Con­rad Enill is ex­pe­ri­enc­ing a sense of déjà vu.

Ap­point­ed as the High Com­mis­sion­er for T&T to Guyana, Enill is see­ing first-hand the de­vel­op­men­tal changes that the coun­try is cur­rent­ly un­der­go­ing as it be­comes a ma­jor glob­al en­er­gy play­er.

“It feels sought of like when T&T found it­self in a sit­u­a­tion where it had lots of re­sources and it had choic­es to make,” Enill told the Busi­ness Guardian dur­ing an in­ter­view on the open­ing day of the In­ter­na­tion­al En­er­gy Con­fer­ence and Ex­po held at the Guyana Mar­riott Ho­tel in George­town.

“Guyana at this point in time is very much in that space,” he said.

Enill said the goal for Guyana is to cre­ate a world-class en­er­gy-com­pet­i­tive in­dus­try by 2030.

“That’s the ob­jec­tive and that’s what the pol­i­cy po­si­tion of the gov­ern­ment is and that is where we in T&T and oth­er coun­tries are sup­port­ing that kind of ac­tiv­i­ty,” Enill said.

“There is a need for skills and there is a need for in­fra­struc­ture and it is in that space that T&T has of­fered to be an im­por­tant part,” he said.

Last May, Enill was ap­point­ed High Com­mis­sion­er to Guyana.

Be­fore that ap­point­ment, Enill was chair­man of the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny of T&T, af­ter pre­vi­ous­ly serv­ing as a min­is­ter of En­er­gy and min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Fi­nance.

Enill said the re­la­tion­ship be­tween T&T and Guyana is one that has stood the test of time.

“One of the things that we don’t talk about a lot is that T&T and Guyana have had a very long re­la­tion­ship.

“In fact, even be­fore Guyana found it­self in this sit­u­a­tion T&T was a part­ner in ne­go­ti­at­ing terms and con­di­tions for Guyana at a time when no­body cared,” Enill said.

“So we have come to the ta­ble not as a new­bie but as some­body who has been here for a while,” he said.

Enill said sev­er­al T&T com­pa­nies op­er­at­ing in Guyana have been do­ing so for quite some time.

“It is not that T&T com­pa­nies have not been here, they have been here and I think that the re­la­tion­ship that now ex­ists is one that you can lever­age those re­la­tion­ships to build a bet­ter so­ci­ety,” he said.

Enill said he be­lieves that col­lab­o­ra­tion is the way for this re­gion to get ahead.

“The oth­er thing about it is that we have found that the world has changed and the Caribbean is now at risk and be­cause the Caribbean is now at risk on the ba­sis of food is­sues, en­vi­ron­men­tal is­sues, there is now an ap­proach to deal­ing with it from a Caribbean per­spec­tive and we are very much in that con­ver­sa­tion,” he said.

On Tues­day, some of the re­gion’s heads of gov­ern­ment and lead­ers in the glob­al en­er­gy sphere con­verged at the Guyana Mar­riott ho­tel dur­ing the open­ing day of the four-day con­fer­ence.

Enill wel­comed the con­fer­ence.

“I think what this is in­tend­ed to do is to give all stake­hold­ers a bet­ter ap­pre­ci­a­tion of the re­al­i­ty of what is tak­ing place rather than what is some­times mis­com­mu­ni­cat­ed in the pub­lic do­main,” he said.

“So I think what the con­fer­ence seeks to do is to clar­i­fy is­sues, to an­swer ques­tions and this is the en­vi­ron­ment where you learn what you need to do, to be suc­cess­ful. It is a fan­tas­tic place to be at this time,” he said.

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley was on hand on the open­ing day to cut the rib­bon to of­fi­cial­ly open the ex­po.

De­liv­er­ing re­marks at the cer­e­mo­ny Row­ley said the ma­jor­i­ty of Caribbean coun­tries re­ly on im­ports of pe­tro­le­um prod­ucts which rep­re­sent 87 per cent of pri­ma­ry en­er­gy con­sump­tion.  

And, as a re­sult, oil im­port­ing coun­tries in the Caribbean have re­port­ed spend­ing of up to 15 per cent of an­nu­al GDP on fu­el im­ports.

“The heavy de­pen­dence on im­port­ed en­er­gy has neg­a­tive­ly af­fect­ed the eco­nom­ic per­for­mance of many Caribbean na­tions, con­tribut­ing to in­sta­bil­i­ty in both fis­cal and ex­ter­nal ac­counts.

“This in­cludes T&T, which was im­port­ing most of its crude oil and cre­at­ing re­fined prod­ucts for its do­mes­tic needs and for the re­gion­al mar­ket,” Row­ley stat­ed.

“This im­port and re­fine mod­el was be­ing car­ried on with sig­nif­i­cant loan sup­port from the na­tion­al Trea­sury.

“By 2018, in the ab­sence of an im­proved crude oil sup­ply the ac­cu­mu­lat­ed debt and pro­jec­tions for sus­tained loss­es re­sult­ed in a re­struc­tur­ing of the state-owned com­pa­ny, and this in­clud­ed a clo­sure of the re­fin­ery, which in the ab­sence of a new source of crude, stands moth­balled at Pointe-a- Pierre.

“This re­fin­ery and its sup­port­ing in­fra­struc­ture are avail­able for restart, up­grade and use on rea­son­able terms to any in­ter­est­ed re­fin­er or crude sup­pli­er,” he stat­ed.

Asked his thoughts on Guyana pur­chas­ing the moth­balled Pointe-a-Pierre re­fin­ery, Enill said:

“Guyana is de­vel­op­ing a world-class type en­er­gy sec­tor and there may be needs for a re­fin­ery, how­ev­er it is go­ing to be based on cap­i­tal at the use of cap­i­tal and whether cap­i­tal can in fact be avail­able for that. If it is and there is an op­por­tu­ni­ty, I think that it can work,” Enill said.

Enill said we are now fac­ing dif­fer­ent times.

“The chal­lenges that we face go­ing for­ward are slight­ly dif­fer­ent and there­fore the so­lu­tions that we must look for and the way that we have dealt with it in the past are dif­fer­ent so if some­thing hasn’t worked in the past that does not mean it wouldn’t work now.

“We are in dif­fer­ent times and we are in dif­fi­cult times and I think the on­ly way we are go­ing to get out of this is if we have a glob­al ap­proach and we look at our­selves as a re­gion and we work as a re­gion and that op­por­tu­ni­ty presents it­self at this time,” he said.

Enill laud­ed the col­lab­o­ra­tion of T&T, Guyana and Suri­name to lead the way for the re­gion.

“If Suri­name, Guyana and T&T could come to­geth­er as a unit of en­er­gy then there is a lot that we can do with en­er­gy se­cu­ri­ty, cli­mate se­cu­ri­ty and chang­ing the con­ver­sa­tion that is tak­ing place in the world so that we can par­tic­i­pate in a re­formed world.

“And I think that that is the op­por­tu­ni­ty that ex­ists here and that is what we are work­ing on,” Enill said.