En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young is urg­ing En­er­gy Sec­tor stake­hold­ers not to pan­ic about the fu­ture of in­dus­try in spite of a pend­ing tran­si­tion away from hy­dro­car­bons.

Dur­ing his speech at En­er­gy Cham­ber’s Pol­i­cy Fo­rum on Tues­day, Young once again gave as­sur­ances that Trinidad and To­ba­go’s en­er­gy sec­tor still had a lot to of­fer.

“First of all, I un­der­stand your con­cerns and your anx­i­ety, but my ad­vice to you is let’s not pan­ic. Let’s work to­geth­er. Let’s do what is nec­es­sary be­cause the truth is hy­dro­car­bons are here to stay,” said Young, who once again stressed that nat­ur­al gas was the clean­est of the fos­sil fu­els and there­fore would be last to be phased out dur­ing the world’s tran­si­tion to clean en­er­gy.

“Gas is go­ing to be not on­ly the tran­si­tion hy­dro­car­bon fu­el, but it is the clean­est burn­ing fu­el, and what we need to take for­ward with us in­to the fu­ture, and we must pro­tect that. So I ask all of you to get on board with that con­ver­sa­tion and don’t pan­ic, don’t be anx­ious about our clos­ing world on us. We have our place there at the ta­ble and we will fight. The gov­ern­ment will fight,” he said, echo­ing a sim­i­lar call which he made be­fore the GECF last week.

Young was re­spond­ing to con­cerns raised by Chair­man of the En­er­gy Cham­ber Dwight Ma­habir, who shared that there were grow­ing wor­ry among stake­hold­ers.

“Many mem­bers of the cham­ber are ner­vous about the fu­ture. Many of our mem­bers were not ful­ly re­cov­ered from the shock of the 2015 oil price crash, when we were hit by the glob­al pan­dem­ic in March 2020,” said Ma­habir who added that these anx­i­eties have on­ly been height­ened by the pend­ing En­er­gy tran­si­tion.

“They have been strug­gling to stay afloat over the past two years. There’s been a mas­sive shift in sen­ti­ment against fos­sil fu­els in the in­ter­na­tion­al cap­i­tal mar­kets,” he said.

Min­is­ter Young al­so told the fo­rum that he planned to ap­proach Cab­i­net next year to dis­cuss the re­form of fis­cal regimes for oil and gas pro­duc­tion, in­clud­ing changes to the Sup­ple­men­tal Pe­tro­le­um Tax (SPT) and the Pe­tro­le­um Prof­its Tax (PPT) as first an­nounced by Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert in his 2022 bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion.

“As we ma­ture as a province we must find ways to stay com­pet­i­tive and to com­pete for that glob­al capex of these com­pa­nies who are in­vest­ing in T&T,” Young ar­gued.

Young added he al­so in­tends to ap­proach Cab­i­net this Thurs­day to dis­cuss the deep-wa­ter bid rounds.

The En­er­gy Min­is­ter added he will be lead­ing a team to the world pe­tro­le­um con­gress to help push the bid rounds in a few weeks time.

“And you will see when those bid rounds be­come avail­able and be­come pub­lic that we have lis­tened and we have made the nec­es­sary ad­just­ments to en­sure there is suc­cess with per­sons en­ter­ing that bid rounds and the fu­ture de­vel­op­ment of oil and gas in Trinidad and To­ba­go,” he said.