion sec­tors.

His ap­point­ment comes as At­lantic LNG con­tin­ues ad­just­ing its cor­po­rate struc­ture and op­er­a­tional frame­work amid on­go­ing shifts in the do­mes­tic gas in­dus­try.

The com­pa­ny has been un­der­go­ing a re­struc­tur­ing process aimed at strength­en­ing its op­er­a­tional mod­el and po­si­tion­ing the LNG busi­ness for the long term.

At­lantic in­di­cat­ed that the re­struc­tur­ing process has al­ready moved in­to its first op­er­a­tional phase, with a fo­cus on main­tain­ing safe­ty, re­li­a­bil­i­ty, and op­er­a­tional per­for­mance.

Moti­lal’s back­ground in the petro­chem­i­cal and en­er­gy in­dus­tries places a vet­er­an in­dus­try fig­ure at the helm of the com­pa­ny’s board as it nav­i­gates those changes.

He holds a Doc­tor­ate in Busi­ness Ad­min­is­tra­tion from the In­ter­na­tion­al School of Man­age­ment in Paris and an Ex­ec­u­tive MBA with dis­tinc­tion from the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies. Moti­lal has al­so been award­ed an hon­orary doc­tor­ate in en­gi­neer­ing and en­tre­pre­neur­ship from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go.

At­lantic LNG re­mains a cen­tral pil­lar of T&T’s en­er­gy ex­port sec­tor, op­er­at­ing the liq­ue­fac­tion fa­cil­i­ties that con­vert nat­ur­al gas in­to liq­ue­fied nat­ur­al gas for ship­ment to in­ter­na­tion­al mar­kets.

The com­pa­ny’s op­er­a­tions have faced in­creas­ing pres­sure in re­cent years due to de­clin­ing do­mes­tic gas sup­ply, which has af­fect­ed feed­stock avail­abil­i­ty for both LNG and petro­chem­i­cal plants.