The vast ma­jor­i­ty of prof­its seen as a re­sult of surg­ing en­er­gy prices will be dec­i­mat­ed by Trinidad and To­ba­go’s out­stand­ing bills.

En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young, while a guest on CNN’s Quest on Busi­ness on Tues­day, con­firmed the Gov­ern­ment did not ex­pect huge wind­falls de­spite high en­er­gy prices.

“I wouldn’t put it as tremen­dous amounts of rev­enue. You know, as a gov­ern­ment, what you’re do­ing is you’re re­al­ly mak­ing those rev­enue in­creas­es off of tax­a­tion. So you wait for it to come in. But as a gov­ern­ment, just com­ing out of a very dif­fi­cult time with the pan­dem­ic, you have bills, so we will be pay­ing our bills. We sur­vived the ear­ly stages of the pan­dem­ic,” said Young in re­sponse to a ques­tion from CNN’s Richard Quest con­cern­ing po­ten­tial wind­fall from these prod­ucts.

Young con­firmed while many had looked to Trinidad and To­ba­go’s nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion, oth­er ar­eas such as am­mo­nia and methanol had seen price surges as well, which the coun­try hoped to see ben­e­fits from in the fu­ture.

“We’ve gone through yet an­oth­er cy­cle com­ing out of the dif­fi­cul­ties of the ear­ly stages of the pan­dem­ic. And yes, we are see­ing in­come in­crease as a re­sult. Es­pe­cial­ly on the LNG side, as well as the am­mo­nia side of pric­ing. As you know with am­mo­nia prices, they’ve climbed from around US$180 a met­ric ton. They’re now hov­er­ing around US$1,400 a met­ric ton, so there is a sig­nif­i­cant in­crease in rev­enue to these com­pa­nies, etc. And we will see some in our cof­fers as well,” said Young dur­ing the in­ter­view.

Young added that a sig­nif­i­cant chunk of the mon­ey earned is ex­pect­ed to be spent on ed­u­ca­tion.

“The gov­ern­ment rev­enue is used to look af­ter ap­prox­i­mate­ly 1.4 mil­lion peo­ple in Trinidad and To­ba­go, who, quite frankly, have quite a good life. So we will be spend­ing it on our ed­u­ca­tion, which we spent bil­lions on in terms of our cur­ren­cy and just oth­er things that are nec­es­sary for the peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go,” said the En­er­gy Min­is­ter.

The min­is­ter al­so talked up Trinidad and To­ba­go’s abil­i­ty to step up giv­en the en­er­gy cri­sis cre­at­ed by the on­go­ing Rus­sia Ukraine con­flict.

“We’re look­ing on at this in­ter­na­tion­al cri­sis tak­ing place and as you said, we see our­selves as punch­ing way above our belt. We have been a sig­nif­i­cant gas pro­duc­er, LNG pro­duc­er for the last few decades. At our height of pro­duc­tion we were pump­ing out about 770 mil­lion MMB­tu of LNG a year on an an­nu­al ba­sis. We are four trains, and so we see the abil­i­ty we have ad­di­tion­al ca­pac­i­ty right now,” said Young.

“We are ea­ger to step in to as­sist in what is go­ing on glob­al­ly, in what­ev­er way we can. It’s not on­ly on the LNG front, we were al­so a sig­nif­i­cant am­mo­nia pro­duc­er in Trinidad as well. Am­mo­nia and methanol and we have ca­pac­i­ty there as well. So, as a gas pro­duc­er who turns gas in­to both LNG as well as what we call Pet-chems and am­mo­nia, methanol, urea, UAN (fer­tilis­er), we are ready to do what we can to as­sist with what we see as this cri­sis tak­ing place.”

The min­is­ter said the onus was on oth­er oil and gas coun­tries like Trinidad and To­ba­go to ramp up pro­duc­tion and pro­vide an al­ter­na­tive to Rus­sia dur­ing this cri­sis.