Ac­cel­er­at­ing Ac­tion has been cho­sen as the theme for the 2024 en­er­gy con­fer­ence which takes place at the Hy­att Re­gency in Port-of-Spain from this Mon­day to Wednes­day.

In shar­ing de­tails as to why this theme was se­lect­ed, CEO of the T&T En­er­gy Cham­ber, Dr Thack­wray “Dax” Dri­ver said while strides have been made in the in­dus­try, there still re­mains the need for speed.

“We had de­vel­oped this theme be­cause we have a feel­ing from the in­dus­try that we are sort of on the right path. We need to do what we need to do to cre­ate a sus­tain­able fu­ture for the en­er­gy in­dus­try in T&T. Thank­ful­ly, there is a good align­ment be­tween Gov­ern­ment and the in­dus­try on what needs to be done and how we need to change things, but we need to be do­ing it faster. That re­al­ly is why we came up with this idea about ac­cel­er­at­ing ac­tion.

“We need to ex­e­cute quick­er, to bring the new projects on faster, to move from hav­ing a bid round to give out new off­shore acreage to ex­plo­ration com­pa­nies for them to ac­tu­al­ly be do­ing the ex­plo­ration, to them hope­ful­ly find­ing oil or gas and pro­duc­ing it and that needs to hap­pen faster ... the changes to de­car­bonise our in­dus­try, we know the things we need to do but we need to get af­ter it quick­er,” Dri­ver ex­plained last week in an in­ter­view with the Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian Me­dia.

He em­pha­sised that it is crit­i­cal that such changes take place speed­i­ly as this would al­so en­sure that the in­dus­try, and by ex­ten­sion the coun­try, would not be left be­hind.

“You don’t want to end up with strand­ed as­sets that you can’t utilise,” Dri­ver warned.

The En­er­gy Cham­ber, on its web­site, al­so shared fur­ther de­tails about the ob­jec­tive of the event.

It stat­ed, “We need to get to the bot­tom of why things take so long to be im­ple­ment­ed and try to sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly ad­dress those bot­tle­necks and get things flow­ing. Four ma­jor things that we need to ad­dress:

• First­ly, fix­ing the busi­ness-as-usu­al mind­set that pro­tects the sta­tus quo;

• Break­ing siloed de­ci­sion-mak­ing in the pub­lic ser­vice;

• Ruth­less­ly stream­lin­ing the ap­provals process; and

• Fi­nal­ly, mak­ing sure that the key reg­u­la­to­ry agen­cies can hire the bright­est and best and ac­cess the skills that are re­quired.”

On what he hopes to be achieved fol­low­ing the con­clu­sion of the three-day event, Dri­ver said this en­tails whether the con­ver­sa­tions and the de­bates have been pushed for­ward around the en­er­gy in­dus­try in the coun­try and whether the way peo­ple think would be changed.

“That’s the big thing that I am al­ways look­ing for and that al­ways hap­pens and it hap­pens a mul­ti­tude of dif­fer­ent ways. Some­times it is just that two com­pa­nies meet who haven’t met be­fore and they find a way of do­ing busi­ness to­geth­er and you see that sort of busi­ness re­la­tion­ship com­ing out from the floor of the trade show.

“It could be that there’s a new con­cept with some­one, which some one de­liv­ers from the stage that we haven’t thought about be­fore which changes the way we ap­proach prob­lems. It’s re­al­ly about set­ting up fu­ture ac­tion, which I think is im­por­tant and for me that’s re­al­ly what I like to see from the event,” Dri­ver added.

Ac­cord­ing to the En­er­gy Cham­ber web­site, the con­fer­ence fur­ther pro­vides a sol­id plat­form for par­tic­i­pants to learn about new and emerg­ing trends in the en­er­gy sec­tor and ap­proach­es to­wards net-ze­ro in­clud­ing en­er­gy ef­fi­cien­cy and re­new­able en­er­gy and oth­ers; forge new busi­ness re­la­tion­ships and strate­gic al­liances through net­work­ing with sec­tor–spe­cif­ic in­di­vid­u­als and com­pa­nies and high­light their strengths to the ma­jor pur­chasers of goods and ser­vices and a cross-sec­tion of both lo­cal and in­ter­na­tion­al ser­vice com­pa­nies and con­trac­tors.

Re­gard­ing the oth­er in­tri­ca­cies of the con­fer­ence, the web­site said it is de­signed to at­tract a broad cross-sec­tion of par­tic­i­pants in the en­er­gy in­dus­try from the up­stream and down­stream sec­tor, pol­i­cy­mak­ers, ser­vice com­pa­nies and acad­e­mia and peo­ple with a unique in­ter­est in the Caribbean en­er­gy mix.

It will al­so seek to get di­verse opin­ions from in­ter­na­tion­al and re­gion­al del­e­gates and pre­sen­ters, not­ing that the ma­jor­i­ty of the at­ten­dees are “C” lev­el del­e­gates of ma­jor up­stream, down­stream and en­er­gy ser­vices com­pa­nies in the re­gion and al­so many se­nior gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials.

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley is sched­uled to speak on day one as well as Stu­art Young, Min­is­ter of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries, Pene­lope Brad­shaw-Niles, Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary, Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries, among oth­ers.

Al­so, sched­uled to speak on that day are Mo­hamed Hamel, sec­re­tary gen­er­al of the Gas Ex­port­ing Coun­tries Fo­rum (GECF), Ok­sana Dem­bit­s­ka, se­nior vice-pres­i­dent of Gas Growth bp, Paul Hex­ter, pres­i­dent of Wa­ter­front Ship­ping (a Methanex sub­sidiary) as well as Jerome Dook­ie, chair­man of the En­er­gy Cham­ber of T&T.

Among the oth­er speak­ers or pan­elists are Mark Lo­quan pres­i­dent of the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny of T&T Ltd, David Camp­bell, pres­i­dent of bpTT, Kellyanne Lochan, coun­try man­ag­er of Wood­side En­er­gy T&T and Erik Kesku­la, CEO of Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um as well as sev­er­al oth­ers.

The T&T En­er­gy Con­fer­ence is the ma­jor an­nu­al con­fer­ence of the en­er­gy sec­tor and is one of the largest and most re­spect­ed in the re­gion.

The En­er­gy Cham­ber al­so boast­ed that in 2023, the con­fer­ence had over 900 in-per­son del­e­gates, 200 vir­tu­al del­e­gates and over 1,500 vis­i­tors to the trade show.

“The con­fer­ence in 2024 promis­es to be big­ger and bet­ter than ever be­fore” the cham­ber said, adding that the re­gion­al en­er­gy sec­tor is chang­ing with new dis­cov­er­ies in deep wa­ter off main­land South Amer­i­ca and in­creas­ing pen­e­tra­tion of re­new­able en­er­gy in oth­er is­land ter­ri­to­ries.

Ac­cord­ing to its web­site, the En­er­gy Cham­ber of T&T is the rep­re­sen­ta­tive as­so­ci­a­tion for the en­er­gy in­dus­try in this coun­try, with mem­ber com­pa­nies and or­gan­i­sa­tions span­ning the en­tire val­ue chain from up­stream pro­duc­ers of oil, gas and re­new­able elec­tric­i­ty through to ma­jor down­stream in­dus­tri­al con­sumers and petro­chem­i­cal man­u­fac­tur­ers and span­ning the sup­ply chain from small sub-con­tract­ing firms or in­di­vid­ual pro­fes­sion­als through to the ma­jor in­ter­na­tion­al op­er­at­ing com­pa­nies.

Its mem­ber­ship com­pris­es mul­ti-na­tion­al en­er­gy com­pa­nies, lo­cal­ly-list­ed pub­lic com­pa­nies, pri­vate­ly-owned com­pa­nies (owned by na­tion­als and non-na­tion­als), State-owned en­ter­pris­es, not-for-prof­it or­gan­i­sa­tions and ed­u­ca­tion­al in­sti­tu­tions and in­di­vid­ual pro­fes­sion­als.