Sascha Wil­son

Se­nior Re­porter

sascha.wil­son@guardian.co.tt

En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young ex­pects to get feed­back from the eval­u­a­tion com­mit­tee re­view­ing the bids for the moth­ball Petrotrin re­fin­ery in a few weeks.

Dur­ing the Peo­ples Na­tion­al Move­ment 51st con­stituen­cy con­fer­ence last Fri­day, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley re­vealed that In­di­an busi­ness­man Naveen Jin­dal, chair­man of Jin­dal Steel and Pow­er Ltd, had with­drawn his in­ter­est in pur­chas­ing the re­fin­ery. Row­ley said Jin­dal bowed out due to at­tacks by the Op­po­si­tion.

Asked about the re­fin­ery dur­ing an in­ter­view with re­porters at Na­tion­al En­er­gy Skills Cen­tre (NESC) Tech­ni­cal In­sti­tute’s drilling acad­e­my in Ste Madeleine on Tues­day, Young not­ed there were ten or more prospec­tive bid­ders

The min­is­ter said, “The eval­u­a­tion com­mit­tee chaired by for­mer per­ma­nent sec­tary, now High Com­mis­sion­er from Trinidad and To­ba­go to the Unit­ed King­dom Vish­nu Dhan­paul, they are busy work­ing at it and look­ing at what has come for­ward and I look for­ward to get­ting the re­sults from them and rec­om­men­da­tions in the next few weeks.”

Asked by re­porters if there is a pos­si­bil­i­ty of a restart­ed re­fin­ery pro­cess­ing crude oil from Guyana and if dis­cus­sions had been held with George­town, Young replied, “The Gov­ern­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go has been en­gaged with the Gov­ern­ment of Guyana.

“The Prime Min­is­ter has gone to Guyana for their last two en­er­gy con­fer­ences. Him­self and my­self have par­tic­i­pat­ed in high-lev­el con­ver­sa­tions with the pres­i­dent and vice pres­i­dent of Guyana.

“Ob­vi­ous­ly, those are things that you will look at, be­cause there must be a sup­ply of crude (oil). But at the end of the day let’s see what the pro­pos­als that have come for­ward are, be­cause the gov­ern­ment is not tak­ing a share­hold­er in­ter­est in this thing. So let’s see what the pro­pos­als come for­ward with.”

Wel­com­ing A&V Oil and Gas Ltd’s an­nounce­ment that its Cat­shill Field is pro­duc­ing an av­er­age of 2,100 bar­rels of oil per day, the min­is­ter said the Gov­ern­ment has been push­ing for more drilling.

He added, “I am hap­py that fi­nal­ly, we have some on­shore gas pro­duc­tion, be­cause on­shore gas pro­duc­tion is a lot less com­pli­cat­ed. It can al­so come in a lot cheap­er than off­shore.”

Touch­ing on this dur­ing his ad­dress ear­li­er, the min­is­ter added that A&V was now the largest on­shore in­de­pen­dent pro­duc­er in the coun­try.

Not­ing that there were in­ter­na­tion­al job op­por­tu­ni­ties in the en­er­gy sec­tor, he en­cour­aged stu­dents, “One must nev­er be stag­nant and to you, the stu­dents what you have here is won­der­ful op­por­tu­ni­ties. Don’t con­fine your minds on­ly to Trinidad and To­ba­go.”

Boast­ing that T&T was on the glob­al en­er­gy map, he urged them not to lis­ten to naysay­ers. Con­grat­u­lat­ing the ad­min­is­tra­tion, he said the drilling acad­e­my is im­por­tant, he said if had his way he would be drilling a few wells per day in “the whole of South Trinidad.”

De­scrib­ing the drilling acad­e­my as a gem, NESC pres­i­dent Cur­tis Dass said they in­tend to ex­pand their train­ing re­gion­al­ly. He al­so asked the min­is­ter to con­sid­er a stan­dard min­i­mum cer­ti­fi­ca­tion for work­ing on a drilling rig, sim­i­lar to the PLEA pass for the Point Lisas In­dus­tri­al Es­tate.

Dass said his aim is for NESC to part­ner with the “big boys.”

Launched in 2013, the in­sti­tu­tion is the first of its kind, in the Caribbean and Latin Amer­i­ca. Some 400 stu­dents have grad­u­at­ed from their pro­grammes de­signed to pre­pare learn­ers for jobs on drilling rigs. The min­is­ter toured the fa­cil­i­ty.