An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

For­mer En­er­gy Min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine says the on­go­ing po­lit­i­cal un­rest in Venezuela would im­pact do­ing busi­ness with the coun­try.

Speak­ing on the Morn­ing Brew yes­ter­day, Ram­nar­ine said that state-owned Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC) has a 30 year-li­cence with Venezuela state oil com­pa­ny PDVSA to de­vel­op the Drag­on gas field with Roy­al Dutch Shell as the op­er­a­tor, and then the 20-year li­cence for the Cocuina/Man­akin.

“The re­al­i­ty is that you see what's hap­pen­ing in Venezuela. I mean, even if things were to clear up across there, it still would be very dif­fi­cult. The re­ports I'm hear­ing com­ing out of Venezuela, it's very dif­fi­cult to get things done. A lot of things don't work,” he stressed.

Ram­nar­ine not­ed if he was sit­ting in gov­ern­ment, he would not have put all his eggs in that Venezue­lan bas­ket, giv­en what's hap­pen­ing there.  

"Al­so, we don't know what's go­ing to hap­pen with the US pres­i­den­tial elec­tion in No­vem­ber. You could have a change in ad­min­is­tra­tion.  

And al­though I hear that this gov­ern­ment is say­ing that they're talk­ing to peo­ple in the Re­pub­li­can Par­ty, they haven't said who from the par­ty they've been speak­ing to. “There's so much un­cer­tain­ty and of course, the Venezue­lan gas is part of the gov­ern­ment's po­lit­i­cal nar­ra­tive. And we are in an elec­tion year, as the prime min­is­ter point­ed out,” he dis­closed.

Ram­nar­ine in­di­cat­ed that plan B would be for the coun­try to have its re­serves, as there still are sig­nif­i­cant pock­ets of gas on Trinidad's east coast.  

“There still is a lot of deep­wa­ter, which re­mains strand­ed, a strand­ed re­source, 3.5 tril­lion cu­bic feet of nat­ur­al gas to the north­east of To­ba­go, which we don't seem to be able to de­vel­op for rea­sons of eco­nom­ics. But there still is a re­source base with­in our bor­ders that we could con­tin­ue to tap in­to and de­vel­op. And to some ex­tent, the com­pa­nies are do­ing that. But it's not hap­pen­ing at the rate at which would off­set the de­cline in nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion,” the for­mer En­er­gy Min­is­ter ex­plained.

On the top­ic of bpTT sell­ing four ma­ture gas fields in T&T to Peren­co, Ram­nar­ine said it was a busi­ness de­ci­sion in their best in­ter­est and what bpTT did was to di­vest some of its pro­duc­ing fields and its plat­forms, for which their op­er­at­ing cost is too high.

He high­light­ed that for a low-cost op­er­a­tor like Peren­co, aquir­ing the five blocks makes eco­nom­ic sense.  

“I think that as we progress in­to the 2030s and lat­er, and through­out this decade, we are go­ing to see com­pa­nies like bpTT do­ing more of that kind of di­vest­ing down to the low­er-cost op­er­a­tors like Peren­co. Peren­co has demon­strat­ed a busi­ness mod­el, not on­ly in Trinidad, but all over the world. I see peo­ple on Face­book ask­ing who Peren­co is, seem­ing to sug­gest that Peren­co is owned by some kind of dark shad­ow Trinida­di­an char­ac­ter.  The com­pa­ny is a well-es­tab­lished in­ter­na­tion­al French multi­na­tion­al.”

He posed the ques­tion, "How im­por­tant is Trinidad to BP in 2024 com­pared to 2014? " The foot­print in 2024 com­pared to 2014 is to­tal­ly dif­fer­ent.

Ram­nar­ine iden­ti­fied that the vol­umes are sig­nif­i­cant­ly down by about 40 per cent, while the head­count is down maybe by 30 per cent to 40 per cent. Now the en­er­gy com­pa­ny is di­vest­ing as­sets.  

“T&T is be­com­ing less strate­gic to BP and that is some­thing that we should be con­cerned about, be­cause that com­pa­ny in var­i­ous in­car­na­tions has been the main pil­lar of our en­er­gy sec­tor since 1972, as it was then known as Amo­co, and then it be­came BP.  So, it is some­thing that, from that point of view, I would be con­cerned about. How does BP view Trinidad in the medi­um to long term?” Ram­nar­ine said.

Speak­ing on Peren­co’s abil­i­ty, he not­ed that the com­pa­ny was op­er­at­ing some very ma­ture fields, some fields that have been pro­duc­ing for decades.

“They've been pro­duc­ing since Jan­u­ary 1972.  They've demon­strat­ed that they could run those fields and ex­tract eco­nom­ic val­ue from them, pay tax­es, pay roy­al­ties, and so on, but have a low-cost ap­proach. That is some­thing that big­ger com­pa­nies don't have, be­cause they tend to do things with more, I wouldn't say frills, but they tend to have high­er costs,” he added.