KEVON FELMINE

Se­nior Re­porter

kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt

Min­is­ter of En­er­gy Stu­art Young said yes­ter­day that many cit­i­zens do not ful­ly ap­pre­ci­ate the ex­tent to which the Point Fortin-based LNG com­pa­ny, At­lantic, con­tributes to T&T’s Gross Do­mes­tic Prod­uct.

Speak­ing at the com­pa­ny’s 25th an­niver­sary and re­struc­tur­ing cel­e­bra­tions yes­ter­day, Young re­flect­ed on the chal­lenges of op­ti­mis­ing the com­pa­ny’s fu­ture amid de­plet­ing nat­ur­al gas re­serves.

He re­called that, in 2015, when the new gov­ern­ment came in­to of­fice, it im­me­di­ate­ly be­gan work­ing on how to se­cure the fu­ture of gas pro­duc­tion as At­lantic’s Train 1’s li­cence was set to ex­pire in 2018. In­tense dis­cus­sions took place with key share­hold­ers, bpTT and Shell, over price re­struc­tur­ing, seek­ing bet­ter val­ue for cit­i­zens.

“And there be­gan the task of how do we es­tab­lish and se­cure an en­er­gy fu­ture for Trinidad & To­ba­go, where At­lantic LNG is ar­guably one of the sin­gle most im­por­tant pil­lars for the fu­ture of the coun­try’s en­er­gy sec­tor. It was in 2018, when I ac­com­pa­nied the Prime Min­is­ter to Lon­don for talks with Shell and BP, that the con­cept for the fu­ture of At­lantic LNG was con­cep­tu­alised, and the de­ci­sion was made by the heads: we need­ed to re­struc­ture it,” Young ex­plained.

Young not­ed that the re­struc­tur­ing process took five years to com­plete, un­der­scor­ing its sig­nif­i­cance for the coun­try’s fu­ture. He em­pha­sised that this lev­el of re­struc­tur­ing had nev­er been achieved any­where else in the world. The re­struc­tur­ing, he said, has ex­tend­ed the life of both the en­er­gy sec­tor and the econ­o­my un­der chal­leng­ing cir­cum­stances.

“I am hap­py, cer­tain­ly dur­ing this tenure of mine, that not on­ly did we ac­com­plish the re­struc­tur­ing, but we have now man­aged to in­crease our share­hold­ing through NGC for the cit­i­zens of Trinidad & To­ba­go,” Young said.

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley un­der­scored that the re­struc­tur­ing went be­yond share­hold­ing ad­just­ments. He de­scribed it as a plat­form for fu­ture in­vest­ments to en­sure a con­tin­u­ous stream of gas, which would se­cure the fu­ture of the busi­ness.

Row­ley af­firmed that T&T’s fu­ture in the gas and LNG in­dus­tries, as well as pro­vid­ing raw ma­te­ri­als for Point Lisas, is se­cure as long as the coun­try can main­tain a sta­ble gas sup­ply.

“I want to thank all of you who have played any role what­so­ev­er in the cre­ation of this in­dus­try be­cause we start­ed this from scratch in the face of sig­nif­i­cant re­sis­tance and doubt. To­day, it is the back­bone of the econ­o­my and the rev­enue stream for all the peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go. I call that suc­cess,” Row­ley said.

Re­flect­ing on T&T’s gas in­dus­try, Row­ley de­scribed the coun­try as a sig­nif­i­cant con­sumer, once us­ing up to 4.2 bil­lion cu­bic feet (BCF) of gas per day. He ac­knowl­edged the strain on the non-re­new­able ge­o­log­i­cal re­serves, es­pe­cial­ly as new drilling ex­pe­di­tions yield­ed dis­ap­point­ing re­sults.

With no ma­jor oil and gas dis­cov­er­ies in re­cent years, Row­ley said con­sump­tion had been ac­cel­er­at­ing, reach­ing 4.2 BCF dai­ly. How­ev­er, he not­ed that when the gov­ern­ment changed and took of­fice, gas pro­duc­tion had fall­en to about 3.1 BCF. To­day, pro­duc­tion is down to around 2.6 BCF, a re­al­i­ty the coun­try must con­front.

Row­ley ex­pressed con­fi­dence in T&T’s po­si­tion as a glob­al play­er in the en­er­gy mar­ket.